Page 8 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

those in our time you need to have a reasonable grasp of the numerous topics involved in the book history of both periods. This means an under- standing on some level of medieval technology as it related to book culture, of current computer technology, and of the many developments in between. You need some understanding of the medieval manuscript tradition, out of which printing by movable type evolved. To understand aspects of the his- tory of manuscript books over the nine hundred years of the Middle Ages I think you need to learn about the earlier great transition in the form and function of the book—the transition from the roll to the codex that took place during the second through fifth centuries CE.2
When reviewing the history of information from the earliest written re- cords to present digital technology, many factors make analysis difficult. One is the quantitative scale of evidence when we work between the recent and the distant past. Prior to the development of the personal computer in the 1980s, when electronic computing and the Internet began to have a wide- ly-recognized impact on society at large, the history of information (exclud- ing analog communication media such as the electric telegraph, radio and television) could often be studied through specific examples, or examples on a relatively small scale, such as individual books or manuscripts or specific libraries. When we address issues relating to the Internet the numbers are often several magnitudes higher, especially since the development of the World Wide Web in the 1990s. This is the result of several factors. On the one hand so much of the record is lost the further we move backward in time; on the other hand there is the growth of information, which occurred with the advance of societies and populations, and grew through the devel- opment of communications media, but which became much more widely recognized as explosive since the Internet. The early history of information in places like ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece or Rome often means the study of individual items, or groups of items—often, but not necessarily books—or libraries with a finite, though not always quantifiable number of physical volumes.
2 Most of the hyperlinks in this work are to entries in the database. 8