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

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Exercise

In groups of 2, explore one of the websites below and answer the following questions:

1. How do you think this material object was digitized, and why?
2. How is the information about this material object organized?
3. What kinds of information are you able to learn from interacting with this site and the digitized images?
4. 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.