Invention Of Printing Research Articles

The evolution of printing

The history of printing is a captivating narrative that has significantly influenced the dissemination of knowledge and the development of human society. This article explores the prehistory of literacy, the emergence of writing systems, the tools used before the invention of printing, and the profound impact of Johannes Gutenberg's movable type printing press. It also discusses the challenges faced by printing technology over the centuries, the role of digitalization, and the enduring value of traditional printing.

Philosophy as a thief?

AbstractThis is a performative piece of writing in the presence of and inspired by Richard Shusterman's Philosophy and the Art of Writing. It tries to show that the relationship between the act of writing and the formation of our human consciousness (philosophical and, more deeply, poietic) is a developing and growing process through history, and before it. The dominance of an image consciousness was slowly challenged and then replaced by a linguistic consciousness with the advent of writing, and accelerated by the invention of printing and mass literacy. Shusterman teaches us an embodied kind of philosophizing that uses the word but isn't limited by it. This paper suggests that a return to image consciousness has already occurred and that the old book consciousness is disappearing. Lessons from the book consciousness are offered.

Dickens and Democracy in the Age of Paper: Representing the People by Carolyn Vellenga Berman

Reviewed by: Dickens and Democracy in the Age of Paper: Representing the People by Carolyn Vellenga Berman John M. L. Drew (bio) Carolyn Vellenga Berman. Dickens and Democracy in the Age of Paper: Representing the People. Oxford UP, 2022. Pp. xiv + 353. £90.00. ISBN 978-0-19-284540-5 (hb). In his lengthy speech condemning the Absolutist regime of Miguel I of Portugal on 1 June 1829, Viscount Palmerston gave a memorable account (inserted into Hansard by special permission) of the operation of power in human society: “There is in nature no moving power but mind, all else is passive and inert; in human affairs this power is opinion; in political affairs it is public opinion; and he who can grasp this power, with it will subdue the fleshly arm of physical strength and compel it to work out his purpose.” Indeed, those who “know how to avail themselves of the passions, and the interests, and the opinions of mankind, are able to gain an ascendancy, and to exercise a sway over human affairs, far out of proportion greater than belong to the power and resources of the state” (Hansard) 1668). Palmerston took it for granted that it fell to statesmen to wield such power, but during his lifetime, the rise of what Macaulay a few years later famously dubbed the “Fourth Estate” of the realm saw journalists, newspaper editors, and even writers of popular fiction assuming a similar influence, to the consternation of Establishment figures like Sir James Fitzjames Stephen (1829–94), who felt democratic institutions could be dangerously undermined through being called to account by unelected populist rabble-rousers: [J]ust as a foolish gossip in a country-town, who says what she pleases because all the world knows what her tongue is like, may babble away the purest character, a popular novelist may produce more disaffection and discontent than a whole army of pamphleteers and public orators, because he wears the cap and bells, and laughs in your face when you contradict him. A novelist has no responsibility. (347) In the classic Whig-Liberal narrative of the growth of the periodical press in the nineteenth century, a mighty engine gradually frees itself from the grip of government, aristocratic patronage and reactionary “Taxes on Knowledge.” But for Marxist and many left-leaning media historians in the twentieth [End Page 248] century, the press merely passed from being the plaything of ministers to that of unprincipled capitalists, moguls and market forces: power without responsibility remains a keynote of the analysis.1 Across such fault-lines and mindful of their implications for the way we live now, Carolyn Berman’s important new book on Dickens picks its way, with thoughtful ingenuity. It hinges throughout on the idea of representation of “the people,” as the twinned imperative of parliamentary democracy on the one hand and fiction writers on the other, and in particular on the simultaneously comic and deadly serious interplay in Dickens’s writings between these Doppelgängers. Broadly, it draws on the fact that in the “age of paper” (that is to say, the Modern period, since the invention of printing) government business involves the recording in print of the activities of its citizens–an activity, particularly in the so-called “blue books” of the 1840s Royal Commissions, that involved chronicling the lives of the poor and reporting their oral testimony. This draws the work of both Dickens and Parliament into the same medium, as well as pointing up how both kinds of authority present their own narrative world of “alternative facts.” Berman tackles the problem of analyzing Dickens’s political aims (considered openly socialist by some and covertly despotic by others) with skill and vigor, claiming from the outset that “we have underestimated the ways in which his writings can help us to understand the challenges of representative government” (3). The book is divided into three parts, the first of which (“The Art of Representation”) covers Dickens’s saturation in shorthand as a reporter and contributor to his uncle’s verbatim record of the debates in the Houses of Commons, The Mirror of Parliament, and explores the place of The Pickwick Papers in the context of...

