Just back from the Modernist Studies Association’s annual conference, and still buzzing with conference energy while trying to squeeze everything I have to into this short Thanksgiving week.
MSA was, as always, such a joy–met new people, saw brilliant work presented, had new ideas for my current work and future projects.
I was speaking on a panel called “Modernist Cultures of Information,” and I’ll leave you a brief abstract here to whet your appetite:
“Via archival research on the largely un-examined Paris Tribune, my paper charts the evolution of the newspaper’s arrivals and departures listings, from the paper’s early days as the Army Edition of the Chicago Tribune in 1919, through its closure, a victim of the Great Depression, in 1934. What began as simply a list of boat names and departure dates, presuming prior knowledge of shipping lines and voyage lengths, evolved into an informative table conveying a wealth of information, with several incarnations along the way. The evolving nature of this daily chart reveals an effort to balance lengthy headnotes explaining the data with information that could be parsed at a glance by a reader, revealing increasing attention to methods of presenting information clearly and concisely. I scrutinize this shifting data-set to speculate on the changing assumptions of the reader’s knowledge and needs, examining the ways the column’s evolution mirrors the shifting audiences the paper catered to.”
Or, in visual terms, how the steamship column transformed from this:
To this:
More on this soon? I hope so!
Nissa Ren Cannon 