I’m most interested in building complex reading environments on the web and in mobile environments. I’ve used a wide range of web technologies, though most of what I’m doing is based around React, JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS3; I've made a lot of projects using Jamstack-based technology like Next.js or Gatsby, though lately I’m spending more time with frameworks like Astro, Remix, and SvelteKit. I’ve spent a lot of time with CMSes (Craft CMS, Drupal, Sanity) and markup languages old and new (LaTeX, Markdown, JATS, XML, SGML). Off the web, I’ve made things with Processing, Arduino, and Python. I’ve made apps for the iOS and Android platforms and have apps for sale in the Apple, Google Play, and Amazon app stores.

If I haven’t used it, I’m happy to figure it out.

Current projects

Past projects

My work in publishing started as a book designer, and to a certain extent that’s still how I think of myself, though what constitutes a book (and what constitutes book design!) has grown more nebulous with time. Here are some of the projects that I’ve worked on:

Current projects

• Circumference Books. A current project is a small press presenting books in facing-page translation, in both print and bespoke electronic editions; I’m handling design and development. Our first two books, Lupe Gómez's Camouflage and Kulleh Grasi’s Tell Me Kenyalang were published in 2019, an edition of Severo Sarduy’s poetry followed in 2020, and more are on the way. You can read an article about the press in the January/February 2019 edition of Poets & Writers.
• Ring on Deli. A novel by Eric Giroux. I did the book design and came up with a website for it.
• This Chair Rocks . I did the interior design for Ashton Applewhite’s fantastic book on ageism. I also created a wide variety of electronic versions of the book and constructed a website and store in which to sell them. I’ve also helped construct Old School, a clearing house for anti-ageism resources. Images: 1, 2, 3, 4.

Selected past projects

Print work

• Marc Lafia, The Event of Art . Book design for a monograph for the American media artist. Images: 1, 2, 3, 4.
• Circumference. I did design and production for the first eight issues of Circumference, a bi-annual journal of poetry in facing-page translation. Images: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
• Tebot Bach . I’ve done some book design for Tebot Bach, a publisher of poetry based in California that concentrates on work in translation. Images: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Web- and app-based projects

These projects were done in a variety of electronic media, some just to test out different software. Images to come; electronic formats often don’t last as long as we hope they will!

• Democritus Jr. Jr.. This is a tiny IOS/Android app ( Apple, Google Play, Kindle Fire app store) that takes the text of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and turns it into a kind of sortes Vergilianae for use in personal divination. Images: 1, 2, 3.
• The End, a version of a piece by Richard Kostelanetz offering the final sentences to stories which don’t exist presented for Hotel St. George Press. This is a Java applet programmed in Processing; a Mac application can be downloaded here, and a Windows application here.
• Nouvelles impressions d’Afrique . A web version of Raymond Roussel’s book-length poem. Roussel’s poem makes radical use of parentheses to expand his narrative by digression: in this version, you can click on the parentheses and footnotes to expand and contract the poem, making it significantly more legible than the print version. A version of this appeared in Exact Change’s iOS-based magazine.
• Finnegans Wake . This is an audio archive of my ongoing reading of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: I’ve been recording myself reading it out loud and posting it online. I’ve been taking a break from this.

Sophie-based projects

These projects were constructed in Sophie 1, which can be downloaded here; it should still work. Download and unzip them; they can be opened in Sophie Reader or Sophie Author. If using Sophie Author, make sure that the application is in test mode first.

