Unit Four: Print Knowledge

Eisenstein's famous study of
the effects of printing

The final unit for our course on Reinventing Knowledge pertains to print. What are the institutions, the cultural patterns, the conventions of communication and of thought that emerge when a society adopts printing as its primary intellectual medium? These are the larger questions we mean to explore.

Our calendar is as follows:

• Intro to Print (Tues, Nov 8)
• Intellectual Property, Copyright, Censorship (Thurs., Nov 10)
  Read: Walter Ong, "Print, Space, and Closure" (13 page PDF)
• The Protestant Reformation (Tues., Nov 15)
  Read: Martin Luther, "Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation"
• Learned Communication / Scholarship (Thurs. Nov 17)
  Read: Reinventing Knowledge, Chapt. 4: The Republic of Letters
• Guest Lecturer: Royal Skousen (Tues., Nov 29)
• Print and Science (Thurs. Dec 1)

What follows is a required field trip and a bibliography assignment, both of which we expect students to work into their blogging during this unit:

Field Trip

Each student will be required to do one of the following during our print knowledge unit, and to document this experience through a blog post:

• Visit the Crandall Historical Printing Museum
• Visit the Life and Legacy of the King James Bible Exhibit at the Harold B. Lee Library

Bibliography Assignment

One of the blog posts should be an annotated bibliography. This is required to be a book-based bibliography. No websites or purely digital sources are allowed (unless your digital source is a digital copy of a physical, printed book. Even so, note how you must find at least four sources by way of print sources).

• Make a topic-based bibliography.  Explore one of the ideas or issues surrounding print-based knowledge (see below for a list of ideas).
• Include 5-10 books. Please note that how you find these works is just as important as what you find, see "Finding books through print sources," below
• Follow this format:
• Book info (Author, Title, Publisher, Year)
• Annotation (which should include a summary of the source and some comment as to its relevance or importance for the topic being explored).
• Links (to where these books can be found online either through Google Books, through Amazon, through Goodreads, or even through a library catalog search).
  
  For an example of such a bibliography, look at the bottom of this post, or at the bottom of this seed post about language.
• Document your process. The blog post should include a narrative about your research process, especially about your finding process
• Find books through print sources. To encourage you to explore print-based research processes, four of your five-to-ten sources must be:
1. from footnotes, endnotes, or a bibliography within a printed book (you can refer to digitally scanned print books for this).
2. from a general, printed reference work (you may find the source online; you must consult it in print). 
3. from a printed periodical or journal (you can locate this online; you must browse it in paper form, physically)
4. from physically browsing library shelves (REQUIRES LIBRARY PHYSICAL VISIT)
   
   Indicate the print source for items in your bibliography by adding a bracketed note at the end of the notation (see my example within the second book listed in my bibliography below)

Topics:

As you explore these topics, they will naturally extend forward in time toward the present. That is fine, but please base some of your research and discussion in the Renaissance or in general before 1700. You do not need to research the same civilization or culture you have reported on previously.

• Non-European printing
• The rise of publishing as a practice, then as an industry (before 1700)
• History of the printed book (before 1700)
• Materials and methods for printing (1450-1700)
• Printing presses and publishers in the Renaissance
• Standardization and uniformity and how print affected these trends
• Fonts and typefaces (as developed between 1450-1700)
• The economics of the book trade before 1700
• History of publishing, editing (between 1450-1700)
• The rise of the author (before 1700, and perhaps between manuscript and print culture)
• The effects of printing on the Protestant Reformation, or the Catholic Counter-Reformation
• Distribution and dissemination of printed books before 1700
• Reading practices and how these developed or transformed with the coming of print.
• Persistence of oral practices or scribal practices into the print period
• Literary representations of printing, publishing
• The visual arts and how these were present in or affected by printing
• The roles of compositors, type founders, printers, binders, translators, illustrators, engravers, indexers, etc. 
• Censorship (before 1700)
• The use of print in education (before 1700)
• New reading practices with the coming of print (such as silent reading)
• Dictionaries and lexicons (before 1700)
• Spelling, and how print affected orthography
• Print and privacy 
• Plagiarism (before 1700) or the issue of originality
• Print knowledge and law
• Print knowledge and medicine
• Conventions of print-based knowledge: tables of contents, indexes, pagination, footnotes and endnotes, critical apparatus, etc.
• The history of bibliography (before 1700)
• The development of the anthology as a literary genre

Bibliography: Print Knowledge

• Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge University Press, 1993. Eisenstein is the major person to have assessed the influence of printing upon Western culture. This is a redaction of her earlier, ground-breaking work, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge University Press, 1980).
• Febvre, Lucien and Henri-Jean Martin. The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800. London, 1976. Covers key issues such as the format of books, paper, and the nature of books as commodities during the early growth of the publishing industry in Renaissance Europe. [I found this work was frequently cited in the footnotes of Eisenstein's The Printing Revolution, and so I found a paper copy of it]
• Goody, Jack. The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University, 1977. Goody looks at the effects of typography and the cultural consequences of organizing knowledge through lists, etc. Goody's others works are also important.
• McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962.
  On the revolution of print technology. McLuhan is interested in discerning the changes to culture due to electronic media, but he goes back to oral and to print modes of knowledge very effectively. His sources are also very important. A good introductory source for McLuhan is Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds. Essential McLuhan. HarperCollins, 1995.
• Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization, 1934.
  Another seminal book that looks at the history of civilization from the point of view of developing technologies. The printing press is discussed as second in importance to the clock as a transformative technology.
• Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy. New York: Routledge, 1982
  Ong's seminal work looks at cultural transitions between oral, written, and print-based societies and practices. It's hard to overstate the importance of Ong in this field.
• Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin, 1986. Relevant to the development of print culture is Postman's chapter 4, "The Typographic Mind." While he is focusing on 18th- and 19th-century literacy in America, his generalizations about the psychological and social effects of print literacy are more generally applicable.

[This is not a complete example of the bibliography assignment, since it does not include a narrative of how these books were found, nor how use was made of print sources in finding them.]