This book examines the seventeenth-century project for a real or universal character: a
scientific and objective code. Focusing on the Essay towards a real character and a
philosophical language (1668) of the polymath John Wilkins Fleming provides a detailed
explanation of how a real character actually was supposed to work. He argues that the period
movement should not be understood as a curious episode in the history of language but as an
illuminating avatar of information technology. A non-oral code supposedly amounting to a
script of things the character was to support scientific discourse through a universal
database in alignment with cosmic truths. In all these ways J.D. Fleming argues the world of
the character bears phenomenological comparison to the world of modern digital information-what
has been called the infosphere.
