Page 93 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

Blair’s physical book and her footnotes may very well be just as distracting, perhaps in a different way, than following any number of hyperlinks that are directly relevant to a given electronic text.
A more specialized work that I read on paper in June 2011 was Eliza- beth A. Meyer’s Legitimacy and Law in the Roman World. Tabulae in Roman Belief and Practice (2004). The book discussed the Roman use of wooden tablets, frequently tied together—probably the precursor of the codex form of the book. Meyer’s work consisted of 356 pages, divided into nine chapters, with a total of around a thousand footnotes. From the reading standpoint, the main difference between Meyer’s and Blair’s books was that the footnotes in Meyer’s work are printed on the page openings in which they occur in her text, much as footnotes were originally intended to be printed at the foot of pages, as indicated in their name. Having Meyer’s footnotes on the pages to which they apply made it much easier for me to read her text, and I was able to read through the portions of her book relevant to the history of the tabulae or tablet format in a couple of hours, placing about 30 markers on pages to which I planned to return. Because Meyer’s footnotes tended to be longer and more technical than Blair’s, and her subject matter was even more esoteric, it is debatable whether either book is easier to read, but for those who want to check all the footnotes, I think it is fair to say that being able to glance at the footnote at the bottom of a page to tell whether the footnote is worth reading or not, makes the reading process far less disruptive.
As far as is known, long before footnotes and highly referenced, scholarly writing and publishing, the earliest reading was often a social experience. In the ancient world through Late Antiquity the reading experience was very different from our experience today. During those centuries all reading is thought to have been done aloud, whether alone or with other people; it could be listened to by others if they were present. Typically, the experience involved an individual reading to a group. The convention of writing in scriptio continua without word division, and also without interpunctuation, whether on papyrus rolls or codices, made reading a slower, sometimes ar- duous process, and vocalization a necessary part of reading, probably even
93