The Atlas of Early Printing: Digital History and Book History

The history of the book is an interdisciplinary field of
inquiry that has been emerging for the last decades.
Scholars of the history of the book use the development
of books and reading to study larger historical ideas. In
the digital realm, the digitization of books has received
a great deal of attention, including funding and media
coverage, as facsimiles of physical books are created for
the digital environment. The application of digital tools
to the broader study of the history of the book, however,
has been much slower to catch on. This presentation will
introduce the Atlas of Early Printing, a digital project
utilizing tools such as GIS data, Flash-driven interactivity,
and 3D computer graphics visualization to transform
how information about the invention and spread of printing
during the fifteenth century is presented. Rather than
a consideration of the digital book, the Atlas of Early
Printing represents new directions in the digital book
history.
The background of the project will be outlined by an
overview of the historical moment the Atlas is designed
to represent. The printing press was developed by Johannes
Gutenberg during the mid-fifteenth century in
Mainz, Germany. Following the production of his famous
Bible during the years 1450-1455, printing slowly
began to spread throughout Europe as the secrets of the
trade were handed down to apprentice and journeymen
printers who set off to establish businesses. By the beginning
of the sixteenth century, printing was a well-established
and widely accepted trade, with presses operating
in hundreds of European towns and a brisk trade in
books increasing in volume every year.
The spread of printing has been depicted in several
maps, the most well-known being those in Lucien Febvre
and Henri-Jean Martin’s L’apparition du livre. In
these views, the arrival of printing in towns across the
continent is arranged by decade, showing the broad trend
of movement but lacking the detail necessary for more
sophisticated interpretation. In addition, the maps lack
any contextual information. For an event as revolutionary
as the invention and adoption of printing, this context
is crucial to an understanding of the forces at work:
what elements in society supported printing and ensured and markets? How did these complicated factors work
together to produce the intellectual environment for
printed books to flourish?
The Atlas of Early Printing offers an interactive map that
not only animates the spread of printing year-by-year,
but includes layers that place printing within a historical
and cultural context, such as the locations of paper
mills, universities, market towns, and trade routes. All
of these layers can be controlled by users, allowing them
to view as much or as little information as they choose.
The site relies on Flash to display the information online,
drawing from a series of XML files containing the
data. Changes to the site can be made instantaneously by
changing the data in the XML files, leading to a flexible
and scalable site that does not require extensive database
maintenance. New layers can be added by creating a new
XML file, without disturbing the information already
present.
The presentation will examine these technical aspects of
the map before shifting focus to another primary feature
of the site: a 3D computer graphics model of an early
printing press (http://atlas.lib.uiowa.edu/press-animation.
html). The model was created in Maya and can be
rendered in any number of views and animations. The
technical process of creating a printed page from metal
type inked and pressed on a wooden structure is essentially
foreign to many students and even scholars of history.
While physical replicas can be viewed at several
museums and libraries around the world, few people
have the opportunity to experience their operation in person.
The digital model brings this esoteric history to life
in a manner that enables a user to see a press in action.
Because the press is modeled in Maya, individual pieces
can be modified. Any reconstruction of an early printing
press is conjecture, so the flexibility of the 3D model
allows for changes and variations. Future plans include
detailed close-up views and, ultimately, a model that a
user can manipulate in real time online.
This presentation will also describe the site’s development
process. The primary goal for the project was to
create an intuitive, easy-to-use, yet in-depth resource
with widely available software in a compressed period
of time. The Atlas of Early Printing was created over the
course of a year from initial discussion and funding to
the uploading of version 1.0. The collaborative effort between
different university units that had seldom worked
together previously, which enabled this schedule, will be
discussed.
Finally, the possibilities for future expansion and development
will be considered in light of the potential that
digital mapping holds for a broader range of book history
topics. By applying digital humanities tools and techniques
to the databases and image resources representing
historical books, new ways of capturing and depicting
the history of books as objects can be achieved. The Atlas
of Early Printing is an initial step toward projects
that will analyze bibliographic data and combine it with
geographic information systems, to provide methods for
researching and teaching the history of the book.