readers of graceful script
“Information Technology Minister Tarek Kamel said at a U.N. sponsored Internet conference that his government had filed an application to register the domain “.masr” – or “.Egypt” — written entirely in Arabic,”
It required a painful transition to bring Arabic script into print. It was only accomplished with hundreds of letters and refined design in the twilight of the Linotype Corporation in the 1960’s. Now we have the advent of this script read by readers of many languages as an internet domain …for the first time.
ur-equivalence
“The Google settlement’s fatal flaw is that it violates every copyright law ever written, including international treaties signed by all but a handful of tiny nations. Copyright law simply doesn’t make the distinction Google wants to make between in-print and out-of-print. That would be nonsense. If it did, the most out-of-print works of all, those that have never been published, would have no copyright protection.” Mike Perry
Another unmentioned is the presumed equivalence of print and screen renditions of a given work. How this assumption became embedded is curious, especially as Google, to some extent, wishes the book simulation service to be perceived as innocent remote display without any physical pretense.
manifesto
The Florence Declaration, signed by 271 archivists, begins the definition of the interdependence of source and surrogate in terms of the analogue photograph.
on ramus
An innocent re-reading of Adrian Johns Forward to the new reprint of Walter Ong’s Ramus Method and the Decay of Dialogue provokes a tipping point. But this is the most magnificent essay in all of book studies!
So many revolutions of media history have gone mostly unobserved. The casual assimilation of the 16th century Ramist gimmick is one example and the casual assimilation of screen reading is another. Who is crafting such revolutions into a useful transmission ecology? In place of a diagram of print and screen relations we need a construct with the book entity in the center and the far boundary of the habitats of reading. This is a zone of interdependence; orality, audio of silent reading, visual, print and screen with a book pivot.
Ong was was McLuhan’s student and then became his teacher as he revealed how the page space became a dramatic stage for the history of thought. This was diagrammatical space accentuated by the grid of the type but it was also a three dimensional stage of the codex. Now we adventure in the two dimensions of the screen and binary code looking for another transmission matrix.
Perhaps we are now looking for a missing third dimension of the screen. Word processing, hypertext, then Wiki, social Twitter, intelligent searching and the Web suggest an added dimension. So does the churn of reading devices, contentions of stakeholders at play in the Google Book “settlement” or the tumbling roles of the library. Then there is the loan of materiality from print to screen which has not gone well. We still need a more cohesive stage for the history of screen thought.