Print Culture (Lecture 7) Woodcut. Using a handheld gouger to cut a woodcut design into Japanese plywood. The design has been sketched in chalk on a painted face of the plywood. Woodcut—occasionally known as xylography—is a relief printing artistic technique in printmaking in which an image is carved into the surface of a block of wood, with the printing parts remaining level with the surface while the non-printing parts are removed, typically with gouges. The areas to show 'white' are cut away with a knife or chisel, leaving the characters or image to show in 'black' at the original surface level.
The block is cut along the grain of the wood (unlike wood engraving where the block is cut in the end-grain). The surface is covered with ink by rolling over the surface with an ink-covered roller (brayer), leaving ink upon the flat surface but not in the non-printing areas. Multiple colors can be printed by keying the paper to a frame around the woodblocks (where a different block is used for each color). History[edit] Almanac. Etymology[edit] The etymology of the word is unclear, but there are several theories: The word almanac derives from the Greek word almenichiaka, which means calendar. The earliest almanacs were calendars that included agricultural, astronomical, or meteorological data.One suggestion is that alamanac was originally an Arabic word, al-manākh, meaning the climate, this refers to the natural change in weather.
In the modern sense too an almanac, or almanakh, is the average weather forecast for a certain period of time that is characterized by relatively stable weather conditions covering a specific area, also called climate.However, the earliest documented use of the word in any language is in Latin in 1267 by Roger Bacon, where it meant a set of tables detailing movements of heavenly bodies including the moon.One etymology report says: "The ultimate source of the word is obscure.
Early almanacs[edit] An almanac is text listing a set of events forthcoming in the next year. GPS almanac[edit] Printing press. Printing press from 1811, exhibited in Munich, Germany A printing press is a device for evenly printing ink onto a print medium (substrate) such as paper or cloth. The device applies pressure to a print medium that rests on an inked surface made of movable type, thereby transferring the ink. Typically used for texts, the invention and spread of the printing press are widely regarded as among the most influential events in human history,[1] revolutionizing the way people conceive and describe the world they live in, and ushering in the period of modernity.[2] Printing soon spread from Mainz, Germany to over two hundred cities in a dozen European countries.[9] However the first book in English was not until 25 years later in 1475. In Renaissance Europe, the arrival of mechanical movable type printing introduced the era of mass communication which permanently altered the structure of society.
History[edit] Woodcut print dated 1423 of St. Economic conditions and intellectual climate[edit] The Emergence of Print Culture in the West. The Machine That Made Us. The Day the Universe Changed - EP4: A Matter of Fact (1/5) James Burke : The Day The Universe Changed: "Matter Of Fact", 1 of 5 (CC) The history of printing. Elizabeth Eisenstein. Elizabeth Lewisohn Eisenstein (born October 11, 1923[1]) is an American historian of the French Revolution and early 19th century France. She is well known for her work on the history of early printing, writing on the transition in media between the era of 'manuscript culture' and that of 'print culture', as well as the role of the printing press in effecting broad cultural change in Western civilization.
Eisenstein is the third daughter of Sam A. Lewisohn, son of Adolph Lewisohn and Margaret Seligman, granddaughter of Joseph Seligman. Career[edit] Eisenstein was educated at Vassar College where she received her B.A., then went on to Radcliffe College for her M.A. and Ph.D. She has held positions as a fellow at the Humanities Research Center of the Australian National University and at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Palo Alto). Her most recent work is "Divine Art, Infernal Machine, the Reception of Printing in the West," (Penn Press, 2011).
Awards[edit] THE GOOGLE STORY by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed. Johannes Gutenberg. With his invention of the printing press, Gutenberg was the first European to use movable type printing, in around 1439. Among his many contributions to printing are: the invention of a process for mass-producing movable type; the use of oil-based ink; and the use of a wooden printing press similar to the agricultural screw presses of the period. His truly epochal invention was the combination of these elements into a practical system that allowed the mass production of printed books and was economically viable for printers and readers alike.
