The Science Project

Book pages as art

2008-07-22T19:08:54Z

The site Ladybird Prints recently caught my eye; they do digital art prints of pages from old Ladybird books. There is a particular nostalgia around old children's books that becomes obvious in second-hand bookshops and antiquarian fairs. Picture books and illustrated fiction seem to dominate. Of course, old books can be taken apart and the individual pages framed as prints. Horrific! Ok, maybe its not so bad when the book in question is beyond repair, as in Kate Tempest's prints taken from damaged vintage children's books.

The (increasingly popular) process of digital photo printing, on canvas or heavy art paper, seems like a responsible alternative to ripping the book apart. (Especially if it wasn't especially well printed in the first place! Sorry, Ladybird.)

(click to enlarge)

One of the more interesting choices on the Ladybird Prints site must be the classic The Computer. How about one of these at A0 size -- that's over a metre high -- on 'watercolour paper'! (more images after the jump).

]]> And how refreshing to see a library of lowly Ladybirds to choose from, though the offering is a bit uneven. Many different spreads are on offer for some books, only the covers are offered for others. Well, you can't scan everything, though I think some cover-only books have excellent internal illustrations. I'm thinking of books like 'The Telephone', for example.

Unfortunate also that not all the covers belong to the earlier, more engagingly designed editions of the books. Instead we get to pick from some pretty awful redesigns.

The Science & Space section contains a lot of good stuff, though again many are cover-only. One of my personal favourites, from the book Magnets, Bulbs and Batteries, isn't available, so I've put it up here: the classic picture of a girl and boy playing with batteries. The girl is peeling some zinc off a battery (!) for the boy to make a lemony electric current. Brilliant!

Evolution greenhouse: horticultural and educational

2008-06-28T15:27:45Z

A recent and long overdue visit to Kew Gardens (mainly because we couldn't resist the concept of the Treetop Walkway, which was by the way a lot tamer than I was expecting… ) lead me to visit the Evolution House, a greenhouse given over to a film set depicting plant evolution. At the entrance are maps (here's a close-up) tracing the path of plant evolution. You enter in the Precambrian era, surrounded by sloping 'basalt rocks' and glowing hot 'lava' underneath (nice effects!) and bubbling mud puddles (real mud, fun!).

After that, life begins and the rest of the greenhouse walk snakes through a seriously dramatic evolution landscape with dinosaur tracks, towering crazy trees (horsetails, ferns etc.), sheer 'rock' faces, various forest sounds and waterfalls; very entertaining, if a little tight (bit unfair to compress 3500 million years of plant evolution in a such a moderately sized greenhouse…). Luckily, you emerge back in the present era at the other end.

]]>

This exhibit is interesting because it is so unlike others at Kew -- the website tells me that it is 'a completely new type of educational-horticultural display concept, involving landscape immersion techniques'. See? Its not a greenhouse but a concept. Ok, I'd like to see a more extensive concept with more mud ponds and live amphibians. Good fun though.

the Big Science Read

2008-06-19T18:57:48Z

The Big Science Read

History corner: Byrne's Euclid, 1847

2008-06-07T18:41:34Z

Oliver Byrne’s 1847 edition of Euclid’s Geometry is a striking example of Victorian typesetting and book design, notable for its use of colour and layout to express mathematical proofs. It seems worth sharing here for its experimental use of graphic forms for teaching geometry.

The title page reads: ‘The First Six Books of the Elements of Euclid in which coloured diagrams and symbols are used instead of letters for the greater ease of learners.’ Byrne was a surveyor, mathematician and teacher, and the contents of the book, which covers the first six books of Euclid’s ‘Elements of Geometry’, covers topics that made up the basic mathematics curriculum for many students at the time. These pictures are ones that I took of the copy held in Special Collections at the University of Reading.

(click on the spread for a larger view; more spreads after the jump)

]]> Published in London by the Chiswick Press, the book was novel for using colour, shape and orientation to replace the traditionally letter-based coding used to present Euclidean proofs (in which a triangle would be labelled with angles a, b and c). Byrne was an expansive (even eccentric) thinker and his aim was to reduce the sheer quantity of text, and to give a visual form to the information. The result is a surprisingly modern layout: a combination of bright blue, red, and yellow woodblock-printed shapes, thoroughly integrated with the black type and rules throughout the book. The only hint of the book’s real age, on some pages, is in the odd Victorian flourish or drop cap.

