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- Title
Looking through, looking into and looking at the book: the materiality of message and medium.
- Authors
Jones, Phil
- Abstract
The relationship between material, medium and message with respect to books has been a recurring source of discussion in graphic design. Such discussion punctuates the last 100 years: with divergent thoughts on the material resources of the book ranging from considering them as inert, equivalent to a neutral substrate that carries an imprinted message, to understanding them as a set of independently meaningful material properties possessed by the physical artefact. This article reviews such different appreciations of books and the relationship between materiality and meaning-making and reassesses them using a theoretical framework derived from cognitive linguistics and relevance theory. It suggests that both dematerialized and materialized understandings inaccurately describe the ways that meaning is made from books, and advances an account based on attention, iconicity and relevance to describe the background processing that results in dematerialized and materialized understandings at the phenomenological level.
- Subjects
BOOKS &; reading; GRAPHIC design; IMPRINTS (Publishers' &; printers' statements); MATERIALITY &; art; LINGUISTICS
- Publication
Book 2.0, 2011, Vol 1, Issue 2, p255
- ISSN
2042-8022
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1386/btwo.1.2.255_1