Dear Terry,

The reason for using the dictionary is simple. It shows how a word is used across centuries, and how that usage changes. Many schools teach the art of linocut printing. In five decades of visiting art and design schools, however, I have never once been to a school that teaches design for *printed media* that way. Some schools still have an old-fashioned, mechanical letterpress with cases of wood type for titles and headlines and cases of metal type for body copy. Even this is increasingly rare. Most schools teach these kinds of skills using computers with desk-top printer outputs or large commercial-quality printers to see the results. Some schools even find ways to give students access to today’s forms of book production and print production.

Many years ago, I did the illustrations for a book titled The Epickall Quest of the Brothers Dichtung by the late artist and composer Dick Higgins. Dick asked me to create a style that would emulate the look of woodcuts or engravings from the late 18th century and early 19th century. He liked the result so well that he changed his printing plans from an offset book to a book printed on an old fashioned press that Gutenberg would essentially have understood. As a result, he sent the book to Stinehour Press in Lunenberg Vermont. Even in those days — the late 1970s — most print production had moved from letterpress to various forms of offset. 

The reason that few design schools teach letterpress production is that most designers will never have the privilege of working with letterpress technology. This technology is unaffordable for most purposes.   

If you want to learn about these issues, I recommend Marshall Lee’s text, Bookmaking. This was the book that Dick gave me when I served as general manager for Something Else Press. It is the classic comprehensive survey for people new to the art of book design.

Lee, Marshall. 2009. Bookmaking. Editing, Design, Production. Third edition, revised. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

If you want to learn about books, reading, and the different shifts in how people read that evolved over the centuries from scribal times in the Middle East, Greece, and Europe to the world today, I suggest these books:

Eisenstein, Elizabeth. 1997. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Communications and cultural transformations in early-modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Febvre, Lucien and Henri-Jean Martin. 1997. The Coming of the Book. The Impact of Printing 1450-1800. London: Verso.

Grafton, Anthony. 1992. New Worlds, Ancient Texts. The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Grafton, Anthony and Megan Williams. 2006. Christianity and the Transformation of the Book. Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 

Harris, Roy. 2001. Rethinking Writing. London: Continuum. 

Hobart, Michael E. and Zachary S. Schiffman. 1998. Information Ages. Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 

Jackson, Donald. 1981. The Story of Writing. London: Barrie & Jenkins, Ltd.

Manuel, Alberto. 1997. A History of Reading. London: Flamingo. 

McCarty, Willard. 2010. Text and Genre in Reconstruction. Effects of Digitalization on Ideas, Behaviors, Products, and Institutions. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers. 

Nurnberg, Geoffrey. 1996. The Future of the Book. Berkeley: University of California Press. 

Petroski, Henry. 1999. The Book on the Bookshelf. 1999. New York: Knopf.

Piper, Andrew. 2012. Book was There. Reading in Electronic Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

van der Toorn, Karel. 2007. Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 

These books will give you a useful overview of the issues we have been discussing — literacy, writing, the shift from scribal culture to print culture, the spread of books, the act of reading, and the influence they have had in shaping cultures and societies. These books also shed some light on how these affected some of the human beings who lived in those cultures and societies. There are newer books on these subjects. These are the ones I found useful enough to buy when I was working on some of these questions.

Once you know something about the current situation — and how it came about over the past few millennia — conjecture and speculation may be valuable. Given the amount of serious work done on these issues, there is no need to speculate until you find out what experts on these issues already know. This is especially the case for the kinds of assumptions being offered here on how these issues evolved over an historical time for which a great deal of evidence exists. 

The books that David mentioned are also excellent. Frances Yates’s work is the renowned classic text on the question of memory systems. Another important title is The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci by Jonathan D. Spence, a 1984 book still in print with Penguin. 

With respect to the relationship between reading, psychology, and neuroscience, there is a more to the process than you describe. A literature review would disclose a great deal. I did not learn to read in the style you claim as a “general adult subjective assumption,” … “c-a-t spells cat.” But neither did I learn to read as you propose. 

As with Jinan’s assertions on the relationship between literacy, illiteracy, and language, empirical research should be possible. I would not take the results of self-experiment all that seriously when you describe a process that affects over 80% of the human population. Self-experiment may give you some interesting experiences and ideas — but your self-experiment involves one mind and one brain in the single body of one person. No matter what you learn, that is one case in a world with 7,435,000,000 or so people. The odds that any self-experiment located within one culture covers a reasonable enough proportion of the world population … well, ask any engineer, physicist, statistician, or psychologist how likely this is to work. Aside from the odd notion of imagining that a one-off case on such a process will tell you enough, there is also the question of bias. You will learn something useful and interesting about yourself. That’s a good heuristic starting point. You won’t learn very much about those other seven billion people. You definitely won’t learn enough to learn where the human nervous systems work at the border of cultures, social psychology, and individual psychology.

I can’t stop reading for six weeks. My job requires me to read.

For this thread, however, I can stop writing. I long ago passed the “two-post per thread” recommendation. I shall stop here.     

Yours,

Ken 

Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/

Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia 


> On Jul 9, 2016, at 4:41 AM, Terence Love <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> Hi Ken,
> 
> Thank you for the dictionary references.
> 
> In a simplistic way, I was viewing 'printing' as is often taught in design and art schools, e.g. through linocut printing. On that basis, there is no fundamental difference between a carved roll  or flat plate showing a story when pressed into clay and a print by lino cut - except the detail on the early rolls were better than can easily be achieved by linocut.
> 
> Jinan's claim about the link between printing and modes of thinking  can perhaps be teased out in a different way. I've been working on something similar  exploring the neuro-physiology and psychology of the issues described in Patanjali's writings. Some of it also relates to Klaus' and others work on language and design.
> 
> An interesting  focus is on the issues around being able to stop the conscious thinking process and the role of words in the conscious and unconscious thinking processes (the classic meditation problem)
> 

[etc.]


-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list  <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------