Newspapers

When I was 8 years old, my mom took my siblings and I on a trip around the border of the united states.  We stopped in a lot of states and saw a lot of interesting things.  I remember visiting a print shop that produced newspapers and being in awe of the huge machinery.  Later, when I was in fourth grade, I had the opportunity to stay the night at Sutter's Mill for a field trip.  One of the activities we were able to participate in while we were there was assembling our own newspaper.  Well, only partially.  I was able to assemble the type for my own name for trip, "Clara Greenly" and pick one out of a list of predetermined headlines to have my name inserted into.  Probably the most informative part of the experience was watching how the machinery was operated and the ink applied.  I still have that newspaper in a drawer somewhere back home.

Adventures in the Life of Catherine Hawkley

Over the past two days I've kinda felt like a drug dealer.  I arranged drop off meetings, one of which occurred in a deserted lobby, and transported goods from one place to another.  These "goods" were actually and a page of translation we needed to create our tablet, so theses meetings were all completely legal, the setup just made me laugh.

She can sing. She can dance. But she can't do calligraphy.

I'm a girl. As a girl I feel like there are a few chief components to life that I should be the master of. Handwriting is one of those things. Calligraphy? Of course I should be able to handle it. WRONG! Such was the discovery I made tonight whilst working on the Rosetta project with my civilization group.

First and foremost, I now have a deep and abiding respect for anyone who can successfully manage a calligraphy pen. Those things are difficult! As such, it was my responsibility to acquire the calligraphy pen with which we were to write our message. Perhaps I didn't buy the highest quality pen (college budget... hehe), but still it was a good pen. Despite my most valiant efforts though, I could not make that pen work for me. On our practice page, I managed to convince the pen to write one word: "Mom." Thanks Mom!

In our group, the process of creating our "artefact" happened like so:

• We met at the library with supplies in hand.
• We journey through the library to find a suitable place to work
• We select parallel verses from the Qur'an and Bible about Joseph in Egypt to compare and contrast the two works.
• We each take turns writing the Hebrew/Arabic calligraphy in pencil on our medium. Hebrew on one side, Arabic on the other.
• We each take turns tracing the pencil with the calligraphy pen (except for me who couldn't get the pen to work).
• We examine our work.
• We celebrate!

I'm amazed at the time it must have taken monks to slowly and meticulously write this calligraphy. Theirs was much more detailed and much higher quality than our artifact, and ours took nearly two hours to complete! I'm definitely grateful I do not have to copy all my books by hand, and especially that I do not have to use a calligraphy pen in doing so. Maybe one day I'll figure out how to use one. Or maybe I'll simply be forever haunted by the memory.

Questions to answer about fonts and typefaces during the print unit

I'd like to use this post (don't forget about my other one!) to jot some ideas down about what I'd like to get out of and questions I'd like to answer during the print unit. Please feel free to bring up any issues I might be missing, suggest subjects to research, and give me your feedback!

Why fonts and typefaces? Design really interests me. I think I have a good eye for design, and I actually enjoy designing things myself. I've learned that well-used fonts and typefaces are an integral part of good design.

I think these are pretty fonts, especially together.

Why were different fonts and typefaces created?

What's the difference between fonts and typefaces?

How were different fonts and typefaces used? (Were they used like we use them today--emphasis, readability, etc.?)

Who designed fonts and typefaces? Were they artists? Printers? Both?

How did various fonts and typefaces get used in religious texts?


Did any scientific research go into fonts and typefaces? Researching readability, perhaps?

I think I'll start my research simply--with Wikipedia. Then onto its references and "external links".

This website also seems to have a pretty good list of published sources.

Illiterate for a day

About a week and a half ago, Group 4 got together to try our hands at calligraphy. Here's how it turned out!

Ancient Illustration

Before movable type, wood cuts were difficult to make, 

but easy to mass produce. See the detail in this carving? 

Unfortunately, there's no way to correct any mistakes!

After seeing the codices held in special collections, and after trying my hand at calligraphy from the perspective of an illiterate, I have a new appreciation for the effort and time it took to create a single book. 

