IN 1981, TWO YEARS AFTER FINISHING A PH.D. in computer science at Stanford University, I went to London to study calligraphy and bookbinding. My intention was clear: to leave the world of high tech and immerse myself in a traditional craft. To those around me, this seemed at best impractical and at worst just plain stupid. Why would someone throw away a hard-earned degree, a ticket to success? And for what purpose — to study what? I remember one conversation with an uncle, who tried to persuade me to make my fortune first and pursue my hobbies later.
It wasn’t hard to understand these reactions. To most people, calligraphy must seem a minor craft at best, the moral equivalent of macramé — hardly worthy of serious, let alone full-time, study it represents a quaint and dusty past, a medieval world of monks with cowls and quills. Whereas computer science is the craft of the new priestly class, and pays accordingly. What could possibly tempt one to abandon the shiny new for the shabby old?
In fact, the discontinuity wasn’t as great as it seemed. As an undergraduate, I had been passionately interested in language and literature as well as computers. I was aware of, and fascinated by, boundary issues between disciplines: C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures had introduced me to the rift between the sciences and the arts, and Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine essayist and storyteller, to the playful interaction of fact and fiction. After college, I entered a doctoral program in artificial intelligence (AI), hoping to explore questions at the intersection of language, mind, and technology.
It didn’t take long to discover that neither AI nor computer science offered the richness of perspective I longed for. (With hindsight it seems foolish to have sought it where I did.) Both disciplines seemed ungrounded to me, lacking cultural and historical perspective. My early graduate studies of language centered around analyzing the syntax and semantics of sentences like “John hit Mary.” From the sublime to the misogynistic — how much further from poetry and literature could you get? The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus had just written What Computers Can’t Do, a strong attack on AI claiming that its conception of intelligence — and indeed its very understanding of human thought and action — was fundamentally wrong. In those days it wasn’t acceptable to acknowledge you’d even read the book. I wasn’t very happy.
Partly as an antidote, I began to study calligraphy, taking evening classes in San Francisco. This was actually a return to a childhood interest. I had first been exposed to the craft by my fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Unterberger, a wonderful man with a great love of books and stories. Once the required work — spelling and arithmetic — was out of the way, he would sit on the edge of his desk and talk with us about books, not just their content but their physical properties: paper and margins and typefaces. At some point he handed out Speedball pens and India ink and encouraged us to make calligraphic letters, composed of thick and thin strokes. I was hooked, and for years afterward I continued to draw letters, although with little understanding of how the broad-edged pen actually worked.
While I was a graduate student, two significant developments were happening in the world of computers. In my department at Stanford, Donald Knuth was developing the computer typesetting system TeX and the typeface design tool MetaFont; and at Xerox PARC, the high-tech think tank where I was a research intern, the personal computer was being invented, along with powerful tools for doing computer-based typography and graphic design. These were major steps in the invention of digital documents and digital document technologies. I wasn’t involved in either effort, other than as a user of the technologies being created. (I wrote my dissertation on an Alto computer using the Bravo editor, precursors of the Macintosh and Microsoft Word, respectively)
On completion of my doctorate, I decided to study calligraphy full-time. This was both a move toward the richness of expression and opportunity I felt the craft offered and a move away from the (for me) stultifying narrowness of computer work. In the fall of 1981 I entered the one full-time calligraphy program I had found in the English-speaking world, a program in Calligraphy and Bookbinding at Digby Stuart College in London, established by Ann Camp. Immersing myself in these studies, I began to find some of the extra dimension lacking in my academic work: a sense of history and culture, the freedom to play with visual language, and permission to explore a broad range of literary texts. (My main project for the first year was the design and execution of a calligraphic work based on the climax of Borgess story “The Aleph.”) Our studies stressed historical understanding as the basis for sound design and grounded innovation. The visual and the historical went hand-in-hand. And the craft itself, the handwork, was a counterweight to the highly intellectualized, abstracted work of graduate school. It was a pleasure to train my hands to make things that carried meaning — in virtue of their linguistic content, as well as their form and their place in history and culture.
