Some recent links relevant to the materiality of cognition, books and communication.
VLOG: Seven Videos On the Art of Making Books By Hand http://bitly.com/2coRxDD
The Gutenberg Press; Making Washi Paper; Overview of Pre-Industrial Book-Making; Restoring an Old Book; Carving a Woodcut; Modern Fine Press Books; Marbling Paper.
Book Review: Imagined Futures: Fictional Expectations & Capitalist Dynamics by Jens Beckert http://bitly.com/2crKYRF And from The Atlantic: Applying Literary Theory to Capitalism http://theatln.tc/2cb5dCE
Evidence from an unexpected source on the interpenetration of material and imagined worlds. “The German sociologist Jens Beckert argues that literary theory can help explain what economics fails to… a thorough, exhaustively documented argument in support of what many have suspected about capitalism: It’s a castle in the air, built on fantasy shading into fraud. He makes a compelling case that no corner of the market is untouched by the process of generating imagined futures. The novelty of his work lies in offering a way to understand that process as a social system in which everyone, from individuals to institutions, is implicated.”
A nose by any other name would sound the same, study finds | Cornell Chronicle http://bitly.com/2cUKl19 [Link to study: http://bitly.com/2cp0iwy]
Contra Chomsky, evidence that the underlying core of language is the manipulation of physical regularities, not abstract symbols.
The 17th century book trade http://bitly.com/2cVCS5U [From a new “unconventional” bio of John Aubrey] http://bitly.com/2cn9q96
I’m hoping this book, besides reviving interest in Aubrey, will bring apt detail and perspective to a crucial era in the history of reading: “The coffee shops,” Scurr said, “helped people exchange information, either verbally and in person, or through reading the news-sheets and early newspapers. Aubrey, who was a great chaser of information, loved them. For similar reasons he loved the Royal Society, which was founded after the civil war to promote scientific inquiry. But to be a member of the Royal Society you had to pay a fee, whereas anyone could drop into a coffee shop and talk or read about the news.”
New research project: The Visibility of Knowledge | Andrew Piper via @jafurtado http://bitly.com/2d3Lsyl
“Our aim is to study how scientific knowledge became visible to readers over the course of the nineteenth century using new computational techniques in image detection… How ideas were visualized in print through different kinds of techniques gives us an important sense of context for our present moment of thinking about the visual nature of intellectual production and its accessibility to a wider audience. It can help us see the long history of how text and image have intersected within the practices of knowledge diffusion.”
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