Towards a new relevance for research libraries

The invention of printing in 1455 by Johann Gutenberg and the invention of the World Wide Web in 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee have often been compared when it comes to making knowledge accessible. Both events marked a breakthrough with far-reaching social consequences. The printing press led to the disappearance of monastic libraries and their scriptoriums as sources of knowledge, to make way for university libraries and publishers. The Web is again a revolution in the distribution of knowledge, embraced by the academic community and culminating in the Open Science movement. This editorial is an exploration into the challenges that this development poses for the roles of publishers and libraries.

Author’s Being and Death: from Ancient Times to Postmodernism

The article examines the concepts of “author” and “authorship” in literature in terms of his birth, evolution, decline, and return. The problem of authorship in literary studies is related to the question of approaches to textual research: should we pay attention to the author’s personality, what place does the author occupy in the author-text-reader relationship, and is it possible to completely abandon the author in favour of the reader or the text? The subject of the study is the concept of “author” in literature in the context of the historical development of the phenomenon of authorship. The purpose of the study is an attempt to comprehensively analyse the phenomenon of authorship, its evolution, and to compare different theories and approaches to the study of literary authorship. Anglo-American literary critics (E. Bennett, S. Burke, and J. Frow), considering the issue of authorship, include in their searches the early epochs – Antiquity and the Middle Ages, where there were proto-models of authorship. The figure of the author as an independent creator whose ideas are presented in his literary work wereconsolidated in the Modern period. This was facilitated, in particular, by the invention of printing and copyright. In Romanticism, the concept of “author” is more developed. Here, the author appears as a carrier of original ideas, and the literary work is a real reflection of his thoughts and inspiration. The development of modernism is undergoing dramatic changes. In the twentieth century, representatives of the formal school of literary criticism, the new criticism, determined that a work cannot be explained solely by the author’s personality. Besides, the focus was on the text and later on the reader. The works of R. Barth and M. Foucault reached their apogee without author-centered approach in the 1960s. At the end of the century, literary critics resumed an active discussion about the place of the author, considering the “death of the author” to be too radical. The study uses the historical method to trace the evolution of the phenomenon of authorship, the comparative method to help establish logical connections between different theories, and the method of analysis. In the course of the study, the author identifies the periods of development of authorship and the specific features inherent in each of them. In particular, the author identifies the characteristic features of authorship in the ancient era, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, Romanticism, Realism, Modernism, and Postmodernism. An important element of the work is the establishment of relationships between different theories of authorship in the twentieth century, where there is a struggle with traditional ideas about the author. Based on the research of S. Burke, it is determined that the transition from author to text and reader was carried out gradually during the first half of the twentieth century. The “death of the author” was the result of the work of many literary schools, and R. Barthes summarized it in a rather radical form. The author’s rapid return to the discourse is due to the impossibility of solving the issue of text interpretation by completely ignoring the author, in particular the peculiarities of his individual style. The novelty of the work lies in an attempt to take a global historical view of the problem of authorship, since authorship is more often discussed in the context of the twentieth century. The obtained results will help to better understand the reasons for the decline of the phenomenon of authorship and its revival, as well as to understand the variability of approaches in the study of literary texts.

