Cluster Hiring Initiative

History of Text Technologies (HOTT) from cave paintings to personal computers

Socrates, Shakespeare, Saint Paul, Rembrandt, Sappho, Darwin, Beethoven, Jane Austen and Charlie Chaplin and Billie Holiday are all dead. We remember them because their words and works were preserved for later generations by means of different text technologies. Texts are material artifacts that take many different forms: cave paintings, tattoos, stone tablets, clay tablets, papyrus scrolls, manuscript books, musical scores, maps, printed books, engravings, newspapers, photographs, films, DVDs, computers. Every kind of text is produced by a special technology, but all those technologies share a simple purpose: they were designed to supplement the fragile human mind by providing a more durable artificial memory system. Those technologically preserved and transmitted memories are the foundation of all human culture.

Looking at human cultural achievements in this way overcomes many of the entrenched obstacles of national boundaries, languages, and academic departments. Technologies are not limited to nations or languages: they invade and transform cultures. The Hebrew and Greek Bible, the literary and philosophical masterpieces of classical antiquity, influenced readers (like Dante and Chaucer) thousands of years and thousands of miles away from the time and place when they were first written down. The same print technology that circulated the revolutionary ideas of Copernicus and Galileo throughout Europe also circulated the works of Cervantes and Montaigne.

Although the history of text technologies has lasted more than forty thousand years, and interests faculty in many departments of FSU (from Anthropology to Religion), the interdisciplinary cluster of new hires focuses on a single crucial transition: the centuries just before and after the technological evolution from manuscript to print in western Europe, especially in the related literatures and cultures of England, France, and Italy. This major structural change in some ways resembles the digital revolution of our own time, and our new technologies are crucial tools for studying their old technologies.

HOTT Steering Committee

Richard Emmerson, Professor and Chair of the FSU Department of Art History

S.E. Gontarski, Sarah Herndon Professor of English

Gary Taylor, George Matthew Edgar Professor of English

Lori Walters, Harry F. Williams Professor of French

Wayne A. Wiegand, F. William Summers Professor of Library and Information Studies and Professor of American Studies