The Artifact: The Boustrophedon

This is an I Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hey Portlandia fans. Carrie Brown seen in Fred Armason here. The Dream of the 90s is alive in podcast form. We're launching Podlandia A.O. Rewatch. Our brand new podcast where we revisit every episode of Portlandia together. Breaking down sketches, going deep on our iconic characters and pulling back the curtain on how it all got made. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guest stars, collaborators and friends, including director Jonathan Kreisel, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician, Amy Mann and many more. Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised not just words, but a song about it. I thought you were all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia A.O. Rewatch on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I Heart Radio. Hi, my name is Robert Lamb and this is The Art Effect, a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind focusing in on particular objects, ideas and moments in time. For many of you, the flow of written text goes left to right, top to bottom. When your eyes reach the end of a line of text, by the far right margins, your eyes jump back to the beginning of the line below it, over by the left hand margin. While this is true of various modern European languages, other scripts, such as Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and Urdu, run right to left, top to bottom. Still other writing systems, however, are bidirectional. Traditionally, Chinese script was read right to left and top to bottom, but European influences subsequently introduced a left to right, top to bottom styling. Chinese signs may be encountered written in either direction. Likewise, Egyptian hieroglyphics can be read in almost any direction. This enables the production of Egyptian steelas that could encode multiple readings as discussed in our core episodes on document duplication. But this leads me to the main topic of discussion today, booster feed-on style. This was an ancient Greek style of writing that moved in a kind of snaking pattern, alternating direction by line. When a line of text moving left to right reached the end of a line, it continued on the next line, sure enough, but it didn't jump to the far left again. No, it began at the far right, directly underneath where the last line ended, and then it moved right to left in reversed script. You might think of it as a textual snake unable to teleport or typewriter its body to the beginning of the next line. You can look up examples of the booster feed-on style using modern English language, and you might be surprised that you can certainly read it, even with the reversed letters of the right to left traveling lines. The name booster feed-on literally means as the ox plow, which makes perfect sense. The directional details of reading and writing concern more than just the written word, however. Is EWJ Swan noted in 1965's Left and Right in Visual Perception as a function of the direction of writing? The direction one writes in is tied to one's visual perception of the passage of time. For individuals whose language travels left to right, the left side of the page is associated with proximity, past and self, and the right side of the page is associated with distance, others, and the future. In short, such left to right writing styles result in a visual concept of time is a straight line traveling from the left to the right. The reverse is true of right to left scripted cultures. Thus, the readers and writers of the booster feed-on would have likely viewed time differently, at least when visualizing its flow. As pointed out by Marilyn Mitchell in 2004's The Visual Representation of Time in Timelines, Graphs and Charts, none of this means that we're restricted, of course, to a given visual depiction of time's flow. We can draw on multiple different visual depictions of time, but it's interesting how different models give us different ideas. The booster feed-on, for instance, is still used in timeline designs due to its emphasis on snaking continuity, from one event or item to the next. The author writes, quote, "In a booster feed-on design, neither the hand nor the eye has to be raised back to one side of the page to continue writing or reading. Unlike a horizontal timeline, booster feed-on timelines always show an arrow or arrows showing how to read the line." Now I can't help but be reminded in all of this of the classic board game Snakes and Ladders, which entails alternating directions of travel, but with the added element of special routes connecting different portions of the procession of tiles. Game boards, after all, are also a visual depiction of time and space. A different board game, just like a different writing system, can provide us with an alternative means of visualizing the flow of time. Tune in for additional editions of the Artifact or the Monster Fact each week. As always, you can email us at [email protected]. Stufftoblior Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey Portlandia fans! Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armasen here. We're launching Podlandia AO Rewatch, our brand new podcast where we revisit every episode of Portlandia together, breaking down sketches, going deep on our iconic characters, and pulling back the curtain on how it all got made. We're also going to be a part of the show's history of the music industry, and we're also going to be a part of the music industry of the music industry of Portlandia. We're also going to be a part of the music industry of Portlandia. [BLANK_AUDIO]