MSTU4016-08/Discuss 9

From Studyplace

Jump to: navigation, search

October 29
Interrogating the Past VI: Print and Its Cognitive Effects

Discussion Question
Discussion leader: Lindsey Terwilliger
Required Readings
  • Elizabeth Eisenstein, "Some Conjectures about the Impact of Printing on Western Society and Thought: A Preliminary Report" in The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Mar., 1968), pp. 1-56 Read
Supplemental Reading

Contents

[edit] Response to Readings

[edit] Some Conjectures about the Impact of Printing on Western Society and Thought: A Preliminary Report – Elizabeth L. Eisenstein

"We should note that force, effect, and consequences of inventions which are nowhere more conspicuous than in those three which were unknown to the ancients, namely, printing, gunpowder and the compass. For these three have changed the appearance and state of the whole world" – Francis Bacon

[edit] The Force, Effect, and Consequences of Printing- A Brief History

Late 15th to early 16th century

  • Period referred to as a “communications revolution” or the era of Incunabula (extant copies of books produced in early stages, before 1501)
  • Printing resulted in
    • Large scale utilization of a new process to a major cultural transformation
    • Basic change in the mode of production
    • The establishment of presses in major urban centers throughout Europe
    • Shift from scribal to typographical culture
    • An awareness that mind and society were affected
  • Did printing serve as a “divine art” or as a “poor man’s friend?”
  • Although influential, the first century of printing was referred to as a “somewhat wide-angled, unfocused scholarship” by E. Harris Harbinson
[edit] Key Points Worth Noting
  • Qualitative changes in print, including the attention to format, arrangement, content, page layout, use of illustration, title pages, and running heads made for a more “user friendly” resource
    • Works were being illustrated by “exactly repeatable pictorial statements”
  • Main bulk of book reproduction, once done by churchman, was now being completed by early capitalists, who established printing plants
  • Reading had an influence on economic, legal, technological, and political developments as well as the standardization of scholarship and science
  • Considering the effects of printing, one must remember that it was not only the birth of new forms of enlightenment, but also a rebirth of older concepts (new philosophy was actually very old)
  • Guidebooks, manuals, maps, charts, diagrams and other visual aids became widely circulated, therefore “making it easier to lay plans for getting ahead in this world” (from the 1480’s on). Also, the use of a table of contents (first seen in “Tabula” to the “Great Boke”)
  • Typographical fixity was the basic prerequisite for the rapid advancement of learning, including a standardization of vernaculars and translations, thus resulting in the advance of European languages and nationalism
    • A permanence that introduced progressive change
  • Fixity also led to more recognition of individual innovation and ownership as well as distinguished artists and authors
    • Note that printers themselves did not necessarily share a “common mind”
  • Advertising relics and commercializing iconography resulted from advances in print
  • Books outlined precise codes of conduct, causing a universal development of practices, behaviors, and a collective morality
  • Printed texts caused a social revolution in Europe, where “book-learning” became the center of daily life during childhood, adolescence, and early manhood
    • Shift from “learning by doing” to “learning by reading”
    • Organization of peer and youth groups
    • Included French Philosophers
  • Affects from printing include advances in cognition and creative acts
[edit] For Further Discussion
  • Significant increase in the output of books and the more drastic reduction in the number of man-hours required to do so can be referred to as an early form of mass production and the introduction into an “industrial” age. Do you agree? Would you term this period something else?
  • Eisenstein asks, “What effect did the appearance of new advertising techniques have on commerce and industry?” Are these effects similar in comparison to those caused by technological advances today?
  • “Learning to read is different from learning by reading.” Is this statement true and if so how can one observe these differences in today’s classroom environment? Does this relate to Lou’s goal to teach in the environment, rather than the classroom?
    • Additionally, note that learning by doing became more distinguished from learning by reading (while the role of hearsay and memory arts disappeared)
  • Is it possible that the increase in the output of older texts contributed to the formulation of new theories?
  • There is evidence that suggests that more copies of a given test were “spread, dispersed, or scattered” as a result of the printed edition. Previously, early printing practices made it impossible to issue any form of standard material. Did this new form of standardization result in an increase of literacy?
  • A new “era of intense cross referencing between one book and another began.” The availability of multiple resources allowed for the comparison of different texts and the creation of new intellectual ideas, or an entirely new system of thought. Universal reference guides, household guides, and domestic manuals, like calendars, almanacs, thesauruses and dictionaries also contributed to new ideas. Was this the birth of in depth research? (Note that almanacs contained tables for computing costs or wages, distances between towns, and lists of weights and measures.. not like those created today)
  • Sarton claimed “it is hardly necessary to indicate what the art of printing meant for the diffusion of culture but one should not lay too much stress on diffusion and should speak more of standardization.” Do we agree or disagree?
  • Editorial decisions, including page layout, helped early printers reorganize patterns of thinking by readers. Does this practice still apply today? Do you prefer to read a certain magazine or trade journal for these reasons?
  • What caused the birth of “free-born” learners? Could this generation have ushered in additional change?
[edit] Terms Worth Defining
  • Scriptoria
  • Print Culture
  • Standardization
  • Dissemination
  • Fixity
[edit] For Future Reading or Reference