Byrne’s Euclid may strike contemporary viewers as a forerunner of modernist design, eerily foreshadowing theDe Stijl colour palette; in reality it is an early example of sophisticated use of visual metaphor in information design. It also reflects developments in print in the nineteenth century, a period in which the use of colour would increase radically through multiple innovations in the productivity of the (by then) centuries-old press. The book was rediscovered with the development of information design scholarship over the last half century (like McLean's 'Victorian book design' of 1963 and Tufte's 'Envisioning Information' of 1990) and deserves to be more widely acknowledged.

David Macaulay Talks

2008-05-27T14:47:18Z

As a follow-up to Katherine's post last week linking to a video on the processes of illustrating a science book, here's a link to an online movie of David Macaulay. He's talking about history, not science (producing his book on Rome), but Macaulay's probably best known for The Way Things Work and I thought this clip might still be of interest.

The process behind an illustration

2008-05-19T08:18:14Z

Here is a great time-lapse animation of a series of screenshots showing one illustrator's work on a piece called 'Science Machine', which took about 40 hours to complete. I really like this because it shows the amount of work that actually goes into a piece and how much every detail needs to be carefully defined (in Illustrator, which is a vector-based drawing programme, you can see that even 'messy' shapes need to be defined precisely). I urge you to keep the video running even if you go and get a cup of tea or something in the middle; it is worth it to catch all the little details that are buried in the final piece. (Posted on Gizmodo, via Rebecca Cottrell).

educational access and the frappuccino kids

2008-05-01T14:52:56Z

This has been bugging me for years. I've so far held off writing down my rant, but Tristram Hunt et al have pushed me over the edge. I figure that Hunt's suggestion that only select final year undergrads should be allowed to use the British Library (i.e. over 21s) is a question of young people's access to knowledge, and so I'll blog about it here.

]]> Basically the fuss surrounds the fact that the British Library is overused around Easter. It can be hard to get a seat if you arrive after 11. Plus, in recent years they've been a bit a bit more open in their access policy, largely letting local undergrads in (which they were always very fierce about in my day).

Cue headlines all over the place on 'Frappachino' kids ruining the once hallowed halls of the British Library reading room. With their Pokemon and their SunnyD; texting, chatting, passing lecture notes on major religions and dressing like they're auditioning for the next series of Skins.

What bugs me, and fair few others, is the suggestion that problems at the BL are some how the fault of increased access policies. To Tristam Hunt et al, I say get over it, we live in a society. Moreover, the BL's a publicly-funded space. Learn to share, even with those brash kiddies.

That said, I am continually disgusted by what I think is misuse of the BL. People seem to use the library as a cool place to hang out. As a nice place to work. And they shouldn't. The BL isn't a public library, or even a 'proper library', it's a library of last resort. It has a very specific role, it's a place to read books you can't get anywhere else. Use the library for anything else and you are potentially obstructing the work of others. It might be true that academics have more of an awareness of this issue than 6th formers, but that's no reason to make use of the place exclusive. The library can just get better at communicating its proper function to potential members. That counts equally for the ageing Professor looking at nothing but his own computer as he proof-reads his latest work of great insight as it does the 16 year old annotating their own copy of York Notes, Macbeth (or the people, of various ages, I continually spot SLEEPING there).

I have equal disdain for the freelancers who use the coffee shops as free office space. Firstly, how dare they power their laptops off publicly-funded electricity? Secondly, I think a fair number of them hang out there largely to pose. I'm sure many of the BL consumers simply like the atmosphere of being around intellect. They sit with their posh laptops, sipping middle class coffees with middle class clothes and a stench of superiority - you know the style (and I admit, I often apply it myself). It's all very well indulging that aesthetic in a bar, cafe, private art gallery or even the London Library. But such use of the BL not only draws on the image of it as a middle class high-brow space, but emphasises it. I think that just reproduces the idea of the BL as a location not simply for learning, but as a site for social distinction. Bourdieu would have a field day, and I'm sure it puts off many of the people the access programmes seek to encourage.

