Word Garden
I've posted quite a bit about what led up to this project, over in the Reading and Writing section. It started as a way of looking at orthographic patterns in simple one-syllable words.
This is basically a matrix of rimes. Vowel sounds form horizontal strata, and closing consonants form columns. Families of consonants get grouped by color: here, bubble-gum pink for stop sounds, yellow for fricatives, and peach for the stop-fricatives between them.
As an architect, I’m used to thinking of pattern in terms of visual cues such as alignment, proximity, size, and color. The Word Garden uses those cues to communicate a sense of the order underlying sounds and syllables in English: a complicated, weedy territory, when you look at it in writing, but an order that can be mapped nevertheless.
A spreadsheet in matrix format would have some advantages over this paper garden gizmo. The high-tech version could be loaded with drop-down lists and filters. It could tabulate data, and display it different ways. It would easier to share and reproduce. (For instance, here’s a pdf using the matrix to look at orthographic and phonotactic patterns in one-syllable words, posted to Google Drive.) As a book artist, though, I’m intrigued by the haptic experience of turning pages, that intimate journey shared by eye and hand. I think the Word Garden has potential as a classroom tool, one that unfolds in three-dimensional space, inviting annotation and exploration. It seems apt that the garden we are sowing is a field of books.