THE BEGINNINGS OF MEDIEVAL INFORMATION VISUALIZATION - Information Visualisation: Techniques, Usability and Evaluation - page 5

century, there were insufficient literate individuals to help administer the
expanding state. For the Church at that time, illiteracy meant that not all
priests possessed the requisite skill to read the Vulgate Bible. Language
and communication were issues as well. The decline of the Roman Empire
had engendered a regionalization of Latin dialects, the future modern
romance languages, which seriously impeded communication across
Europe. During the last quarter of the eighth century Charlemagne
executed a program of reforms that would transform the state, and become
known as the Carolingian Renaissance [8] . A major part of his programme
was to attract many of the leading scholars of his day to his court. With the
aid of one of these scholars, the English monk Alcuin of York (c. 735-
804), who arrived at his court in 782, a programme of cultural
revitalization and educational transformation was undertaken to restore old
schools and found new ones throughout his empire, each under the
guidance of a monastery, cathedral, or noble court. A standard curriculum
was developed that established the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric),
and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy) as the basis
for education, and textbook writing was undertaken. A standardized
version of Latin was also developed that became the common language of
scholarship and supported pan-European administration of the empire.
Writing was standardized too. The Carolingian minuscule was introduced
to increase the uniformity, clarity, and legibility of handwriting. It was
used between 800 and 1200 to write codices, pagan and Christian
manuscripts, and educational texts [9].
Medieval Visualization
In general, early medieval scholars were more concerned with the study
and preservation of classical texts than generating new scholarship. For
example, in Eastwood's discussion of Roman astronomy's impact on
Carolingian science education [10], he considers the four most influential,
widely disseminated classical scientific texts that can be found in the
manuscripts originating during the Carolingian Renaissance [3, p. 197]:
Macrobius's Commentary on the Dream of Scipio , Pliny's Natural History ,
Martianus Capella's On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury , and
Calcidius's Commentarius (Commentaries) on Plato's Timaeus . The
significance of these works from an information visualization perspective
is that they contain diagrams explicitly created to elucidate concepts
within their respective texts. In some cases the diagrams that appeared in
manuscripts needed to be invented by medieval readers, because none
were specified in the original source (e.g. Pliny, Capella). In other cases,