To conclude my ramble, my biggest issue with all this recent fuss about the BL is that these 'frappuccino kids' aren't that far off the elite themselves. With their use of it as a fashion choice, they exacebate elitist boundaries, not challenge them. The BL isn't a lifestyle (and they can stop those bloody single nights too), its a utilitarian public service. The more people who remember and respect that, the better off we'll all be.

Horrible non-fiction

2008-04-21T11:09:13Z

I think the Horrible books might be illegal.

The Horrible approach, if you don't know it, is a sort of irreverent antithesis of a school textbook, and makes up one of the key trends in British children's non-fiction in recent years (it's also what I'm writing my thesis on).

]]> Martin Barker, in his great book A Haunt of Fears (about campaigns in 1950s Britian against so-called American horror comics) mentions a bill that banned the dissemination to children of publications consisting 'mainly or wholly of stories told in pictures' portraying the commission of crimes, actions of violence and, importantly for the Horribles, 'incidents of a repulsive or horrible nature'. Punishment is four months in prison, or a fine of £100. You can see an image of it reproduced by Barker through googlebooks (it's page 16). According to Barker, it was passed in 1955, renewed in 1965 and remained in force when he was writing in 1984. I checked with a comics expert, and apparently it still applies today.

OK, I'm not serious about this, I'm only really applying it to the Horribles to point out how silly the law is. Crucially, the law notes that the publications would incite young readers to commit a crime, or enact violence or cruelty. For all the vagueness of 'cruelty' (or violence for that matter), it would be hard to apply it to the Horribles. But then, arguably it's hard to apply it to anything much. Media effects isn't exactly a precise science.

I suppose the Horribles, like the Beano or Bugs Bunny before them, get away with being so happily horrible by way of treating the whole thing as a joke. That said, as Barker emphasises, there is an intimate link between humour and the Horror comics this bill was set up in reaction to. I don't think that humour automatically excuses it, and it's not as if Bugs Bunny et al haven't been criticised for violence (think about Marge Simpson's campaign against Itchy and Scratcy). You could also argue that the law doesn't apply to the Horribles simply because they aren't 'stories', but non-fiction, facts, instead - though again, that's pretty slippery.

What this 1955 law really shows us is how much things have changed. Horrible Histories author Terry Deary (in this book, in the late 90s), argues that the whole approach wouldn't have been possible if Roald Dahl hadn't already brought about an acceptability of groteque and dark humour in British children's literature. I guess it's a truism to say people have relaxed since the 1950s, especially in respects to imagery presented to children. Plus, I think Barker's point is partly that the huge fuss made over the horror comics in the 50s, which led to the passing of that bill, was a bit of a crazy moment in British history anyway. Although with the usual suspects of Daily Mail readers, the campaign was fought by communists, worried by the influence of American propaganda.

Still, Mary Whitehouse et al have had an on-going (and surprisingly large) influence on British media (just read this book on Dr Who). Maybe there really are people who object quite strongly to the Horrible books. And maybe they have a point. I don't know, it's an interesting one.

Non-fiction picture books ignored again

2008-04-16T14:20:37Z

A recent article in the Economist (April 5-11 2008) bemoans the decline of the picture book and the status of illustration generally in Britain, after the author's visit Bologna children's book fair. But the piece is concerned solely with fiction…

]]> True, the international market is tough and publishers have to compete with the internet, put up with big bookselling conglomerates and a myriad other pressures, but the author's assertion that 'most picture books cannot be published for British readers alone' has been true to some extent since the 1970s.

And there is such maddening tunnel vision with respect to storybooks in children's publishing that seems to exclude the validity of all other forms. Non-fiction and information books for children have long been heavily illustrated with drawing, diagrams and photography of all sorts (witness this random spread from an Usborne NatureTrail book or either of these Aventis Prize winners (2007) from DK.)

If anything, illustrated books are expanding and developing! And don't tell me that photographs and diagrams aren't pictures. The enormous value (both communicative and artistic) of all of these forms is ultimately realised much more often in non-fiction than in children's storybooks.

Green books for kids

2008-04-10T11:30:00Z

I saw an announcement for a kids 'green' book award, and it reminded me of an issue I've been thinking about for a while; namely a recent mini boom in kids eco-crit publishing.