• Mothlight. This book is a version of an essay on the act of watching Stan Brakhage’s film; the Sophie version places one of Brakhage’s films, Mothlight, under the text. Turning the pages of the book using the red arrows won’t affect playback. Clicking the area around the text should pause and restart the film.
• S/Z . This piece is a version of the start of Roland Barthes’s S/Z which is itself a reading of Balzac’s “Sarrasine”. Barthes splits the text up into different lexias, which he argues embody different codes. Clicking any of the buttons for the codes at the bottom of the page will highlight lexias that use that code; clicking on a lexia will open an embedded book with a discussion of that lexia.
• Emily Dickinson 279. This single-page book presents Emily Dickinson’s poem 279. If the daggers to the right of the poem are clicked, alternate words that Dickinson considered in her manuscript are substituted in, suggesting other ways that the poem can be read. Clicking “Manuscript” shows a scan of Dickinson’s manuscript (a button overlays text so that Dickinson’s handwriting can be read); clicking “Reference” shows the standard reference version of this poem, which provides a very different sort of reading experience.
• Tender Buttons . This book presents two different ways of visualizing how the text of Gertrude Stein’s “Tender Buttons” works: first as a slideshow showing an image representing each word, second as a slideshow showing a different color representing each part of speech.

I’ve done a lot of writing (and editing) over the years. I’m in the process of writing a book about reading, travel, and knowledge, though that’s been taking a while! Here are other things I’ve written, split into categories.

Print publications

• “The Book and Place, The Place of the Book.” TXT: Exploring the Boundaries of the Book, pp. 12–15. The Hague: autumn 2014.

• Untitled review of Jack Green’s Fire the Bastards!, Rain Taxi, Volume 17, no. 1, p. 16. Minneapolis: spring 2012.

• “The Failure of Americans.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. XXXI, #1: The Failure Issue, pp. 80–103. Urbana, Illinois: spring 2011. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

• “Hopscotch-o-Matic.” Rong–Wrong, Vol. No. 1, pp. 70–76. Amsterdam: 2011.

• Untitled piece on Jan Tschichold. The Most Beautiful Swiss Books 2009, pp. 105–110. Bern: 2009. Translated into German by Daniela Janser.

• “The Responsibility of the Reader,” Logos, Volume 20, no. 4, pp. 167–170. Amsterdam: 2009.

Online publications

• “Heman Chong and Renée Staal’s Library of Unread Books” at e-Flux Criticism, 17 March 2023.

• “Confoundingly Picturesque” at The Paris Review, 28 January 2015.

• “Illinois Jesus” at The Paris Review, 18 May 2014.

• “Pamela Moore” at Writers No One Reads, 30 May 2013.

• “Frederick Rolfe” at Writers No One Reads, 28 February 2013.

• “Charles Montagu Doughty” at Writers No One Reads, 21 May 2012.

• “Going Back to Patchogue” (review of Thomas McGonigle’s Going to Patchogue), The Brooklyn Rail. Brooklyn: March 2012.

Interviews/co-authored pieces

• -with Adam Hyde & Ben Whitmore: “Kotahi: a new JATS production system", Journal Article Tag Suite Conference (JATS-Con) Proceedings 2022.
• —with Amaranth Borsuk et al.: “What is a Book?: 101 Responses.” American Book Review, Volume 41, Number 5, July/August 2020, pp.4–26.
• —with Jennifer Kronovet: Marwa Helal, “Publishing Poetry in Translation”, Poets & Writers, January/Febuary 2019, p. 16.
• —with Caroline Malone: “Emerging Forms: Interview with Dan Visel, Contributing Editor, Triple Canopy,” Spaces, 13 May 2013.
• —with Sam Frank, Lucy Ives, and Christine Smallwood, “I Know What You Did Last Summer: Four Fictions,” in Triple Canopy, Issue 17, 29 November 2012.
• “Appendix 1: Open Review Software,” in Open Review: A Study of Contexts and Practice. White paper in progress produced by MediaCommons & NYU Press for The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
• —with Bob Stein: “Mao, King Kong, and the Future of the Book” in Triple Canopy, Issue 9: 23 July 2010.
• —with Michael Humphrey: “iPad and memoir: an interview with Dan Visel” True/Slant, April 3, 2010.
• —with Michael Rüger & Bob Stein: “Sophie – The Future of Reading” in C5 2008: Poitiers, France. Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Creating, Connecting and Collaborating through Computing, 2008: pp. 13–20.
• —with Robert Stein: “Sophie and the Future of Reading and Writing” in Forum Futures 2007, 2007: pp. 57–60.
• —with Christina Svendsen, Let’s Go Rome 2000. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
• —with Sam Bull, Let’s Go Ireland 1998. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.

