Shannon


 * //Handbook of Research on Writing// Edited by Charles Bazerman**

**Chapter 1 Origins and Forms of Writing** by Denise Schmandt-Besserat and Michael Erand, University of Texas

Art preceded writing by 25,000 years.

//Writing systems, script, orthography// //syllabaries//**:** represent consonant + vowel syllables

Art was a means to understand the unknown... to forge a common understanding of the mysteries of life (p. 8). No culture is known that does not foster art.

Writing arose in three places of the world:

-Mesopotamia 3200 BCE -China 1250 BCE -Mesoamerica 650 BCE

**Mesopotamia:**

Economic origins; use of tokens Art communicated profound, but vague ideas, but the tokens communicated concrete, discrete information on specific quantities of merchandise such as grain and animals. Keeping records with tokens became cumbersome and bulky. To make contents (tokens) visible, tokens were impressed on the envelope.

3100 BCE From these impressed signs to signs traced with a stylus appeared in Mesopotamia city of Uruk Then, they wanted to record the names of those people who gave or received Phonograms: Signs standing for sounds Pictography: writing with pictures

2700-2600 BCE The royal scribe of Ur wrote inscriptions that had nothing to do with accounting; New purpose was funerary.

2600-2500 BCE Evidence of inscribing small statues in the name of deceased individuals.

2500 BCE a Sumerian king inscribed his victories

2000 BCE writing was used for historical, religious, legal, scholarly, and literary texts, including poetry

**Cuneiform**

// 2200-2000 BCE (reed stylus with a triangular end produved distinctive wedge patterns// //lost ground when Aramaic came around, which was flowing hand on papyrus or parchment//

// **The Alphabet** // invented only once, so Latin, Arabic, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Ethiopian, Tamil and Navaho derive from the same first alphabet First one had 22 letters, each standing for a phoneme. 1700 BCE Near East, probably present-day Lebanon Phoenician cities on coast 1000-300 helped to spread alphabet across Mediterranean Sea, including present day Greece modified into a 27 letter alphabet Estrucans (present-day Italy) modified shaped of letters of Greek alphabet When conquered by Rome, in first century BCE, became Roman alphabet... where the armies conquered, the alphabet spread.

**Chinese** 3,000 years leading up to the modern time... same writing 1250 BCE changes over time Questions to an oracle on a shell now 60, 000 characters, but most are archaic words, variant characters, proper names For modern Chinese writer, 1,000 characters account for 90% of all occurrences in texts and 2400 characters cover 99% Each character is NOT a small picture that represents ideas. Most characters represent speech sounds, 90% consist of a graphic element that indicates pronunciations and another element that marks meaning (p. 16).


 * Mesoamerica **

900 CE 13 different writing systems by various civilizations 250-900 CE Maya written until Christopher Columbus encounte

glyphs 800 with diacritics on stone stelae writing associated with calendar calculations and the actions of kingly dynasties Still trying to understand the antecedants of Maya some in Tabanso and Oaxaca in 650 BCE

From 400 BCE to 200 CE 3 related writing systems used in Mesoamerica Isthmian script from Mexican Gulf Coast to Isthmus of Tehuantepec Oaxacan script used in Valley of Oaxaca Maya script used in an area that extended from Yucatan peninsula to foothills of Guatemalan Highlands Europeans outlawed native writing system (p. 17).

**Writing as Culture** 1952 **I. J. Gelb**, philologist at University of Chicago, //Study of Writing// categorized writing systems Grammatology

1920s **Milman Perry** Harvard classicist relationship between orality and literacy; Homer

1960s **Marshall McLuhan** How does visual culture contrast with oral/aural cultures? 1976 **Eric Havelock** How did literacy shape Greek society? What's the impact of alphabet on organization of ideas, abstract, thought, and consciousness?

Anthropologist **Jack Goody** "technology of the intellect"; writing influences religion, economy, law and commerce.
 * Walter Ong** writing is a technology that restructures consciousness and refocuses energy of society.
 * David Olson** writing, not speech, determines our ability to reflect on ourselves.

