The global spread of the Printing Press | A collection of points representing an enthusiasm for data
Some years ago I spotted a lovely image on one of my trawls through the internet. While I do enjoy a breathtaking landscape or a beautifully captured scene - preferably with archaeology involved - this was something special. It was a simple set of six maps of Europe showing the 'Cities with Printing' at decade intervals from 1450 to 1500. It clearly showed an explosion from the single dot representing Johannes Gutenberg and his Bible in Mainz around 1452 to incorporate cities across the continent, from Portugal to Poland and from the toe of Italy to southern England by the turn of the sixteenth-century. A bit of searching led me to Nicholas Carr's Rough Type blog, and thence to Jeremiah Dittmar's 2011 paper Information Technology and Economic Change: The Impact of the Printing Press . It's well worth a read as he manages to quantify the rate and magnitude of city growth where early printing presses were established over those who were left behind in the ad...