as i started to say in another response tot his artifact, for me this image conveys something about "text as toxic" since the framing really doesn't connect it to other forms or action of toxicity, although I think it was meant to say something about toxic racism. If you simply read a transcript of the words you wouldn't get the same feeling (at least not so immediately) you (I) do reading it this way: ill at ease, queasy, unsettled and uncertain. So: "citizens" here transmits a kind of toxic effect, a poisoning of discourse through cleaning up this reference to people in a lynch mob! Is the nameless author serious? Following a convention? I can read also read it as if Mark Twain wrote it: "citizens" with a satiric edge from "a pen warmed up in hell," as he once described his own writing. But I think a more reportorial, straight reading was the one intended - but still, you canlt help gertting a sense that these terms and the system of law and justice they supposedly reference have in fact been terribly poisoned by a racism they can't name...
what's interesting to me about this image is not so much how my eye moved as how hard it had to work to read. which is apprrpriate to the distance in time in play here -- reading from the present to the mid-19th century. You have to resad it word by word, stopping and pondering and guessing and reading back and forward and revising your reading. We don't "see" print like this anymore and that makes it harder to read casually or transparently -- "naturally." Maybe it's an example of how to "toxify" text, or at least highlight its pharmakonic qualities of poison/gift, obscuring/showing: we're forced to confront the alien materiality of what usually passes as "information"
this is an image of text, more accurately an image of a newspaper clipping from the 19th century. for me it raises interesting questions of how differences in the imaging of texts can make a difference: a newspaper clipping, the front page of a typescript report, a screenshot of text, etc.