Teresa M. Dobson, PhD
Associate Professor
Department of Language and Literacy Education
University of British Columbia
2125 Main Mall
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4
Office: (604) 822-8365
Fax: (604) 822-9515
Email: teresa [dot] dobson [at] ubc [dot] ca
About the main-page image
The main-page image is one that I came across in Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading. Manguel (1996, p. 30) observes that it is a "depiction of the functions of the brain in a fifteenth-century manuscript of Aristotle's De anima." The manuscript is part of the Wellcome Institute Library Collections. What is represented on the main page is a replica created at my request by laika for the purpose of this website.
The image intrigued me from the outset for two reasons. First, this depiction of the workings of the mind is decidedly associative in nature. In the wake of much discourse respecting the associative structure of online information management systems, it seemed particularly suited to serve its present function. Second, the image strikes me as an example of the sort of pre-print multimedia or hypertext writing to which Bolter (2001) alludes in Writing Space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. Bolter remarks that illuminated manuscripts were "examples of multimedia writing at its finest, in which all the elements functioned symbolically as well as aesthetically to define a verbal-visual meaning." He continues that while print technology may have improved production of written materials in some respects, it also "destroyed the synthesis that medieval manuscripts had achieved" (p. 78). The main-page image is not an illuminated manuscript, but it does, I think, demonstrate the sort of cohesion to which Bolter alludes, and also provides an interesting visual parallel to hypertextual information management systems through the literal depiction of linked nodes. On first viewing it several years ago, I thought it would function very well as a map-style navigation aid, for, in terms of technologies for text, it is both reflective of the new and reminiscent of the old.
Website design © laika, 2003
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