For most of 20th century, linguists focused on spoken language. In the 1970s, there was a renewed interest in writing systems. In the late 20th century, focus again on writing systems: //Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems// (1999) Florian Coulmas

Teaching writing systems: textbooks... //Writing Systems : An Introduction to their Linguistic Analysis// 2002 by Florian Coulmas and //Writing Systems: A Lingui////stic Approach// 2005 by Henry Rogers

**Decipherment** European scholars were deciphering ancient texts long before Perry and Gelb. Early 19th century decipherment projects, like the translation of trilingual text (hieroglyphic, Coptic, and Greek) of **Rosetta Stone by Jena Francois Champollion.**

Scholars tried to decipher cuneiform in early 17th century.

Hency Rawlinson rock of Behistun in Western Iran; Akkadian was a Semitic language.

Linear B from Aegean island of Knossos and from mainland Greece deciphered by John Chadwick and Michael Ventris in 1953 Mycenaean.

Pro-decipher by Europeans for biblical scholarship and European expansion colonial into Asia and Middle East.

Presently, John S. Justeson is studying the stele of La Mojjara, Mexico Epi-Olmec Hieroglyphic writing; Still others out there to be deciphered...

1986 Bruno Latour: representational devices (drawings, charts, graphs, photos, and diagrams) allow scientists to make increasingly stronger arguments about the phenomena they study. Writing persists because of its utility for human work and its adaptability across spheres. There are social advantages to alphabetic over representation of ideas, words, or syllables. It may be easier to learn, more easily adapted to other languages and more efficiently ordered.

Technology Chinese characters/ keyboards development of a universal standard for text encoding with computers would be an important development for the future of writing (Erand, 2003) IBM, Xerox-Parc, and Apple developed a **Unicode** with 96,000 characters and 55 writing systems, 70,000 of which are for Chinese characters.
 * The Future of Writing **

100 writing systems remain to be encoded; [|Universal Scripts Initiative] working on it to allow as many people as possible to participate in the digital age.

Evolving nature of writing with texts, blogs, etc. Emoticons :) Youth cultures 6,912 languages in world as of 2004, most not written down because no writing system has been developed or adapted for them yet. The future favors Roman alphabet, written by more people in world than any other.

**Related Links:** [|English Won't Dominate as World Language]

**Chapter 2 History of Writing Technologies** by Brian Gabrial, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

clay, stylus, **papyrus** (Egypt) easy to make, not durable; others wanted in on Egypt's monopoly on papyrus, so made **parchment** from sheepskin, cheap and durable and you could write on both sides, book prototype developed Christian Gospels by 2nd c BCE, Greeks and Romans were using parchment or vellum, similar material made from calfskin
 * Manual Technologies**

Paper in ancient China thin, portable, durable invented by **Ts'ai Lun** Kept secret for centuries, then spread to Japan and Korea, and then to Arab traders then to Europeans 1050



Incan civilization of South America **khipu (quipu)** Knots on strings for binary system? or just a business record keeping? also wrote on bark of trees in other parts of the Americas [|Khipu- Pre-Columbian Communication]

Greeks and Romans modified stylus from cuneiform tool to hold ink plants, bones, animal horns, and some metal ones have been found among Pompeii's ruins

-1883 Lewis Edson Waterman first **fountain pen** -1888 J.J. Loud **ballpoint pen**, only worked on rough surfaces -1938 Hungarian journalist Laslo Josef Biro patented first ballpoint pen effective Marcel Bich introduced Bic pen in 1950
 * Quill** 500 CE sytlus of choice for over 1000 years; downfall? need constant replacement

first ones were a bit coarse, but by 18th c, safer 19th c, better pencils in England and American Henry David Thoreau made pencils; teachers did not encourage pencils. They thought the erasers attached to the pencils would encourage students to forget how to prepare their lessons properly. (Think of Cut, Edit, Paste now).
 * Pencil** from Latin penicillum, a thin paintbrush the Romans thought early pencils resembled [[image:Screen_shot_2011-07-09_at_3.18.28_PM.png width="60" height="105" align="left"]]

Postal system in China 10th c BCE; Romans by 4th c CE; Slaves as scribes, then during Middle Ages, religious monks did most of the scribe work. As Europe entered Renaissance, libraries were built; Greek Ptolomies built the Great Library of Alexandria with 40,000 volumes.

