The world on paper is an apt metaphor for analyzing the implications of literacy for by creating texts which serve as representations one came to deal not with the world but with the world as depicted or described. To create representations is not merely to record speeches or to construct mnemonics; it is to construct visible artifacts with a degree of autonomy from their author and with special properties for controlling how they will be interpreted.
We can see just how well seventeenth-century artists and writers succeeded in their attempt to put the world on paper by examining the evolution of representations in five domains: representational paintings of Dutch art, the representation of the world in maps, representation of physical motion in mathematical notations, the representation of botanical species in herbals, and the representation of imaginative events in fiction.
The close relation between maps and landscapes is also indicated by the fact that the point of view from which the artist viewed the landscape was often similar to that assumed in a map – the view from nowhere… For the Dutch of the period, there was no strict distinction between maps and art, between knowledge and decoration, for “pictures challenged texts as a central way of understanding the world.”
The Micronesians and the Polynesians navigated thousands of miles in the South Pacific between Samoa, Hawaii and Easter Islands arriving at destinations visible from as little as ten miles away after days of sailing in an unmarked, uncharted sea. – The navigator visualizes himself as the fixed center of two moving frames of reference, one provided by the islands among which he sails and the other provided by the pattern of stars which wheel overhead from east to west. The navigator thinks of the boat as stationary while the point of embarkation recedes and the destination approaches.
Although geographers had taken the critical step of representing the physical world by means of an abstract geometry – seeing the world in terms of a geometrical sphere with its known mathematical properties…
Pictures provided the medium in which knowledge of the natural world could be represented. Only when drawing was coordinated with scientific description … did botanical drawings become diagrams and did botany become a science.
The paper world, therefore, did not simply provide a means for accumulating and storing what everyone knew. Rather it was a matter of inventing the conceptual means for coordinating the bits of geographical, biological, mechanical, and other forms of knowledge acquired from many sources into an adequate and common frame of reference. This common frame of reference became the theoretical model into which local knowledge was inserted and reorganized. This is the sense, I believe, in which western science of that period acquired the distinctive property of being theoretical science.
Citation: Olson, D. R. (1996). The world on paper: The conceptual and cognitive implications of writing and reading. Cambridge University Press.