Final Exam Part 2: The Rise of the Digital Medium

The world is in the midst of another information revolution, just as civilizations past underwent revolutions from oral forms of communication to written forms of communication, and subsequently written to printed.  The advent of the new digital medium with the invention and popularity of the personal computer, internet, and more recently the laptop and smartphone changed the way people communicate and share knowledge with each other. Although these new media have already had great impact on both everyday interactions and the world of academia, they are not yet the prevailing form of sharing knowledge. Print is currently still the dominant medium through which knowledge is shared; however, in the very near future due to the desires of the rising generations as well as its ability to synthesize all forms of communication, the digital form will become the most popular knowledge medium.

Final Exam Notes

To review for the final exam, I basically just went back and skimmed all of our group's blog posts from the beginning to remind myself about everything we talked about, then made a spreadsheet like Dr. Burton posted including all of my blog posts, as well as some of my favorites from the other group members.

There's a screen shot of the table, and here's a link to the Google Doc (it might be a little easier to read on that).

Some highlights of the year after looking back:

• The teaching/ learning activities at the beginning of the year and how much they taught me about the effectiveness of folk knowledge
• The King Benjamin speech activity and how it kind of validated everything we had learned about oral knowledge, especially my group's topic about memorization and mnemonics.
• Ogham project. We wrote stuff in stone. Enough said.
• King James Version Bible exhibit at the library. It really made me appreciate the Bible more and inspired me to watch the "Fires of Faith" documentary, which I also really enjoyed.
• My trip to the Fort Worth library, which was a surprising testament to the effectiveness of folk knowledge, which I found in talking to the librarian.
• Overall, just learning the different ways of communicating knowledge, their historical contexts, the outcomes and effects of different media and institutions really intrigued me. It's something I had never thought seriously about before but once I did it really interested me and made a lot of sense.

Now bring on the culmination of it all, the salon!

 
 
 



The Influence of Print on Western Society (an academic paper)

While doing my annotated bibliography assignment (which can be seen here), I found one particular book that struck my interest more than any of the others. It was Printing and the Mind of Man: a Descriptive Catalogue Illustrating the Impact of Print on the Evolution of Western Civilization during Five Centuries. It was essentially an annotated bibliography of important printed works over the past five centuries. I thought it was interesting to see how much print impacted Western society so I decided to write my paper about it...

More about the King James Bible

Visiting the KJV exhibit at the library (you can read about my experience here)really sparked my interest in the history and background of the printed bible. I had seen articles about a documentary about the coming forth of the King James Version Bible in the Daily Universe that would be on BYU TV, so I thought I would watch it. The second part of the three part series deals a lot with how vital printing was to the spread of the Bible to the masses, especially as it was translated into the vernaculars. There was some really interesting things I learned that I never knew or had even thought of before...

Delving into the Depths of the Library: Fort Worth Edition (An annotated bibliography on the history and influence of the printed book)

Rachel recently posted about her experience "delving into the depths of the library", and I had a similar experience at some different libraries. Since I'm home for the Thanksgiving break, I didn't have access to everyone's favorite library, the HBLL. Instead, I got to explore two of the Fort Worth Public Libraries.

Mayan+English+Ogham+Stone= Daunting Process

This post pertains to the second part of our Rosetta Stone project, the actual creation of the Rosetta Stone! (For a recap of part one check out my previous post). We had the fortune (or misfortune) of receiving the Mayan group's original phrase, which was written in Mayan hieroglyphs.

Here is what ensued:

King James Bible

The Bible is the single most influential book in the history of mankind, and no where is this more true than with the King James Bible and the English language. I had a chance to go see an original King James Version (KJV) Bible at the exhibit at the Harold B. Lee Library, an experience I won't soon forget. When I first came to BYU and heard about the exhibit, I kind of took it for granted. I didn't really realize what an opportunity this was, having a 400 year old and older sacred texts within a 5 minute walk, until I took the time to go to the exhibit and look at everything. Here's what I found:

Ogham

Being in the miscellaneous group, my civilization, the ancient Welsh, was one of the few with any form of a written language. Although the Welsh adopted the Latin alphabet, before that they used the Irish alphabet Ogham, a rune type alphabet mainly used for engraving in stone. (For more info on Ogham, check out this post I did a few weeks ago.)

