The Mirror of Information in Early Modern England : John Wilkins and the Universal Character / by James Dougal Fleming.

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The Mirror of Information in Early Modern England : John Wilkins and the Universal Character / by James Dougal Fleming.

9783319403014
331940301X

Cham : Springer International Publishing : Imprint : Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

English

1 online resource (xi, 292 pages)

10.1007/978-3-319-40301-4 doi

HN8-HN19

306.09

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 discourse 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.

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