errant art

Just wrote this in an email to ol' Ozzy:

Harper's has their entire (160-year) history online and searchable, and free to subscribers, and maybe something like that is the future of print v. web. Because a subscription to Harper's only costs me about $15 a year, and though I've grown frustrated as, during the Bush presidency, it's grown into less of a thinking polyglot journal and more of an educated liberal/progressive/anarchist/paranoid rag, it remains good enough to buy, and this isn't the first time that I've gone online looking for something I read ten years ago. But what I want to actually say about that is: the end product is scans of the actual magazine pages, which have been scanned and OCRd to be searchable. The pages are big image files, so load somewhat slowly, so when you want to read something, you copy the text out and paste it somewhere else as straight ASCII data. And this works great for the bulk of the article, but where text is used as a graphic element – big, small, italics, what have you, in the interest of laying out the page or, in this case, the author bios – that ASCII data sometimes has a hard time keeping up, and what results are lovely little word poems. I've attached four.



I'll probably copy this into a blog post, since I never update those damn things, so no one ever reads them. The only thing I ever do when I feel like writing something is send email to Robin.