american bookbinders museum
For a long time bookbinding devices mechanized hand processes to alleviate fatigue and augment strength. Only subsequently did increased producion speed, printing trade like materials handling and feeding and purely mechanical products become the objective. This
museum tells the story.
artifact of the mind
The paper book is an artifact of the processing power of the mind and the internet is an artifact of the processing power of networked computers. That said, neither manages the social reassemblies or new behaviors that it engenders.
I searched “artifact of the mind” and the first results were diagnostic. The top result was a paper book, “Early American Drama” with its key phrase “telltale artifact”. The third result was “MIND: A Distributed Multi-Dimensional Indexing System for Network Diagnosis”.
“Our experiments show that MIND can detect and report network anomalies in about one second on an inter-continental backbone. We also analyze the efficiency of our load balancing mechanism and evaluate the robustness of MIND to node failure.” This sounds like a line from early American drama reflecting the first implications of magnetic message transmission.
The second search result is also a book.
Creations of the Mind –
Theories of Artifacts and their Representation. Looks like a primal FotB resource! A one click Amazon order.
undead readers
So Many Books has kindly linked to FotB.com. This is a lively, current forum for novel (exceptional) readers.
whatduhya know?
We know the presentational fixtures of paper and the screen are well established. We also know that the presentational formats of the book or visual broadcasting have significant conventions and momentum. There is also evidence that bionic processing capacity and efficiency has been rather stable across the history of literacy. Where then is the factor lending a sense of momentous change to the exchange of conceptual works?
The processing, connectivity and storage capacity of computer networks has compounded quickly lending a sense of momentous change to the exchange of conceptual works. Image tagging and mapping across networks, integration of stored data and more complex access applications continually expand and grow the automated comprehension of information. This dynamic benefits all the presentational fixtures of
paper and screen and all the presentational formats of book or broadcast.
But does it also expand bionic processing and efficiency? Perhaps the sensation and disorientation of the changing conceptual landscape is some discord between unchanging and changing capacities for conceptual assimilation.