Gutenberg's method for making type is traditionally considered to have included a type metal alloy and a hand mould for casting type. The alloy was a mixture of lead, tin, and antimony that melted at a relatively low temperature for faster and more economical casting, cast well, and created a durable type. His major work, the Gutenberg Bible (also known as the 42-line Bible), has been acclaimed for its high aesthetic and technical quality. Legacy. The Manuscript Culture (Lecture 6) "Mac is Catholic, DOS is Protestant" by Umberto Eco. Jean Mabillon. Dom Jean Mabillon, O.S.B. Early life[edit] Mabillon was born in the town of Saint-Pierremont, then in the ancient Province of Champagne, now a part of the Department of Ardennes. He was the son of Estienne Mabillon (who died in 1692 at age 104) and Jeanne Guérin.
At age 12 he entered the Collège des Bons Enfants in Reims and in 1650 entered the seminary. He left the seminary in 1653 and instead became a monk in the Maurist Abbey of Saint-Remi. His devotion to his studies there left him ill, and he was sent to Corbie Abbey in 1658 to regain his strength. In 1663 he transferred again to Saint-Denis Abbey near Paris, and the next year to the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris, where he met and worked with many other scholars, including Luc d'Achery, Charles du Fresne, Sieur du Cange, Etienne Baluze, and Louis-Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont.
As editor, collaborator[edit] De re diplomatica[edit] Opposition[edit] There were, however, opponents to Mabillon's work. See also[edit] The Centre for the History of the Book - Home Page. Codex. A codex (Latin caudex for "trunk of a tree" or block of wood, book; plural codices) is a book made up of a number of sheets of paper, vellum, papyrus, or similar, with hand-written content,[1] usually stacked and bound by fixing one edge and with covers thicker than the sheets, but sometimes continuous and folded concertina-style.
The alternative to paged codex format for a long document is the continuous scroll. Examples of folded codices are the Maya codices. Sometimes the term is used for a book-style format, including modern printed books but excluding folded books. Advantages[edit] Codices largely replaced scrolls similar to this. The codex began to replace the scroll (or roll), almost as soon as it was invented. For example, in Egypt by the fifth century, the codex outnumbered the scroll by ten to one based on surviving examples, and by the sixth century the scroll had almost vanished from use as a vehicle for literature.[9] History[edit] Bookbinding[edit] See also[edit] References. The evolution of the book. The Common Place MOO: Orality and Literacy in Virtual Reality.
Computer-Mediated Communication Magazine / Volume 1, Number 3 / July 1, 1994 / Page 7 by Don Langham (langhd@rpi.edu) In the Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates deliver what may be the earliest protest in Western history against the dehumanizing effects of "modern" technology. With the benefit of our literate perspective, it is easy to say that with his condemnation of writing, Plato establishes Socrates as the earliest Luddite. Yet, as modern critics acknowledge, writing is not without its dehumanizing qualities insofar as it encourages the isolation of the individual from community.
Today, there is enthusiasm for computer-mediated communication's potential for ameliorating the divisions and isolation of print. For some rhetorical theorists, computer media promise to revitalize rhetoric by reintroducing the forgotten canons of classical rhetoric, memory and delivery. The fact is that this invention will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it. Virtual philosopher: Was Socrates right to prefer live philosophical dialogue to writing? In Plato's dialogue Phaedrus Socrates attacks the idea that writing is the best way of communicating ideas.
He says that, as with paintings, you might get the impression that words could answer you back, but instead both remain solemnly silent (Phaedrus, 275d-e): 'You'd think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever. When it has once been written down, every discourse rolls about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn't know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not.
And when it is faulted and attacked unfairly, it always needs its father's support; alone, it can neither defend itself nor come to its own support' (trans. Nehamas and Woodruff) John M. Ed. This contrasts with René Descartes comment: Socrates' objections to writing. Dr. Wolf goes back to look at Socrates’ objections to writing. He worried that reliance on writing would erode memory (it has!) , but also, and maybe more importantly, that reading would mislead students to think that they had knowledge, when they only had data. In the dialog titled Phaedrus, Socrates tells the story of the ancient Egyptian god Theuth, inventor of letters, and what the god and king Ammon (Thamus in Greek) said to Theuth about his invention: ...this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.
