Synopsis:
A fascinating, insightful, and wonderfully written exploration of the document.
Like Henry Petroski’s The Pencil, David Levy’s Scrolling Forward takes a common, everyday object, the document, and illuminates what it reveals about us, both in the past and in the digital age.
We are surrounded daily by documents of all kinds letters and credit card receipts, business memos and books, television images and web pages yet we rarely stop to reflect on their significance. Now, in this period of digital transition, our written forms as well as our reading and writing habits are being disturbed and transformed by new technologies and practices.
An expert on information and written forms, and a former researcher for the document pioneer Xerox, Levy masterfully navigates these concerns, offering reassurance while sharing his own excitement about many of the new kinds of emerging documents. He demonstrates how today’s technologies, particularly the personal computer and the World Wide Web, are having analogous effects to past inventions such as paper, the printing press, writing implements, and typewriters in shaping how we use documents and the forms those documents take. Scrolling Forward lets us see the continuity between the written forms of today and those of the past.
Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history--books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
Review:
What's up, doc? Information scientist David M Levy wants us to look at the documents that fill our lives, and his book
Scrolling Forward is a thoughtful reflection on their near-omnipresence. Levy has the perfect resumé for this job--after getting his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1981, he moved to England to pursue the study of calligraphy and bookbinding. His love of books shows in his writing, which is rich with references and anecdotes from Walt Whitman to Woody Allen.
Drawing on examples as disparate as grocery store receipts, greeting cards, identity papers and (of course) e-mail, Levy finds the common threads binding them together and explores how and why we use them in daily life. He looks at digitisation closely, considering how speed, ease of editing, and potentially perfect copying changes our traditional considerations of documentation. Though he insists that he's looking at the present, not speculating about the future, it's hard to see how to avoid looking ahead after reading Scrolling Forward. --Rob Lightner
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