From Mary Beard's review of the memoirs of historian Peter Brown, in the September 22 TLS:
Brown has a sharp eye too for how the practical everyday details of academic life have changed over his career and with what result. One unexpected hero in the book is the humble photocopier, a novelty which landed in Oxford in the late 1960s. As Brown explains, it had a transforming impact on teaching and learning. Lengthy notes and bibliogrphies could now be distributed to large lecture audiences (this was the origin of the "handout"). But, more important, group discussions of a whole new range of texts became possible. Even if there was only one printed copy of some little-known saint's life in town (penned up in some remote corner of the Bodleian Library), you could for the first time discuss it, face to face, with colleagues and students in a seminar, wherever you wanted, simply by photocopying it. This was a new intellectual world. Like the internet later (or the printing press before), the photocopier was instrumental in expanding the historical agenda.
Even if there was only one printed copy of some little-known saint's life in town (penned up in some remote corner of the Bodleian Library), you could for the first time discuss it, face to face, with colleagues and students in a seminar, wherever you wanted, simply by photocopying it.
ReplyDeleteI think this is overstating the effect considerably. Photocopying was quicker and eventually cheaper, absolutely, but it's not as if you couldn't take a your sole printed copy and get it copied fairly cheaply and easily before them.
Mimeographs, for example, were used with much the same regularity that photocopiers enjoyed later on. A single person with a typewriter and access to a mimeograph machine could quickly and readily make their own run of prints with minimal effort or cost - and indeed, people did exactly that all the time, particularly for things like pamphlets, fliers, and all the other sorts of things they would later use photocopiers to achieve.
I struggle to see how photocopiers offered teachers and academics anything other than mild convenience over mimeographs and other similar methods. And I imagine much of the convenience in college settings came not in the existence of the photocopier itself, but in the presence of a copying machine of any sort directly on campus. (Similar to computers arriving on campuses later on - the availability of the school-owned machines without having to go pay to use someone else's was the primary benefit.)
@G.
ReplyDeleteAs the excerpted passage suggests, the advantage of the photocopier is that you can copy substantial numbers of pages directly from a book and hand them out to a class. Thus, if some medieval saint's life was translated and published in a book in 1880, and nowhere else, you can copy the 10 or 20 pages of the saint's life (early saint's lives were often pretty short) and hand it out. And if you're, say, teaching a course on early medieval religion, you may want to do this quite a bit for one course.
@David
ReplyDeleteIndeed. But you could also take those same 10 or 20 pages in that same book, sit down at your type writer with them, and simply type them out, then make just as many copies.
Yes, it takes the added time of type-copying each page for the master - comparable to the amount of time it would take a modern keyboard user to type out a copy of a page of text, with a bit extra time added because you would go slower to avoid mistakes that you could not easily correct without modern word processing (or take the time to retype a page if you DID make a mistake; or just live with the mistake, because your lecture attendees will happily overlook a few typos).
But the actual act of creating duplicates on mimeographs in the 1960s was actually FASTER than on early photocopiers.
So really, we're not talking about a huge difference in time savings to copy something 10 to 20 pages long. A professor could still put together a lecture on short notice, they would just need to spend an hour or two sitting at their typewriter the night before making a master, and then take that master to the mimeograph machine to copy it in bulk.
As I said - photocopying was quicker, and eventually cheaper. You save a couple hours, which is nice. But my point was that photocopiers did NOT make it possible "for the first time" to prepare a lecture or seminar on short notice and be able to supply copies to everyone. That was something anyone could EASILY do, as far back as the early 1900s!
If you want to argue that saving a few hours in transcription beforehand was somehow revolutionary to the way people taught, I'm going to need something more to convince me. As I suggested earlier, I think the bigger deal was the very PRESENCE of a copying machine in a college for professors to avail themselves of - if your college didn't have a mimeograph machine, but it DID have a new photocopier, it's not the time savings that make the difference... it's the ready availability of a copying machine of any kind whatsoever that matters.
@G.
ReplyDeleteFirst, I'm amused by your phrases "simply type them out," "a couple hours," "EASILY," and similar locutions. I was a wretched typist, and did not improve with years of experience. Faced with a miserable, sweat-soaked, mass-of-wastepaper producing afternoon, I would have bagged it. If that makes me a slacker, then the revolution was, slackers got to do a little more, which is good enough for me.
Second, the idea would have been to do this repeatedly, for as much as every class of a multiple-course semester.
Third, photocopying allowed research in hard-to-access, often competed-over books to take place away from libraries, with convenient marginal notes, re-access in the middle of writing when you suddenly realized what the key passage was, etc.
Fourth, it sounds like you're operating from a priori assumption rather than experience; apologies if I'm wrong. I've spend the last, more or less, 45 or so years in this world, counting the last years of high school when I had to write multiple research papers. YMMV, but I know what mine was.
We agree that photocopiers made things quicker and easier.
ReplyDeleteBut easier and quicker is something very different than making possible something that wasn't possible before, which the originally sourced quote claims.
On the note of you personally having been a wretched typist, I would think that many professors of the age would be fairly competent ones - and even those professors who were not, and were indeed wretched, still had the option of going to a professional typist and having them type something up for them for a small fee. Likely you could find such a typist in the same place you were sourcing your access to a mimeograph, and could enlist their services at the same time you rent the use of their machine.
On the note of repeated usage over the course of semesters, yes, the extra time adds up, but again, that's mere convenience - it was still entirely feasible to create 50 to 100 copies of an excerpt in relatively short order with a mimeograph (part of an afternoon), when making copies by hand would take exceedingly long amounts of time, or making copies by moveable type would be prohibitively expensive.
On the note of copying hard-to-access, competed-over books, I don't see what point you are trying to make, since whether you use a mimeograph or a photocopier, you still need to access the book for a while (either to scan for the entire length of time you photocopy, or to have a typist create a master from it). Yes - once you had copies, those copies could allow people to research without access to the book. But again, you could get those exact same copies from a mimeograph, just slightly less quickly. We're not talking days or weeks of delay or anything - just a very modest amount of prior preparation.
And finally, on the note of your age, the very number you supply shows that you weren't around for the transition from mimeographs to photocopiers, so I fail to see how you have any more claim to wisdom on the matter than anyone else of your age or less.
And yet, I have so many lovely memories . . . the ability to copy a book, just like that . . . greater promise never beckoned. To take the stack home and set it down on one's desk, still warm . . . it was almost like reading it, only . . . better. And the machine scent that lingered--! Was it all an illusion? Perhaps yes, it was . . . only now, at the end, do I see . . .
ReplyDelete