Second century BC, paper was manufactured in China (it would not be manufactured in Europe until the 12th century).
Interestingly, this early shift was from a scroll read from the top to the bottom, to a paginated system (beginning with folded quartos and folios). We are now returning to a scroll form when reading on a computer screen, although the scrolling screen is much easier to navigate due to pagination, indexes, and concordances. This ease of navigation has always been important - in fact it was one of the primary affordances that made the codex popular with readers. However, when the change from the scroll to the codex occurred it also became possible to join a large number of texts together into one volume, but this advantage was not immediately explored. It seems to me the same is true in the shift to electronic texts; while navigation within e-texts was a primary concern in early development, hyperlinking texts and creating archives of multiple texts came later.
“Most persons are surprised, and many distressed, to learn that essentially the same objections commonly urged today against computers were urged by Plato in the Phaedrus (274– 7) and in the Seventh Letter against writing. Writing, Plato has Socrates say in the Phaedrus, is inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can be only in the mind. It is a thing, a manufactured product. The same of course is said of computers. Secondly, Plato’s Socrates urges, writing destroys memory. Those who use writing will become forgetful, relying on an external resource for what they lack in internal resources. Writing weakens the mind.” (Ong 79)
By Plato’s day a change had set in: the Greeks had at long last effectively interiorized writing – something which took several centuries after the development of the Greek alphabet. (Havelock 1963, p. 49, citing Rhys Carpenter)
By the 8th century BC the Greeks borrowed the Phoenician alphabet and adapted it to their own language, creating in the process the first "true" alphabet, in which vowels were accorded equal status with consonants. (Eisenstein dates the development of the Greek alphabet around 720– 700 BC)
The world's oldest known printed book, The Diamond Sutra, a seven-page scroll printed with wood blocks on paper, is produced in China.
In the 11th century the Chinese and Koreans continue to experiment with movable type, using clay, wood, bronze and iron. The complexity of Chinese and Korean symbols creates a major stumbling block to the process.
In the twelfth century AD writing shifts from being a largely religious act to preserve - and horde - history, to a scholastic one. Book production began to shift from the monasteries to lay stationers in the twelfth century, centuries before the advent of print. In this system copyists were given portions of a text and were paid from the stationer for each piece (pecia system). This is the so-called “book revolution” of the twelfth century in which production moved from free labor of monks under supervision of the universities to the wage labor of copyists under supervision of the stationers. Silent reading is difficult because words are not separate, so this is still predominantly an oral culture.
Between 1350 and 1450 this trend toward printed books temporarily reversed and the monastic scriptoria had one last “golden age” before the advent of print. But, even after the printing press arrived, the practice of copying by hand remained. For example, in Johannes Trithemius’ De Laude Scriptorum the Abbot of Sponheim “not only exhorted his monks to copy, but enriched an ancient topos” by explaining why it is beneficial to monastic life to continue copying despite the invention of the printing press. Trithemius even incorrectly cited that word on parchment would last longer than the printed word on paper. This was during a time when texts were printed on both papyrus (short life-span) or vellum (long life-span). In contradiction to these claims, he had his work printed in a Mainz print shop.(13-14)
The earliest public library in England is believed to be established
In early modern times, scholars studied the relationship between words and things, which Issac Newton and his contemporaries claimed to “revolution[ize] in terms of a fundamental recasting of that relation, or even as a discarding of the former in favor of the latter.” However, even with the nature of science being to experiment with things, the results are communicated with words. Furthermore, the natural philosophers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries still based their methodology on the reading the work of their predecessors and building new theories from their groundwork. This practice of reading and writing is obviously still the basis of scholarly inquiry across the disciplines today.
Johann Gutenberg invented movable type by developing foundry-cast metal characters and a wooden printing press.