Engraving in stone our own phrase in Ogham was an interesting process to say the least...

Neumes

In sticking with the musical theme going on in the blog lately, I figured I would post about another form of written knowledge, written music, specifically that of the ancient Brits (and therefore Welsh), neumes.

The Piraha

Ah, the ambiguous third blog of the unit. Since there's no specific assignment for this one and I already covered two of the assigned topics in my first two blogs, I thought I would do something a little differently and look at how having no written language affects a modern culture. (I know we've been advised to stay in antiquity but this just sounded like too much fun to pass up.) The Piraha, a tribe in the Amazon jungle of only about 350 people, still has no written language or even a real concept of what a written language is to this day. Living in a literate world without even having a word for "literate" presents some challenges for the Piraha people.

Universities

Dr. John Searle, an uber-renowned professor at UC Berkeley, in an interview on written language, said this:

But furthermore -- and this is where it really gets exciting -- is you can now create the forms of civilization that are enduring. I'm thinking not just of great art and literature, but of money, property, government, marriage, universities, textbooks, all of the elaborate systems that language has that we can encode in written language that enable us to create an elaborate civilization that is based on our capacity to represent and to create enduring representations. (You can read the whole interview here).

In this post I'm going to discuss the Western world's oldest Univeristy, the University of Bologna in Italy and how writing made it possible.

Ogham

This is the Vitalianus stone, a bilingual
stone in Wales. It's very hard to see the
characters, but you can kind of make
them out right above the shadow.

Ogham (it sounds so pretty) is the name of the alphabet used in Ancient Wales (along with the Latin alphabet), although it originated in Ireland. There is debate over its origins, with some scholars arguing that it was created as a way for the Irish to communicate secretly so those who could read Latin couldn't understand them. The Romans occupied Southern Britain and this could have been a measure against a conquest of Ireland. A second theory is that the language was started by early Christians in the area that wanted an easier way to communicate, since it was difficult to transcribe Irish into the Latin alphabet. A third theory, which I think is very interesting, is that the alphabet was started by Irish people living in Western Wales who intermarried with Welsh people with a knowledge of the Latin alphabet. This is evidenced by the fact that there are several examples of bilingual Ogham stones, with both Ogham and Latin translations inscribed.




It is an alphabet consisting of a lot of straight lines, which like Dr. Petersen was saying in class, makes them easy to carve into stones. For this reason, Ogham was used in gravestones, memorials, etc., and now there are many Ogham Stones that can be found across Wales and Ireland. The letters referred to as a whole were called "feda" (trees) or "nin" (forking branches) because of their shape. The letters themselves are named after plants and trees. These names may have actually come after the original invention of the alphabet, actually given later simply because the letters are shaped like trees and based off of the collective names. The alphabet consisted of 20 characters grouped into four families based on their formation. As you can see in the picture, one family is strokes on the right side of the stem line, one is on the left, etc.

Ogham was carved into gravestones or stones that marked a certain territory, and it was written around the edge of the stone. It was read from bottom left up, then across the top, then from the top right down. So kind of in the shape of an arch. There is a book from the 13th century that goes into great detail about Ogham and its proper formation called "In Lebor Ogaim". Sounds kind of like a dictionary. This is a fascinating aspect of written language to me; that you use written language to preserve written language. It's self sustaining. When we forget how to spell a word, we don't just make our best guess (unless we're just feeling kinda lazy), we go to a dictionary or to Google to find out how to spell it. That's part of the reason the Lord knew it was so important for Nephi to take the Brass Plates to the Promised Land. As long as we have written language, we have written language. Kind of paradoxical.

A Word Borrowing Fiesta!

It seems like all languages are influenced by the languages of other cultures that either conquer them or are geographically near to them, and in many cases there is just blatant word stealing (or word borrowing... is that the politically correct term?). Some easy examples I can think of are "shared" between the U.S. and Mexico. Words like email, yanqui and carro are used in Mexican Spanish, and words like burrito, rodeo and tornado are used in American English. These words seem to only come when there is something new introduced into a culture that there was no word for before. It doesn't seem very common for one language to simply replace its own words with another's. For example, the English language didn't have a word for meat and beans wrapped in flat bread, so "burrito" is used. The Spanish language (or any language for that matter) had no word for messages sent electronically via the internet, so it as well as many others adopted the American word "email". Ancient Welsh was no exception to this.

