Spausdinimo senosiomis spaudos staklėmis judėjimas

At the end of the twentieth century, increased access to certain technologies and processes, such as 3D scanning, computer-aided design, rapid fabrication and microcircuitry, enabled consumers to become creators of material design. These activities, which collectively came to be known as making, extended across both public and private sectors, including the study of the book. This paper offers an extended discourse on the full range of activities comprising the bibliographical maker movement, which in recent years has coalesced around the idea that maker culture may be employed to enhance our understanding of not only the history but also the future of the book. The application of these new technologies toward critical book studies has proceeded from the practice-based approach to research and instruction first begun under the auspices of the bibliographical press movement in the mid-twentieth century. In keeping with this earlier work, biblio-making is predicated upon the idea that certain kinds of knowledge are best gained through personal experience and experimentation. This article will first outline the benefits of applying 3D technologies to the goals of book history before locating and describing the activities of participating individuals and institutions within three broad categories: holistic, 3D digitisation; recovering historical tools and processes; and creative experiments in book design. As the article demonstrates, the strength and potential of the bibliographical maker movement lies in its widening community of practice and that, by virtue of its being an open-access network of constituents, it is now poised to make a significant and lasting contribution to the study of the book.XX a. pabaigoje padidėjusi prieiga prie tam tikrų technologijų ir procesų tokių kaip 3D skenavimas, kompiuterinis projektavimas, sparti gamyba bei mikroschemos leido vartotojams tapti medžiagų dizaino kūrėjais. Ši veikla, kuri apibendrintai pradėta vadinti „kūrimu“ (angl. making), apėmė viešąjį ir privatų sektorius, įskaitant knygų tyrimus. Šiame straipsnyje pateikiamas platus visos veiklos spektro diskursas, apimantis spausdinimo senosiomis spaudos staklėmis kūrėjų judėjimą, kuris pastaraisiais metais susiliejo su idėja, skelbiančia, kad kūrėjų kultūra gali būti pasitelkta siekiant pagerinti mūsų supratimą ne tik apie knygos istoriją, bet ir jos ateitį. Šių naujų technologijų taikymas kritiniams knygų tyrimams kilo iš praktika pagrįsto požiūrio į tyrimus, o mokymai pirmiausia buvo pradėti XX a. viduryje pasitelkiant spausdinimo senosiomis spaudos staklėmis judėjimą. Remiantis šiuo ankstesniu darbu, knygų kūrimas grindžiamas idėja, kad tam tikras žinias geriausia įgyti per asmeninę patirtį ir bandymus. Šiame straipsnyje pirmiausia apibūdinami 3D technologijų taikymo knygų istorijos tikslams pranašumai prieš nustatant ir aprašant dalyvaujančių asmenų ir institucijų trijų plačių kategorijų veiklą: holistinę, 3D skaitmeninimą; istorinių įrankių ir procesų atkūrimą; kūrybinius knygų dizaino eksperimentus. Kaip rodo straipsnis, bibliografijos kūrėjų judėjimo stiprybė ir potencialas slypi besiplečiančioje aktyvioje bendruomenėje, o kadangi tai yra atvirosios prieigos elementų tinklas, tai dabar ji pasirengusi įnešti reikšmingą ir ilgalaikį indėlį į knygų tyrimą

Remix the Medieval Manuscript: Experiments with Digital Infrastructure

Remix the Manuscript: A Chronicle of Digital Experiments is a collaborative research project that takes up this challenge. It brings together academics, librarians, technologists, conservators, and students to study the many permutations of a single manuscript—a fifteenth-century Middle English prose chronicle of Great Britain, commonly referred to as the “Prose Brut.” Our project raises fundamental questions about the digital research environment. How is today’s code configuring tomorrow’s historical knowledge? How do digital technologies affect our access to and understanding of material culture? By investigating these broad questions through the example of one manuscript, we define a limited yet infinitely expandable dataset. In this way, we try to ensure that team members, whose time and capability to participate varies, can complete projects while not sacrificing epistemological concerns to expediency. We seek the flexibility to adopt new tools as they emerge, change course in response to new problems, and abandon lines of inquiry as team members change. Our approach is therefore grounded in sampling and prototyping. We aim to develop insight into how digital culture is reshaping medieval manuscript studies, while remaining connected to the unique sensualities of historic books. In the long run, we hope that this research will identify some of the distinct affordances of digital forms. In this project, remix is a method, a theory, and an aesthetic philosophy

Speculative practices : utilizing InfoVis to explore untapped literary collections

