Vancouver Ahoy-hoy!

from me, JoAnna Cassie. You may get the ahoy-hoy reference which is from when Edison decided on “Hello” to be the innocuous term used to answer the phone, his counterpart, Alexander Graham Bell, was rooting for the more nautical term instead,… now it is survived only in Springfield’s oldest citizen (20 years is a long time to get a joke, thank you Matt Gröening). I only learned this this week while listening to the fascinating broadcast by Cambridge Forum when Professor James O’Donnell was answering questions at the end.

I chose this image because I was looking for something that would represent the old and the new at once in terms of reading/writing/communication. I had been searching ideally for and image that encapsulated the idea of the evolution from papyrus to codex but could not find any in without infringing copyright. This image is one the artist, Angus Fraser, took of his own work which is now nearly 20 years old. It took him a month to create and he has been trying to figure out a way to scan it or get it into viewable format but hasn’t been able to solve that problem. I thought that this idea perfectly illustrates the challenges that were solved with the move of writing from scroll into codex (bound book) format. Also, I love that someone took to the time – a long dedicated amount of time by today’s standards – to create art in this ancient way, using modern techniques (it’s made from receipt paper).

So far loving this course! Based on the course title, I think like many of you I was surprised by (but very glad for) for the immediate dive into a discussion of Dewey’s Democracy and Education (and Plato(!) which I had not previously read). I had imagined that this would be a course about texting, or something…