THE MULTIMODAL СONTENT OF THE FIRST GERMAN LANGUAGE TEACHING MANUALS

The information explosion caused by the invention of printing in the middle of the 15th century, the Reformation and Luther’s activities led to the elevation of the German language to the level of “high” languages in which it was possible to teach in German schools in addition to the three sacred languages. For the first time, the German language became not only an object of description, but also an object of instruction in German schools, where, along with the abacus and the basics of the Law of God, they taught reading and writing in their native German. There is a need not only for linguistic comprehension of the German language, but also for its introduction into teaching. The communicative practices presented in the first literacy manuals in German reflect a multimodal process carried out through three main information channels — verbal, prosodic and visual. The article describes the formation of the process of integrating verbal information, focused primarily on the teacher, with prosodic (syllabification, onomatopoeia and sound production, etc.) and non-verbal, visual, information contained in tables, graphics and pictures (taking into account gestures, facial expressions, etc.), designed for the student. The objectives of the article are to describe the functional interaction and the invasive potential of verbal, visual, sound and graphic signs in the process of communication when teaching literacy in German. The content of the analyzed literacy manuals of the 16th–17th centuries, compiled by Valentin Ikelzamer, Fabian Frank, Peter Jordan, Ortolph Fuchsberger, etc., demonstrates the dynamics of the development of this type of text from monomodal verbal manuals, through the inclusion of tables and diagrams in the verbal text to the integrative embedding of a picture (image) in a verbal context and the “centric” inclusion of a staged image, in which the leading role is given to the image, and the verbal part acts as an explanation.

Significance of Creative Commons Licenses for the Evolution of Copyright in Cross-Border Relationships

The paper analyzes the evolution of copyright and the main events that led to a change in the concept of determining the author’s rights and their protection. The main legal acts regulating copyright relations from the stage of their inception (from the moment of the invention of printing in Europe) to the present time are considered. The creation of the Internet became the starting point for rethinking the foundations of copyright law to adapt it to modern needs. Thus, treaties were adopted, the norms of which extended traditional law to the digital environment, securing the rights of authors on the Internet. Developing a licensing approach under the Creative Commons licensing concept and the “some rights reserved” principle has been an important step in the enforcement and protection of cross-border copyright rights on the Internet. This is a new stage in the development of licensing, due to technological progress and the introduction of artificial intelligence into human life.

Catastrofi nel cielo. I letterati del Cinquecento e i pronostici infausti

Common in manuscript form since the Middle Ages, with the invention of printing, predictions, iudicia and almanacs soon reached very high circulations. Much of this forecasting literature concerns catastrophic events, including floods and deluges (the one predicted for February 1524 on the occasion of the great conjunction in the sign of Pisces is particularly famous), earthquakes, plagues, or attempts to explain the unexpected, including comets or the stellae novae that appeared in 1572 and 1604. The contribution investigates the reactions of sixteenth-century (in particular with the ‘novelle sul diluvio’ by Anton Francesco Doni and Ortensio Lando) and early seventeenth-century literati to the ominous predictions of the time, also highlighting the gap between private and public positions. In a variegated panorama influenced by the bulls of Sixtus v and Urban viii on astrology, severe condemnations of iudiciaria alternate with mockery of predicted calamities, but also – in keeping with the etymology of ‘catastrophe’ – there is the recovery of a hope for upheaval or even renovatio, as in the Catastrofe del mondo by the physician-philosopher Giovanni Francesco Spina.

Introduction: Approaches to the Paper Revolution: The Registration and Communication of Knowledge, Value and Information

Invented in China and brought to Europe by Muslim merchants across the Silk Road, the use of paper in the West took off in the Mediterranean towards the end of the Middle Ages. Overshadowed in cultural and media history by the invention of print, paper has played a fundamental role as the media infrastructure for innumerable processes involving the registration and communication of knowledge and value in communities and institutions, from religious orders, mercantile societies, to global empires.
 This thematic section of Cromohs features four essays. Three essays examine particular cases of paper as a medium for the codification and exchange of knowledge, information and value, whereas the fourth outlines the state of the art on the history of the so-called paper revolution and methodological issues illustrated with relevant case studies. These essays exemplify the research conducted by the Paper in Motion workgroup within the People in Motion COST action.