Funding: Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research CouncilIn this paper we exemplify how information visualization supports speculative thinking, hypotheses testing, and preliminary interpretation processes as part of literary research. While InfoVis has become a buzz topic in the digital humanities, skepticism remains about how effectively it integrates into and expands on traditional humanities research approaches. From an InfoVis perspective, we lack case studies that show the specific design challenges that make literary studies and humanities research at large a unique application area for information visualization. We examine these questions through our case study of the Speculative W@nderverse, a visualization tool that was designed to enable the analysis and exploration of an untapped literary collection consisting of thousands of science fiction short stories. We present the results of two empirical studies that involved general-interest readers and literary scholars who used the evolving visualization prototype as part of their research for over a year. Our findings suggest a design space for visualizing literary collections that is defined by (1) their academic and public relevance, (2) the tension between qualitative vs. quantitative methods of interpretation, (3) result- vs. process-driven approaches to InfoVis, and (4) the unique material and visual qualities of cultural collections. Through the Speculative W@nderverse we demonstrate how visualization can bridge these sometimes contradictory perspectives by cultivating curiosity and providing entry points into literary collections while, at the same time, supporting multiple aspects of humanities research processes.PostprintPeer reviewe

In defence of sandcastles : research thinking through visualization in DH

Although recent research acknowledges the potential of visualization methods in DH, the predominant terminology used to describe visualizations (prototypes, tools) narrowly focuses on their use as a means to an end and, more importantly, as an instrument in the service of humanities research. While acknowledging the broad range of possible approaches to visualization, we introduce the metaphor of the sandcastle to highlight visualization as a research process in its own right. We argue that building visualization sandcastles provides a holistic approach to interdisciplinary knowledge generation that embraces visualization as (1) a dynamic interdisciplinary process where speculation and re-interpretation advance knowledge in all disciplines involved, (2) a mediator of ideas and theories within and across disciplines and (3) an aesthetic provocation to elicit critical insights, interpretation, speculation and discussions within and beyond scholarly audiences. We illustrate our argument based on our own research of an exceptional literary collection.Postprin

Opening the Early Modern ToolBox: The Digital Interleaf and Digital Commonplace Book

This paper considers how early modern note-taking practices can inform the design of digital reading environments.  In particular, it argues that proximate, handwritten note-taking is essential for both memory retention and archiving, and that digital readers should work within structures that allow for such practices.  The Digital Interleaf, the first of two conceptual prototypes introduced, offers one response to that need: a multi-layered page designed for individual and social annotation.  The Digital Commonplace Book, the second of the prototypes discussed, provides a method for indexing notes from the Digital Interleaf.  These two interoperable concepts are the first in a suite called the Early Modern Toolbox

Speculative metaphors: a design-led approach to the visualisation of library collections

We are at a critical moment when a library patron’s first, and sometimes only, point of access to library collections is an interface. The relationship we have with physical collections can not be discounted but it also can not be re-created within the screen space. There is a need to understand not only how interfaces operate and how they can be ‘usable’ but also how they shape our relationship with library collections. There is a need to understand how dominant orders of classification are reinforced through their visual representation within collection interfaces and how this shapes the way in which we come to know things. Johanna Drucker notes: “Digital technology depends on visual presentation for much of its effectiveness…but critical understanding of visual knowledge production remains oddly underdeveloped”. We have an opportunity to rethink how we encounter collections through the physical act of browsing and through an interface; an opportunity that is not being addressed. What does each of these experiences afford? How can we reimagine the library collection? In this dissertation I will explore these opportunities through a practice-based approach to the development of a set of speculative prototypes. I will seek to re-imagine the collection through an exploration of the role of metaphor in the visual language of library interfaces and our experience of library collections

Intersections Between Social Knowledge Creation and Critical Making

This article outlines the practices of digital scholarly communication (moving research production and dissemination online), critical making (producing theoretical insights by transforming digitized heritage materials), and social knowledge creation (collaborating in online environments to produce shared knowledge products). In addition to exploring these practices and their principles, this article argues for a combination of these activities in order to engender knowledge production chains that connect multiple institutions and communities. Highlighting the relevance of critical making theory for scholarly communication practice, this article provides examples of theoretical research that offer tangible products for expanding and enriching scholarly production

The Cosmopolitan Evergreen and the Global Digital

Examines how Patrick Geddes’s The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal used the affordances of fin-de-siècle print culture to imbricate the regional and the transnational, and shows how the magazine’s digital remediation on Yellow Nineties 2.0 makes its cosmopolitan vision newly accessible to global audiences today