History 280B (Seminar), Spring 1999, Mary Kay Duggan,
Thursday 1-3, Bancroft Library, Stone Seminar Room; Office Hours, Wed., 3-5

Transitions in Media
Manuscript to Print, c.1450, Print to Digital, Today
 


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For selections from 1999 Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think by Stuart K. Card, Jock D. Mackinlay, Ban Shneiderman, see the class on Visual Literacy.

Robert Darnton. "The New Age of the Book," New York Review of Books, Mar. 18, 1999.

The Rocket E-Book was the subject of a Feb. 19th article in the NY Times. A more critical review of currently available ebooks can be found in Forbes (Feb. 8, 1999) (search Melvyl MAGS for rocket ebook). Bolter/Grusin, Remediation (1999), is in my mailbox, South Hall.

Wednesday, Mar. 4th, 4PM. Michael Mabe (Elsevier). "The Journal: Past, Present and Future." 220 Stephens Hall.
Monday, Feb. 8th, 4PM. "The Commercialization of Higher Education" by David F. Noble. Noble's article, Distance Education on the Web, discusses the transition of higher education to the digital medium.

What happens to knowledge and information, to publisher, auithor and reader as the medium of comunication changes? To answer that question, the first two parts of the seminar will focus on chronological periods of transition, and a final part will develop themes chosen from either period by students for term projects/papers. Factors to be addressed include the physical appearance of information-layout, letter forms, illustration, color, etc.; organization and structure -table of contents, indexes, footnotes, chapters, multiple access to indexes, hypertext, interactive texts; reader-literacy (verbal, visual, digital), language, affluence, class, age; author-class, education, gender, age; and content. How does the knowledge medium affect the balance of power in society, ways of thinking and problem solving, education?

Requirements: short paper and class presentation on manuscript or early printed book. Short paper and class presentation on a digital genre or aspect. Term project/paper on either chronological focus.

Bibliography

Background: Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin. The Coming of the Book London: NLB, 1976.
Henri-Jean Martin. The History and Power of Writing. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1994.

New Books to be used:
Michael Camille. Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Jay David Bolter. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.
Stuart K. Card, Jock D. Mackinlay, Ben Shneiderman. Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 1999.