Carrión and the Meaning of Text – Editorial Workflows Blog

My publication is the Fear of Coding group. We’re still fleshing out what we want to do in the publication. As I understand it, we’re focusing on a guide that helps new coders learn about coding and maybe get past some of the imposter syndrome that can plague people.

“What is more meaningful: the book or the text it contains?”

I chose this quote by Carrión because it’s something I resonate with and can be applied to our publication. Carrión mentions in his essay that a book is a container, that it carries words and text throughout its pages (1). He’s right; a book usually has words in it unless it’s a picture book. Text conveys information, whether it be useful to the reader or not.

What I take away from his idea is the design of our publication doesn’t have to be completely like a book. It could be like a standard website with links to various places. It could be a continuous page of flowing information. I take the stance that text is more meaningful, because though books can exist for more than just containing something, text can exist outside of books. We can expand on and explore how text is portrayed. Perhaps our “table of contents” won’t be in a traditional format, or maybe we won’t have chapters and instead will have sections with links to them. I can’t say definitively what we’ll do, but it doesn’t have to be strictly like a book.

Works Cited

Carrión, Ulises. “The New Art of Making Books.” Kontexts, no. 6-7, 1975, pp. 1-8.

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