Manuscripts, Books, and Maps: The Printing Press and a Changing World

Table of Contents:


About this Document

This hypertext document traces the development of the printed book. It is comprised of several linked documents. At the beginning of many of the paragraphs are small images (called "thumbnails"). Clicking on one of these produces a full-screen view of the image. The text also includes many highlighted words, which, if you click on them, will show you a selection of University of California library holdings (up to date as of the time this was assembled in September of 1994) on the subject that you might use for future reference.

This document was originally prepared as an exploration of how the World Wide Web might be used to build and transmit educational materials outside of traditional classroom contexts. That part of the work was supported by Jill Warn and the UCSD Summer Session Office.

The text and images in this archive originally derive from a lecture written by Chandra Mukerji of the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. That lecture is normally given during the Fall and Spring quarters as part of the department's "Introduction to Communication" (Comm/Gen 20) course.

The text presented here was written from notes taken during several of those lectures and from the text of the same lectures I gave on the subject when I taught Comm 20 during the summers of 1987 to 1991. The original images on the page were scanned from the slides that Professor Mukerji uses. Like all web pages, this one is continually under construction. As time permits and interest strikes, I am working through the books that Prof. Mukerji used in her lecture, adding text to the page, primarily explaining various aspects of the images. As I add information and images to the page, I am also linking up a hypertext bibliography. Footnote numbers will be links to the appropriate bibliographic entry in that document.

NOTE: The full-screen images linked to the thumbnails are of mixed quality. When this document was originated, the only way I had to make large images from the slides where the images resided, was to use NTSC frame-stores. Not a particularly good way to make GIFs. Since then, I have had limited access to a Nikon slide scanner. As I have time to rescan the slides, I am replacing the frame-stores with better quality images.

WARNING: The images behind the thumbnails are large - running from a minimum of about 300k to over 1mb in some cases. This is not a page for the faint at heart or those running at modem speeds unless they have lots of time or are only interested in the thumbnails and text.

Finally, because of the continuous nature of the work on this document, frequently users will come across broken links. When that happens, please send me some mail and let me know so I can fix them.

Thanks and enjoy!

Bruce Jones - bjones@ucsd.edu