I am moving on in the World!!

I started my own blog! And I am super excited.  Granted it only has the first intro post, but I am excited to keep up this cool practice.  I am at  " iamworthfightingfor.blogspot.com "  Check it out!

Wrapping up the semester, removing artificial labels

On Tuesday, we ended our Honors 201 class with a salon-style discussion about the different types of knowledge we’ve examined over the course of the semester: folk, oral, written, and printed knowledge. I left the discussion with one overwhelming impression: you just can’t look at them that way. I understand that while none of these types of knowledge stands alone, they were separated this way by our professors in order to examine them as manageable units—it’s an artificial separation, but we needed to separate them somehow, and this works. However, what really struck me during our class discussions this week was that the artificiality of these separations makes it nearly impossibly to compare the effects or relative power and significance of one type of knowledge over another.

WITH EACH INVENTION OF A NEW KNOWLEDGE MEDIUM...

Technology inherently replaces the obsolete to a varying degree. One should view different knowledge mediums pseudo technology in of themselves. Each medium can be thought of as an invention or revolution in the way humans think. While no knowledge medium is ever completely eradicated, history shows that each newly invented medium replaces the previous medium as the dominate way to communicate knowledge. 

Knowledge Exclusivity: A Swinging Pendulum

According to one of my old professors, diagrams with
triangles and circles are a key part to any presentation.
So here is a triangle diagram that illustrates exclusivity
with respect to knowledge institutions across time. 

As we have studied various types of knowledge institutions during the semester, we have come across various different patterns that transcended each of the different types of knowledge.  In our “salon” activity yesterday and while studying the different blog posts in preparation for the activity, I realized that one of the important trends in the knowledge systems was exclusivity and complexity of knowledge.  From folk knowledge to written knowledge, exclusivity increased, but then it came back full circle and is once again widespread with digital media.  After the move from folk and oral knowledge to written knowledge, the increased exclusivity and problems that accompanied it were the cause for a drive to increasingly widespread forms of knowledge systems.

Final Post: Community and Communication

This morning we gathered in small groups to discuss each unit covered in the course (folk knowledge, oral knowledge, written knowledge, print knowledge). I enjoyed getting some new perspectives on my thoughts on the connection between the mode of communication and the type of community formed. The last rotation, focused on print knowledge with Brianne and Montana, was particularly helpful. In my notes for the final, I mentioned my impression that studying different mechanisms of communicating knowledge affected how our group interacted; discussing with my classmates helped my expand that idea to the cultures that we studied in the course. The broader the reach of the a type of knowledge, the larger but less intimate community it forms. 

Oral Knowledge: Spirituality and Religious Practice

Oral Knowledge: Spirituality and Religious Practice

            Within history, oral knowledge has had a more powerful effect upon spirituality and religious practice than other types of knowledge. Word of mouth has been more influential upon religion, because it is considered a more sacred means of communicating and relaying knowledge, it is personable to religious followers, and it is a means of communication that has paved the way for other areas of knowledge.

Practice makes Perfect

        Ignoring the argument that really only PERFECT practice makes perfect, I would like to apply this title phrase to our civilization class.  While striving to teach a class about four different knowledge institutions, our professors have put into practice these variant types of knowledge and created a perfect class.  But maybe only in the Greek sense of the word, how Christ used it in Matthew, meaning to be complete, finished and fully developed.  We received a complete class, combining all the types of knowledge together to create the ideal environment.  By bringing in guest speakers and lecturers, sending us off on field trips, putting us in familial groups to learn together, and giving atypical assignments we experienced the different types of knowledge, instead of just learning about them.

Notes for Final

Here is the link to a Google Spreadsheet with my notes. (I just can't NOT put it in a spreadsheet. Economist.)

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AlYsfDG-FsYOdFEwN0JsbHJIWVhkVlZPOVlISDRGV2c

Enjoy!

Are You Lost in Learning? I Am.

I know we won't be here much longer, but I would really like to share this with anyone who happens to read these last posts on the blog.  And of course, it has a story with it, though mercifully short.  :-)

When I get bored with homework in the library, especially chemistry, I start exploring the art exhibits throughout the library.  They are always interesting, if not always the most amazing art.  So the awesome exhibit that was in the Library Auditorium Entrance was really cool just a little while ago.  I felt that it also adeptly applied to our class and what we have been learning, which is why I am sharing it with you all.  It is titled "Lost in Learning" and is about the amazing men and women of the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution (Leonardo DaVinci, Columbus, Newton, etc.).  It is a photographic exhibit and they are just really inspiring to me.

Just a taste, and not her best in my opinion.  Titled "Journal".  

