I watched the “inventing the alphabet” documentary. There was a guy in the video that made an excellent point that I never thought of before: letters are very simple. Looking at the letters that constitute our alphabet, and almost any alphabet, they are very easy to write and are not very intricate.  He made the point that this is because of when early humans had to carve letters into clay, there was not a lot of room for precision because of the writing tools available, so the letters became easy to draw. I think it is interesting how even with the computer and more precise writing utensils, the simplicity of the letters of our alphabet is the same today as it has been for thousands of years.

This article from last week shows that, despite law and fines, illegal file sharing continues on a fairly large scale. And that is only just within Japan.  However, what surprises me more are the people in the forums who SUPPORT the file-sharing (I for one, refuse to associate with these people in general, and only come for the news). What surprises me isn’t the fact that they support it, but the fact that they’re open about it. In the case that they are kidding (which honestly does not seem to be the case), it would be in poor taste.

Overall, considering what they were sharing and how, should the people arrested get support, pity, or punishment?

When I think about how books would be different if they had some of the future technology, I think about how many more books at that time would have been published with color and photos. Before the printing press was invented, people wrote books and drew pictures by hand.Think about how much easier it would have been for these books to have some form of color or picture in them had they had the same technology we have today. When I think of books with pictures and colors, I think about children’s books. Before printing was invented, children were not able to go through a book and look at all the wonderful pictures. I try to imagine my childhood without these colors and pictures and I cannot. I can only imagine the wonderful children’s books that would have been created if people had the ability to create them during that time.

When looking at the prompt today, I found myself asking the question what if some of our most ancient text had been created during a time when computers existed. Many authors write their books on the computer these days. The computer makes writing and printing so much easier for us to do. I wonder if the computer had been around during the time of some ancient text if they would still be as important or worth as much to us today. These books were so unique because the process of making them was so incredible difficult. If the process had been easier like it is today would these books still be of such high importance?

Today, I watched The Making of the Renaissance Book. I was extremely surprised to see the amount of detail necessary to go into making a book. It was interesting to go through each step of the process because I never really realized how difficult and time consuming it was back then. The process of setting the letters seem the most time consuming to me because he had to go through each size and shape of each individual letter for each sentence. This movie really made me appreciate the technology we have today. I am so lucky to have word to write my papers on because all I have to do is simply choose the size and style I want and it appears on my computer.

This video really helped me understand the process we learned at EPI.

Walking through the library and browsing through the books I stumbled upon one that was  entitled “Printing in Plastic” by Patrick Daniel. The book was basically about how to build your own printer. One thing I noticed just seconds after looking through the book was that it was clearly written very recently. I do not think that it would have been possible hundreds of years ago for someone to build their own printer at home. Not only would it be way too costly, but a printer in every home was not the norm centuries ago. This got me thinking about how lucky society is today. After all, I think it is safe to say that the norm today is for each family to own at least one printer, if not more.

I discovered an article in the National Geographic that discusses how just recently, a clay tablet was found in Greece that is said to be “the oldest known decipherable text in Europe”. The clay tablet was found in an olive grove, which was surprising to those who found it because it is not quite clear how it got there. I think it is pretty amazing how such old texts are still being found today, and I am sure that in the future even older texts than this will be discovered. It is cool to think that maybe at one time or another, someone we know may have stumbled across something ancient like this without realizing it. In fact, I wonder how many people had come across this clay tablet in the past and disregarded it as being nothing more than an old rock.

While watching The Story of Writing Part 1, I got to see what it was like for the Egyptians to carve their writing into stone. I never imagined their stone carvings to be quite as intricate and detailed as they were in the video, and was shocked to learn how long it took for these carvings to be completed. I had always thought that ancient stone carvings were very plain and lacked the detail that drawings done on other surfaces had. However, watching this video showed me that this was not the case.

In addition, the music that was played during this segment of the film clip definitely played a role in my response to the film’s content. It was very eerie sounding music, and it made it seem all the more unbelievable and almost magic-like how the Egyptians were able to create such amazing means of communication with the few resources they had.