lay literacy
"Only after several years of reseach on the history of that conceptual space that emerged in archaic Greece did I grasp the depth at which the computer-as-metaphor is exiling anyone who accepts it from the space of the literate mind. ...In retrospect, Orwell appears to some of us as an optimist; he thought that the cybernetic mind would spread only as a result of intensive instruction."
"In fact, many people now accept the computer as the key metaphor for themselves and for their place in the world without any need for "Room 101". Surreptitiously. they cross over from the mental domain of lay literacy to that of the computer. And they do so often with as little competence in the use of the machine as the thirteenth century layman had in the use of pen and parchment."
Ivan Illich
cascading style sheets
Emma at
Strange Girl continues her natural bookbinding. I also love the way Keith has annotated his thumbnails of paperbacks to make them look like live, living books. But, of course they are live, living books by the great Master of the book about books.
legacy dot com
The Future of the Book website is now six years old. In all that time the paper book has not disappeared and the electronic mongraph is still taking off.
All of the support and most of the motivation for this website is provided by BookNotes blogger
Craig Jensen at the
BookLab.
paratext paradigm
" The absence of interword space and interpunctuation at the end of antiquity was a reflection of the particular relationship of the antique reader to the book. The reintroduction of word separation in the early Middle Ages by Irish and Anglo-Saxon scribes marks a dramatic change in that relationship. It is, therefore, the introduction of word separation that constitutes the great divide in the history of reading between antique cultures and those of the modern Occident." Paul Saenger
AsPaulpointsoutimaginehowimpossiblethedevelop-mentofspellingsoftwarewouldbeiftherewasnoprompt ofthefinalspaceendingtheword!
Turns out that the paradigm shift away from scriptura continua also relocated the physiology of reading to a different region of the brain. Just a space at the end of each word. Makes the advent of writing and printing and the invention of the codex appear trivial!
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