The coolest thing is that her website about the exhibit is just as masterfully done.  And she has a blog!! So here are the links to these great pictures and the blog, and I hope you enjoy this artistic inspiration and want to keep that great curiosity that inspired these people alive in yourself.  Keep reinventing knowledge, and expressing yourself with our limited institutionalized freedom.  It is part of our heritage as humanity and divinity to create and discover.  Enjoy!!

Wrap It Up, or Maybe Just Leave it Open- Ended?

According to Webster, the first known usage of "wrap up" to refer to summarizing or completing something was in 1568.  But I couldn't find much more why about that phrase became synonymous to finishing and summarizing something.  I know why with a film reel, but that early....  Just thought I would end on a self-directed-learning note.  :-)  

I am going to organize my notes based on the unit, a paragraph for each one.  And Alicia and Mike, I love your posts.  If you don't mind I would love to use them tomorrow in addition to my own reflections.  

See my other post for credit of this amazing picture - Eva Timothy

Honors Civilization Salon Notes.

Here are my salon notes in a google document for the assessment tomorrow. I used the blogging topics from Alicia's post in the chart just so you guys could get an idea of how we came to the learning outcomes of each unit. Feel free to change or add on to it. Good luck everyone!

Salon Notes

Here is a link to the GoogleDoc of my salon notes! Nothing special...
Salon Notes Google Doc

thought this sums up the semester rather nicely

Salon Notes

Ok so here they are.  My word vomit of notes for the salon tomorrow.  Feel free to take ideas or add to it if ya'll want.  I'm not going to repeat anything from Alicia's post since it's already written down, I'll just add my own personal thoughts on each of these categories.  HERE is the spreadsheet, just because it's fun to make, and

HERE --------------------------------------->

is a picture because posts are boring without them.

PS Just double click each box on the spreadsheet to read the whole text.

Thoughts on my Library Exhibit Exploration

It might be too late to get credit for my visit to the Bible exhibit, but I did go earlier, I just forgot to post on it, until I reviewed the posts I have made and it wasn't in there.  I even tried to go to the print museum, but that failed when I arrived 1 hour after it closed.  Who closes at 2 p.m.? So then I visited the HBLL exhibit instead. 

Anyway....

Notes on the semester

Ok So I thought I would get this going so we can have some ideas start flowing. I have this same table as  a google doc so you can add or subtract from it.

Retrospective on Spelling Paper

Having completed my final paper on spelling, I wanted to reflect a bit on my experience writing and polishing it.

Learning is the Purpose... Or is it to Produce a Paper?

A master of comic rhyme in our time, I had to add him in. :-)

I have had a marvelous time learning all about Rhyming and its origins and development in the English language, but no matter how much I research, I can't seem to find the information I am looking for.  I can't find evidence to support the connections that I have hunches for, but I have found a lot of great information on the device of rhyme and its history throughout our society.  So I am afraid that I am going to write a thesis paper on what I have been learning about even though it doesn't necessarily correlate with the topic assigned to me. 

(I am building my argument... please keep reading...)

Draft of "Vesalius and the Press"

Hey guys.  I am posting this draft as a google doc.  Anyone can edit the document but please don't just delete things or I won't notice you did that, also make all comments with a different color of text please so they are easy to find.  Some questions I have are: does the intro sound too cheesy? Does my argument make sense and is it cohesive or does it sound too superficial?  I am still planning on putting a opposing viewpoint part in the conclusion paragraph or its own paragraph before it.  Any comments would be GREATLY appreciated.  (I realize that I did not put the citations at the bottom but I am going to work out the citations and formatting tomorrow)

Here's the LINK

Thanks

Draft. Spelling and Renaissance

So I made some changes after today. Thanks for your help, especially Morgan.
I got some mixed feed back on how well I support my thesis. Your feedback on that and the flow would be appreciated

Print Essay Draft

Misa Morreall

Professors Burton and Petersen

Honors Civilization 201

6 December 2011

Print Distribution: Religious and Scientific Texts during the Renaissance Era

            Although the printing press was most notably used to distribute the King James Bible which influenced various religious sects during the Renaissance era, the scientific works and discoveries which were brought about through religious efforts were more effective at stimulating and accelerating European unification than the actual Bible itself because these scientific texts allowed scholars and scientists to establish scientific standards and communicate knowledge throughout various European nations, regardless of their religious beliefs.

Patronage as Censorship, draft 1

I don't think it's possible to upload a document as such directly to this blog, and I didn't really want to have to reformat my paper so that it would work here, so here is a link to my first draft, in Google Doc form.

See it here. 

If you have a chance, look over it. Let me know what you think.

Keeping it Short

I'm about done with the first draft of my paper, which I'm writing about Elizabethan patronage of Shakespeare's plays as an indirect vehicle for censorship, and I've been a little bit surprised by the hardest aspect of this paper for me: keeping it short.

