The Wooly Jumper: Typographical Problems of Concurrency in Information Display

Abstract

The well-documented use of typographical cues to illuminate instructional text has in the past been limited to illustrating containment relations (sections within chapters or subsections within section) and succession relations (after one chapter we come to the next). No other relations have been studied. Powerful though containment and succession are, other relations also exist, and in particular the rise of information technology will make it increasingly necessary to document the relation of concurrency. As it happens, descriptions of simple concurrent processes are already found in knitting patterns, so our suggestions for typographic expression of concurrency are worked out on a fragment of knitting to give a domestic and readily-grasped example.