Paul Duguid and John Seely Brown, "The Social Life of Documents"; and Elizabeth Eisenstein, "Some Features of Print Culture"; both in Writing Material, 104-22 and 124-33. David R. Thomas, "Whence the Semicolon?: Thoughts on Sign and Signal in Western Script," in Early English and Norse Studies: Presented to Hugh Smith in Honour of His Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Arthur Brown and Peter Foote (London: Methuen, 1963), 191-5. [photocopy]
Talking points/quotations/issues:
Duguid and Brown:
106 Anselm Strauss "social worlds" created by texts and (107) the "404" problem caused by online texts--is print culture more stable than digital culture?
107 Benedict Anderson "imagined communities" --print enables events like the shared awareness of being colonized (in the C18 British American colonies).
108 Jan Huizinga "awareness of spiritual unity" as central to the American Revolution and evolution to C20. [Jefferson on the importance of the C18 novel (Richardson and Fielding and Burney etc.) in creation of empathic identification with and participation in the consciousnesses of people who are not us. Class identity; class action.]
110 Stanley Fish "communities of interpretation"--but Fish argues these communities are "always already" in place to control individuals' interpretation of texts. How many ways can those texts shape the interpretive practices of those interpretive communities?
114 Bruno Latour "mobility" and "immutability" as characteristics of texts--is the printed text really "immutable"? (See Williams and Abbott on W.W. Greg, re: transcription and variation, p. 20 of W and A); Richard Lanham, "economy of attention" (development of readers' aids like tables of contents, page numbers, indices, printed glosses, etc.)
115 Julian Orr documents "patrol and control" the boundaries of expertise and authority (can you read this web page?--if so, you're "in" English 241, but if not, you might not be "in 241" even if you are registered for it and attending the class meetings--see me!)
115 Leigh Star and James Greisemer, "boundary objects" (e.g., for English majors, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volumes 1 and 2)
Eisenstein:
126 "standardization of error"--press variants create the need for "corrigenda" lists or whole pages (vs. scribal "crux")
127 "standardization of design"--two dominant scribal hands become type fonts (Gothic and Roman); dominant page designs become standard printed book page designs (leaf structure and text block design)
128-9 Author as a "solitary singular self" whose opinions and ID matter; author as "reasoning and writing being" (vs. the TEXT as "auctoritas," the "author of knowledge," in manuscript era)
130 Awareness of places and selves that are not one's own place and self--travel writing and illustration; BUT interchangeability of images of self and place (all types of persons and places look the same--131-2: BUT notice the error in the first edition caption to the illustration in which the "above" and "below" descriptions are reversed--or is it the images which are reversed in printing?
133 Standardization of behavior--guidebooks for social roles--Castiglioni/Hoby, The Courtier (1528/1561) and various guide books for right behavior published by Caxton.
133 Layout decisions influence mental development in readers: McLuhan, "scanning lines of print affects thought processes" (See Ralf Schneider!)
Thomas:
And one form of textual standardization Eisenstein inexplicably missed, punctuation! Before basic pointing was invented (c. 9th Century), scribes laid out the text in grammatical units to indicate word groupings in "per cola et commata" writing. Before that scheme, there was no punctuation, and no distinction between capital and miniscule letters, and no word divisions--the readers were on their own.