Calligraphy had been revived in England around the turn of the twentieth century as part of the Arts and Crafts Movement, which arose as a protest against the dehumanizing effects of industrialization and bureaucratization. The initial protests had come from the workers, the so-called Luddites, beginning in Nottingham in 1811. Today the term Luddite has come to mean anyone who is (or is perceived to be) anti-technology. But the original Luddites weren’t lodging a general protest against machines or industrialization; they were unhappy with certain specific effects of mechanization on the textile industry, notably lower wages and the poor quality of goods. Initially they vented their anger at the machines, not at people.
But unhappiness with the culture of the machine soon spread to the educated classes as well. In 1829 the historian Thomas Carlyle wrote an influential essay, “Signs of the Times,” in which he protested against the ways people were becoming “mechanical in head and heart, as well as in hand.”1 Later in the century, John Ruskin, the eminent English art critic, was equally vehement in his condemnation of machines. The problem, he said, was not so much with the machines themselves as with the effects they had on their products and on the human beings who used them. “It is . . . possible and even usual,” he wrote in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, published in 1849, “for men to sink into machines themselves, so that even hand work has all the character of mechanization.”2
With Ruskin as its standard bearer, the Arts and Crafts Movement arose in England in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Where the industrial ethos championed the mass production of machine-made artifacts, the artisans of this new movement advocated the crafting of individual, custom-designed and handmade artifacts for particular clients. Where industrial methods stressed speed, efficiency, and quantity, the craft ethos emphasized deliberate craftwork and quality. These values were applied to a succession of products, among them furniture, architecture, pottery, textiles, and metalwork.
It was through this movement, too, that calligraphy was revived, when the architect W. R. Lethaby asked a young man, Edward Johnston, to teach a course on the subject at the Central School of Art and Design in London. Johnston had no prior experience in the subject — no one did. Quill pens were still in use at the time, although they were being increasingly supplanted by steel. For many centuries prior to the invention of the printing press, the quill, cut with a broad or flat edge rather than a point, had been the principal tool for manuscript and book production. Following the ascension of print, its use had gradually declined — especially for the purposes of the mass production of texts — and the art of writing, the masterful use of a broad-edged tool to make “beautiful writing,” had essentially been lost.
Johnston, an intense and introspective young man who had dropped out of medical school for reasons of health, began by studying medieval manuscripts in the British Museum, trying to work out how they had been made. In partnership with his students at the Central School, over the next two decades he gradually recovered the main techniques — cutting quills, preparing vellum (calfskin), gilding (laying gold), mixing ink, and, of course, writing with a broad-edged pen. My teacher, Ann Camp, had studied with Irene Wellington, perhaps the best of Johnston’s students.
In my studies in London, I too learned to cut and use quills, to prepare vellum for writing, to lay gold. I learned the basics of bookbinding: how to fold paper (much more involved than you might think), how to sew book pages together, how to cover books with cloth and leather bindings. I studied historical letterforms, read extensively in the history of writing, looked at lots of art. But mostly I did calligraphy: I spent endless hours “with quill or pen in hand, writing, designing, experimenting. It wasn’t unusual for me to spend the entire weekend at my drawing table, lost in explorations of form and meaning, in the tactile pleasures of laying ink on paper, in the knotty but earthy problems of visual design.
At the end of those two years, I wasn’t sure what to do next. Throughout my studies I had done computer consulting work on the side as a means of supporting myself. I happened to be doing computer work in California the summer of 1983, the summer following my second year in London. As it turned out, that August the International Typographic Association was sponsoring a Working Seminar on Digital Typography at Stanford. Digital typography (the use of computers to typeset documents and to design typefaces for display on computer screens and on paper) was in its infancy then. The organizer of the seminar urged me to attend. From his point of view, I must have seemed an ideal candidate, with training in both computers and calligraphy. But I was hesitant: I had scrupulously kept my craft work distinct from my computer work, afraid that the latter and its high-tech values might contaminate the former. He persevered, though, and I enrolled.
And how right he was. The Atypi seminar profoundly affected my thinking. I found myself amid a very interesting and wide-ranging group of speakers and attendees, among them calligraphers, typographers, computer scientists, graphic designers, and historians. Sometime around the middle of the conference I had an epiphany: The computer is the writing tool of the future. On the face of it, this is hardly an earth-shattering insight. For me, though, it required a significant leap in both my intellectual and emotional life. I had been programming and using computers for nearly twenty years, and had been educated to view the computer primarily as a very powerful calculating device or, in the tradition of AI, as an artificial mind. It was therefore something of a leap for me to see it as a tool in the lineage of the quill, the pen, the printing press, and the typewriter. But once so located, it acquired a historical and cultural context — a past and a future. The epiphany seemed to signal that I was ready to bring together the two worlds I had so assiduously kept apart.
