The Centre for the Comparative History of Print's (Centre CHoP) mission is to explore the role of printing technologies in reshaping societies, political and economic organisation, and knowledge cultures through rigorous, comparative research into printing and other communication technologies.

Centre CHoP is the first Research Centre in the world explicitly devoted to both the investigation of print in comparative perspective and the exploration of parallels and divergences between the global impacts of printing and those of more recent communication technologies.

Building on existing strengths and collaboration across a diverse range of disciplines, it aims to play a leading role in global understanding of the communication revolutions unleashed by printing and reprographic technologies, while providing transformative insight into the social impact of Information Technology.