Many years ago when the world was young, around 1995, I started attempting to produce multimedia presentations on various topics in medieval history. The received wisdom being spouted by the bright young things who had just graduated from multimedia school was that text was going to disappear from our learning process. All instructions, navigation and even content should be in the form of graphic imagery, because the upcoming generation was not going to ever need to read. It seemed we were going back to preliterate medieval style visual culture.
Strange as that seems, it never happened. The killer app of the internet is not digital video, animation or fancy graphics, but email. We are addicted to it. Advertisers bomb us with it. We can now check it and send it on our mobile phones. Web designers have gone back to advocating text links, as those little inscrutable icons are not actually intuitive after all.
The bizarre news item of the week is that a street in London is having its lamp posts and bollards wrapped in thick white padding so that people walking along the street text messaging don't injure themselves when they walk into them. The human race has become so obsessed with text that it no longer looks where it's going.
I wonder if there was panic among late medieval scribes that fancy manuscript picture books for the laity would put them out of work because book owners would all be illiterate. Then along came printing, more people learned to read, and text was king again. Nuthin' new in the world.
2 comments:
Thesis Writing Help"Great Concept you provided here, I appreciate your king knowledge about Manuscript and Multimedia, it will very useful for me
Wonderful research and comments.
I am a retired schoolteacher / calligrapher /heraldic artist although I can't seem to stop my fanatic interest in Lettre Batarde, to the length of researching in the Bodleian, V&A, Brit Lib, Fitzwilliam and Christ's College on my irregular trips to UK (No more --- at 86, the trip is getting to be too much to suffer.
Of course, when studying MSS it helps if identifying archaic letter forms came easily and I believe I do a reasonable job but the one which really stumps me, both in Latin and French MSS, is the character which looks like a z, either as a medial of terminal letter.
Any thoughts on this?
Are there dictionaries available dealing with Medieval Latin or French?
I recently discovered a Wycliffe 1420 MS of the Gospels and that presents a very interesting "hand" that I am now trying to redesign in a style suitable for modern use.
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