[Discussion] Media and Culture Journal

[Gonul]

     M/C - Media and Culture
            is calling for contributors to the 'text' issue of

                                M/C Journal
                   http://journal.media-culture.org.au/

The award-winning M/C Journal is looking for new contributors. M/C is a
crossover journal between the popular and the academic, and a blind- and

peer-reviewed journal.

To see what M/C Journal is all about, check out our Website, which
contains
all the issues released so far, at <http://www.media-culture.org.au/>.
To
find out how and in what format to contribute your work, visit
<http://www.media-culture.org.au/submission.html>.

      Call for Papers: 'joke' - edited by Catriona Mills & Matt Soar

In 1976, ad critic Leslie Savan began her first ever column for New
York's
Village Voice magazine with a short piece called 'This typeface is
changing
your life.' In it, she discussed the ways in which one particular sans
serif typeface - Helvetica - had insinuated itself into American daily
life
to the extent that "The 'signs of the times' can be found on the literal

signs of the times. The use of Helvetica on so many of them expresses
our
need for security, for visual proof - if nothing else - that the world's

machinery still runs."

In truth, our everyday lives are suffused with textual encounters - in
the
letterforms that come together to provide newspaper reading; subway,
washroom and street signage; directions for taking medicine; film titles

and webpages; bus tickets and advertisements, etc. How, then, does the
construction and arrangement of letterforms imply security, as Savan
suggests, or - for that matter - friendliness, or menace?

For Beatrice Warde, writing in 1932, this was the wrong question
altogether. The task in hand ideally involved absolute transparency:
"The
book typographer has the job of erecting a window between the reader
inside
the room and that landscape which is the author's words. He may put up a

stained-glass window of marvellous beauty, but a failure as a window;
that
is, he may use some rich superb type like text gothic that is something
to
be looked at, not through."

What we're looking for

Between the positions taken up by Warde and Savan lies a whole realm of
artefacts and encounters that beg critical analysis, and it is these
phenomena that constitute the theme for this issue of M/C Journal. We
are
seeking fresh, informed interventions that bring media, literary, and
cultural studies perspectives to bear on:

Letterforms: typefaces (including their conception and application),
fonts
(the 'cuts' of typefaces that reside on computer hard drives or in
printers' trays); handwriting, calligraphy, comic book 'inking',
tattoos,
graffiti, homemade shop signs;

Textual studies: the search for authenticity - including word choices
used
in manuscripts; textual author-ity located in the mark of pen or typeset

letter on paper; translations; first editions; facsimile editions and
annotated editions; electronic versions (e-books, pdf files, CD-ROMs);
book
marketing based on the external rather than internal text (blurbs,
pseudo-
historical typefaces, typefaces as a means of facilitating author-
recognition);

The act of composition: the increasing interest on-screen in the manual
production of the text (eg Nicole Kidman 'communing' with Virginia Woolf

through her attempted replication of Woolf's handwriting in preparation
for
The Hours, or the use of handwriting on-screen in Possession); novel
structures that foreground the act of writing (epistolary fiction, diary

forms, plots driven by forgery or by the immutability of the written
word);

Typefaces: cultural/critical histories of particular typefaces; media
and
the connotations of 'native', or media-specific typefaces (dot-matrix
and
the cash register; courier and the typewriter);

Type in motion: film title sequences and television advertising;
broadcast
graphics (TV station identifiers/bumpers); 'pop-up' music videos; TV
weather maps; CNN's stock market tickertapes; Sesame Street, etc.


M/C Journal was founded (as "M/C - A Journal of Media and Culture") in
1998
as a place of public intellectualism analysing and critiquing the
meeting
of media and culture. Contributors are directed to past issues of M/C
Journal for examples of style and content, and to the submissions page
for
comprehensive article submission guidelines. M/C Journal articles are
blind
peer-reviewed.

deadline for submissions: 13 October 2003
article length: 1500 words

for more info - text@journal.media-culture.org.au

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         2004 issue topics and deadlines to be announced shortly!