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The Mirror of Information in Early Modern England John Wilkins and the Universal Character
Author
Title
The Mirror of Information in Early Modern England [electronic resource] : John Wilkins and the Universal Character / by James Dougal Fleming.
ISBN
9783319403014
Publication
Cham : Springer International Publishing : Imprint: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Physical Description
XI, 292 p. : online resource.
Local Notes
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Summary
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. .
Variant and related titles
Springer ebooks.
Other formats
Printed edition:
Format
Books / Online
Language
English
Added to Catalog
November 01, 2016
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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