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Ἡ τέχνη γράφοντος

“The Technē of Writing”

Writing Lecture, Part 1

• Writing lecture, part 1.mp3
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Prologue 

τέχνη (techne) is the Greek word that gives us words like technique, technical, technological, technician, techno, and, of course, Louisiana Tech.  According to the OED, it is "An art, skill, or craft; a technique, principle, or method by which something is achieved or created. Also: a product of this, a work of art."  The τέχνη of writing reaches back thousands of years, and technical writers ignore this history at their peril.

We begin our study of technological advances in technical writing with sticks in mud and feathers marking on animal skin parchment. This is probably the most important lecture of the quarter because it lays the groundwork for everything to come.  Naturally you don't believe me.  So to quote Hans and Franz, hear me now and listen later.  Fortunately, this lecture will be here when you are ready for it.

Part I: Language

In the beginning was the word (John 1:1)

John 20

30. And many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book:
31. But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name.   
    

While many animals and even plants are able to communicate through signs, the human capacity for language far exceeds what we see elsewhere.  Fortunately for us, this ability is pre-technological and thus beyond the limits of this course.

What isgermane to the course is to recognize that writing developed as a way to deal with the natural limitations of speech. A speech act is limited to a specific time and place;  writing extends the reach of the speech to a broader audience removed in time, place, or both.

Part II: Cave Paintings

The oldest extant human writing that I'm aware of is cave painting, some of which is 30,000 years old.  The technology involves would include paint, some kind of brush, a surface (the cave interior), and lighting to see what they were doing.  This isn't a written language yet, but it does give us insight into human aesthetics; after all these millennia, the art is not only recognizable but beautiful.

Part III: Etched in Clay, Chiseled in Stone — Whatever.

Baked clay and stone have similar qualities; the big difference is in the ease of creation and the beauty of the finished product.  Clay is soft enough that the scribe can use a sharp stick or stylus; rock requires chisels; therefore, it takes longer and is more expensive. 

Tablets in Cuneiform (3300 bc)

1. Stylus
2. Tablet 1
3. Tablet 5: Epic of Gilgamesh
   They wrote using pictographs, which changed to syllabograms later.
4. Current uses of this technology.
1. Writing in wet concrete.  Who can resist?
   
2. Cemetaries
3. Vietnam memorial
4. Tech bricks
   
5. Over building entrances.  Compare the old Ruston State Bank inscription with the sign on the building to the left. The inscriptions on banks, government buildings, and similar institutions imply strength and permanence.  "I'm Ruston State Bank; I kept the deposites safe from Bonnie and Clyde; I'll keep your deposites safe too."  The neighbor to the left is flashier but less reliable.  "I'm Paramount 'ealthcare  'onsultants.  Hurry in; I'll be gone before the rest of my letters drop off."

Drawbacks of this method

1. These forms are by their nature monumental; they last a long time, but they are incredibly heavy and hard to move. 
   
2. Each inscription is bulky, limiting the amount of information you can record.  Imagine going to class with a physics textbook etched in baked clay.
3. They are expensive to produce.

History of Writing, Part 2

• Writing lecture, part 2.mp3
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Part IV: Scrolls in Hebrew, Greek, & Latin

There is a debate over who created the alphabet. 

The Phoenicians created a Consonantal Alphabet, which is an alphabet made up only of consonants.  mgn tht (imagine that).  The Hebrew alphabet is derived from Phoenician. Also, Hebrew is written from right to left.

Greek had the first full alphabet of consonants and vowels.  Rome followed suit with Latin.  Both are written left to right.  But the scribal techniques are otherwise similar among the three languages.

1. Written on papyrus or parchment.
1. Paryrus Reeds (bullrushes)
2. Making papyrus
2. Parchment (animal skin)
   
1. Making parchment
3. Written with quills from a goose or flat brushes.  The shape of the quill helps determine the shape of the letters. 
   
1. A modern pencil or ball-point pen tends to produce the same width line regardless of direction of the stroke.
   
2. The shape of the traditional nib means that strokes in one direction are narrower than strokes in another.  The art of the scribe was eventually passed down to the printer.
   
4. Written with homemade ink.
   
1. Carbon ink.  Soot, glue, and water.
2. Sopher's ink. A composite of iron-salts, nutgall, and gum, and water.  This is the ink still in use today to produce Torahs.  I'm not sure why, because soot is universally available (it's actually a waste product), and the carbon in it is permanently black.  Perhaps the other recipe produces a superior black ink, but there are two important characteristics of this ink to note:
1. The acid in the nutgall gradually eats into the papyrus or parchment, making the surface more uneven.
2. The iron slowly oxidizes, making the ink fade on the page.  It doesn't fade to a rust color; it combines with the other pigments to form a deep brown. The text on most of my site is a close match to rusty scribal ink, as you can see in the bar below:
   
5. Wound up into a scroll.
   
6. The Torah Scroll is still being regularly produced and used in synagogues today.
   
1. Watch the Dedication of a new Torah Scroll
2. Torah = Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy
   
3. Each book was originally a separate book, a separate scroll.  Books were rather short: otherwise the papyrus or parchment tended to crack, and it took too long to get from one section of the book to another.
4. Takes 6 months to a year to make. Requires a full-time סופ sopher (scribe) who needs to be paid a full-time professional wage ($50,000 — $75,000 per scroll)
5. All adult men in the synagogue help write it to fulfill the command that every man write one torah scroll in his lifetime.  Women contribute too nowdays.
   
