IS 260: Johanna Drucker Guest Lecture
October17
Guest speaker today, Prof. Joanna Drucker is on UCLA faculty, but currently working on a fellowship project at Stanford. She is with us today thanks to the wonders of video skype. Prof. Drucker sent her Powerpoint presentation as a file in advance of her lecture. It’s all about the technology of print. Very interesting. These notes reference the slide presentation.
She has five points. I’ve missed a few of them. One of note is, Book culture as separate from print technology. It existed before the printing press.
First up: Book culture. No slide for this. Technology, Scroll vs. Codex (separate leaves bound together, the form of a book.) The scroll is a sequential technology, you must unroll it. The codex book is revolutionary in that it is a random access technology, you can access whatever page you want without reading through the rest.
The codex was the preferred technology of the Christian religion. Reading became a religious act—monks were required to read one book a year and no monk was allowed to own a book as private property (books belonged to the monastery). It wasn’t until the formation of Universities that books began to be a business.
Stationers would read a book aloud to a room full of scribes who would each copy down the words. This led to much variation in versions of the same book. Also, the secular market grew, books became consumer items, and the middleclass wanted poems, plays, and other secular material. So when Guttenberg came along, there was already a market.
Avi asked about figures on the literacy rate in the middle ages, but Prof. D. doesn’t have the stats. Dave asks about sales of fiction at the time. Though there were Romances (poems) and tales like the Decameron, but fiction as novel didn’t exist until the late 15th century .
Slide 2: Asian Antecedents to print.
Note the irregular shape of the clay types (stamps). “Quadrature” — regularity — was something that allowed the mechanization of type.
Note the irregular shape of the clay types (stamps). “Quadrature” — regularity — was something that allowed the mechanization of type.
Slide 4
The main invention of Guttenberg was a way of casting – that is, making the letters for the press.
The main invention of Guttenberg was a way of casting – that is, making the letters for the press.
- Punches: Every single letter in the type face (italics, size, etc) has to be carved in reverse on the bottom of the steel punch. Think about the skill it takes to create something so uniform and regular by hand.
Slide 5
Punches were pressed into a Brass Matrix–the mold for the typeface. So you had to put the brass matrix into a mold, fill the mold with hot lead, throw the closed mold sharply upward to get the metal to the bottom. At the end, a “sort” is created (fun note: the phrase “out of sorts” refers to not having enough letters to complete the page you’re trying to print.
Punches were pressed into a Brass Matrix–the mold for the typeface. So you had to put the brass matrix into a mold, fill the mold with hot lead, throw the closed mold sharply upward to get the metal to the bottom. At the end, a “sort” is created (fun note: the phrase “out of sorts” refers to not having enough letters to complete the page you’re trying to print.
Revolutionary technology was the Variable Mold which allowed one mold to accomodate molds for all sorts, allowing greater standardization of sorts, leting them line up perfectly no matter how they were arranged. This “Quadrature” standardization that allowed for mechanization and mass production. Quadrature is the technology that revolutioized thought, paved the way for the industrial revolution, and our modern age.
Person next to me (I don’t know her name) aks how portable the press was. Prof D. says the press, being wood, could easily be set up on site. The lead was heavy ans cumbersome, and once set up, early models were difficult to move. Initially it was the knowledge of how to construct a press that was highly portable.
SHe notes there was an initial bias against paper, as it was seen as an Islamic technology, which came from Egypt.
1475 William Caxton — first book printed n English., wanted to print all the classics of English.
Print had effects of standardization and rationalization. It inspires standardization of languages, spelling, editing practices.
Now: Images–Slide 9
A botanical woodcut of wolf’sbane. This is much easier to work with than a textual description. So the coming of print technology for image production and reproduction. When you think about printing, think of the image and how crucial it was for medicine, botany, pharmacalogical knowledge of herbs.
A botanical woodcut of wolf’sbane. This is much easier to work with than a textual description. So the coming of print technology for image production and reproduction. When you think about printing, think of the image and how crucial it was for medicine, botany, pharmacalogical knowledge of herbs.
1423, first woodcut printed picture was of St. Christopher. Predates printing press by about 50 years.
