The term 'text technologies' is a useful label for the history of the form and content of human communication. The field emerges from what has been traditionally known as the 'History of the Book' or the 'History of Writing', neither of which is capacious enough to incorporate image-text, music, film, and new technologies, such as Blogs. 'Text technologies', though, is such a recent scholarly field that it also requires meticulous clarification. What, then, might it mean?
I think that "History of Text Technologies" zooms out a bit from such labels as "History of the Book" and "History of Writing", looking at what they encompass and recontextualizing it. Text technology, to me, is any medium that conveys thought or meaning, from paint and cave wall to Twitter.
ReplyDelete-Jake Gibbons