Now that we are moving on to printed knowledge, I want to explore the illustrative printing processes. Before the advent of movable type, printing consisted of wood cuts and engravings. Wood cuts were very difficult to make, but were very cheap to reproduce. Prints made from wood cuts became very widely circulated in Europe during the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries as paper became more common.

Cryptograwhat?

In light of recent news on the BYU Frontpage, there have been many advances, discoveries, and funds put towards hacking, code cracking and holding trade secrets secure. For one, my roommate claims he is very good (or was back in the day) at breaking into any computer he wishes that's attached to a network. This got me thinking, how am I going to secure my computer and my files to best his attempts? Maybe I'll try to secure my computer and one file and see if he can penetrate it sometime!

As Kacee was saying yesterday, people have been the same over generations of time with typically the same worries. Although earlier people weren't trying to secure terabytes of data, they may have been protecting valuable secrets. Things of value that should not be disclosed to a select group whom the author chooses, he wishes  to barricade his knowledge against their learning. Thus cryptography is born!

Code your own message with a simple
pinwheel (from here).

What is Cryptography? The word actually is greek for "hidden"+"writing" or "study" and we do have ancient examples of the Greeks using coded messages. It's medium is anything written and in it's basic form, it means to translate a message in a way that the message is unreadable to anyone but the intended reader who must translate into the original. Cryptography can be simple, such as a pinwheel with a principle letter or "key" that all the other letters align with, then the code can be decrypted. It can be something similar to the Caesar Shift as Caesar in order to communicate with his generals would code his messages so that each letter in the message was shifted down the alphabet a set amount. He shifted by three.

 It can also be mind numbingly difficult like the Vigenere square, invented by Leon Baptist Alberti (who I learned about in my Italian History class as the first "Renaissance Man"). Here, a Caesar shift is written down in a matrix so that each column represents the alphabet shifted a certain number of times. The coder chooses a message (e.g. "attackatdawn"), and a key word (e.g. "lemon"). The key is repeated until it is the same length as the plain text ("lemonlemonle"). From there you just take one letter at a time from the message and the key (L from the key, A from the message) and match the "L" row with the "A" column to get your first code letter (coincidentally and L!). When you're done your message will be LXFOPVEFRNHR. It's pretty hard to crack that!!!

Vigenere Square

An ancient Greek Skytale. This little instrument would have
you wrap your message in such a way that the lines matched
up. When literacy was uncommon, simple methods such as
this were adequate means of coding.

How do you determine how much time and effort to put into a code ? I could jumble the words of a message all day, but how tough does it need to be to crack? This question may be solved by considering what the task is. Let's say we're are roman soldiers back in the 3rd century AD stationed in Brittania with knowledge of a mutiny army bent towards Italy. We wish to relay our knowledge to Rome but without the perpetrating general's knowledge. The message needs to be coded well enough that the messenger, should he be caught and questioned along his 1100 mile journey that nothing be revealed. Maybe the message should be hidden within a routine message that would calm any prying eyes. Armies, Diplomats and Majesties were the principle curators of coded messages for many centuries. However, those under fear of their text calling them out as heretics would eventually join the ranks among the greats of hiding a message within a message. The value of written knowledge is amply evident in the extent to which people will go to make it unreadable to all but intended eyes.

Altered Perceptions? Also, Architecture is a Metaphor. But Actually, I think this is a Post about Journals. Maybe. Or maybe I just want you to think. Enlighten me.

I really don't know what happened...

I'm always so stuffy in my blogposts. In my attempts to sound scholarly or academic or professional or whatever it is I try to sound like in my blogposts, I sometimes lose myself. No, I almost always lose myself. I could even say I always lose myself. This is a tragedy.

So what does this have to do with written knowledge, architecture, or anything worth noting? Well, as I was contemplating how to write this blogpost, I got thinking about all the different voices we use in writing. There's our personal voice, our formal voice, our persuasive voice, our objective voice -- so many voices! Then comes the editing. Think of how much we edit our thoughts as we create the final product (Even as I attempt to type this I'm editing like crazy, and I was trying so hard to just speak my mind!).