Print conveyed so much information about the natural world. As the technology improved from woodcut to steel engraving. Prof D. sites Athanasius Kicher who did illustrations of allsorts of things.
Prof D. uses 4 images of Laocoan to illustrate the difference of four different print technologies to show how different print modes convey different information–she likens it to digital image file formats lossless ve. lossy, etc.
The transmission mode (technology like woodcut vs. engraving, paper vs parchment) conveys information in addition to the meaning of the text.
Student asks whether Prof D’s work deals with the “synthetic syntax” of digital image manipulation (like photoshop filters). Prof D. is curently working on how marginalia, endnotes and other scholarly practices can be adapted to the digital form while also taking advantage of web 2.0 technology.
November 20th, 3 pm, Prof Drucker will be formally introduced to the department. Current First-year students will be able to take one of her classes next year. Note to self–sign up for one. If Prof Drucker was this fascinating as a giant blurry talking head on a screen-projection of video skipe, she must be great in person.
Question for Prof B: (Questioer unknown) Why did the inventors of microfilm create it as a sequential technology? Prof B. says microfilm is more of a preservation than rerieval. It’s great for storing info, not so good for finding what you want.
Prof B. mentions the ratio Burke gave in the video last class that print was 400x cheaper than hand-copied text. When a technology reduces the cost of something by that much, huge societal change is bound to follow.
Your assignment is to pick one of the four communication
Ong discussed primary vs. secondary orality — primary is oral language only, secondary is spoken language which also exists in a written form.
Prof. B discusses the depth of “print-boundness” within a literate clture (like ours). She points out that some people still prefer to hear information in order to learn it, while others feel they could learn anything given sufficient time and the correct texts.
Sir Francis Bacon–not Francis Bacon the painter, who was a colateral descendant–known as the catalyst of the Scientific Revolution. Pioneered the idea of “peer review” in science.
Orality, literacy & epistomology-2
[Here is a point at which I spaced out and missed about 15 minutes of talk]
Note: The history dept. of UCLA is the largest in the US, but it’s also part of the social sciences dept. So, here’s a question about where the humanities end and the social sciences begin? Differences between the two? Methodology, funding (the NSF funds social sciences, but not humanities.)
Derek J. Sola Price–a history of science scholar. He looked at academic papers and used the number of sources cited as a metric for how scholarly they are. Prof. B points out
A system that has mirrors of the archives of lots of collections around the world, so what happens is the various repositories are always comparing their collections. If one is different from the others, then we know the copy has corrupted, and the original version can be substituted for the damaged file.
Notions of Fixity
Printing implies “fixing in place” — the identical transfer as opposed to the relative fungability of a hand-copied text.
How Fixed is Fixed?
Question (Karen): Asked about how we don’t write like we speak. Prof B says that as a writing culture matures (gets a formal grammar, formal spellings, etc) it becomes less like the oral culture which is not similarly fixed.
The slides now contain a range of typographical styles.
Prof B uses the example of the novel Tristram Shandy which is varied and playful in form–not really a narrative. The student who answered the question about Tristram Shandy used the term “postmodern” which is true even though the book was written in the 17th century. Prof. points out that in Shandy the layout is as important as the text–it’s part of the text. The words alone in ASCII would not convey the same experience at all.
Scholarly journals started with letters–correspondence–being passed around between and scholars.
Discussion of citation follows, and then journals, and, after a brief break due to technical difficulties, back to peer review. Peer review is a greatprocess, but it’s less perfect than you would think.
You know, I’m missing a lot of this discussion, I’ll listen to the podcast and flesh out these notes before the next class on October 31.
Books in the Digital Age – apparently it’s a very long book. Also, it isn’t available in digital format. I used OCR on the PDF of the photocopy of the chapter assigned, turned it into a text file and then turned it back into a PDF which is now searchable (thank goodness!).
Brown & Duguid Reading
This, also, I will review with the podcast.
Now: Essay Assignment 1
Description in the Moodle. Use primarily the text readings.
Hilary asks if we have to choose a contemporary culture, or we can choose a historical community. Yes, we can use a historical community. Whatever culture you choose, you must tie it to a specific definition of information.
How does the wiki fit into this?