In the first part of the book Albertine Gaur compresses a great deal of cultural history and draws on an impressively wide range of ethnographic reference to argue the case. At its weakest this is not much more than a very elegantly illustrated list, with examples jumping from pre-Christian culture on one page to New York subway graffiti on the next. At its best, it is an example of a writer who can make her scholarship attractive, accessible, and inviting to her audience. Reading this filled me with a curiosity to look at her other work.
Words therefore become hieroglyphs or icons themselves.
But we are taken from one aspect of the subject to another without any firm sense of structure or reasoned exposition. For instance, we are dropped into an encomium of aboriginal iconography on one page with a claim that 'no future iconography is likely to approach that level' - only to then be rushed on to dingbats with no connecting argument. A chapter on musical notation is not much more than a description of traditional craft methods, followed by an acknowledgement that what was once a laborious process can now be done easily using computers. It's not until we reach Adrian Grater's chapter on movement notation that we get closer to the IT element promised in the title. He describes in some detail the cognitive process of constructing a software program which can record the subtleties of dance in graphic form.