A late 15th-century Dominican friar, Filippo De Strata, claimed,that “the pen is a virgin; the printing press is a whore” in Polemic against Printing. Filippo De Strata argued that the printing press harmed the value of the book because the printers were uneducated and uncultured men, and that the “flood of cheap books was corrupting morals” and “encouraged the wrong sorts of readers.” I would argue the cultural elitism still exists today. (Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance.)
1455 Gutenberg prints his first book, a Latin Bible. Shortly after Gutenberg invented the printing press with movable type, the discovery of America was documented through this technology. For instance arguably the most famous voyage to the “new world” Epistola Christofori Colom was reprinted eleven times published in multiple European cities. Travel narratives such as Hakluyt’s three part Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation served as templates for a new genre of popular literature. These texts not only described the perils of transatlantic exploration, they also gave a coveted glimpse of the landscape and native cultures that defined this wild frontiers.
A 15th century Venetian editor Hieronimo Squarciafico, who in fact promoted the printing of the Latin classics, also argued that already ‘abundance of books makes men less studious’ (quoted in Lowry 1979, pp. 29– 31): it destroys memory and enfeebles the mind by relieving it of too much work (the pocket-computer complaint once more), downgrading the wise man and wise woman in favor of the pocket compendium. "Of course, others saw print as a welcome leveler: everyone becomes a wise man or woman (Lowry 1979, pp. 31– 2).” (Ong 80).
Printing came to the New World in 1539, and explorers sent travel narratives back to their home countries. This genre continued to be popular throughout the 1700’s and were often published as serial monthly installments in the colonial newspaper and journals.
In 1557 the Company of Stationers, the legally recognized body that had been chartered by Queen Mary to oversee the "art and mystery" of printing, was established.
According to the Folger Institute, Jonson's masterly manipulation of print as a cultural agent, culminating in his monumental folio edition of The Workes of Beniamin Jonson (1616), which issued Jonson's plays, poems, and masques, played no small part in his magisterial authorial self-fashioning. Jonson was by no means a stranger to manuscript culture and its various coteries, however. Jonson's poetic identity owes as much to the handwritten worlds of early modern Britain as it does to the printing press.
Writers began to seek publication rights in the seventeenth century. Up until this point publishers were free to do whatever they saw fit with copies of a text within their geographical boundaries. This created a system of piracy, that in many cases was supported by the governing bodies. In some ways piracy prevented “monopolies, inadequate distribution, and high prices,” however it also caused writers who intended to live off of their writing to begin negotiating with publishers to ensure they had control over their work. This led some writers to print their work at their own expense, or join together to establish collective printing companies.
In 1638 a press in was established in Cambridge, MA where the famed Bay Psalm Book was the first to be printed in the United States. After this, the print industry developed rapidly. By the end of the seventeenth century there were permanent presses in all of the major colonial cities and by 1740, five printers in Boston alone were issuing their own newspapers.
Its official foundation date of the Royal Society is 28 November 1660. The Royal Society depended on the system of printing, distributing, and then reporting and reviewing in registries to maintain their system of knowledge making. Experiments had to be witnessed by an audience of trained notetakers who wrote and registered these reports - “ideally on repeated occasions.” Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this practice is the “learned sociability” developed through reading these reports in public. The educated gentlemen present at Royal Society gatherings brought diverse interpretations of these experimental readings that helped to solidify their findings, disseminate knowledge, and advance the rate of scientific progress. Furthermore, these reading helped to cement social bonds and sustain the community. However, the Society did not lay claim to authorship. The laborers who recorded and often read the experiments were not attributed as authors. To recognize a gentleman as an author was viewed as “immodest” and when Edward Tyler was given this title it was deemed and “allowable boldness.” These public readings became to progenitors of scholarly peer review, although at this point they were still based on “civility rather than expertise.”
America's first newspaper, Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, is printed in Boston, Massachusetts, and subsequently suspended for operating without a royal license.
The Spectator was a daily publication founded by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in England, lasting from 1711 to 1712. Each "paper", or "number", was approximately 2,500 words long, and the original run consisted of 555 numbers, beginning on 1 March 1711. Jürgen Habermas sees The Spectator as instrumental in the "structural transformation of the public sphere" which England saw in the 18th century. He argues that this transformation came about because of, and in the interests of, the middle class.
