Scope and Contents Comments by Johanna Drucker on internet: The concept of the "diagram" is vaguely defined in common usage, used to refer to a broad variety of schematic images"”graphs, charts, anatomical images, working drawings and so on. By working towards a tighter definition, we might use the term to refer to a specific category of graphical expressions that spatialize relations. These relations, I suggest, are themselves meaningful"”they are a kind of poetics, a bringing into being of meaning through articulation and expression. The materiality of this poetics of relations provides a way to analyse its formats and features"”to get at, to grasp, to read, see, describe, elaborate the particulars of diagrammatic expressions. The even more specific attention to writing, to written discourse organized in graphical form, exposes the workings of diagrammatic activity within the field of visual verbal activity. We depend upon these, but rarely stop to describe or discuss their structuring principles...

Scope and Contents

In the introduction, Saiber describes Bruno as a 16th century polymath who was a philosopher, poet, playwright, mnemonist and magus but at his core an architect of ideas. Saiber further adds that "Many among the educated class familiar with esoteric learning, like Bruno, looked to locate and empower themselves through spacial manipulation and symbloic permutation, such as memory theaters. encyclopedias, kabbalah, natural magic, alchemy, and searches for the 'perfect language.' Bruno's writing indeed contains verbal patterns that signal an unusual sensibility to the shape of of space - whether of the heavens, between people, on a page, or of one's mind." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.