W. T. Berry and H. E. Poole, Annals of Printing A Chronological Encyclopedia from Earliest Tines to 1950 (London, 1966)

J. Cater and P. Muir (eds.), Printing and the Mind of Man: The Impact of Print on the Evolution of Western Civilization during Five Centuries (Cambridge, 1967)

Rudolph Hirsch, Printing, Selling, Reading 1450-150 (Wiesbaden, 1967)

[edit] The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making – Adrian Johns

Chartier poses a question, “Do books make revolutions?” He answers that “books themselves do not, but the ways they are made, used and read just might.” Do we as a collective agree or disagree??

[edit] Themes
  • Central concern expressed by Johns is the relation between print and knowledge
  • Continuously argues that Elizabeth L. Eisenstein’s “print culture” presented in Some Conjectures about the Impact of Printing on Western Society and Thought: A Preliminary Report does not exist. “She consistently declines to specify any position on the question of how print culture might emerge from print.” He states, “we may consider fixity not as a inherent quality, but as a transitive one” (pg 19)
  • Johns claims that print entailed not one, but many cultures, as individual cultures created their own meanings of printed texts
  • “The very essence of print, is that is enables human beings to transcend their immediate circumstances and reliably communicate with others in different times and places”
[edit] Key Points Worth Noting
  • Books are not produced with a specific individual reader in mind. They are a commercial product, designed to appeal to purchasers
  • Johns claims that “printed texts are identical and reliable because that is simply what printing is”
  • The Nature of the Book argues that the identity of print itself has had to be made. It came to be as we now experience it only by virtue of hard work
  • Any printed book is both the product of one complex set of social and technological processes and also the starting point for another, thus creating a print culture
  • Printed texts can be viewed as a “nexus of conjoining a wide range of worlds of work”
  • The Nature of the Book asks the question of what printing was. It addresses how the people of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries constructed and construed the craft
  • Attributes the success of science to the permanence of paper
  • Tycho Brahe, according to Johns, personifies print culture in the history of science. He calls Tycho the “greatest of all astronomers.” This claim could have been because of evidence that he owned his own printing operation and paper mill, allowing him to “produce books when, for whom, and in whatever form he liked” to only those who were interested in the material. Tycho was emblematic of the transformation of this local craft into global science and atypical in his successful use of print
  • Galileo was also influential in the progression of print. After printing “Cosmian” for the first time, Galileo transformed from a mathematical practitioner into a court philosopher. As expected, books were central to Galileo’s advance, as they were key elements in any strategy to take advantage of patronage opportunities
  • Roger Chartier claimed that specific ways of reading are recognized as social and cultural practices
  • Piracy involves issues of credibility in print. Coined by John Fell, Bishop of Oxford, “piracy” was used to describe the greedy practices of London printers and booksellers. A pirate was someone “who indulged in the unauthorized reprinting of a title recognized to belong to someone else by the formal conventions of the printing and bookselling community”
  • Unauthorized printing threatened unauthorized authors, as is still a significant issue today
  • The bookshop and printing houses were places were there was “promise and achievement.” However, they were also centers for conflict, plotting, and betrayal
  • One of the most significant points made by Johns, and one that I found compelling, is as follows:
    • “England was the first to develop a sophisticated commercial culture of printing and publishing and its concepts of authorship, liberty of the press, and intellectual property have been of influence across the world”
Retrieved from "http://www.studyplace.org/wiki/MSTU4016-08/Discuss_9"
Personal tools