Papers that are 15-20 pages in length are pretty standard for my majors and my place in them. Final papers are often a bit longer, and econometric analyses or behavioral experiments can have lots of appendices that really add to the stack. Last week, I turned in an econometrics paper that was a new record for me: 76 pages. (That's a lot of money for printing.) So keeping this paper to a measly three or four pages has been a bit different.

I've noticed that I have needed to scale back my writing style and leave out some pieces of the logical progression between thoughts, or at least to simplify the overall argument. I've also found myself citing fewer sources and providing less evidence for my argument. It's a weird feeling.

Not that I'm complaining.

Frustration

So I have been in the library for a few hours and realized why I am not a history major.  History essays are really hard for me to write.  I feel like in other subjects you have to understand a concept pretty well to write an essay but for history you have to do 3 times as much research.  I am still trying to formulate my thesis statement.  I am thinking of doing something about either Vesalius that I referenced in my last blog post or maybe I will talk about the resurgence of popularity of the texts of the ancient Greek philosopher and physician Galen.  Or maybe both of them.  I am still figuring everything out.  Hopefully I will get it all figured out soon to post a thesis statement up here and get my draft done for tomorrow.  Otherwise it will be a late night.  Any insight would be much appreciated.

tech issues

Hey all,
So in my ongoing battle with the blogging program I have encountered another glitch. I had written up my visit to the King James Bible exhibit and scheduled it to appear today because I knew that my other blogging days were full of different posts. I got on to check that it had come up, and come up it did, but retroactively on the day that I originally wrote it, 11-17.
I have surrendered to the fact that Internet is smarter than me therefore I cede the victory to Internet and include here only a link to my post that hopefully you will enjoy especially since it has mastered the art of time travel.

Standardization of Spelling correlated with increased literacy

Ok so here is the topic I am interested in but I need you guys' help with a compelling thesis. I'm having trouble because the two events do seem to be correlated and I want to argue for causation but at best any evidence is circumstantial and the arguments rather circular.
How can I improve this statement?
The increase of literacy during the Renaissance made greater standardization of written language necessary to preserve meaning and understanding.

Print Distribution and Dissemination Thesis Idea

The idea I had for my thesis (and my entire paper) is about how the distribution of books in Europe during the Renaissance Era positively influenced humanity in regards to communicating knowledge, particularly in the scientific field of study.

I will most likely be using these sources:

Cheselden, William. The Anatomy of the Human Body. Printed for H. Woodfall, R, 1763.

Eisenstein, Elizabeth. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (2E).  Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Huff, Toby E.  The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West (2E).  Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Natural Library of Medicine. A Catalogue of Seventeenth Century Printed Books in the National Library of Medicine. Bethesda, Md, 198.

Porter Roy. The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998.

Rhodes, Dennis E. Studies in Early European Printing and Book Collecting. The Pindar Press, 1983.

Sarton, George. Appreciation of Ancient and Medieval Science During the Renaissance. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1955.

Webster, Charles.  The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform.  Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd. 1975.

typography thesis draft 1: Comparing the two Renaissances of Typography

I just wanted to "claim" my idea for a thesis. This immediately came to my mind during class:

Reminiscent of the transition from handwritten to print, eReading has its advantages but these should not come at the sacrifice of the beautiful and purposeful typographical design of the original print medium.

I'm concerned that the focus is too modern, but I really want to compare and contrast these two transitions.

On the Fabric of the Human Body

Who has ever heard of Andreas Vesalius?  Most of you probably haven't.  But I am sure that every one of you has benefited from his work.  While I was doing research last week for my annotated bibliography on print and medical knowledge, I ran across a lot of information on this guy, Andreas Vesalius.  Vesalius is known as the father of modern anatomy and was able to make such a huge impact on our modern knowledge of the human body specifically because of the printing press.  Vesalius published his great work De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the fabric of the human body) almost a hundred years after the Gutenberg's invention of the printing press but it still was a huge step forward for the medical revolution.  I was pretty impressed by all of the pictures that were printed in his book, so I wanted to post a number of them here to show the great detail and complexity of the body that the printing press allowed Vesalius to show the world.

Some interesting additions from Thanksgiving

So, for thanksgiving I got to go to my sister's wedding in Hong Kong. I notices several things that we had mentioned in previous blog posts or comments that I took pictures of and thought would be good to pass on to you all.

The Renaissance of font design

Shockingly, I decided to blog about fonts again. Fonts are so simple, we interact with them on a daily basis and yet they are also intricate pieces of art and vitally important in the clear presentation and dissemination of knowledge. I really have become obsessed with fonts as of late. This can probably be attributed to the fact that I am working at a graphic design firm and am surrounded by people who appreciate the subtle art of font design. 