Talks & Panels

• Panelist, “Book/Ends?: Rethinking Scribal in the Digital Age” (with Elaine Savory, Michael Pettingger, and Oz Frankel). MobilityShifts, New School, New York. 14 October 2011.

• “The Book in Time: Futures of the Book.” The Center for Book Arts, New York. 24 March 2010

• “The Page + The Screen: Siting Text in the Early 21st Century and Beyond” (with Bob Stein). The Public School NY, Brooklyn. 25 February 2010.

• Plenary session, “The Digitization of Everything” (with Sven Birkerts and David Cole). 4th International Conference on the Book, Boston. 20 October 2006.

• “Curating Translations: Case Studies from Circumference and Archipelago Books” (with Jennifer Kronovet, Stefania Heim, et al.). American Literary Translators Association conference, Las Vegas, October 29, 2004.

Mentions

• Tausif Noor, “An Interview with PEN/Bingham winner Sergio De La Pava”, The New York Daily News, September 3, 2013

• David Shapiro, “Taking on Tomes Together”, The Wall Street Journal, January 21, 2013.

• Natalie Musumeci, “Gertrude Stein marathon! Get ready for 52 grueling hours of action, literature”, The Brooklyn Paper, January 14, 2013.

• Linton Weeks, “Books Have Many Futures”, NPR, August 10, 2010

• Jim Dwyer, “Confronting a Stranger, for Art,” The New York Times, April 4, 2010, page MB1

• Buzz Poole, “The Next Chapter,” Print, June 2009, pp. 28–29.

• Steve Bradbury, “The Brains Behind Circumference: Poetry in Translation: a Conversation with Stefania Heim and Jennifer Kronovet”. Sidebar: “A Note on the Type” by Dan Visel. Full Tilt: A Journal of East-Asian Poetry, Translation and the Arts, Issue 3, summer 2008.

• Jessica Winter, “The advantages of amnesia,” The Boston Globe, September 23, 2007.

if:book pieces

I wrote many pieces for if:book, the Institute for the Future of the Book’s blog. At some point, I’ll annotate the ones that I still find interesting.

I’m interested in a lot of things! Here are some people whose work I am interested in, in no particular order: Jane Bowles. John Ashbery. Marcel Duchamp. Raymond Roussel. Marcel Proust. Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Donald Barthelme. William Gaddis. Gianfranco Baruchello. Anna Maria Ortese. Terre Thaemlitz. James Joyce. Gertrude Stein. Paul Metcalf. Georges Perec. Stanley Crawford. Tan Lin. James McCourt. Fran Ross. William Morris. Jan Tshichold. Ray Johnson. Robert Walser. Sergio de la Pava. Alison Knowles. Henry Green. Guy Davenport. C. S. Peirce. Fernando Pessoa. Heinrich von Kleist. Daniel Spoerri. Herman Melville. Julio Cortázar. Ronald Johnson. Ross McElwee. Carlo Levi. Chris Marker. Agnès Varda. Andrey Tarkovsky. Éric Rohmer. Stan Brakhage. Fr. Rolfe. Thomas Browne. W. G. Sebald. Michel Butor. Alice Coltrane. Guy Maddin. Joseph McElroy. Eleanor Antin. Giorgio Morandi. Scott Walker. Florian Fricke. Robert Wyatt. Moritz von Oswald.

Some magazines that I have liked, mostly in the past: Dot Dot Dot. Nest. Razorcake. FMR. Fantastic Man. The Sienese Shredder. FAQNP. I was a contributing editor at Triple Canopy, and I think that’s a fine magazine, though I might be biased.

You might get a sense of what I’m up to at the moment by visiting withhiddennoise.net.