Less than a year later I was offered a full-time research position at Xerox PARC. I jumped at the chance to explore my epiphany. I wanted to see what could be said about the computer as a writing tool — how it was like or unlike prior writing technologies. I also wanted to understand what could be said about the products of writing, the written forms or documents, produced by computers, in contrast with those produced on paper, with pens and pencils, typewriters and printing presses. And so I returned to PARC with a direction, if not a clear agenda or research program. I was back in the world of high tech — at the high temple of technology, no less — but with a very different outlook from the one I had held in my graduate-student days. I was no longer concerned with artificial minds, but with tools that enable natural minds to express themselves, and with artifacts that carry and preserve cultural achievements. I was no longer afraid that computer work would contaminate calligraphy, but was instead hopeful that calligraphy might contaminate computers. My idea was not literally to bring calligraphy into the computer age, or even to design digital type based on a calligraphic understanding of letterforms, as some have done, but instead somehow to carry the spirit of calligraphy — some of its worldview and values — into the thinking about documents in the age of computers.
I had been back at PARC for less two years when something happened at Xerox that lent further support to my efforts. Most people associate Xerox with photocopying, and with good reason. In 1947 Xerox (then called the Haloid Corporation) acquired rights to xerography from its inventor, Chester Carlson. With the protection afforded by its patent on xerography, Xerox prospered. In 1970 it created the Palo Alto Research Center, setting it far from its core business units in Rochester, New York. PARC was given a mandate to think bold new thoughts. And that’s just what it did. Within five years a team of researchers had invented the personal computer and invented or adapted virtually all the supporting hardware and software that have become the mainstay of the personal computer industry These included raster screens, the mouse, laser printers, and software for producing text and graphics documents that looked the same on the screen as when they were printed on paper. By 1975, when I first came to PARC, these devices were in regular use by everyone at PARC. It was obvious to all that we had seen the future and it was us.
But it was less obvious to Xerox executives three thousand miles away. Geographically and organizationally separated from the rest of Xerox, PARC had gained the autonomy and perspective that enabled it to innovate; but this isolation also made communication with the rest of the corporation — especially of radically new ideas — that much more difficult. It wasn’t obvious to executives focused on the photocopier business what the market would be for these new inventions, or why Xerox should care. In fact, at that time no such market existed. Over the next ten years, Xerox tried and failed to make a business of personal computers; many of the PARC inventions found their way to other companies, including Apple and Microsoft.
By the mid-1980s, though, one thing was clear to Xerox’s top management: its heartland business would shortly be affected by the new computer technologies. The development of low-cost scanners and printers meant that a personal computer could, in effect, be turned into a copier; the computer market was probably going to merge with and overtake the copier market. A concerted effort was undertaken to develop a new vision and identity for Xerox, one that would capitalize on its strength in photocopying and its public identification with this technology.
I had been back at PARC for less than two years when Xerox announced that it intended to move beyond its image as a “photocopier company” to become a “document company.” Through the successful introduction of the photocopier, Xerox strategists reasoned, it had revolutionized the handling of paper documents in the office. And through the invention of the personal computer and its associated technologies, it had revolutionized — had practically invented — the handling of digital documents as well. By taking documents as its explicit focus — a notion big enough to encompass both of these developments — it now saw an opportunity to fashion an identity and an agenda for the future. That was the intuition, at any rate, and attempts to articulate it, both inside PARC and across the corporation, precipitated a conversation that lasted for years. What are documents, anyway? Does it make sense to extend the notion to digital materials, and if so, on what basis? Why does it even matter, and why should anyone care?