The Renaissance marked an influx of secular knowledge with the movement known as humanism. Scholars in during this period of time turned to the ancient wells of knowledge from the Greeks and Romans. With this new wave of secular information new more legible, clear, simple and secular fonts were required. It was the first time in the history of typography where artisans looked to the past to influence their font designs. Latin and Greek culture and art heavily influenced the type design masters of this era. Improvements in the actual printing methods and machines brought new inventions within the typography realm. Designers were starting to introduce ideas of wider margins and clean typesetting. The Renaissance truly influenced all areas and aspects of life and learning; font design not excluded. 

page from Aldus Manutius' book on Aristotle

all Aldine books bear his logo

The first person I would like to highlight in my exploration of Renaissance font design is Aldus Manutius  (1450–1515). Aldus was a humanistic scholar that through his tutoring of the wealthy Pio family acquired his own printery in Venice. From this printery he published Greek and Roman classics, including a five-volume set on the works of Aristotle. One of his main focuses was to print small format books at low cost to scholars. His biggest contribution to the world of type was that he designed the first Greek alphabet typesetting. He also invented a space saving Latin font based off Italian cursive fonts. All his books (called Aldine books) bear his logo of a dolphin and an anchor and a dolphin.

Granjon, designed by Robert Granjon is considered
to be the closest typeface to the original Garamond

Adobe Garamond font
 The differences in the two fonts above are very subtle.
Can you find them?

Claude Garamond (1480–1561) was a Parisian publisher and font designers. He was one of the most famous type designers of his time. I mentioned this in my bibliography post. I mentioned in my post that his work is so famous that it is still in use today and that Harry Potter was printed using Adobe Garamond. He first gained popularity in 1541 when three of his Greek typefaces were used in a royal book by Robert Estienne. His inspiration for these three fonts came from the handwriting of Angelo Vergecio, the King's librarian at Fontainebleau, and his ten-year-old pupil, Henri Estienne. His influence spread beyond France with his Roman typesettings that followed in the 1540s. His work is still considered to be among the finest within the realm of typography. 

from Troy's famous work Champ Fluery

The last person that deserves attention is Geoffroy Tory (1480-1533). He was one of the prominant  printers of Paris during the beginning of the sixteenth century. His most famous work is the the theoretical treatise on the design of Roman capital letters in 1529. Tory followed the common practice of the day of finding relationships between the proportions of type and the shape of the human body. Thus Tory was known for drafting letters with geometrical aids to better analyze their resemblance to the human body.

Thus concludes my brief examination of the Renaissance of font design with a look at three prominent designers and their individual influence on typography. Thank you for everyone bearing with me as I explore a particular branch of knowledge that frankly I love. I think it is so interesting how we often disregard the subtle beauty and pure art involved with typography. We are surrounded by type everyday and yet we don't actually pay attention to it. How can something be in our face but we don't truly see it?

The Story of the Dictionary (and my discovery of it)

The English Dictionary is the second most purchased and most used book behind the Bible only.  Of course, there isn't just one dictionary or version of it, just like there are multiple versions of the Bible.  Nevertheless, it is a popular book.  But as one renown dictionary maker (also known as a lexicographer) said, it is meant to be browsed in, not read cover to cover. 

There are several parts of language, and one of them is the actual words that are used, the vocabulary or the lexicon of a language.  This is what a dictionary is meant to help with at its fundamental level: allow people to understand the lexicon of the language.  That is why the first dictionaries were what we would call translation dictionaries and have two different languages in them, usually comparing Latin to some other language.  Later the idea developed to define the vocabulary of one language, creating monolingual dictionaries.  Then the development of ordering a dictionary in alphabetical order was introduced by Englishman Robert Cawdery, which became such an intrinsic part of dictionaries that books that don't do anything similar to a dictionary (define the lexicon) have acquired the title because of the alphabetical listing of their entries.  Then, finally there was the idea of an American dictionary, because our version of English was different from the British, and that's how Merriam-Webster became a household name. 

But really, you don't want to hear the story of the dictionary.  You would much rather hear about my story in the library finding out about dictionaries.  I dislike the fact that we have to put our annotated bibliography in alphabetical order, because that doesn't fit the order of the story, so I have numbered them in chronological order if you want a continuous story of discovery. 

Annotated Bibliography: Censorship in Elizabethan England

            For my annotated bibliography assignment, I decided to learn a little bit about censorship in Elizabethan England. Censorship is a topic that I’m very interested in, but it’s such a huge topic that I wouldn’t have known where to start if I was just researching anything to do with it, so I wanted to narrow it down somehow. The Tudors made for some of my favorite English royal drama, Elizabeth I is one of my favorite people, and Shakespeare was producing his work during the Elizabethan and Jacobean (Stuart) Eras, so I decided to learn everything I could about censorship in the Elizabethan Era. There weren’t very many books on that specific topic, but I was able to find several books in the library in which the issue was at least addressed on some level, and I used interlibrary loan to have a few other books sent over.

Print Distribution and Dissemination.

