Within the past two decades, technological advances have changed the way readers consume text, from online blogs to e-readers. Some critics and scholars have suggested that we were embarking on a radically new age of information.
Bonnie Mak, a professor of library and information science and of medieval studies, addresses these ideas in “How the Page Matters” (University of Toronto Press), saying that this “digital revolution” is part of a long tradition of graphic exchanges of written ideas that stretches back to the Middle Ages.
“The same kind of language had been used to posit a ‘printing revolution’ in the 15th century,” Mak said, “and similar claims about an age of information had been made for the period following the advent of the printing press.”
Chapters include “Architecture of the Page,” “Reading the Page,” “The Paratext and the Page,” “Reading the Library” and “The Digital Page.”
Her book covers the genealogy of the written page through the manuscripts of the Middle Ages and the printed books of the early modern period to the digital resources of today. By looking at the history of text, Mak found that how the written word is presented – whether as a book or an e-reader – affects its meaning.
“It is not only that books and similar kinds of resources are historically situated and culturally produced,” she said, “but they also travel through time and space: A medieval manuscript may have had a range of meanings and uses in the 15th century, but the same item might engender a different range of meanings and uses now in the 21st century.”
Mak uses genre books as an example of how written text is packaged to shape its meaning.
“It is no accident that romance novels look the way they do,” she said. “Their look is the result of careful decisions by authors, editors, publishers and designers. Romance novels have a clear graphic identity that shapes the ways in which they are treated and understood by readers, librarians and booksellers alike.”
Because her book covers a wide range of topics that go beyond the divide between manuscript and print, and between book and computer, Mak hopes the book appeals to scholars of art history, communications, cultural studies, graphic design, history, library and information science, literature, and new media.
“It is often difficult to grasp the complicated processes of production that underpin these materials, but my work illustrates how online resources are – just like their traditional counterparts – produced at a particular time and place and are therefore subject to myriad pressures that may be political, economic, social or cultural in nature.”
Mak wants readers to come away with a better understanding of how they formulate knowledge through exploring these different pressures.
“By understanding how both form and content influence the reception of information, whether printed word on paper or digitized image on computer, we can begin to imagine more vibrant ways of communicating with new technologies that are sensitive to the entanglement of materiality and meaning.”
