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The Body of Knowledge

A Short History of Scholarly Media

?Why must knowledge always live in some medium? Is the paper its only body?

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  1. 01Does writing make people stupid?
  2. 02Where did knowledge live before there was paper?
  3. 03Can a single book hold a whole system?
  4. 04Why did scholars write in anagrams?
  5. 05How was the scientific paper born?
  6. 06When did papers become points on a scorecard?
  7. 07What will the next body look like?

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01/07Prelude

Does writing make people stupid?

Every new medium has made people uneasy

In Plato’s Phaedrus, the god of invention presents writing to an Egyptian king as a remedy for memory and wisdom. The king is not persuaded: the remedy can only remind, not cure forgetfulness, and those who learn letters acquire “the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom”. Socrates adds that writing is like a figure in a painting: whatever you ask it, it says nothing. In China, Bian the wheelwright told Duke Huan of Qi, who was poring over a book, that it was nothing but “the dregs of the ancients”.

Today’s fears about AI repeat almost the same lines. Yet the king and the inventor were both right: writing did damage memory, and it also remade the way we remember. The only disagreement is whether to treat it as an external thing that could be lost at any moment, or as an environment already woven into our lives.

Follow-up questions
Read deeperWhy does knowledge always need a body?↘
Asked from elsewhereE3DialogueE5Humanities

Socrates. Line engraving by Paulus Pontius after Rubens, 1638. Wellcome Collection · Public domain

02/07Lectern

Where did knowledge live before there was paper?

Spoken at the lectern, written down by others

Socrates wrote nothing. The dialogues Aristotle wrote for the public are almost all lost; the Physics and Metaphysics we read today look more like lecture notes and research drafts. The Analects are sayings that, after Confucius died, his followers “collected together and, after discussion, compiled”. Three disciples ask in turn about humaneness and get three different answers, because teaching speaks to particular people.

In the medieval university a “lecture” originally meant a reading aloud, and alongside it there were public disputations at which anyone could ask a question. In 1181 Zhu Xi invited his old adversary Lu Jiuyuan to lecture at the White Deer Grotto Academy; some of the audience were “even moved to tears”, and the lecture was afterwards carved in stone. Speech has dialogue, rebuttal and presence, but it is hard to accumulate and does not travel far. In the ancient world the decline of learning was the norm, and accumulation the exception.

Follow-up questions
Read deeperWhere did knowledge live before there was paper?↘
Asked from elsewhereMThe paperE4Wonder

An anatomy lesson in the fifteenth century: the professor reads from his chair while an assistant dissects below. Facsimile of a woodcut from Ketham’s Fasciculus medicinae (1495). Wellcome Collection · Public domain

03/07Books

Can a single book hold a whole system?

One book, one world

The Diamond Sutra of 868 is the earliest surviving printed text with an explicit date, and its frontispiece shows, of all things, a lecture. Bi Sheng’s clay movable type long had little impact in China; what made mass-produced texts the norm was the Bible that Gutenberg printed around 1455, and the printing trade that grew up in its wake.

Print brought not just speed and volume but standardization. Titles, tables of contents and indexes became regular features; errata lists persuaded readers that behind the mistakes stood an original that could be approached ever more closely; and editions became clearly distinct, so they could be set side by side, compared and criticized. The book became a vehicle for building systems: in 1543 Copernicus rearranged the universe and Vesalius redrew the human body; in 1859 Darwin called the whole of On the Origin of Species “one long argument”. A book is complete and self-contained and can absorb its reader, but it is slow to write, expensive to print and, once published, poorly placed to answer its critics.

Follow-up questions
Read deeperCan a single book hold a whole system?↘
Asked from elsewhereMRenaissanceE6Seven layers

Jost Amman, The Printer. Woodcut, 1568. Wellcome Collection · Public domain

04/07Letters

Why did scholars write in anagrams?

The Republic of Letters and its anagrams

Books were too slow, so scholars wrote letters. Marin Mersenne, a friar in Paris known as “the secretary of learned Europe”, passed the questions and answers of Descartes, Fermat and Hobbes back and forth; in London, Henry Oldenburg brought letters from all over to the weekly meetings of the Royal Society. A letter could discuss unfinished work or float a conjecture, but it was private and slow: the letter Newton sent to Leibniz through Oldenburg in October 1676 did not arrive until the following June.

To stake a claim without giving the secret away, Galileo in 1610 sent out a jumble of 37 letters, and Hooke in 1676 hid away ceiiinosssttuv, only revealing two years later what it meant: “as the extension, so the force”. But private letters could not settle public disputes. For this private web to become a truly public republic, it needed printed books and journals.

