Copying information
Trace the history of copying from embodied apprenticeship and scribal labour to mechanised printing and nearly costless digital reproduction. This pathway follows the main changes in chronological order and shows which older practices continued beside them.
How did one copy become many?
Five turning points
Imitation, repetition and apprenticeship
Marks the point where information transmission becomes competence transmission. Speech can describe an action.
Open topic →Scribal copying
Multiple copies reduce the chance that one fire, decay event, theft or political purge will erase a work completely. Copies allow a work to move between courts, temples, monasteries, schools, markets and private collections.
Open topic →Woodblock printing
Once the page has been carved, each additional impression no longer requires renewed inscription of every character. The block preserves an arrangement of signs and images that can be reactivated after storage.
Open topic →Movable type in East Asia
The reusable unit shrinks from an entire page to an individual character or sign. A compositor can replace one type piece without recarving the whole page.
Open topic →Metal movable type and Gutenberg-style press
The historical breakthrough lies in a stable production system rather than one isolated component. Punch-matrix-mould workflows allow workshops to cast more copies of worn or common sorts.
Open topic →Follow the history from beginning to present
Imitation, repetition and apprenticeship
Imitation, repetition and apprenticeship examines the first robust system through which practical information stored in one organism can be reproduced in another.
Scribal copying
Before printing, the main way to multiply a text was to ask a human being to rewrite it.
Woodblock printing
Woodblock printing transfers ink from a carved relief matrix onto paper or another receptive surface.
Movable type in East Asia
Movable type changes the granularity of the printing matrix.
Metal movable type and Gutenberg-style press
The Gutenberg-style printing system did not invent printing, movable type, paper, ink or the press as isolated ideas.