||||Liesl Barrell

The fight for funding to superimpose the digital paradign onto print continues! Mitch Joel, of Montreal marketing agency Twist Image, unleashed this gem on his blog. This time the offenders are at Stanford, where they are mapping out communications between 18th century writers (presumably in a bid to convince Voltaire to join Twitter posthumously) using very pretty colours, delivering epic screensavers that still manage to bore your socks off.

The “dots” or “letters,” do move rather nicely through the lines or “communication channels,” and “principal investigator” is a pretty kick-ass title for Edelstein, I must say. 

Said the world, “wasn’t it content we crowned king?” Well, turning content into dots makes us focus on the really important thing, here: writers of the past had friends, apparently. And in some cases, they even had more than one. And hey, with Twitter rebranding their offering as Information Networking, perhaps we will stop caring about either the medium or the message, and start focusing on the network. At the very least, this Stanford venture has the kind of “enduring” appeal of such Facebook apps as Friend Wheel, billed as a “Wheely Good Friend Visualiser.”

Considering this got a green light, things are looking up for me to receive funding for my upcoming project, “Early Modern Marital Dynamics: It’s Complicated – The Tweeting of the Shrew” in which I plot the relationship statuses of major Jacobean and Elizabethan figures over time using a kind of Ur-Facebook made by carving out of the remains of Bebo.