An exploration of the original Information Technology – the writing systems of history

The Writing Revolution: Cuneiform to the Internet explores the origins, historical development, adaptations, linguistic properties, cultural context, and social impact of one of humankind's greatest inventions: writing systems. Now in its second edition, this popular book traces the history of writing from the earliest proto-cuneiform tablet to the latest AI-generated text. Author Amalia E. Gnanadesikan offers an engaging, highly readable narrative account of how different writing systems originated, how they evolved over time, and how they have represented languages around the world.

Concise, easy-to-digest chapters cover each of the world's major written traditions across time and space, including Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese characters, Bronze-Age Linear B, New World writing systems, the Roman alphabet, and many others. Updated throughout, The Writing Revolution features new and expanded coverage of the Digital Age, including Unicode, the World Wide Web, emojis, generative AI, and more.

Investigating how the creation of writing made the modern world possible, The Writing Revolution:

• Covers the world's major writing systems as well as a selection of lesser-known scripts
• Discusses papyrus, paper, the printing press, digital writing, and other associated technologies
• Features engaging examples throughout, including Egyptian funerary texts, Maya calendars, Arabic calligraphy, Morse code, and modern text messaging
• Interweaves ideas from cultural studies, archaeology, linguistics, literature, anthropology, and information science

The Writing Revolution is a must-read for students of writing systems, linguistics, information science, and intellectual history, as well as general readers with an interest in the history of written language.

Amalia E. Gnanadesikan was the Technical Director for Language Analysis at the University of Maryland Center for Advanced Study of Language. Now retired, she has taught writing, linguistics, and writing systems at the University of Maryland, West Chester University, and Rutgers University, and published works on writing systems, phonology, and language description. She is the author of Dhivehi: The Language of the Maldives.