As you can tell from my previous blog posts, I am intrigued by the idea of printing and how it affected society today. I'm grateful that Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press during the Renaissance Era, because it changed how people back then and even still today receive and distribute knowledge. Without it, the education system, the legal system and many other aspects of society today would be completely different and would most likely be more oral based and involve a great deal of memorization.

To show my appreciation for print, distribution and dissemination during the Reniassance Era, I decided to do some investigating on this subject. I searched the Harold B. Lee Library and made my way to the fifth floor to scope out some books on the topic.

Visiting the Crandall Historical Printing Museum

A few weeks ago, I rode my bike down to the Crandall Historical Printing Museum. It wasn’t my first visit to the museum, but in fulfilling the “field trip” requirement for our class unit on printing, I decided to go back. I thought it would be interesting to see what my impressions of the museum were this time around. Here are a few of the thoughts I left with:

Print and its Effects on Medical Advances

(So according to some suggestions by our professor I'm adding this note.  This post is part of my ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY assignment.  The bibliography is below the page break and is about THE EFFECTS OF PRINT ON MEDICAL KNOWLEDGE.)

*     *     *

Venturing into the strange world physical research in a library with actual books, moving bookshelves, and code-like numbers on the sides of these books can be a pretty scary task for today's college student.  I probably do about one or two research assignments in the library each semester, but I swear that each time a have I have to again overcome my fear of doing research and actual physical movement at once.  I also have to relearn how to look stuff up there every time I try to use the numbering system, which reminds me of the library card song from Arthur - An integral part of my childhood.  Please enjoy:

"Who's Dewey?": one of those questions we will never know the answer to. . . or maybe we could look him up on wikipedia.  Anyway, after getting reacquainted with the cataloguing system again, (which is actually not the Dewey Decimal System in the HBLL) I started to search for books that teach about how the printing press affected medicine.  So here it is:

Typography

So first of all I would like to apologize for not getting this post up yesterday. I can of had an emergency yesterday in which I got stuck on a cliff/mountain up Rock Canyon with my roommate and my cousin for the better portion of the day. Needless to say I forgot to bring my computer and the HBLL with me so I didn't get this post up yesterday.

It probably came to no ones surprise that I chose to do my bibliographical post on exploring the different typefaces and fonts that were popular between the years 1450-1700. I love everything design oriented and since interning at Vada Creative Studio I have come to really appreciate the beauty and intricacies of typography. Wikipedia defines typography as: [coming] (from the Greek words τύπος(typos) = form and γραφή(graphy) = writing) is the art and technique of arranging type in order to make language visible. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading (line spacing), adjusting the spaces between groups of letters (tracking) and adjusting the space between pairs of letters (kerning). Additionally, I must admit that this post really stretched me, I am much more comfortable to researching online. I read physical books, but mostly for pleasure. So, it was quite an experience to actually dust off the pages of some good ol regular books. It was also pretty distracting I found myself browsing through many books on typography even though I knew I wouldn't be able to use them in my post because they were too modern. I guess that is the beauty of self directed learning- getting lost in the knowledge of what you love...

Ah my old nemesis...Spelling

All my life I have been a horrible speller. Going to bed early on Christmas eve was never a problem because my family would always have a giant family Scrabble competition into the wee hours of the morning (thought still retiring before St Nick made an appearance). Who wants to be awake for that? When I learned that spelling and punctuation were not standardized in the distant past, I thought it was the most brilliant idea ever. But, like many of you, when I try to read old documents I shake my fists and shout to the heavens "had these people no sense of language?" Standardization is important for more universal understanding and this standardization has been facilitated and fostered by print and publishing.

I have compiled an annotated bibliography of useful sources on the standardization of spelling. I hope you find it informative.

King James Bible Exhibit.

This past week I visited the Life and Legacy of the King James Bible exhibit in the Harold B. Lee Library. In his most recent blog post, Will analyzed the whole exhibit and explained the pros and cons of translating the Bible. (I encourage everyone to read his post). However, I personally found it interesting how the translated King James Bible has affected society, especially American society from the 1800s to date.

King James I of England ordered that a uniform translation of the Bible would begin in 1604. The translation was complete in 1611. "Cultural, religious, and political forces over the next half century of this version's existence finally contrived to make the King James Bible the only used in England. The King James Bible traveled with the British as they colonized the world" (King James Bible exhibit pamphlet). This means that as people began to come to America for political and religious freedom, they brought the King James Bible with them.

"Publicly and privately, the King James Bible was read, heard, and studied by countless individuals in English-speaking countries and territories, and its language and style shaped their own thoughts and writings. Critics note the influence of the King James Bible—not just the stories, but the syntax and style—in works by many great orators and authors of the 18^th, 19^th and early 20^th centuries, especially in the United States" (Transforming the Word).