Socrates leads his friend Phaedrus to see the “...living word of knowledge which has a soul and of which the written word is properly no more than an image...” Cultural Impacts of Writing (Lecture 5) Jack Goody. The Consequences of Literacy. Notes on Scribner and Cole, Akinnaso, Heath, Brandt, Barton and Hamilton | thoughtjam. The Psychology of Literacy—Slyvia Scribner/Micheal Cole Field study in Liberia for four or five years, and then more years to write. Chapter: The Practice of Literacy Ong and Goody Working against oral-literate divide.
Olson says schooling improves literacy skills. This text considered an authority on debunking these notions. Working in response unproved claims that literacy leads to the development of new higher cognitive skills than cannot be achieved in oral communites and that schooling leads to literacy acquistion, these two authors with the assistance of many others set out to determine how literacy practices in the Vai community affect cognitive development. Social scientists have previously assumed that (print) literacy is both essential to maintaining traditional ways of life and that literacy is a major impetus for social change and modernization. Deep psychological differences do not exist between literate and nonliterate communities. Class Notes: Like this: Like Loading... The Oral-Literate Dichotomy. Read Marshall McLuhan's analysis of the effects of literacy on cognition--or Walter Ong's treatment of the same issue, or David Olson's or Jack Goody's or Eric Havelock's--and you'll quickly see that this binary is at the center of the analysis in a way that oversimplifies orality and totalizes the effects of literacy.
Despite the complexity and subtly of much of McLuhan's analysis of literacy's potential impact on the human mind and human societies, his characterization of oral or "primitive" cultures borders on ethnocentrism and leaves little room for the complex understanding of such cultures that has emerged in scholarly work in anthropology and related fields (I'm thinking here, for instance, of Clifford Geertz's finely drawn descriptions of Balinese culture). Walter Ong has understandably taken some of the most pointed criticism for his representation of oral cultures in the oft-cited third chapter of Orality and Literacy (1982).
Shavian alphabet. The Shavian alphabet (also known as Shaw alphabet) is an alphabet conceived as a way to provide simple, phonetic orthography for the English language to replace the difficulties of the conventional spelling. It was posthumously funded by and named after Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. Shaw set three main criteria for the new alphabet: it should be (1) at least 40 letters; (2) as "phonetic" as possible (that is, letters should have a 1:1 correspondence to phonemes); and (3) distinct from the Latin alphabet to avoid the impression that the new spellings were simply "misspellings".
Letters[edit] There are no separate capital or lowercase letters as in the Latin script; instead of using capitalization to mark proper names, a "naming dot" (·) is placed before a name. All other punctuation and word spacing is similar to conventional orthography.[1] Additionally, certain common words are abbreviated as single letters. History[edit] Other print literature[edit] Disagreement[edit] Unicode[edit] Pinyin. Pinyin, formally Hanyu Pinyin, is the official phonetic system for transcribing the Mandarin pronunciations of Chinese characters into the Latin alphabet in China, Taiwan,[1] and Singapore. It is often used to teach Standard Chinese and spell Chinese names in foreign publications and may be used as an input method to enter Chinese characters into computers.
The pinyin system was developed in the 1950s based on earlier forms of romanization. It was published by the Chinese government in 1958 and revised several times.[2] The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) adopted pinyin as the international standard in 1982.[3] The system was adopted as the official standard in Taiwan in 2009, where it is used for romanization alone rather than for educational and computer input purposes.[4][5] Hànyǔ means the spoken language of the Han people and pīnyīn literally means "spelled-out sounds".[6] History before 1949[edit] History after 1949[edit] Usage[edit] Overview[edit] Initials[edit]
Perspectives on literacy. Perspectives on literacy. Institute of Archaeology Publications Department - Andrews University. The Archaeological Publications Department of the Institute of Archaeology at Andrews University has chosen the Egyptian scribe as our motif. Some background information is found below. Scribes and Writing The invention of writing around 3000 BC defines the beginning of Egyptian history more than any other single change.
Similarly, literacy set the chief cultures of the ancient Near East apart from their contemporaries, opening up new possibilities in social organization and in the transmission, and occasionally criticism, of growing bodies of received knowledge. A scribe was trained in his first job by another scribe, and the children of important people could enter office very young perhaps about the age of 12. There are two noteworthy features of this training. Apart from administration, letters etc., the cursive script was used for non-essential purposes, the most interesting of which, from our point of view, was transmitting works of literature. The Scribe Amenophis. Orality. The domestication of the savage mind.