Książki

This book examines the seventeenth-century project for a "real" or "universal" character: a scientific and objective code. Focusing on the Essay towards a real character, and a philosophical language (1668) of the polymath John Wilkins, Fleming provides a detailed explanation of how a real character actually was supposed to work. He argues that the period movement should not be understood as a curious episode in the history of language, but as an illuminating avatar of information technology. A non-oral code, supposedly amounting to a script of things, the character was to support scientific discourse through a universal database, in alignment with cosmic truths. In all these ways, J.D. Fleming argues, the world of the character bears phenomenological comparison to the world of modern digital information-what has been called the infosphere. 

The Mirror of Information in Early Modern England: John Wilkins and the Universal Character

.Introduction.-

.Mercurial messages: What is information?.-

.Unreal characters: Orality and technology in seventeenth-century England.-

.Through a glass, literally: From shorthand to Wilkins's Essay.-

.The next big thing: How the real character works.-

.The Circularity: Or, how to end the world.