Famous Americans throughout history such as Abraham Lincoln, Herman Melville and John Steinbeck were influenced greatly by the Bible. All used imagery, repetition or allusions to the King James version of the Bible (Transforming the Word). This, in turn, influenced the political and social aspects of American society as people read their novels and followed politics closely.

Religiously, the King James Bible was, and still is, used by many of the Protestant churches that flourished in America. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is not considered a branch of Protestantism, uses the King James Bible as well. In fact, Joseph Smith translated portions of the King James Bible in the 1800s to help clarify the meanings of some passages. In addition, there are cross references in the Book of Mormon to the King James Bible in order to make studying and feasting upon the scriptures much easier for Latter-day Saints. Today, the King James Bible is the most popular Bible used in America by multiple religions. This is significant in that America was founded on the belief of religious freedom. With most religions using and basing their faith off of the King James Bible, it seems that even today is one of the most influential works printed and read.

Corrected and Improved by the Author

 Today I took a visit to the Crandall Historical Printing Museum.  I wasn't really sure what I would find there so I just drove over and walked inside.  No one was at the desk so I wandered inside and I found a group of elementary school or middle school students inside on a field trip.  They must have been an LDS charter school or something and were listening to a presentation of how the first copies of the Book of Mormon were printed using the old printing presses and process.  I slipped into the back of the group and listened a bit.  The presentation was obviously more of an overview than technically historical so I wandered around a bit as I listened, examining the old presses and prints that the museum workers have made on them.  The tour guide said something that really caught my attention though.  He said that With the 37 signatures and setting the type and hand sewing the books together, the 5000 original copies of the Book of Mormon should have taken 2 years to produce working at full speed full time.  A miracle occurred and the books were printed in only 7 months by (if I heard him correctly) fairly inexperienced printers.

A Museum

Hey guys.  I'm at the museum right now.  The post will be up this afternoon.  Sorry about any inconveniences.  :) - That's a smiley so that if you were annoyed by this you will look at it and be placated.

Influence of King James

I went to see the exhibit in the library about the King James Bible several weeks ago. While I enjoyed seeing the old Bibles, I, like Will, found the display about the impact of the King James Bible on the English language and modern culture most interesting. I was reminded of the university forum presented by Dr. Norton on the King James Bible. If you didn't get a chance to watch it, I would highly recommend it. In essence he talks about the impact of having a standardized Bible. Suddenly, people expected a particular tone for scripture and, to some extent, if it didn't match that, it wasn't just different, it was wrong.

Rosetta Stone part II

After creating our original artifact, as described in a previous post, we passed it on to another group and received a new one of our own.

We were fortunate enough to get the Latin group's artifact. I had the assignment translating their Latin inscription into English and then into Chinese. Fortunately for me, English has adopted many words from Romance Languages, so I was familiar with Latin word roots. Using my deductive skills I came up with a rough approximation of the text. I then took my approximation "Horse no trust. ... it is...party" to the great internet. It turns out that this is a famous line from the Iliad "Do not trust the horse Trojans! whatever it is, I fear the Danaans even when bearing gifts." A tricky element in finding this translation was that the letters are inconsistently formed. Some of the O s look like D s or rectangles rather than O s.
Translating our passage into Chinese was harder than translating it from Latin. Again I consulted the internet and discovered that ancient Chinese has no word for Trojan or Greek and even modern Chinese does not have a term for Danaans. Also tenses are very different in Chinese, this made it difficult to translate the progressive phrase "bringing gifts." After I thought I had an acceptable version,  I presented it to a friend from China, made a few corrections, and passed on my translation to Montana. He then took care of transferring it onto our cool bamboo scroll. See his blog for a summary of the process and a picture of our final product.
Shuan has a good post about making our original artifact.

Akkadian Cuneiform - the Hardest Language I Have Ever Tried to Learn!

For my Rosetta Stone project, I was in the Mesopotamian group (Phoenicia is in that area) and we had some difficulties with our language and writing form.  I mostly worked with Catherine to create the first artifact, and so during the second part I took a back seat, and mostly worked as the liaison to the group that received our artifact.  But the first artifact itself was hard enough.

To start with, one of our other group members had talked to  a professor on campus that was fluent in Akkadian cuneiform, so he went and talked to him, and gave us a sheet of paper with the English phonetic syllables and the English translation of the Akkadian, but not the cuneiform.  For that, he told us to go down to the Museum of Peoples and Cultures and look at the actual clay nail that it was written on.  (Note: Akkadian is the language of the Babylonians around 2500 B.C., cuneiform is the script they used to write it down, and Babylonia was the civilization that Catherine studied.)

To Fold or Not to Fold? That is the Publisher's Question

If you have studied Shakespeare even a little bit, you should have been exposed to the idea of folios and quartos, not to mention octavos or thirty-twomo's.  If not you are about to be educated.

