• The social meaning of the codex book.
• The page and the book as an information system: 9th century manuscripts to digital media.
• The prehistory of hypertext and recent history of hypermedia as means of transcending the material limits of the book.
• The digital future of the book: possible book futures and scenarios for etext.

• Books have a material history, writing and texts assigned value in the physical form of books. The social significance of the book is under revision in digital environment.
• The material counterpart of textuality is codicity--the significance, value, authority of the codex book from script to print and now digital form.
• The ideology of the book is sustained by a network of social and political institutions--schools, literacy, publishing industry, copyright law, social class expectations.
• The book has always embodied technology and convergence in technology: the old technologies of the book are usually transparent to us as technology (part of the ideology of the book): the printed codex, and print technology in general, seems "natural" to us.
• Beware of technological determinism (McLuhan, Ong, Postman, Birkerts, etc.) 
• Regis Debray and Mediology: materiality, culture, technology, ideology
• Information in the medium: cultural/social information in the material form of the codex book, its use and reception throughout history.

The Text as social node: "codicity" and "textuality" 

• Book as material form or instantiation of a text vs. text as weave of language separable.
• Book as nodal point, node in a network of texts and other material books. Any book is always already a node, not simply a delimited object.
• The abstract and material texts: 
• The abstract text of editors and the abstract text of literary theory. 
• Text has been dematerialized, abstracted from a necessary material bookness, since modern printing.
• Renaissance printing still linked to "codicity" (the material union of text, type, page, and book). 
• On one level, the text has always been a node in a network, a momentary configuration of language, genres, styles. 
• The digital abstraction of the text for multiple material channels of representation, display, and design is only a step in the cultural logic of "mechanical reproduction" as described by Walter Benjamin.
• Modern notions of the pure, authentic text without embedding in accrued commentary or anything that is not the "authors": why do these ideas seem transparent or natural? 
• Modern notions of the text and the book are embedded in notions of authorship, ownership, property, and book as commodity. 
• The "book" is always already a social, political, and economic entity before its material form, but it is the material form of the book that supports, encodes, and reproduces the nexus of forces that define it. 
• The "book" never has, and never will be, a simple or unified self-disclosing material object in and of itself. 

• Modern books and digital media design are still post-medieval, or "post-codical".
• Example: script and type fonts encode value and social meaning; there is a politics of script and type (see Morrison, The Politics of Script).
• For example, consider the semiology of type fonts:
  
  
• There is a larger semiology of the page that was part of the literacy of the manuscript book.
• The Page as information system: the page contains an abundance of cultural information beyond the text content.
• Format and layout of the page as information system.

Hypertext before hypertext:
cultural attempts to transcend the physical limits of the book from manuscripts to digital media

[Click on images for larger size]
 

10th c., Donatus, Ars grammatica	14th c., scribe laying out page	10th c., Vergil plus Servius as gloss

• Attempts to reveal the network of the node, the text in its library, the archive in the text.
• Medieval "text and gloss" format, institutionalized in scriptoria and libraries from c.800-1500.
• Institutionalization of late classical page design for wider reproduction
• Institutionalization of teaching, reading, and library practices in the design of the page.
• Reading and teaching experience embedded in received interpretations of the text that point to a cultural library.
• Text insufficient, non-self-disclosing; internal meaning displayed/displaced in margins.
• Space on page attempts to overcome some of the material limits of the represented text.
• Latin as operating system, page design as display device.

12th c. glossed bible	12th c glossed bible	15th c. printed Decretals glossed

Renaissance and Early Modern Books:
Imagining Hypertext, or Beyond the Material Boundaries of Books

• Reading wheel (image right), from Agostino Ramelli, Le diverse et artificiose machine del Capitano Agostino Ramelli [The various and ingenious machines of Captain Agostino Ramelli], Paris, 1588. Wikipedia article.
• Science and the Artists' Book: Smithsonian Online Exhibition
  • See Ramelli's Reading Wheel in Engineering section
• Attempts to move beyond the physical limits of books: reading wheel, text in embedded commentary retained until 18th century.
• Manuscript book properties reappearing in digital form: print only fixed manuscript codicity in a single, standardized form.
• Renaissance imitation of medieval books: the content of a new medium is the immediately prior medium (McLuhan).
• Trithemius and the ambiguity of the printed book as cultural memory system:
  • He undertook to recopy printed books on paper back into parchment manuscripts because manuscripts could be trusted for lasting over time.
  • One of the earliest cryptographers, obsessed with writing and permanence.
• See John Tolva, "The Heresy of Hypertext: Fear and Anxiety in the Late Age of Print."

• The book is of course now subsumed in digital media forms, but digital text now transcends the material limits of the codex.
• The Web and Internet are still full of "book metaphor" that are irrelevant to the digital medium: Web "pages", "files", etc.
• E-Text and web hypermedia now the current format for many genres: digital encyclopedias have now replaced books, many texts easier to use in digital form.
• The digital book: new memory and display devices for portability and storage.
• The E-Book: preserving codicity and copyrightable object in the digital age: ebooks.com.
• What about "digital paper" and the multiple media formats for delivering and displaying "books"?
• Amazon.com, Google, and the book: what is a book for Amazon and Google?

Bibliography on the Semiotics of the Early Book

• Martin Irvine, The Making of Textual Culture. Cambridge University Press, 1994. Amazon.com info.