Housekeeping
- Materials for our second project: order as soon as possible
- Your blogs: great reflections on preservation (though we can’t take the digital, or even paper, for granted), access, intimacy vs. scale
- Our first paper
Discussion Leader!
- Books: form vs. content
- Technologies often work side by side and influence one another
- Development (not evolution) necessary through the settlement of towns/communities
- Recording information before written content
- Tablet –> Cuneiform, Pictographs –> Syllabic Writing
- Scrolls –> affordances of the medium (16) allow for new approaches to writing and storytelling
- The writing surface: clay; papyrus; parchment; jiance (bamboo); paper –> preservation and flexibility inspire new methods
- Writing systems require organizing and formatting structures (storage and reading)
- Format: the “page” and directionality in writing emerge through needs of the medium, needs of the reader (19, 26)
- Codex: pages, organizing, folding, begin leading to new system
- Reading: modes and expansion depend again on social changes
Exercise
In groups of 2, explore one of the websites below and answer the following questions:
- How do you think this material object was digitized, and why?
- How is the information about this material object organized?
- What kinds of information are you able to learn from interacting with this site and the digitized images?
- What kinds of information is it not possible to learn simply by viewing this digital remediation of the actual material object?
Group 1: The Cuneiform Digital Archive
Group 2: The Digital Dead Sea Scrolls
Group 3: Digital Library of Medieval Manuscripts
We will regroup about 20 minutes or so to share your findings.