About page

[ogallagher]

Fill in the main content, as well as my own contact card for the right column. The main column will be broken into a number of different secions:

Textiles

You may find yourself wondering, What do textiles have to do with any of this? Well, while the rest of the world uses this word to refer to fabrics, we’ve repurposed it to refer to our new kind of puzzle. A textile consists of a dense patchwork of free-form text as a background, obscured by an opaque cover, and the player/solver/reader can see through the cover via specifically shaped windows. The player moves those shape windows around until each is looking at its corresponding hidden text. Once all the shapes are placed correctly, the textile is solved!

The ways in which one can arrive at the solution are multiple: the shapes together will often reveal some sort of image or scene, and each shape will contain within it a selection of text that matches in some way (by subject matter, symbol, imagery, etc).

The Big Ideas

I’ve felt one of the principle struggles of literature in recent years has been a war waged against new forms of communication and entertainment: photography, movies, television, social media, video games. Each one has offered something new and exciting that simple text has had to compete with. A picture is worth 1000 words, after all. Movies are worth thousands of pictures (not to mention the audio). Social media incorporates multimedia presentation and instant connection. Video games add interaction and the infinity of virtual space.

This has not been strictly a losing battle for literature, however. There are countless ways that artists of letters– authors, journalists, screen writers, poets, song writers– have combated their rival art forms, and have found means of adapting to fit in with new media. The Textiles Journal is but one of these. With this journal we are attempting to create a new medium for literature, taking cues from its rivals: it’s available online, it’s both textual and visual, and it’s interactive.

So, depending on how you see it, one might even call us revolutionary.

Participating

This is still a newborn project with few visitors, few registered accounts, few contributors, a tiny team, missing features, errors,... you get the picture. That said, we’d like all the help we can get! If you’re interested in the site, register an account with us. If you are a writer and are looking for somewhere to share, look no further; see the Contribute page for more details. If you’re up for the challenge you can even send us a whole textile to publish! See How it’s Made for how to do so. If you’re knowledgable in web development and would like to test/review/debug/improve the source, visit the Github page.

The basic takeaway is: if you want to get involved in some way, please do!

How it’s Made

Our methodology for creating a new textile is fairly low-tech and requires no software or equipment purchases. If you’re interested, give it a go yourself and send us the result to contact@textilesjournal.org!

1. Literature content
   To start you need some text fragments. There are essentially no rules here, though it can’t bee too long since it’ll all need to fit inside the space of the textile. It can be from a single work, or from multiple. A work is a source text that the textile will use, and a fragment is an excerpt that is found verbatim in the textile. Make sure you’re allowed to use the work(s), of course. Keep track of what gets used in the textile so that we can publish it with references to included works.

2. Shapes
   Next you need some shapes (by the way, steps (1) and (2) can be done simultaneously or in reverse order, too. Not all songs are lyrics with music added after, or all music with lyrics added after). Each shape will act as a piece in the puzzle, and as a window to view the text behind it. The shapes should in some way relate to the text where they belong.

3. Composition
   Before you can put it all together together, here are some questions to think about. How do the shapes relate to each other? Where should they go? Also, what will go between the shapes? A good textile will probably not just have white space between each area where a shape goes.

4. Execute
   It’s finally time to create something. There is more than one way to do this step, but I'll describe our specific method here.

   • Get two pieces of blank paper that are not too think (printer paper is good). On one page, draw the shapes with a clearly visible pen that won’t smudge too much. On the other page, draw the text. To make the two pages line up, you can place them in a stack on a light box or over a window, “onion-skinning” as one would do for consecutive frames in 2D animation.
   • Once the pages are done, scan each one to an image (something like a png or jpeg should work). If you don’t have a scanner available I suggest trying Scannable, by Evernote.
   • Each scan is then binarized (turned to a black-or-white image) and vectorized (from pixel raster to scalable geometry). You can use something like the following shell script, which uses ffmpeg and potrace.

     
     #!/bin/bash
     # vectorize_img
     # Owen Gallagher
     # 1 August 2019

usage to convert image.png to image.svg: $vectorize_img image png;

set input file, filetype, and destination directory

if [[ -z $1 ]] then echo 'Error arg1: no input filename included' exit 1 else if [[ -z $2 ]] then echo 'Error arg2: no input filetype included' exit 2 fi fi

img=$1 ext=$2

convert to bitmap image

ffmpeg -i ${img}.${ext} ${img}.bmp

vectorize

customize blacklevel to set threshold for vectorization

potrace --svg --progress --blacklevel 0.5 ${img}.bmp

see results

open ${img}.svg -a /Applications/Safari.app

5. __Create the SVG__<br>Import the shapes and text vector (svg) files into an [Inkscape](https://inkscape.org) project, and resize them so they are properly aligned. You can use the app to modify the shapes as well. We always replace the shapes with simplified ones drawn in Inkscape, to shrink the file size. If you have the patience, you can also simplify the paths of the text, which greatly reduces the file size for us.

6. __Export the SVG__<br>This step is not necessary, and if you send us the result from step (5) we’ll take care of the rest. However, if you can, it makes things a lot quicker for us if you combine all the text into one path, and keep the shapes each as its own path. Also, don’t use any transforms (be careful with `<g>` groups; they will often have transforms which need to be applied to child nodes). Then, open the svg file in a text editor, and open a new blank text file also. In the blank text file, paste the path data (`<path d="COPY ME”/>`) for the text and label it. Then, do the same for each shape.

7. __Send it to us__<br>Finally, send us the text fragments, the text file with the path data, and (optional) the svg file. We’ll review them, let you know whether we add them to the site, and credit you as the textile designer for it.

[ogallagher]

The about page still needs my contact card and some images.

[ogallagher]

I should widen the scope of the site a little bit, encouraging a broader definition of literature to encompass visual art, lyrics, etc. this would mean changing a few words in the mission statement, contribution explanation, and the explanation in the about page.

[ogallagher]

As per the new mission statement:

To publish literary and visual artwork in a new, accessible, and fun medium for the benefit of authors, readers, and gamers alike.

[ogallagher]

The mission statement is updated, as well as my contact card and the addition of some demo textile screenshots as About page images. Next up (and possibly last up) is to change the contribution (both in About and Contribute pages) and how-its-made sections to match the broader scope and include art like visual and lyrical.

[ogallagher]

The About and Contribute pages should now be updated to implicitly expect more types of artwork.