6. Ordinary people don't own books. Too expensive.  Most common people didn't read. Jewish boys like Jesus & Peter WOULD have learned to read at Hebrew school.  One scroll per village not uncommon.
   Judaism therefore produced many scholars in the ancient world.

Part V: The Codex

• Medieval Manuscript Manual.  The history of the codex.
• A rough guide to making a manuscript. Tonight, when you pick up your book, observe the legacy of sewn gatherings in the fixings of the pages. Discern, in your fountain pen, the memory of the hollow feather. What follows is a general, Wiki-How-style overview of how a medieval manuscript would have been fashioned. The craft flourished for over 1,000 years and dominates the material foundation of Western literary culture.
  
• The next breakthrough in writing was the codex.  It is just like a modern book, except handwritten rather than printed.
• The codex was invented in the second century by the church.
• The early church was extremely poor and needed to save paper when transcribing the books of the New Testament.  Scrolls waste the whole back side of the paper.
• The church cut scrolls into sheets, wrote on both sides of the sheets, and sewed the whole thing together in book form.  
• Here is tech support for the transition from the scroll to the codex.
• Early codices were on papyrus because it was cheaper.  In later centuries, the church got more wealthy and moved to parchment and produced the beautiful manuscripts of the middle ages. They stuck to the codex form, however.

• Codes Sinaiticus.  Here is a famous Greek codex, the Codex Sinaiticus, written on parchment.  Notice the two font colors on the page and that the original black ink has faded to brown. Examine the texture of the letters themselves, where they are broad or narrow. 
  
• Atthispointthetextallrunsto getherfromonewordtoanoth erthisiscalledscriptocontinua. (At this point, the text all runs together from one word to another - this is called scripto continua.)  Ancients dealt with this form of writing by reading aloud, even when alone.  Cicero once wrote that he could not read that day because he had a cold and had lost his voice. 
  
• They used all capital letters, called uncials or majuscules.
  
• Spacing between words, punctuation, upper- and lower-case letters are innovations that will develop over the centuries. 

Effects of changing to the Codex  

1. You can get from one section to another quickly, hopping from the front to the back to the middle at will.
2. A codex can hold much more information than a scroll.  This transformed the way the the church thought about its sacred texts. 
   
1. Jesus and other Jews referred to their sacred texts as the scriptures, (which means the writings, from the word script).  They understood clearly that they were by separate people writing at separate times.
   
2. Christians could put all their sacred texts into one volume. They began to think of all their scriptures as one book.  They even called it τὸ βιβλίον "To Biblion," "the book".  This is where we get the word "Bible."
3. Codices are cheaper than scrolls, but still quite expensive, especially the fancy ones.  The first full handwritten Bible since the Renaissance has recently been completed, the Saint John's Bible.  This Bible was made by the Queen of England's calligrapher, complete with illustrations.  For the gold ink, he used real gold.  The handwritten edition cost $10,000,000 to produce, but you can get a copy for $175,000.  Or you can buy a house.

Part VI: Printing Press

Effects of the printing press

The printing press had major social impacts.

Photocopying

Part VII: The Digital Age

• Computers have a number of ancestors, but the modern computing age started around 1940.
• Text is stored digitally - 1's and 0's.  Thus Bruce R. Magee in digital is: 01000010 01110010 01110101 01100011 01100101 00100000 01010010 00101110 00100000 01001101 01100001 01100111 01100101 01100101.  HTML as a code stands between the digital code and the finished product you see on your screen. The ones and zeroes are the actual Matrix. 
  
• It can be altered and transmitted easity.
• The Internet began to be developed in the 1960s and 1970s.
• HTML was created in 1990.  The World Wide Web was born. Hypertext came into widespread use - links, images, videos could all be used to communicate. 
  
• The cost of information once again came down.  So did the space required to contain it.  The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, fills 20 large volumes and costs $1,290 on Amazon, down from around $2,000 at other places.  The digital version fits on one cd and costs about $300.  The university system of Louisiana subscribes to the OED, and you can access it through the library website for no additional cost beyond your tuition and fees.
  

The design of digital information was initially quite wretched.  Here is a screenshot from my first computer, a Kaypro 2X.  The screen was small and the pixels huge; the letter strokes were all one pixel wide.  Change fonts? Forget about it. 

What changed? Steve Jobs dropped out of college. Let’s let him tell us his story:

So he didn't stop going to school — he quietly attended classes that interested him.  One of these was calligraphy.  Years later when he was designing the Apple computers, he decided that his computers should replicate the beautiful fonts of print.

The current situation is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to design and fonts.  My laptop currently has 1,996 fonts installed.  They are ancient, medieval, renaissance, and Klingon and are dumped into a directory that lists them alphabetically.  The past can guide us in making our choices for the future. In addition to all the fonts, he popularized the GUI (Graphical User Interface) that enables WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editing. Sophisticated software allows us to apply all the traditional principles of document design to electronic documents, along with allowing new types of design not possible with paper documents. Like embedded commencement speaches.

This page, for example, follows the format of the Louisiana Anthology.  The page is written on a papyrus background (why papyrus? It's optimized for scrolling!).  I picked Caslon font after spending an evening pouring over maps of colonial Louisiana.  Caslon, a British font developed in the 1750s, was the closest match to the maps that is commonly installed on computers.  Caslon is a computer font based on a print font based on the ebb and flow of the scribal quill.  And the ink may look black at first, but on close inspection you will find that it is the dark brown color of rusty scribal ink:

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