The technologies of inscription and print that developed in the late medieval and early modern world greatly transformed the ways of producing and preserving knowledge. The shift from scribal to print culture was, of course, a very gradual and complex phenomenon, deeply affecting and affected by cultural and historical events. Our Transcriptions topics page examines the early technologies alongside our modern incarnation, the computer keyboard, in an effort to highlight a recognizable ideology as well as to trace the technological developments--from manuscript, to codex, to printed book, and now hypertext--which would have been utterly alien to, although perhaps anticipated by, a scribe working hundreds of years ago.

We take as our main focus, then, the dissemination of knowledge via writing, print, and digital print, exploring the ways in which our medieval and early modern predecessors approached the act of inscribing words on a piece of vellum or through a printing press--comparing this, ultimately, to how we in the information age "process" words electronically into (and through) a computer. Though the technology and indeed the world we live in has drastically changed, the original idea of attempting to attach "permanence" to our words to instruct, influence, and persuade, and indeed also to control knowledge, remains constant. Join us as we trace the journey from quill to keyboard, for you will discover that we--in the modern "culture of information"--are inheritors of an unbroken tradition that goes back many centuries and continues to influence and transform the way we preserve and communicate our knowledge.