Tuesday, February 09, 2010

The [old] medium is [not] the message......Last Paleographer in Uk cut

With all the 'great news' about Ebooks, Amazon fighting Macmillan's, the Ipad, it seems that the pass may have no relevance in how we read previously. It seems King's announced recently that it was to close the UK's only chair of palaeography. From ­September, the current holder of the chair, Professor David Ganz, will be out of a job, and the subject will no longer exist as a separate academic discipline in British universities.
It seems a shame that the study of ancient writing has now disappeared. I suppose we could always study them via twitter or even show our outrage by starting a facebook page. That will make losing our history and culture so modern and at least we'll feel we have done something modern to show we won't put up with this. Or maybe not.......

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

There already is a facebook page woith over 4700 members

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=303202385890&ref=share

And online petition with over 5500 signatures

http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?spkcl10&1

And some extraordinary letters here

http://www.palaeographia.org/cipl/actu/paleoatkings.htm

library2.0 said...

No disrespect, but will facebook and online petition really stop Kings get rid of the paleography seat? I don't think so.

Its all well and good having a cyber presence, but would not a better way to be to picket kings? Picket mandelson?

I feel the facebook/i petition pages are the lazy form of making a point. There none political and don't work.