About

Artist statement

A lot of what steers you through a book isn't the words. A comma tells you to take a breath, a period tells you to stop, and an exclamation point tells you someone is yelling. You follow every one of those instructions while you read, and you almost never notice them.

Punc takes the words away and leaves the instructions. Without the words, punctuation stops being invisible, and you can see a book's rhythm on its own: where a writer keeps you going without a breath, where the dialogue gets crowded and everyone talks over each other, and where it goes quiet for a while. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland comes out loud and nervous, full of exclamation points and questions, which is how the book feels to read.

I think a lot of what we call a writer's voice lives in those marks. Two writers can use the same words and sound nothing alike, because one of them never lets a sentence end and the other stops every few words. Punc takes the meaning out of a book, and a lot of the voice is still there.

It's an erasure, like the blackout poems I make on paper, except a blackout poem keeps a few words and Punc keeps none.

The statement also lives on Punc’s page on my site.

How it works

Punc reads a text file, drops every letter and number, and keeps the marks: periods, commas, semicolons, dashes, quotes, brackets and about a hundred other symbols. Curly quotes and long dashes count as their plain versions.

Everything happens in your browser. A file you open on the read page is never uploaded anywhere. The site counts visits with a self-hosted copy of Plausible, which uses no cookies and keeps nothing that identifies you.

The books on the shelf are public domain texts from Project Gutenberg: the five hundred English books people downloaded most in the last month, minus dictionaries, encyclopedias and repeat editions, plus a few favorites. Gutenberg's license header and footer are removed before counting. The posters are Gutenberg's own covers, dithered to pink and black.

Punc is also a TypeScript library and command line tool that makes PDF, SVG and PNG versions of the same pictures. The code is on GitHub.

Credits

Punc started in 2016 after Adam J. Calhoun's essay Punctuation in novels, which was itself inspired by Nicholas Rougeux's Between the Words.