The Genesis of Socio-Philosophical Understanding of the Peace and War Relationship in the Social World Development

The article is devoted to research the genesis of the relationship between peace and war in the development of the social world was determined. It was found that the social world in concrete historical manifestations was considered by philosophers through the functioning of state-building processes of government and self-organization, and the absolutization of one of them led to war, and harmonization – to peace. The stages of formation of the problem were traced and the traditions of understanding the social world were determined. The first stage was characterized by the study of the world as a cosmic phenomenon – in the natural philosophical, mythological and cosmogonic traditions – and social – in the socio-organic, polis, paternalistic-subject traditions. The second stage – the dominance of the theocentric position – was characterized by the distinction between Heaven and Earth. The third stage – modernism – was marked by the dominance of the objectified world in connection with the invention of printing, the development of the institute of education, institutionalization of science. The fourth – stage of industrial institutionalization and world institutions, which was characterized by the consideration of peace and war as a world phenomenon, marked by ideological, idealistic, materialistic, managerial, psychological and peacekeeping traditions. In the fifth – the stage of information and virtual worlds formation, which took place in the integrity of the relationship “society – technology”, it was highlighted the system-holistic tradition. The sixth is the modern stage of the synergetic world, defined by the phenomena of hybrid and network war and peace and connected with the hybrid, network and synergetic traditions. Here the problem of the world as a whole in the dynamic uncertainty and technological aspect of the subjects’ activity is actualized.

Michael Clanchy, Looking Back from the Invention of Printing: Mothers and the Teaching of Reading in the Middle Ages

Les publications de la collection Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy des editions Brepols se sont multipliees ces dernieres annees, revelant notamment un interet croissant pour les pratiques de lecture et d’ecriture du bas Moyen Âge. L’attention particuliere portee a ce sujet s’insere dans un contexte de renouveau historiographique qui ne concoit plus la notion de literacy comme un simple phenomene d’alphabetisation ou comme le developpement d’un style litteraire, mais davantage comme un en...

Messengers of the University of Paris on the Paths of Humanism?

Humanism in Europe spread out along convoluted paths. As is well known, books played a major role in this, especially after the invention of printing. In particular, it was the travelling book dealers who transported writings with humanist content over long distances. This includes a group from the end of the 15C up to the middle of the 16C that attracts our attention : there were persons from the book trade who at the same time held the office of a messenger at the University of Paris. Although little of this double function is visible from historical sources, we can still see how the path they trod towards a reception of humanism looked like, even if only sketchily.

Changes in British Logic Teaching During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

British logic teaching in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was provided in England by Oxford and Cambridge, both medieval foundations, and in Scotland by the universities of St Andrews and Aberdeen, both founded in the fifteenth century, and Edinburgh, founded in 1582. Wales had no university, and high schools in England did not teach logic. This paper explores the effect that the invention of printing, along with organizational, political, and sociological changes, had on the teaching of these institutions as they affected the logic textbooks that were used and the ways in which the material was presented to students. The disappearance of important medieval developments such as supposition theory along with changes in the treatment of Aristotle’s logic are discussed in relation to selected logicians from the period under discussion. In particular, attention is paid to the Cambridge logician John Seton (d. 1567), whose popular Dialectica was published in 1545, the Frenchman Peter Ramus (d. 1572), whose influence in both England and Scotland was less than has been supposed, and the Oxford logician Robert Sanderson (d. 1662/3) whose Logicae artis compendium was reprinted as late as 1841.

