From the About the Project page:
ARETE is a project of the UCLAB at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam. The central result of the project is the interactive visualization of the history of the Latin alphabet. In particular, the visualization shows the temporal and formal relationships of the different scripts and typefaces to each other.
Our main concern was to show the diversity and variance of the Latin alphabet over the centuries. It is often suggested that the Roman Capitalis evolved to Antiqua scripts to today’s Grotesk in a linear way. However, we believe that this is only one possible view among many. Like any cultural development, the history of type and script is, at its core, a network. Over the centuries, designers have learned from others, referred to existing designs, and developed variants. There were times of greater standardization and then again times of great variance. The Arete project wants to show and clarify this diversity and these different design lines.
Another concern was to show not only the typographic history, but also the history of calligraphy and handwriting. Even after the invention of printing, a lot of text production occurred by hand. In the 17th and 18th centuries, various social, economic and cultural developments even caused handwriting to flourish.
Lots more info at the link; it’s a pleasing layout, even if I don’t understand all the ins and outs — there are lots of things to click on. (Via chavenet’s MeFi post.)
Many years ago at a conference I was chatting with someone who told me they were building a corpus of historical letters. ‘Oh, Briefe or Buchstaben?’ I asked. He was working with Briefe, although it occurred to me after that moment of ambiguity that a corpus of historical Buchstaben would also be an interesting project to investigate the evolution of the alphabet over time.
Well, now someone’s done it, and indeed it seems they have drawn some interesting conclusions from it!
Am I missing something? There is a ton of literature, scholarly and popular, about Latin Paleography, the history of writing in Europe, the history of typefaces, and all that. Did I miss something? All I can find at the site is the “timeline”, which is pretty thin, even if you click on the information icons.
I concur with Y: there must be something I don’t see in the value of this project. Given its acknowledged heavy dependence on František Muzika’s “Die schöne Schrift”, I’m not sure why I wouldn’t buy that and be done with it.
Very nice chart. And I am a big fan of Muzika’s “Die schöne Schrift”
But the evolution of letter forms is something that needs a bit more detail than that.
Each letter has its own story.
…
They’ve also lumped together a lot leaving a lot of detail out. My favourite old script – Beneventan – should be somewhere under “Medieval regional scripts”.
It is said that the ampersand was first developed in Beneventan.
…
Even now what strikes me is regional handwriting variation (to the extent that anyone does handwriting that is).
For example, here in Australia, school lettering books teach that the capital letter I has serifs.
In Croatia by contrast, the school version of the capital I is without serifs and is identical to the lower case L
‘There is a ton of literature…’ – having wasted several evenings on attempts to figure when-where-how our capitalisation practice arose (an annoyed Chinese-speaking boy asked ‘why do you do it?’ and I always take such questions seriously, for out the mouth of babes) and found nothing I’m tempted to ironise:)
(I haven’t checked the site yet, and am not objecting to anything said here)
zyxt, Beneventan is nice, and I didn’t know about it’s use in Dalmatia!
Beneventan in Dalmatia? Where is that mentioned? I am very doubtful.
(I’m also a bit amused to learn from Croatian WP that ‘local, of that place’ (fem) is tamošnja. The word has the status of colloqualism in Russian, mestn[aja] ‘local’ is used instead, as in English. I actively use tamošn[‘aja], it’s one of those instances where the literary register annoyingly limits itself. It’s convenient to have an adjective from ‘there’ and come to think of it, ‘local’ IS a pronoun. What surprised me is not this, but the use of same šn)
Y, https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escritura_beneventana (ah, and English WP has it too. I’m browsing the Internet with Spanish VPN, listening to youtube advertisments in Spanish:)…)
When I google ‘Briefe’, GT translates it as буквы (‘Buchstaben’). Still through English:/
It is a bit perplexing that their ”about” is more complex than the tool their ”about” is about.:)
Also, while I’m not a fan of interactive media and scripts, their tool is more complex than its content. Even a fan of such tools will question such a choise.
Or is this to make it work for mobile users?
Well, I approve the plan, but… xkcd wou have done it better. I wouldn’t be so rude if it were a work of a single guy or gal, but they’re a project with a ‘team’ and ‘funding’ and what not.
As I understand it: 1. visualisation 2. each script is based on many influences
Both are good. But: for the second idea arrows (of informative thickness) aren’t enough. Better than without them, yet to learn something from them one needs more information about those influences. Why do we believe in this specific influence, how and why scribes picked this or that etc.
Visualising complex information in a way that facilitates thinking about it is good. Sometimes achieved by simplification, like here. Good too, but simplification doesn’t take a ‘project’. Or funding. Artistically: no more no less than an exercise in web design. The designer’s goal (as I perceive it) is making the site look neat and fashionable.
For German, we had a page of successive historical quotes in our schoolbook one year. The oldest recommended capitalizing the names of princes and cities, I think, “because it is decorative / and pretty”. Two or three centuries of inflation later, the current “all nouns” stage was reached (with ongoing quibbles about what exactly counts as a noun).
Obligatory: this is almost identical to what I was taught in 1988/9; the most consequential difference is I wasn’t taught the tilt. Uppercase i has the top of 1 and the bottom of J, lowercase L is a loop, J has a loop below the line.