A thirty-twomo (its a book size :-)

The Rosetta Balsa Wood

So here is the picture of our final product for the Rosetta Stone Project.  Yes that's right - you have here a sampling of modern English, Akkadian written in cuneiform, and some Mayan glyphs (you have to turn your head to read them by the way).

So the process after receiving our Akkadian clay tablet was a lot harder than anyone expected.  A number of us started to try to find the characters and look up which syllables they represented independently.  Luckily Erin was able to visit with a professor who gave her some more direction.  It turns out that not all the characters were actually correct - revealing to us why it was no one could find a few of them.  After translating all we could, we had to find the original document that the other group used in order fill in the gaps and get it translated to English ---------->
 

 With that done, Holland and Brianne headed up the artistic process (with Will's help and materials of course) of getting the cuneiform written on our "wood paper." This also proved to be very difficult because the ink bleeds easily in the porous wood.  They ended up having to use a SUPER fine pen to get everything to fit as small as possible.

I again was in charge of the Mayan translation which was difficult of course, because 1-Mayan is not completely deciphered yet 2: I am still shady on Mayan syntax and grammar 3: There are not equivalent words in Mayan, English, and Akkadian.   This is something that I have realized as I have volunteered as a Spanish medical translator too.  Sometimes things really are just "lost in translation," whether it is because of translator error, or meanings difficult to express in another language, copy errors, bias of a translator, or just plain laziness in translation.  It is not an easy task.

This was a difficult assignment for MANY reasons but I really liked the idea of it and had fun learning about these mayan glyphs.  I think that it really helped me understand how knowledge is passed on and how that really has changed from the age of writing to typing to the pixel.  I also think this project helped us think creatively in order to solve problems that were completely unfamiliar to us.

"A Bible! A Bible! We have got a Bible, and there cannot be any more Bible"

bible: (lowercase) any book, reference work, periodical, etc.,accepted as authoritative, informative, or reliable: Heregarded that particular bird book as the birdwatchers' bible. (from dictionary.com)


note: in this post I do not intend to summarize the exhibit because we are all going to go there but rather analyze my thoughts on the exhibit. This seems kind of obvious but I thought I should add that...

Bring out the Money

Cabbage, dough, mulla, green, buck. The number of terms of endearment for currency is staggering. I can recognize money immediately, as can most of you.  In currency there needs to be extreme consistency, inconsistencies are what allow us to identify forgeries. The first money was coinage. It could be cast or imprinted with exactness. The level of consistency needed for paper money to function was made possible by the advent of printing. And for that we can thank the Chinese.

The Chinese gift

Qufu

For the Rosetta stone project  I had the opportunity to work with the group representing Asia. Two of us represented China, one Japan, and one Cambodia. Because the majority of our group represented China, and China represents the majority of the world, we thought it best to portray China in our project.
Our first thought was to have a quote from Confucius on rice paper. This would have been culturally significant because paper was invented in China (see Shuan's post on this). However, attempts at making rice paper were disastrous. Contrary to popular belief, at least my own and that of my group members, rice paper is not actually made out of rice. It is made out of rice straw or more modernly wood fiber,, mulberry, or bamboo. Also the arguably most famous Confucius artifact is actually the Confucius temple of Qufu. Confucius sayings are inscribed in stone.

Going Mayan

Me trying out different inks with the sketches.

Will and I are in the same group for the Rosetta Project so he made a wonderful post about the process of creating our rosetta thing.  He pretty much summed up that whole process so I won't add much to what he said.  I instead wanted to blog a little about the process of coming up with the writing that we were going to use.

Because this project is pretty time consuming, our group mostly split up into smaller specialty groups to get it done and so that we wouldn't be spending way too much time to finish the project.  So I pretty much ended up as the Mayan language expert.  The mayan language can be pretty daunting.  Various dialects of Mayan are spoken today, but none quite like the ancient language.  Modern Mayan is also written in regular Roman lettering like English, so trying to crack the code of Mayan glyphs was a pretty daunting task.

Printing and Digital Media.

The printing press, which I talked about in a previous blog post, made it possible for literature to be mass produced at a quicker rate that was less expensive. It provided the common people of the Renaissance Era the opportunity to own books and read what great scholars where discovering and learning all over the world. But that's just it...printing allowed GREAT SCHOLARS and WELL KNOWN FIGURES to promote their ideas.

Gutenberg Press

People like John Locke, Martin Luther and Voltaire were able to express their revolutionary ideas. John Locke, for example, promoted a more liberal philosophy which is considered a "keystone" to American government and other Western countries' governments. Martin Luther was considered the father of the Protestant Reformation, which taught people to break away from the traditional teachings of the Roman Catholic Church and taught that it was through the grace of God and one's own faith that one could be saved. Voltaire, another prominent figure (writer) of the Renaissance Era who advocated freedom of religion, free trade, and separation of church and state. 

