The mirror of information in early modern England : John Wilkins and the universal character
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Bibliographic Information
The mirror of information in early modern England : John Wilkins and the universal character
Palgrave Macmillan, c2017
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 275-286) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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.
Table of Contents
.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.
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