Mass Media as the Key Space for Preaching and Defending Christian Personalism

Since the invention of print, the media have been increasingly influencing individual and social awareness. They seem apt to undo, in a relatively short period of time, whatever good the upbringing and authorities of a high moral standard have instilled into a person. However, the media can also support the development of this good in a significant way. They are a powerful tool that everyone has to reckon with, they are a place to exchange all sorts of ideas – from the worst to the best. That is the reason why anyone who wants to proclaim the principle of Christian personalism in society should try to think through how to wisely use them to spread the message. However, this message will inevitably meet with strong opposition from people who have opposite beliefs and from the media they own, as they have made them a fundamental place for the struggle for power and dominion over human consciousness. This article, written on the basis of theoretical considerations, but also the rich media experience of the author, attempts to provide practical advice on these matters. The article explains the common structure of all such opposition that follows the pattern of the very loud media case of Fr. Krzysztof Charamsa (in which the author was himself deeply entangled), Tygodnik Powszechny and Gazeta Wyborcza which supported him. In this way, the article shows the mechanisms of manipulation of contemporary media, but also the remedies available.

कवितेची रूपबंधात्मक मीमांसा (The Morphological Theory of Poetry)

Marathi Abstract: आधनिक काळात कावयाचया सरवागीण मीमासला विशष गती मिळाली. एक मलभत वाङमयपरकार महणन जगातील सरवच भाषातन एकाचवळी कावयरपाची सरवसपरशी मीमासा होत गली. कविता ही आसवादरप असत. कविता वाचावी लागत किवा ऐकावी लागत. तयाशिवाय तिच सौदरय लकषात यत नाही. कविता ही सगीतमय वाणी आह. तिचयात शबदाच, तयाचया उचचाराच खप महततव आह. आज आधनिक काळात मातर मदरणाचया शोधामळ कविता रसिकासमोर परामखयान मदरित सवरपात यत. आता कवी उचचारणातील परयोगापकषा लखनात परयोग करतो आह. जोपरयत एखादी कविता रसिकाचया मनापरयत पोचन आसवादित होत नाही, तोपरयत ती कविता निरजीव असत. कविता हा असा कलापरकार आह, जो निरमितीनतरही रसिकाचया मनात पनःनिरमित होत रहातो आणि तयाची आसवादन परकरियाही निरतर चाल राहत. भावकवितच ‘पयअर पोएटिक एनरजी' अस वरणन करणयात यत. भावकवितचया सफट आकाराच नात तिचयात असललया विशिषट परकारचया उतकटतशी असत. कोणतयाही तऱहची तीवरता वा उतकटता ही मनाची अलपकाळ टिकणारी अवसथा असत, ह एक मानसशासतरीय सतय होय. साहजिकच भावकवितच रप आकारान छोट घडविणयात या उतकटतचा महततवाचा सहभाग असतो. English Abstract: In modern times, the overall theory of poetry has gained special momentum. As a basic literary genre, all the languages of the world at the same time became a comprehensive study of the form of poetry. Poetry is a form of taste. Poetry has to be read or to be listened. Without it its beauty is not realized. Poetry is a musical voice. The words and their pronunciation are very important in poetry. Today, in modern times, however, the invention of printing has brought poetry to the fore in printed form. Now the poet is trying to experiment in writing poetry rather than experimenting with pronunciation. As long as a poem does not reach the hearts of the aficionados, it must be said that the poem is inanimate. Poetry is a form of art, which continues to recreate in the minds of the aficionados even after its creation, and the process of its enjoyment continues unabated. Poetry is described as 'pure poetic energy'. The eloquence of rhetoric is related to the specific kind of passion it has. Any kind of intensity or passion is a short-lived state of mind. This is a psychological truth. Naturally, this passion plays an important role in making the form of rhetoric smaller in size.

Looking Back from the Invention of Printing: Mothers and the Teaching of Reading in the Middle Ages by Michael Clanchy

Looking Back from the Invention of Printing: Mothers and the Teaching of Reading in the Middle Ages by Michael Clanchy

When iconicity stands in the way of abbreviation: No Zipfian effect for figurative signals.