Rosetta Stone Project: Greece

This past week I had the opportunity to meet with members of the class who, like me, have been researching the role that oral and written traditions have in Greek culture. We discussed the various methods and materials that the Ancient Greeks used in order to record and write down their knowledge in order to help us come up with ways that we could create our own Greek "artifact." 

Papyrus (a form of our modern day paper) was used in Ancient Greece, but the process of letting the product ferment takes weeks and we had limited time. (The fact that the bookstore does not sell papyrus may have played a role in our decision not to use it as well.)

Mayan Glyphing Party

This past Wednesday I had the opportunity with Mike and others not from our group to travel back in time and get our hands dirty with the beautiful Mayan glyph writing system. 

Scripts and Fonts

I think that this week for everyone is a pretty crazy one.  I am going to do you all a favor by trying to keep this short (and to do myself a favor too).  Since we just barely switched over from written knowledge to print, I thought I'd make sort of a bridge post about the transition and its effects on the way we write.

Compare these two writing samples.

A sample written script.

Sample font from Gutenberg's Bible

Obviously not all written things are that hard to read and not all print was that detailed and beautiful, but that is just an example.

A few weeks ago I got a random email from FamilySearch about indexing.  (Family Search indexing is a way that anyone can give service by transcribing old written documents into electronic type so that they are readily searchable for people studying their genealogy.)  The email linked me to a few sites about paleography which got me thinking about the differences between our letters today and the letters of 'back then' and the way that print changed that.

Marginalia: Facinating or Defacing?

Marginalia: marginal notes or embellishments (as in a book).  Latin.            
Love,
Webster

Marginalia of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe

Behind the Mystery of Facsimile 2

Last week I posted about Facsimile 2 and said that I would follow up with this topic of the occult with a more in depth look at two very important factors of Facsimile 2. These factors are the centrality of God and His divine purposes. In my more comprehensive study I found that I had to sift through the not so in depth LDS.org library on this topic and the mountain of anti-Mormon material there is out there. After carefully avoiding all the anti-Mormon pollution, I found this interesting book called A Study Guide to the Facsimiles of the Book of Abraham written by Church scholar  Allen J. Fletcher.  I also found a link to the LDS Pearl of Great Price Study Manual. (Due to the lack of information and excess of anti-Mormon material, all of my information will come from those two sites unless otherwise noted...) Without any further ado: here are some key points and notes behind the mystery that is Facsimile 2 from the Book of Abraham from the Pearl of Great Price. 

An update on me (I know, SO interesting ;-)

Hey guys!! I have been sick this past week, which is why I missed class on Thursday and have not been commenting.  But I hope to catch up today and tomorrow on comments, because I am interested in what you have learned about and shared.
I have read our instructors' blog post about the Rosetta Project, but I was wondering if there was anything else I should know about class.  What we learned about that was your favorite part or something.  I would appreciate anything you would like to tell me about.  Thanks, and I can't wait to see you on Tuesday!

Monks, Meditation, and Mummies

In honor of Halloween (which is actually also the anniversary of Martin Luther pounding his 95 theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg in 1517), I have dedicated a post to the mysterious mummified monks of Japan. While we are all familiar with the mummies of Egyptian acclaim, I argue that these mummies of northern Japan are more remarkable. Why? Because they didn't wait to die to be mummified; they did it themselves as the ultimate expression of devotion.

Symbols and Codes.

We discussed in class a little bit yesterday the correlation between a literary system and a numeracy system. As soon as writing developed, written numbers were used to keep track of business transactions and other records. In fact, most artifacts that we have today are records of accounting.

The oldest tablet found in Europe, written in the Mycenaean Linear B System. It records business transactions.

But can letters and numbers have other correlating purposes? Of course, they both can be used to create a code, or a system of secrecy or multiple representation in which certain words, letters, or numbers are assigned different meanings.

The Ancient Greeks, for example, actually used there letters as symbols of numbers. Their alphabet served a dual purpose. It communicated thoughts and ideas, but also stood as representation of a number in many cases. Today, we still use letters of the Greek alphabet to represent numbers which we plug into formulas (or mathematical codes) such as Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Phi and Pi.

Similarly, the Roman alphabet, or the Latin alphabet, which is the most recognized alphabet in the world today, evolved from a Western variety of the Greek alphabet. This alphabet, along with Arabic numerals, is the basis of what is perhaps the most common code today, Morse Code. This code is unique in that it can be used through almost any kind of medium; sound, written, visual.

Just for fun, I created my own code using numbers as letters. See if you can decipher what this says and you'll discover an interesting fact about me!

23...15.1...6.19.26.15.8.19.18...8.3...21.3.6.18.3.2...16...22.23.2.17.25.26.19.13...