The Gentleman's Magazine, considered the first modern magazine, is published in England. The periodical is intended for entertainment and includes essays, stories, poems and political commentary.
Sociologists claim that the second half of the eighteenth century was a reading revolution, especially in Germany, France, England, and Italy - all countries included in the Republic of Letters.
The sheer volume of books published in Germany was well ahead of the rest of Europe in “1755, there were just 1,231 titles. in 1775; there were 2,025 titles; and by 1795 the number had risen to 3,368 titles.”
1851 Augustus de Morgan proposes a quantitative study of vocabulary to investigate issues of authorship using a counting machine.
In 1874, responding to an influx of new students [of widely varied social classes and levels of literacy, Harvard] administered an entrance exam in [writing]. . . . Over half of the applicants who took it failed. Colleges responded by creating composition courses.
There is a dispute over when and where the typewriter was invented, but its impact is clear. As Kathy Yancey writes "We forget how difficult the labor of writing has been historically—the “sheer physical difficulty of inscribing alphabetic characters on some sort of surface” (Murphy 5), especially for children; how pencils weren’t widely available until the early part of the twentieth century, which was forty years before the invention of the ballpoint pen; how messy and sloppy it was to try to compose in ink that dripped all over the page—and then smudged. The labor of composing was such, in fact, that for a few years in the late 1920s manual typewriters—and we know how hard it is to pound those keys on the page—actually seemed a viable alternative to pencil or pen for children in elementary school." (Writing in the 21st Century, 2)
In July 1945 Vannevar Bush publishes his prophetic description of the Memex in his article "As We May Think" in The Atlantic Monthly.
Enter story info here
1949 Roberto Busa begins planning the Index Thomisticus
1963 The "Mother of All Demos” during which Douglas Engelbart demonstrated e-mail, tele-conferencing, videoconferencing, and the mouse
In 1963, a Scottish clergyman, Andrew Morton published an article for a British newspaper claiming that, according to the computer, St. Paul only wrote four of his epistles.
1964 IBM organized the Literary Data Processing Conference and published the proceedings which included complex questions in encoding manuscript material and also in automated sorting for concordances.
The National Endowment for the Humanities establishes its Office of Digital Humanities "To best tackle the broad, interdisciplinary questions that arise when studying digital technology, ODH works closely with the scholarly community and with other funding agencies in the United States and abroad, to encourage collaboration across national and disciplinary boundaries. In addition to sponsoring grant programs, ODH also participates in conferences and workshops with the scholarly community to help foster understanding of issues in the digital humanities and ensure we are meeting the needs of the field." (http://www.neh.gov/divisions/odh/about)
1965 Ted Nelson introduces the term “hypertext” and begins Project Xanadu.
1966 Computers and the Humanities journal established
1970 the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC) was founded
1971 Michael S. Hart types the US Declaration of Independence into a computer. He launches Project Gutenberg to create electronic copies of more books.
CCCC/NCTE’s 1974 position statement “Students’ Right to Their Own Language,” a document authorizing students as legitimate language users in ways not imagined a mere 20 years before nor obvious to the culture at large, even now (Yancey 4).
In 1976 the Oxford Text Archive (OTA) was established. This was the beginnings of a digital library.
1983 Apple releases its first personal computer.
In 1978 Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) was founded.
Tim Berners-Lee wrote his first weblike program in 1980 in his spare time. His vision was of “a single, global information space.” (4) “The added excitement was that computers also could follow and analyze the tentative connective relationships that defined much of our society’s working, unveiling entirely new ways to see our world.” (5)
In 1982 the Oxford Concordance Program (OCP) software was released.
In 1985 Richard Stallman releases the GNU Manifesto.
1985 the first ALLC conference in which email addresses were exchanged.
1986 Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) published by ISO
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