Zipf’s law of abbreviation, relating more frequent signals to shorter signal lengths, applies to sounds in a variety of communication systems, both human and non-human. It also applies to writing systems: more frequent words tend to be encoded by less complex graphemes, even when grapheme complexity is decoupled from word length. This study documents an exception to this law of abbreviation. Observing European heraldic motifs, whose frequency of use was documented for the whole continent and over two large corpora (total N = 25115), one medieval, one early modern, we found that they do not obey a robust law of abbreviation. In our early modern corpus, motif complexity and motif frequency are positively, not negatively, correlated, a result driven by iconic motifs. In both our corpora, iconic motifs tend to be more frequent when more complex. They grew in popularity after the invention of printing. Our results suggest that lacking iconicity may be a precondition for a graphic code to exhibit Zipf’s Law of Abbreviation.

Генезис современного информационного общества и основные мировые характеристики

We consider the historical aspect of the formation of the modern information society as a result of the world information revolution. The main stages of the world information revolution are: the Neolithic revolution, iron revolution, the emergence of writing, the invention of printing; the appearance of the telegraph, telephone, radio and television; the emergence of electronic computers, the creation of the Internet. The idea of the information society was formulated in the late 60s — early 70s of the XX century. However, in the 70s of the 20th century there was a convergence of two simultaneously emerging ideologies — the information society and post-industrialism. To date, Information economy is a sector of the information industry of the economic system of the country. The new economic system is highly dynamic, leading to the growth of economic inequality countries, becomes a potential source of conflicts of a different nature. Information, as a reproducible resource, becomes an object of sale and purchase and a source of long-term economic growth. We consider the stages of the world information revolution. The Internet revolution is comparable in its value to the Neolithic and iron revolutions, with the industrial revolution that made the world economy leader England in the 19th century. We distinguish eight characteristics of the modern information society: unique knowledge, strengthening the role of entrepreneurship, digital technologies, creative highly qualified specialists, the growth of the global online population, the lack of ICT skills, the rapid development of the mobile world, the lack of a unified methodology for measuring ICT skills. The authors come to the conclusion about necessity of creation of uniform world information educational environment for people from all over the world due to the low global level of ICT-skills and the lack of a common methodology for the measurement ICT-skills.

The importance of digitalisation in urology

The Internet has shaped and changed society like no other technology. Culturally, the emergence of the Internet is being described as having the same impact on society as the invention of printing. In 2018, more than 4 billion people had access to the Internet. Among all Internet users, approximately 80 % search the Internet for health-related information, with cancer being the most frequently searched condition. Patients rate the Internet as the second most helpful source of information, outranked only by consultation with a medical doctor. There are more than 2.6 billion active social media users. Among urological residents, 97 % use social media on a regular basis. Digitalisation has the potential to strengthen patients' health literacy and optimise patient care, especially in the oncologic field. In summary, digitalisation bears an enormous potential for the field of urology.

How the medium shapes the message: Printing and the rise of the arts and sciences.

Communication technologies, from printing to social media, affect our historical records by changing the way ideas are spread and recorded. Yet, finding statistical evidence of this fact has been challenging. Here we combine a common causal inference technique (instrumental variable estimation) with a dataset on nearly forty thousand biographies from Wikipedia (Pantheon 2.0), to study the effect of the introduction of printing in European cities on Wikipedia’s digital biographical records. By using a city’s distance to Mainz as an instrument for the adoption of the movable type press, we show that European cities that adopted printing earlier were more likely to become the birthplace of a famous scientist or artist during the years following the invention of printing. We bring these findings to recent communication technologies by showing that the number of radios and televisions in a country correlates with the number of globally famous performing artists and sports players born in that country, even after controlling for GDP, population, and including country and year fixed effects. These findings support the hypothesis that the introduction of communication technologies can bias historical records in the direction of the content that is best suited for each technology.