Group 7's Video Blog Post

This is Group 7's video blog post on mnemonics and what types of memorizing are really valuable in our time, and were valuable in ancient civilizations.  Enjoy! :)

<iframe width="425" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/n0EUBfwm8HE?hl=en&fs=1" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen> - 

Seasonal Songs in Wales

Brief Overview
For an extremely brief historical background on Wales, see the first paragraph of my last post. Wales is know as a "land of song". (I had never heard this before, but it says so in The Welsh Academy Encyclopedia of Wales). This title was born in the 19th century when Wales saw an explosion of musical fervor, that was displayed starting in 1861 in Eistedfod, a large Welsh cultural festival. Unfortunately, this 19th century idea masks the rich history of music in Wales dating back to Pagan times. Songs were used to celebrate the seasons (Winter Solstice, the coming of spring, Summer Solstice), the new year, etc. I'm going to go the route of a general authority at conference and divide my blog post into three subtopics that will hopefully better enable you to remember the message of this post.

Triads of the Welsh

Before I go into too much detail about the mnemonic "triads" of the ancient Welsh, I want to give a quick background on the people and their origins (which was very confusing and hard to for me to dissect, but this I think this book lays it out fairly clearly). According to A History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest by Sir John Edward Lloyd, there are three peoples that make up the Welsh ethnic group:

• The Neolithic, or basically the original inhabitants of Wales (The Welsh inherited many of their physical attributes from this group)
• The Gaels or Goidelic people, a Celtic group (Greatly influenced the politics and social institutions of the Welsh)
• The Brythons or Britons, also a Celtic group (The Welsh language essentialy comes from this people)

Because they inherited their language from the Brythons, the Welsh are considered to be Brythonic people as opposed to Gaelic people like the Irish.

Modern Day Great Britain

Great Britain about 5th Century AD
Red=Brythonic Areas
Green=Gaelic Areas
Blue=Pictish Areas

Water

I emailed Prof. Burton and asked if we had to do a blog post this week, and he said there was no specific assignment but we were expected to post about something that pursues the learning outcomes and is relative to the units we are in between, folk knowledge and oral knowledge. I decided to do one last post on folk knowledge, and I decided to go to the list and find the topic I was least interested in, learn and subsequently blog about it, and I thought that maybe then I would gain a greater interest in and appreciation for it. So here goes: Water.

Miles and Miles of Spirals (almost a rhyme?)

Kelly learning a "3 Point stance" (thanks to Tanner
for his help)

If I thought I was out of my comfort zone learning to braid hair, I can't imagine what these girls were feeling learning how to play football. It's interesting that in today's world of tolerance and gender equality, football remains one of the few sports with no womens' teams at the high school or collegiate level. Why is this? Do we assume girls are weaker than boys and can't handle the physicality of football? Are we afraid to let them compete in any form of football besides "Powder Puff" games or the "Lingerie Football League"? I wanted to break these traditions and teach girls how to play low down, gritty, real football.

Learning to Braid... Or Braiding to Learn?

Thanks to Kelly Williams (being braided)
 and Sarai Davila (instructing)!

I  have always considered myself to be more of a guy's guy, the type of person that likes sports and cars and moustaches and manly stuff like that, so for this assignment I wanted to delve into a world completely unbeknownst to me: hair styling. Of course I only scratched the surface of the tip of the iceburg. I learned how to braid hair.

Coming of Age

In a variety of cultures throughout the world, "coming of age" rituals or rites of passage are performed to signify the transition of a boy entering manhood. Many are performed at a predetermined age, such as 12 or 18 years old, which I find rather silly. Every person develops and matures at a different rate, so I think it's somewhat naive to tell a boy, "You must become a man now. Do this ritual and automatically you mature and are no longer a child". Science shows us that the brain develops over long periods of time and at different rates in different people. I find it interesting that in most Western cultures there is no set coming of age ritual or rite of passage, and I am rather glad about this. This excruciatingly painful rite of passage in the Satere-Mawe tribe of Brazil is one reason why.