The Mirror of Information in Early Modern England - James Dougal Fleming Gebunden

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 disco urse 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.