{"id":120,"date":"2005-04-01T11:18:58","date_gmt":"2005-04-01T11:18:58","guid":{"rendered":"\/ifbookblog\/?p=120"},"modified":"2005-04-01T11:18:58","modified_gmt":"2005-04-01T11:18:58","slug":"nothing_has_changed_in_3000_ye","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/2005\/04\/01\/nothing_has_changed_in_3000_ye\/","title":{"rendered":"nothing has changed in 3,000 years"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"stonetalk.jpg\" Our exploration of digital technology and the revolution it has provoked in our reading and writing practice, tends to focus on the latest gadget and the newest software, but we are also concerned with the things that don’t change and the aspects of human communication that are so deeply a part of our nature that they can not be removed from our reading and writing systems. The first “Information Esthetics” lecture<\/a> at the Chelsea Museum brought this to the fore last night. Robert Bringhurst<\/a> spoke about hand-lettered manuscripts, and about typography that respects and preserves the texture and uniqueness of the hand-made mark. He argued for the humanity of fine craftsmanship. He even managed to convince me that slight variations in the shape of letterforms can serve as metaphors for our own individuality.
\nHe also made the point that the devices in our writing\/reading systems are physiologically based. The average page is a size that can be held easily in our hands and read at arm’s length. Bringhurst showed a slide of an Egyptian manuscript. The size of the papyrus was very similar to page we use today, and the text was composed in blocks around images. Very much like magazine layouts. As I was admiring the beauty of the manuscript, Bringhurst said, “as you can see, nothing has changed in 3,000 years.” That shouldn’t shock me, but it did. I’ve been so absorbed in thinking about the next new thing, I’d forgotten that reading and writing is a very very old thing.
\nInteresting to think that whether we are reading something written on stone, papyrus, paper, or a computer screen, we need the same things we’ve aways needed: legibility, context, and “texture.” I’m radically summarizing Bringhurst’s lecture (hope I’m doing it justice). The way I understand it, texture is Bringhurst’s way of describing the particular kind of beauty we look for in cultural artifacts. Texture, is evidence of complexity, information, meaning and the imperfect human hand at work.
\nSo, I’m thinking about how this “texture” manifests in digital manuscripts and it seems to me that it does so in several ways including: the craftsmanship of the digital document itself (which includes the code, the interface, and the composition), the richness of information\/meaning that resides in virtual layers or as “links” within the text, and the way beauty can be crafted out of the physical material itself–light emitted by a computer screen.
\n(photo by Alex Itin<\/a><\/i>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our exploration of digital technology and the revolution it has provoked in our reading and writing practice, tends to focus on the latest gadget and the newest software, but we are also concerned with the things that don’t change and the aspects of human communication that are so deeply a part of our nature that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[374],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conferences_and_excursions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}