The Hero’s Journey (Wherever I May Roam)
Rover, Wanderer …And the road becomes my brideI have stripped of all but prideSo in her I do confideAnd she keeps me satisfiedGives me all… Read More »The Hero’s Journey (Wherever I May Roam)
reading
Writing and Reading as Technology (7): History’s First Mass Literacy Campaign?
I haven’t been able to find a literacy campaign earlier than King Sejong the Great of Korea‘s 1443-1444 Hunminjeongeum (“The Correct/Proper Sounds for the Instruction… Read More »Writing and Reading as Technology (7): History’s First Mass Literacy Campaign?
Shooting Stars
Dedicated (with apologies) to email subscribers who received a three word “Constellation” a few hours ago… …the Seriph, in his bijou wildernessette, has just riffled… Read More »Shooting Stars
Our World in Data is Great and Getting Better; or, How I Destroyed Several Billion Medieval Manuscripts
Revisionist History Thursday, 20:02 hrs I report an error on an OWID graph in their preliminary collection of information about books. Some of the numbers… Read More »Our World in Data is Great and Getting Better; or, How I Destroyed Several Billion Medieval Manuscripts
Writing and Reading as Technology (6): Stop Press. Who invented moveable type?
Not Gutenberg Gutenberg put several important pieces together in a new way in 1439(ish) when he built what most of us probably think of as… Read More »Writing and Reading as Technology (6): Stop Press. Who invented moveable type?
Writing and Reading as Technology (5): Literacy as Infrastructure for Thought
The development of spoken language was humankind’s first great networking technology.* Speech allows us to communicate thought and to think far better than we could… Read More »Writing and Reading as Technology (5): Literacy as Infrastructure for Thought
Writing and Reading as Technology (4): Innovation at Play; or, A Loaded Pun
Writing History by Messing Around As far as we know, writing has been invented four times in human history. The big four are Sumerian cuneiform,… Read More »Writing and Reading as Technology (4): Innovation at Play; or, A Loaded Pun
Writing and Reading as Technology (3): Marginal Revolutions
Technology often advances at the margins, where new problems challenge people to adapt old tools or to make new ones. (See also Hybrids (2): combinations… Read More »Writing and Reading as Technology (3): Marginal Revolutions
Recommendation: BBC’s The Secret History of Writing
I’ll be coming back to this in future posts, but for now I’ll just highly, highly recommend this documentary tracing the history of writing presented… Read More »Recommendation: BBC’s The Secret History of Writing
Writing and Reading as Technology (2): Half-baked Beginnings
Writing as Infant Technology … the thing about new technologies… is that it takes several generations for us to decide what they’re good for. They’re… Read More »Writing and Reading as Technology (2): Half-baked Beginnings