A book’s title page contains more than its namesake—including its author, contributors, publisher, and release date, and. Antiquarian books are known for having lengthy titles, especially those of a scientific nature. These books’ frequently unassuming title pages are gateways to a wealth of knowledge and the focal point of this project.
Title pages of antique influential scientific books covering a variety of subjects were coded and reimagined as colorful cityscapes based solely on their words to illustrate the unique body of knowledge readers would find within.
Boxes were drawn around each word of a title page and color-coded by its first letter (words beginning with “A” are one color, “B” another, and so on). Each title page has its own palette. Those boxes were then upended and arranged to form an abstract cityscape while maintaining their original sizes relative to each other.
I’m a historian of innovation. I write mostly about the causes of Britain’s Industrial Revolution, focusing on the lives of the individual innovators who made it happen. I’m interested in everything from the exploits of sixteenth-century alchemists to the schemes of Victorian engineers. My research explores why they became innovators, and the institutions they created to promote innovation even further.
To truly increase innovation, I think we need policies focused on what goes on even further upstream, before much of the supply of new inventors is inevitably siphoned off into distractions, dead ends, and failure. Most policies inevitably have a marginal effect, but a slight expansion of the incoming swell of potential inventors can have a much greater impact than fiddling with the incentives of the few hundred who’ve already somewhat made it to the final trickle. Increase the strength of the flow upstream, and everything downstream flows the faster too.