The Palo Alto Research Center, it turned out, was an ideal place to investigate such questions. The idea behind documents is a very big one, spanning art and science, the academy and industry, mind and body, technology and people, past and future. PARC was itself, intellectually, a very big place, sitting on the boundary between academic and corporate life and bringing together physical scientists, computer scientists, linguists, anthropologists, psychologists, artists, and the occasional philosopher. “The boundary,” Paul Tillich once said, “is the best place for acquiring knowledge.” Sitting on the boundary between multiple disciplines and worldviews, PARC was the perfect place to investigate an idea too big to be located in a single discipline or to be defined by a single approach.
When I returned to PARC in 1984, I brought with me several kinds of knowledge that have proved invaluable in my quest to understand documents. As a computer scientist, I was conversant with digital developments — in ways only a practitioner can be. As a student of calligraphy, I had developed some fluency with the tools and techniques of earlier crafts, had cultivated a sense of visual design, and had acquired some feeling for history and for the unfold- ing of document technologies in historical time. But it was only at PARC that I began to learn methods and approaches for studying explicitly how people use technologies. Close collaboration with PARC’s small group of anthropologists over more than a decade nurtured my sense of the subtle interplay between technology and human practice. Both my computer and my calligraphy studies had essentially been technical enterprises: they were focused first and foremost on artifacts — on computer programs in the first case and on handwritten documents in the second. An awareness of people and their patterns of use was present, but only distantly so. My exposure to anthropology, however, began to turn this way of seeing upside down, making people and their activities the central focus, and locating artifacts in the flow of ongoing human work.
These are some of the personal and historical forces that have been at play for me as I have pursued an understanding of documents. It was only as I was drafting the final chapter of this book that I became aware of another major influence on this work. Nearly thirty years ago, I delivered a controversial commencement address at my college graduation. It was 1971 and the country was in turmoil. The Vietnam War, racial unrest, and the recent assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy had created a poisoned, oppositional climate. At my college’s graduation ceremony the previous year, the valedictorian had spoken out against the war, urging graduates to flee to Canada to avoid the draft. The administration wanted no more of such behavior. They put a fifteen-minute limit on the speech I was to deliver.
In my address, I began by describing an incident that had happened to me several months before. I had gone to bed after a long evening of studying, and had been awakened in the middle of the night by terrible, literally gut-wrenching, stomach pains. Suddenly afraid that I might die, I looked over at my desk where my books were neatly stacked from the evening’s work. In the light of my impending death, they seemed absolutely meaningless — no more than “black ink on white paper,” I told the five thousand people seated on the lawn in front of the college library.
Since that time, I went on, I had found it hard to live. Where was the meaning in life? I had considered suicide, but been unwilling to commit it. I then proceeded to ask a series of questions guaranteed to upset one constituency in the audience after another. Could rich parents tell me how money made their lives worthwhile? Could alumni tell me how their (hallowed) undergraduate experience made their lives worthwhile? Could students please tell me how their studies made their lives worthwhile? I concluded by asking those with answers to write me a letter. I even supplied my parents’ mailing address. (Afterward a friend approached me and asked if this had been a pun — giving the “valedictory address.”)
I had never intended the speech to travel beyond my immediate academic community. But a friend of mine, unbeknownst to me, was a stringer for The New York Times. He had alerted them to the subject of my speech, and a Times reporter was in the audience that day. He interviewed me afterward. What did I intend to do now? he asked. I’d like to be a bartender, I replied. Naturally this made it into the article. Through his reporting, my story made it onto the wire services. Stories with titles like “Valedictorian Despairs” began appearing in newspapers and on the radio all around the country. Paul Harvey, the syndicated commentator, did a short radio piece. Art Buchwald, the political humorist, wrote a column following on the New York Times article. The gist was, didn’t I know that bartenders need to listen to other people’s problems, not tell them theirs?
Letters poured in, not only from those in attendance but from people all over the country. Some were quite hostile — and with good reason. One alumnus accused me of spoiling the party — “pissing in the champagne,” he called it. But many others offered deeply heartfelt responses. Some were remarkable gifts. The further the speech traveled geographically and socially from its original audience, the more its complexities disappeared. The anger and frustration in the questions, the partly taunting “in your face” quality, dropped away What remained was the cry for meaning of a lonely, despairing individual — “the voice of one crying in the wilderness.”
