Krissy Wilson's blog could be called a collection of mistakes.
It features black-and-white photos interrupted by neon stripes, doodles in book margins and maps folded to create nonexistent places.
She calls it art.
The 22-year-old English senior created The Art of Google Books, a Tumblr with about 800 posts of Google Book anomalies.
She seeks signs of use — writing in margins, water damage, dog-eared pages, etc. — and aspects of digitization, meaning images that capture details like the fingers of the employee who scanned the page.
Wilson's blog has been featured by PBS NewsHour, Wired.com and Boing Boing, among others. She has about 15,500 Tumblr followers, including the New York Public Library and LIFE.
Wilson was volunteering in the Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature last year when she noticed papers pasted into book bindings. These scraps, called binder's waste, are often misprinted pages or handwritten sheets.
She started trying to match these papers to real books. She'd string the legible words into phrases and search them on Google Books, finding oddities along the way.
"There were all of these interesting anomalies that I started to pick up on," she said.
A printed portrait had been scanned through protective tissue, producing a ghostly image. Wilson liked it, so she put it in a folder on her computer's desktop.
"As I kept doing my research, more things got added to the desktop folder," she said.
Wilson decided to use Tumblr to create a database of her findings. She posts at least twice a day.
"I enjoy it as an aesthetic gallery," Wilson said. "That was the original intention - to stand alone as something that's attractive to the bibliophile, to the artist, to the techie."
Wilson has a "touchy" relationship with Google, she said. Some Google Books engineers thought the blog was cool, but other employees felt she was pointing out errors in the scanning process. If pages are folded in a book, the worker often does not unfold them when scanning. This creates spliced pictures of hybrid animals, odd diagrams and maps of places that do not exist.
Wilson's blog displays these, showing the uneasy transition from print to digital form, said UF associate professor of English Terry Harpold. She will collaborate with Harpold's hypermedia class for a Google Books hunting project. The project will be 10 percent of students' grades, according to its syllabus.
"Krissy has played the role of someone both documenting errors and glitches in the transition, but also pointing out that those errors and glitches have a kind of poetry to them," he said.
The Reitz Union's art gallery will feature The Art of Google Books from March 15 to April 3.
"She's captured how arresting some of these images are," Harpold said. "They have a strange kind of beauty to them."
Krissy Wilson, 22, poses for a photo at her computer Thursday.