There are some really interesting examples out there. Perhaps the most high-profile is the junior book version of An Inconvenient Truth. How's that for crossing media? Lecture to film to book, and adult to kid. There are also a growing range of guides to saving the world today, and don't get me started on the cultural politics of How To Turn Your Parents Green. There's a basic review of such literature published in Nature last December, and a run down of US equivalents can be found here.

There are tonnes of really interesting questions we could ask about these books and I could be all day writing this post. To start with a single point though, I wonder whether it is useful to class them as 'science' books?

There is a long tradition of children's nature guides, which I guess the non-fiction books could fit into. But there is both an analytical tone, and normative force, to these books which the more traditional 'spot the birdie' publications (rooted in Nature Study or similar) would shy away from. Are they politics then? Maybe. But they suggest themselves as factual information, as much as opinion; so are they science? In terms of the fiction and the fictionally-inclined (a lot are purposely in-between fact/ fiction boundaries), children's literature scholars have long argued pro-nature stories in kids SF generally paints science in a bad light, as if nature and science were somehow opposed. Personally, I think that axis is changing slightly, especially within steam-punkish forms of (tech)nostalgia and in some of the fantasy/science fiction genre fusions from writers like Eoin Colfer. Still, Noga might disagree!

Maybe the business of eco-crit for kids is its own small genre (or section of cross-genres). And I don't think we should get carried away assuming this is especially new - just looking back as far as the early 1990s, who remembers Captain Planet? Not to mention Nature Study (again), the Really Wild Show, David Bellamy...

NYC toy fair @ Make: a good scroll

2008-04-01T18:36:22Z

Just a bit of eye candy to bridge the posting gap! It is Make's visit to the NYC Toy Fair 2008; follow the link for a great overview with emphasis on DIY/kits/make-it-yourself toy variety! Got this shot of the Tinkertoy from their post. It was hard to choose.

Dinosaur Top Trumps!

2008-03-08T18:10:15Z

About a year ago I picked up a pack of Dinosaur Top Trumps. The game invokes slight nostalgia for my youth, and I seemed to have collected a couple of sci-fi tie-in editions. I saw the dinosaur ones and thought it might have some relation to my research, as a vaguely scientific children's toy. If you're not familiar with Top Trumps, its basically a card game played in rounds, based on getting a high value card. Each set of cards is themed, and each card will have a set of values relating to that theme. For Dinosaurs it's height, weight, length, "killer rating", age and "intelligence rating". Players take it in turns to call out the category, and the one with the highest value wins.

When I got home I glanced at them and thought about the odd cultural economy of dinosaurs and equally bizarre facticity of many children's non-fiction media. At least I thought about it for about 30 seconds and then left them on a bookshelf and largely forgot about the things. I was reminded of them last month while re-reading Buckingham & Scanlon's discussion of dinosaur books, where they (rather cheekily, but darn accurately in my opinion) compared the cult of the dinosaur in non-fiction publishing with Pokémon. Its all about collecting and exchanging facts, with the odd semi-fantastic monster thrown in.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago some friends and I were bored, and I dug them out for a game. So, some observations based on our lazy Sunday evening game.

]]> Firstly they are very pretty. The images are quite detailed, more Walking with Dinosaurs than the Isotype style Katherine's just discussed. These are reasonably realistically rendered dinosaurs, not cartoon ones. Although, there is still something clearly illustrated about them; they looked more like oil paintings than CGI.

Secondly, the great thing about Top Trumps is each round is very quick, which pleases the more impatiently competitive players amongst us (ahem), but this doesn't leave much time for considering the context of the values assigned. What is more, why do we assume bigger is better? It is purely a matter of highest number, which when transferred to stats about dinosaurs, becomes a matter of size. As we played, we largely forgot about the dinosaur, regardless of the pretty picture, until I implemented a new rule (which I then refused to play when I realised how hard it was) that to win a round you did actually have to pronounce the dinosaur's name.

Thirdly, what's the n/a about? In a Dr Who set we also tried, one character was n/a in size, because it was largely immaterial (a sort of electronic baddy living in the tv), but there were quite a few for the dinosaurs sets, with no clear reason why. We could see in the pictures that these beasts clearly did have a height, so why wasn't it recorded? The sociologist of science in me wants to argue its a subversive attempt to inculcate cultulral acceptance of the lack of certainty in production of scientific 'facts', but more likely it's a lazy researcher somewhere. Either way, these are so decontextualised its impossible to tell.