The speech had actually been a mixture of truth and fiction. I had been awakened several months earlier by terrible stomach pains, and had indeed been afraid that I might die. But when the incident was over, I had felt great relief, an appreciation for the life I had been given, not the despair I reported. Still, the questions were genuine and the anger and unhappiness behind them were genuine, too. I was mad at society and at the elitism of my school. I was unhappy with my life (and detested being told again and again that my undergraduate years were the best years of my life). I was searching for meaning.
For months prior to this, I had been struggling to write an appropriately deep and wise speech. Then, one night, the words I eventually spoke at the commencement emerged in the course of a half hour, as if being dictated to me. During this period I had been rereading Dostoyevsky’s “Notes from Underground,” a novella in which the protagonist, a bitter, resentful man, tells the world the truth it doesn’t want to hear. The title, literally translated from the Russian, is “Notes from Under the Floorboards.” The image is that of a bug, a cockroach, who dares to speak out from the underbelly (or the underfoot) of society. It was his voice, in effect, that was speaking in my address. Without the use of the first-person singular, it wouldn’t have had the same immediacy and power. The four paragraphs that emerged took exactly fifteen minutes to deliver.
The speech was bold and naive . . . and stupid. It was a product of its time and of my own confusion. Once it was out of the box, though, there was no putting it back. I rode out the ripples — my fifteen minutes of fame — and they slowly died down. I did my best to eliminate further publicity. Time and Newsweek approached me to do stories. They wanted to include material from the letters I had been sent. I refused them access to the letters, and no stories appeared.
It was only as I was working on the concluding chapter of this book that I realized how much my work of the preceding years, and how much the content of this book, are responses to that youthful address and the circumstances surrounding it. Thirty years ago, in my first real occasion for public communication, I was struggling not only with the great questions of life but with the forms and mechanisms of public address. Perhaps my single strongest memory of that day was the moment I took the podium. In the pause before I began speaking, and in the fifteen minutes during which I spoke, I was aware of the power of speech.
Words that had come to me weeks earlier and had been written down, polished, rehearsed, typed up, and carried to the podium had been transformed into spoken utterances. These utterances, delivered in a communal, ceremonial setting, put into motion a whole cascade of events involving other written forms. These included the letters mailed to me, numbering in the hundreds, the New York Times article, the AP and UPI stories, and the subsequent articles in newspapers around the country. Through these responses of various kinds, I experienced the power of speaking out publicly. But I also experienced the loss of power that was equally involved, as my words were appropriated and interpreted in new settings. It had never been completely straightforward who the “I” was who was speaking in my address. (Perhaps it never is.) As my words and the reports of them traveled, further dimensions of personhood and identity were attached to me — ‘Valedictorian,” “despairing individual,” ‘lost soul.” It was all much more complex than I could ever have guessed when, sitting at my desk in my dorm room, I had written out those four paragraphs.
Although the speech wasn’t literally about documents, written forms had also played an important rhetorical part in it. The books neatly stacked on my desk had symbolized many things at once. To the audience it would have been immediately, and perhaps largely unconsciously, apparent that they represented the long Western tradition of study and learning, and the values embedded in these. To me personally, books were a source of delight, and the locus of my daily routines of reading and study. To suggest that those books — and not only those particular books, but all books and the practices and values they symbolized — were without significance was at once to deny the very traditions that formed the background for the graduation ceremony and that provided grounding for my own sense of self.
I have learned a few things in the intervening years. At least I hope so. Although I am still angry about society’s hypocrisies, I am more aware of the moral complexities we face every day (and more aware of my own hypocrisy). Little in life is black and white — even black ink on white paper has many more shades than might at first appear. I am aware that righteous anger and self-righteous anger are dangerously close — and that, indeed, the latter can masquerade as the former. I am also aware that people don’t react well to being taunted with the deep, and possibly unanswerable, questions of life. People really only listen to love letters, says Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist peace activist and poet. Besides, life is hard enough without the occasions for genuine celebration being pissed on.
I have also spent these many years investigating the nature of written forms. Whereas thirty years ago, books and other kinds of documents were vehicles of study for me, they have become the objects of my study I can’t say I ever really thought that books were merely black ink on white paper — I had, after all, loved them deeply since childhood. But I have spent many years trying to say just what they are, and trying to assess the significance of the movement from ink and paper to pixels and screens. It is to this story — a love letter to documents — that I now turn.