The nonlinear visual book has been a part of communication
history since the beginning of human life. In terms of the visual
transmission of ideas, there are many examples. Before codified systems
of writing, objects were decorated or modified in such a way as to
communicate a message. In the earliest recorded Western history Herodotus
tells a story in which the Scythian ruler sent several objects to
the Persian King Darius. The objects conveyed a message which could
be interpreted in various ways - they were representations of a bird,
a mouse, a frog and seven arrows. The objects were interpreted simultaneously
as a surrender and a declaration of defiance. The interpretation depended
on the order of placement of the objects as well as their emphasis.
Albertine Gaur describes these interpretations as surrender - equating
the mouse with the Scythians, the frog with their horses and the arrows
with their weapons which they were about to surrender; or a declaration
of defiance - the Persians would be killed by the arrows if they did
not fly away like birds, hide in the earth like mice and leap into
the water like frogs.
Also from the ancient island of Crete is
the Phaistos disc,which archaeologists found in the outbuilding of
a Minoan palace (now housed in the Iraklion Museum in Crete). The
small (16 cm across) disc is especially unique in this much "dug"
part of the world. It is further an anomaly since the inscriptions
from its two sides have never been deciphered. The symbols bear no
resemblance to any of the ancient script of that time period and area.
The signs are recognizable as humans, plants and houses and other
objects but their meaning in relationship to each other is unknown.
Is it a story, or an historical account, or an inventory?
Among many types of objects on which have been used to carry messages
are the message stick used by the Australian Aborigines, decorated
beans of the Moche, a pre-Inca people from Peru; the wampum belts
of the North American Iroquois, and the Cowrie shell of the Nigerian
Yoruba. Knotted cords have been used by the Ancient Chinese, Tibetans,
Japanese, Siberians, Africans and the Polynesians. The most well-known
of the knotted cords used for information storage is the "quipu"
developed and used by the Inca in Ancient Peru.It has been suggested
that in addition to their use for storage of numbers that they may
also have been adapted to convey the sounds of the Inca language.
Picture writing is another ancient form
of information storage. It was used by various peoples from ancient
times through the 19th century, on the walls of caves and on rocks.
Some pictographs were painted, some carved, and some were scraped
out where the rock was covered with soot or other stains. These beautiful
illustrations have given much insight into the communications of prehistoric
peoples.
Iconographic writing seems primitive in
comparison with the aplphabetic and sylibary scripts of modern cultures,
but iconographic representation is used in the twenty-first century
as well - on traffic and warning signs, ranking systems in movie reviews,
the signs indicating the women's or men's bathroom, icons on computer
toolbars, and so on.
You may wonder what the transmission of ideas and language and writing
development has to do with the nonlinear book or text. The answer
is: everything. Visual communication began in forms that were not
as linear as the modern book form with which we are most familiar.
Writing was not originally a linear exercise. Most European languages
are written left-to right and top-to-bottom, but other variations
exist. We have provided some examples of the different ways languages
have been written and read, using the English alphabet.
And how is this document written? Does
hypertext move us very far from our orginal efforts at writing language?
Cass Dalgish sees a parallel between the oldest and the newest of
writing styles. "Patterns of writing and reading in the newest
language environment -- hypermedia -- are echoes of writing and reading
models practiced in the oldest language in history -- Sumerian cuneiform."
As writing evolved into codified linear languages, thus did the "book"
evolve from wax and clay tablets, to scrolls of papyrus (for more
information on papyrus, look at the Duke Papyrus Archive at Duke University
Library), to parchment and vellum, to the codex (the traditional linear
book format of pages fastened together on one side and anchored between
two covers) and later to paper and the printing press. Throughout,
however, there appear to be instances in which traditional formats
are ignored. One example is the pompom-like book seen here, which
is a rather dramatic departure from traditional format. It is supposed
to contain the entire known history of the world, from creation to
the 16th century, written on separate strips of paper.
Medieval European manuscripts (such as
those collected at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University) were
often written in a linear style similar to the trade paperbacks of
today, but some were variations on this form. Some contained notes
written in the margins, or were annotated after their production with
a gloss (or translation) in between the original lines of text. Manuscripts
were sometimes constructed using a tree structure to show the contents
of a book in a less strictly hierarchical way than in a table of contents.
A similar tree structure is now a common way to show files on a web-site
map.
Once the printing press became widely used
in the West, and books in the western codex format were produced in
large numbers, it became difficult to think of the book in any other
fashion. Nearly everyone now expects that a book must have a beginning,
middle and end between the two covers. Texts are written in this format,
and books continue to be physically constructed to support it.
The history of the book as art or the artist's
book is more difficult to trace, but it has been suggested that William
Blake might have been the first "book artist" since he shunned
the commercial printing press in favor of publishing his own books,
which were works of art in and of themselves. The printing press allowed
for block text and prints only. Blake used a resist (a substance applied
to a surface, as of metal, to prevent the action on it of acid or
other chemicals) to make his drawings and write his text together
on a thin copper plate which he then printed on his own press.
1945 brought the invention of a device
called "memex" by Vannevar Bush who was at the time a science
advisor to President Roosevelt. In an effort to organize and distribute
scientific information which had been gathered during the war, he
envisioned his invention, a book composed of microfilm pages which
could store all of a person's records, books and letters, and would
be mechanized and indexed so that a pathway of connections, or "links"
could be made to supplement the mind. This was the beginning of hypertext
from which has grown a whole industry of hypermedia and thus the hyperbook.
There are several time lines of the history of hypertext (an interestingly
linear way to describe the development of this medium), including
the HyperTerrorist's timeline of hypertext history, the Electronic
Labyrinth, and a Subjective chronology of literary hypertext.
History of Books