Fourthly, and this is where things get weird... because oh my goodness, if there isn't a theoretical dinosaur. Well, an image of what a dinosaur would have looked like if it had evolved into man.

Funnily enough, as we played this human-dinosaur soon became the acknowledged rubbish card - unless you happened to call intelligence it was way too small and weedy to win anything. Which, if we're working through cultural symbolism, might say something about man's place in (semi-fantastical) images of nature.

All in all, nothing especially surprised me in this game (with the possibly exception of the pseudo-dinosaur), Buckingham and Scanlon largely say it all in the comparison to Pokémon, but a fascinating example nonetheless. If you are interested in what other aspects of the world (and associated knowledge of it) have been pokémon-ed Top Trumps style, the wikipedia entry is pretty detailed or the official site, Planet Top Trumps, is worth having a look through, though its hard to navigate. If you want a more scientifically-sanctioned version of the game (for free download) try the Natural History Museum education department.

Reminder - call for papers, Science & Public 2008

2008-03-04T09:59:21Z

More details here

CFP: conference on children's literature and the environment

2008-03-03T16:24:06Z

CALL FOR PAPERS. Deep into Nature: Ecology, Environment and Children's Literature

BRITISH IBBY/NCRCL MA CONFERENCE, NOVEMBER 15TH 2008 (Roehampton University, London)

]]> Global warming is a dominant narrative of our time, and we are surrounded by stories of a doomed future of environmental catastrophe. But landscape and our relationship with nature have long preoccupied children’s literature in the UK and internationally. For their 2008 conference, the British Section of IBBY (International Board on Books for Young People) and the NCRCL (National Centre for Research in Children’s Literature) want to look at how the environment, and the human/child relationship with the natural world is treated in books for young readers. We will also examine how children’s publishing can respond to issues of consumption and sustainability. For details, go to www.ncrcl.ac.uk.

The conference will include keynote talks by well-known writers and academics (confirmed speakers are academic Roni Natov, and children's book creators Michael Foreman, Michelle Paver and others), and we would like to include a wide range of workshop sessions (lasting about 20 minutes) which might deal with some of the following or other issues:

* the natural world and the human relationship to it
* the child in nature
* eco-activism and its representation
* landscapes both tame (such as gardens) and wild
* the pastoral
* future relationships with the natural world and how they are represented (sci-fi, fantasy, realism)
* issues around production/consumption and sustainability
* eco-criticism and children’s literature

We would particularly welcome international perspectives and contributions from academics and others interested in any of these areas. Brief accounts of papers given will be published in the Spring 2009 issue of IBBYLink, the journal of British IBBY, and we hope that the proceedings of the conference will be published shortly afterwards in full in book form.

The deadline for proposals is June 30th 2008. Please email a 200 word abstract (for a twenty minute paper) as an attached Word document to Laura Atkins at L.Atkins@roehampton.ac.uk. Please also include a short biography and affiliation.

Isotype workshop

2008-02-24T16:45:13Z

This post is based on my workshop presentation at the 'Discussing popular science' workshop at Imperial College on Friday. Thanks to Alice for a great event! Though I could only make half the day, I met loads of interesting people, and the discussion-based format was a nice change from the usual.

I chose to bring along some the Max Parrish Isotype books for children that are part of the Otto and Marie Neurath Isotype archive held in the Department of Typography in Reading. These were developed by Marie Neurath and published by Max Parrish in London from the late 1940s to the 1960s. The books are innovative in their approach to picture/text integration and characterised by a very systematic approach to pictorial information, colour, layout and writing -- excellent examples of integrated design and layout.

This is just a beauty shot of the covers. 2-page spreads are after the break!

]]> I wanted to show these because it is easy to forget how wide-ranging the work of the Isotype Institute really was -- we tend to think only of isotype charts of social and economic data, but plans for children’s books had been set since the early 1940s, a reflection of the Institute's interest in education. Marie Neurath continued the work of the Institute after Otto’s death in 1945, and worked to write, design (‘transform’), and produce the books along with a small team.

The books deal a variety of themes including nature and biology, science and technology, people of the world, and more. By 1971, the Institute had produced over 80 books for children, which were translated into other languages.