Follow-up questions
Read deeperWhy did scholars write letters, and anagrams?↘
Asked from elsewhereE4AgonE6Trails

A scholar mending his quill. Engraving by Wallis after Mieris. Wellcome Collection · Public domain

05/07Journals

How was the scientific paper born?

1665: letters go into print

In January 1665 the Journal des sçavans was launched in Paris; in March Oldenburg brought out the Philosophical Transactions in London, and its first table of contents reads like a shopping list: lenses, a spot on Jupiter, a comet, a monstrous calf, whaling. Early journals were a mixture of news, book reviews, extracts from letters and reports of experiments; Newton’s 1672 paper on optics was billed in its title as “A Letter”. The scholarly journal has its roots in a “public mailbox”: from the very start, the paper was not a monologue but a conversation.

Journals did registration, dissemination and archiving well: every issue carried a date, and the same words stood on many shelves at once, beyond anyone’s power to alter. Certification came much later. The Royal Society’s written referee reports began in the 1830s, and Nature made external review a condition of publication only in 1973.

Follow-up questions
Read deeperHow was the journal born?↘
Asked from elsewhereE2Digital paperE3Theatre

Philosophical Transactions no. 11, 2 April 1666. The first item listed is a letter from Boyle. Wellcome Collection · Public domain

06/07Counting

When did papers become points on a scorecard?

The paper becomes the unit of credit

In the nineteenth century, research universities, laboratories and specialist journals turned science into a profession with a threshold to cross and a ladder to climb, and papers were the rungs. From 1867 the Royal Society published its Catalogue of Scientific Papers, in which a scientist’s whole life was written up as a list of papers.

In 1955 Eugene Garfield proposed a citation index for science; to decide which journals it should cover, he and a colleague went on to invent the impact factor. Late in life he admitted that the citation index owed its success not to its proper job, searching the literature, but to its use as an instrument for measuring scientific productivity.

Follow-up questions
Read deeperWhen did the paper become the output of a profession?↘
Asked from elsewhereE2CountingE7Assembly line

07/07New body

What will the next body look like?

Not replacement but a new division of labour

The paper never had knowledge to itself. Computer science prizes conference papers; the humanities still treat the monograph as the “gold standard”; the Royal Institution’s Christmas Lectures have run from 1825 to this day. Every medium has its blind spots: speech cannot remember, writing cannot answer back, books are too slow, letters too private, papers too narrow. Peter Medawar even asked whether the scientific paper is a fraud: it does not misrepresent the facts, but it does misrepresent the thinking that produced them.

AI has made writing cheap; what is scarce now is verification, clear explanation and judgement. The next body must be layered, linkable, executable and able to converse, and it must also leave room for immersion and for what cannot be compressed. Nobody will design it. Only when the whole environment has rearranged itself around the new medium will we see clearly how it differs from the old body.

Follow-up questions
Read deeperLectern, book, paper: which replaced which?↘
Asked from elsewhereMThe paper

The round lecture theatre of the Surrey Institution, with Accum lecturing. Coloured etching, c. 1809. Wellcome Collection · Public domain

E1The discussion goes on

The discussion goes on

?Why must knowledge always live in some medium? Is the paper its only body?

Knowledge always has to live in some medium: a teacher’s voice, a disciple’s notes, a scribe’s parchment, a printer’s lead type, a letter in a postman’s bag, and the journal article that scholars today take for granted. Each medium arose in its own age in answer to the most pressing problems of the day, and each quietly laid down what would count as knowledge. This essay follows a timeline of more than two thousand years to see how these media appeared, evolved and divided the work among themselves, and how they in turn shaped knowledge itself. The conclusion is simple enough. The paper is only one of these bodies: the body that print, the post and the networks of learned societies handed to modern science in the seventeenth century. It has prevailed for more than three hundred years, but it is not the natural shape of knowledge.

Deep readThe Body of Knowledge: A Short History of Scholarly Media~8,298 words · 11 questions · 91 sources↗
  1. 1Why does knowledge always need a body?
  2. 2Where did knowledge live before there was paper?
  3. 3Can a single book hold a whole system?
  4. 4Why did scholars write letters, and anagrams?
  5. 5How was the journal born?
  6. 6When did the paper become the output of a profession?
  7. 7Has there always been peer review?
  8. 8When did people start counting papers?
  9. 9Lectern, book, paper: which replaced which?
  10. 10How do media shape knowledge?
  11. 11What will the next body look like?

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