FWIW, I would have been more likely to click on this if instead of the clickbaity title 'Solving a Century-Old Typographical Mystery', which makes me expect to be disappointed or be something I've already ready (like the typeface thrown into the Thames), it had a more informative title like 'Discovering ASCII Art in 1800s Newspapers and Why'.
(Where's dang when you actually need him to edit a submission title for once...)
Fair enough, I agree that the main title is pretty clickbait-y. Luckily there was still time for me to edit the title myself to an excerpt from the subtitle ("a forgotten moment in ASCII art history").
ASCII is a character encoding designed for computers. I wouldn't have been picky about the author calling it ASCII art but he also says ASCII characters in several places. So what should it be called? How about type art?
Differs from ASCII art in that they're (all?) constructed of single letters repeated, and not always in a line, and not always complete letters. See the first example - all Bs, with erased areas, and even some curved rows of Bs.
ASCII art uses various characters in precise typographical lines and ideally uses the shapes of the various characters to represent the shape and shading of the desired image.
The "American Standard Code for Information Interchange" is a digital character set (mapping between numbers and glyps plus equipment control codes) that was not invented and standardized until the 1960's.
It is quaint to call some 19th century artifact "ASCII text"
(Perhaps, "Monospaced type"?)
This is typewriter art which was a fad in the nineteenth century. The author's persistence in calling it "ASCII" while mentioning typewriters only three times in the article is laughable.
The article is aimed at a modern reader so uses modern terms. It's really no different to how we have terms like "classic rock" and "oldskool" when back then they were simply just "rock" and "house" music.
If people are not familiar with your subject then you have to use language what is familiar.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 60.6 ms ] thread(Where's dang when you actually need him to edit a submission title for once...)
Makes one wonder why they don't call it EBCDIC art (just kidding) or BAUDOT art.
This stunt was done for a long time before the invention of ASCII on RTTY equipment as well.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/the-lo...
ASCII art uses various characters in precise typographical lines and ideally uses the shapes of the various characters to represent the shape and shading of the desired image.
I am a huge fan of these two experimental pieces from 'ASCII' artist Raquel Meyers and chiptune/electronica musician Goto80:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y82QTBMBX4o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=054vq9Sd8Ow
And this one from the fourth century is an altar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altar_poem#/media/File:Optatia...
This one comes from 300BC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simmias_of_Rhodes#/media/File:...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calligrammes
It is quaint to call some 19th century artifact "ASCII text" (Perhaps, "Monospaced type"?)
"There were no videos? Then what did you watch on MTV?" -- Kelly Bundy, Married with Children TV Sitcom.
If people are not familiar with your subject then you have to use language what is familiar.
I love it :D