Chinese **xylography**, birth of printing, made mass printing possible; exact origins unknown 880 CE?

oldest book? //The Diamond Sutra// 9th c CE xylography spread to Europe in 12th c

**Mechanical Technologies**

Johannes Gutenberg's letter press 1450-1455; printed 100 Bibles with 42 lines per page. Also, kept secret, then spread to England where William Caxton set up a printing press in 1476.

It caused great **social change**: Roman Catholic Church against it, but it expanded the literate class.

-Stereotyping late 18th c impression of a type-set page for use and reuse -1803 Earl of Stanhope -Friedrich Koenig steam press -Richard Hoe's faster cylinder press -lithograhy -offset lithography

There was a surplus of paper because of the surplus of rags from people killed by Black Death. Rene de Reaumur in the early 18th century had about making paper once he observed a wasp's nest, and then a German cleric took the idea and created paper from wood pulp. In the late 18th century, Nicholas Robert built a machine to mass produce paper.

19th c **typewriter** Henry Mills received a patent. 1714 Sholes makes a purposefully inefficient QWERTY on the keyboard to slow down typists who were jamming the keys, but typist couldn't see the words on the paper as he/she typed.

Then, Underwood created a front strike machine.


 * Social change**? Women started to work outside of the home.


 * Media technology scholar Lisa Gitelman claimed that the machine separated the author**
 * from the text during its creation.**

Pamela Thurschwell: intimacy is mediated through "teletechnologies" like the typewriter and the telegraph. Mark Twain; first typewritten manuscript //Life on the Mississippi.// Typewriter increased office jobs, but the mimeograph (1884 by Albert Dick) eliminated the need for office copyists.

penny press; news media for the masses; modern newsroom; delivery needed, so postal service boom; US Postal Service Pony Express, but then changed by Transcontinental Railroad and telegraph. Postage stamp symbolized American success in quickly distributing communication.
 * 1815-1914 the "Golden Age" of the printed word**; printed word cheaper and more available to a mass 19th c audience;

-1843 First electrical telegraph line by Charles Wheatstone Electricity became a common carrier of communication: Morse code and Marconi wireless Electrical communication was also possible by the end of the 19th century.

-Alexander Bain in 1843 invented the first fax machine. -Thomas Edison invented an electric typewriter by the end of 1800s. -Chester Carlson from Astoria, NY figured out how to use xerography; sold the concept to a company, which later became known as Xerox. The first office photocopier was sold in 1959.


 * Computers**

-Leonardo da Vinci envisioned a computer. -Blaise Pascal created an 8-digit mechanical calculator. -1700s Jacquard invented a machine for woven patterns, eliminated jobs. The Luddites formed as an anti-industrialization and anti-technology group. -1833 Charles Babbage -Herman Hollerith (other versions of the the computer).

Truly electronic computer built at University of Pennsylvania the ENIAC, Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer, which weighed 30 tons. -1938 Hewlitt and Packard created a binary code computer, which has been modified ever since. -1957 creation of RAM made smaller, faster computers. Were they just large word processors?

-1981 IBM home computer invented.

-1960s Internet US Department of Defense Advanced Research Project Agency's system of transferring packets of information -By 1980s electronic communication -Ray Tomlinson sent e-mail and first to chose @ symbol. -HTML computers could communicate with each other despite how the message was made. -1990s Internet world wide; We now have more than 182 million websites on the Web, and computers can look like this

Role of paper? As of the publication of this book, still heavy demand for paper.