Computational History In Action: Discovering Gutenberg's Printing Process

Опубликовано 6 сентября 2016, 5:09

Gutenberg is credited with having invented the typographic printing process in the West around 1450. Printing has been regarded as an exception to the general principle that technological advances happen incrementally; it is held that his idea, full-blown at its birth, remained virtually unchanged until the typographic developments of the 19th century. We have studied early printing from an archaeological standpoint, focusing in particular on survivals from GutenbergΓÇÖs press. Using data analysis techniques based on high-resolution digital photography of these survivals, we have been able to find direct evidence of the technologies used to create them. These technologies do not in fact correspond to typographic printing in the modern sense. Although we are only beginning to develop a comprehensive picture of the early development of printing, it has become clear that Gutenberg was only the first of a series of European experimenters, who gradually evolved the concepts and methods of typography over a period of several decades. The methods used to establish these findings (including multiresolution clustering, image understanding, optimization, and more) are closely related to problems in optical character recognition and document image analysis. New twists are introduced, however, not only by the application of these methods to an unusual problem, but also by the radical conceptual changes written language has undergone between the time of Gutenberg and our own era of digital typography. We will argue that the ease with which the modern Western alphabet and writing system were adapted for digital display in ~1960-present is a direct outcome of this earlier shift in writing technology, between 1450-1500. In more ways than one, GutenbergΓÇÖs printing is at a halfway-point between scribal and typographic representations of text. Parts of this research appeared in the British LibraryΓÇÖs centennial conference proceedings, ΓÇ£Incunabula and Their ReadersΓÇ¥ (2001), and in the Words column of Nature (28 June 2001). This work was also the subject of a BBC Open University documentary, ΓÇ£Renaissance Secrets: What Did Gutenberg Invent?ΓÇ¥ (open2.net/renaissance2/doing/g...