The selected (online) writings of A. G. Gibbons

Alison Gibbons first entered the blogosphere in early 2011, and when she did she felt very self-conscious about what it was she should say. After all, this would be her first blog post (the first of many?) - surely it should be momentous, fascinating, enthralling. Typing, now, in this moment, would bring Iconnote into existence...

Certainly, Alison would need to choose her words carefully. Afterall she had decided to call her blog 'Iconnote', a title she had mulled over and finally arrived at for a variety of carefully considered reasons. Not least, because the URL was available. But more than this, 'Iconnote' was a neologism, an invented word, and one which Alison had dreamed up as a compound. That is to say, it places two independent words together to make a new one. With a linguistically playful title like ‘Iconnote’, surely Alison’s first blog post needed to be written in a manner that was witty and engaging.

As a compound, ‘Iconnote’ can be read as a unification of ‘I’ and ‘connote’: ‘I connote’ (no, this blog is not sponsored by apple and yes, other electronic brands are available). What you should therefore expect from this blog, dear reader, is a series of suggestions, thoughts, ideas from its writer, Alison - or at this point the seemingly allusive ‘I’.

And Alison’s ideas will be focused in a particular area. You see, ‘Iconnote’ is polysemous. It has multiple meanings, for it is also a compound of ‘Icon’ and ‘note’: ‘Icon’, the image, the visual – art; and ‘note’, a reference to the blog itself. Yet by compounding ‘note’ with ‘Icon’, the title also suggests the symbiosis of word and image, the creative combination of verbal and visual which so fascinates Alison.

‘Iconnote’ is a blogospheric outlet for Alison’s thoughts on the creative arts: Multimodal books, art exhibitions, multiplatform storytelling, and perhaps even some cognitive poetics thrown in for good measure.

Now, what to tell the reader about first, thought Alison.

I know, I’ll start at the beginning.