As a nice break from studying microbiology, I found myself browsing through the digital happenings on Twitter. Once I got past skimming through the jokes, running tips, and news, I came across one of my friends that goes to the University of Minnesota. She’s in a class that’s taught by one of the digital humanists that I’m following! So I investigated the class a little bit, and they’re currently talking about fonts and the variety that texts can be enriched with.

The class stated all the things that come with the font of a text, such as emotion, tone, style, and even personality. I was thinking about how this connected to:

• Microbiology- (Yes, unfortunately it resurfaced in my mind during my short break.) The text is so formal, straight-forward, structured, and boring. As Microbiology and the intended message of microbiology should be. Not many color changes, few size changes, and only important definitions are bolded.
• Class- I wondered how the printing press decided its main font? Who fashioned and standardized the font for the first type-writers?
• The idea that we discussed previously in class came up again: What do we lose when we digitalize a beautiful piece of text such as Blake’s poems? The emotion, tone, style and personality that come with each curve, color, and dynamic changes in the font are all diminished.
• Poems and pieces carrying maybe a powerful or beautiful message, understandably, should have a more expressive font than my microbiology textbook.

Anyways, I followed their class discussion on Twitter, and it was pretty interesting as they looked and critiqued certain fonts such as Comic Sans (I refrained from voicing my opinion on the font as I thought it might be weird). One of the girls had an interesting insight on the alphabet that I thought was parallel to some discussions we’ve had in class regarding the history and evolution of the text and specifically the alphabet.