A Brief History of Literary Technology
/The following is an excerpt from Digital Course Materials: A Case Study of the Apple iPad in the Academic Environment.
Throughout the history of human civilization, literary technology has developed and continued to change in form. Oral traditions, clay, cuneiform tablets, papyrus, silk, parchment, vellum, paper, scrolls, books, print-on-demand and e-books are all part of a continuous stream of human technological change. Over the centuries, major shifts in literary technology have circled around usability, durability and ease of reproduction. These forms of technology helped shape the various civilizations that used them. This section briefly describes the evolution of reading materials and printing.
For well over a thousand years, written history was documented using scrolls. Made of papyrus, parchment or paper, scrolls were designed to be rolled from one spool to another. The shift from scrolls to book format slowly developed after the invention of codex. Codex is the term used to describe the modern form of a print book with separate pages bound together inside a protective cover. The codex form pre-dates early examples of woodcut printing. In first century Rome, these bound pages of papyrus or parchment were widely used for personal notebooks, while more formal writings remained on scrolls. These notebooks of parchment could be washed off and reused, and were of great value (Roberts & Skeat, 1983). In the Bible, Paul writes a request to Timothy in 2 Timothy 4:13 (New Living Translation): “…bring my books, and especially the parchments.” The translated term “parchments” is the Greek term membranae, a word commonly used at the time to describe notebooks made of parchment. Over time, the codex gained acceptance due to its usability features compared to the scroll. These inherent features included its transportability (compactness and durable covers), economy of the page (could write on both sides, recto and verso), and user friendliness (opened flat at any page). The Roman poet Martial praised the new codex form in the first century and it soon became the preferred format among first and second century Christians. By the fourth century, the form was commonly adopted in Western culture, replacing the wide use of scrolls (Roberts & Skeat, 1983).
The earliest surviving examples of what has become modern printing date back to woodblock or woodcut printing. Woodcut printing (xylography) describes a process where the areas not to be printed are carved away leaving behind a relief of the image to be printed. This left the desired image on the wooden surface to be covered by ink and pressed onto cloth or paper lying on a flat surface to produce a print. The earliest surviving examples of the woodcut printing method are from China and date back to the Han Dynasty. One such example is a three color woodcut print of flowers on silk that dates back to sometime before 220 AD (Farrer, Rawson, Vainker, Whitfield, & Trustees, 1990). The earliest example of woodblock printing on paper is a Buddhist Dharani sutra dated between 650 and 670 AD (Pan, 1997). This form of printing eventually led to the first printed book in the form of a scroll, the Diamond Sutra, printed in 858 AD. This text is a central text of Indian Buddhism and was discovered in 1900 in a monastery near Duhuang, in Chinese Central Asia. It is currently located in the British Library in London (“Turning the pages,” 2010).
In the 15th century, Johannes Gutenberg produced the first printing press with both great ingenuity and adaptation of existing technologies. As discussed earlier, printing, specifically woodblock printing, had been in use for some time. Gutenberg mechanized the process with his greatest contribution coming in the process of typesetting. Being a goldsmith, Gutenberg created standardized type pieces that were produced through a special hand mold that he invented. With standardized type, Gutenberg was able to mass produce letters that could be arranged and rearranged through typesetting. The process expeditiously formed words and pages of text and changed the written word forever (Childress, 2007).
Throughout Europe, Gutenberg’s printing press quickly changed the landscape of both reproduction of texts and society as a whole. The increased production and availability of literary works quickly inspired the literacy of lay people. By the start of the 16th century, the demand for books was high and nearly 2,500 European cities had presses (“The infancy of printing,” 1999; Kreis, 2004; Prickman, 2009). However, there was some resistance to the printing press technology. The transition from scribed text to the printed page was not at as smooth as one might think. A historical commentary noted: “Many aristocrats of the late fifteenth century hired scribes to hand-copy printed books to manuscript form, so that they might be kept in their original format” (“The infancy of printing,” 1999, para. 7). However, the printing press ultimately became the new standard for written text for centuries to come. Although there have been incremental improvements in printing technology, the next major shift in literary technology did not occur until the development of electronic text in the 20th century.
The concept of an electronic library was first proposed by Vannevar Bush in 1945. The following passage describes his proposed method of storing knowledge in his own words:
Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. (Bush, 1945, section 6, para. 4)
Bush envisioned the theoretical foundation of a digital storage for books. This “memex” concept sparked an idea that later became reality with the advances of computer technology.
In 1971, the Project Gutenberg advanced the concept of making digital material more accessible to readers (Project Gutenberg, 2010). The project lead, Michael Hart, started converting public domain material into digital format and made it available for free. The goal of the Project Gutenberg was, and is, to increase literacy by providing as much access as possible to literary works. His basic premise stated: “anything that can be entered into a computer, can be reproduced indefinitely”(Hart, 1992, “The Beginning of the Gutenberg Philosophy,” para. 1). From its inception to the present-day, the Project Gutenberg volunteers continue to convert public domain texts into digital format. At a minimum, texts are entered in the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII)—the most basic form of code that can be read on almost any device. Today, Project Gutenberg has over 33,000 free e-books available to download on all computers and all of the most popular e-reading devices.
Each major advancement in literary technologies broadened the population of readers and made the written word more efficiently organized and replicated. However, the act of reading has stayed mostly the same. Each development required adjustments, like learning to read the codex of two pages side-by-side or learning to read typeset words instead of handwritten words. However, eventually the innovation became the new standard.
References
Bush, M. H., Cameron, A. H. (2011). Digital course materials: A case study of the apple iPad in the academic environment. Pepperdine University. Retrieved from http://pepperdine.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15093coll2/id/139
Bush, V. (1945). As we may think. Atlantic Magazine. Retrieved from http://www.the atlantic.com/magazine/archive/1969/12/as-we-may-think/3881/1/
Childress, D. (2007). Johannes Gutenberg and the printing press. Minneapolis, MN: Twenty-First Century Books.
Hart, M. (1992). The History and Philosophy of Project Gutenberg. Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:The_History_and_Philosophy_of_Project_Gutenberg_by_Michael_Hart
The infancy of printing: Incunabula at the Golda Meir Library. (1999). Retrieved from http://www4.uwm.edu/libraries/special/ exhibits/incunab/inchome.cfm
Kreis, S. (2004). The printing press. The history guide: Lectures on modern European intellectual history Retrieved from http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/press.html
Farrer, A., Rawson, J., Vainker, S. J., Whitfield, R., & Trustees, B. M. (1990). Caves of the thousand Buddhas: Chinese art from the silk route. London, UK: British Museum Publications for the Trustees of the British Museum.
Pan, J. (1997). On the origin of printing in the light of new archaeological discoveries. Chinese Science Bulletin, 42(12), 976-981.
Prickman, G. J. (2009). The atlas of early printing. Retrieved from http://atlas.lib.uiowa. edu/index.html
Project Gutenberg. (2010) Retrieved September 25 2010 from http://www.gutenberg.org
Roberts, C. H., & Skeat, T. C. (1983). The birth of the codex. London, UK: Oxford University Press.
Turning the pages. (2010). Retrieved from http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/ttp/ttpbooks.html
Cover Image By Stadtbibliothek Duisburg.StabiDu at de.wikipedia [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], from Wikimedia Commons
