What plans are you making to teach with rare books and manuscripts when classes are canceled and campuses closed? Let’s brainstorm what we need to get through this pandemic and how to build for future changes. Share your tips and ask your questions in this open thread!
I guess I'll add this: I created am exercise for how to work with digital images about a year ago, when I was building out EarlyPrintedBooks.com. Long-time readers/followers know that I really believe that digital images are different creatures than analog books, and this exercise was designed to get students to start thinking about that. http://www.earlyprintedbooks.com/whats-a-digital-image/
Hi, all! I'm super excited to have this conversation and to see what's possible now and what we might need to build for the future. One online discussion along these line was prompted by a tweet from Haven Hawley. There are some great suggestions in that thread: https://twitter.com/ehh_ptr/status/1235346170458836992.
I'm often amazed by what students have in their own collections; could be a great chance to share and discuss them virtually; looking at how the market is structured online might be interesting, e.g., could students identify items (and perhaps ethical issues) of things on Ebay, etc.
Home with what I hope is just a cold, drinking tea, so thought I'd jump in and try to do something productive today. My initial thought is to look at rare materials created or existing in the midst of epidemics, i.e. give our current situation an historical context. I can't get the plague mask that was on display in the Luther exhibition a few years ago at the Morgan, MIA, and Emory as a starting point. From there I might try to point to some of the research I believe has been done on trying to identify medieval manuscripts that were present at the sites of plague. Bottom line, I'd maybe begin with a short reading list that provides an historical perspective on epidemics and the items/materials that have survived and are now available for us to study. Tim Johnson UMN Minneapolis (in case this post doesn't ID the poster).
I like all of these suggestions, and in your other comments, too, about how the topic of epidemics can provide a compelling set of explorations! There's definitely a lot to be said for bringing in current concerns to look through historical artifacts. And I guess an opportunity, since everything would be through digital examples, to incorporate artifacts from other institutions rather than using only our own examples.
It would also provide an opportunity to introduce students to research portals such as the one we created for African American materials, Umbra Search: https://www.umbrasearch.org/
I’m writing from Argentina. Since our libraries are very different to those from the USA or the UK, we are very used to work with online rare materials and books and their specificity. I think that today many possibilities of working with this kind of materials are related to learn how to deal with digital archives and the increasing number of digitalized rare books. For example, Omeka is a very useful platform to create particular corpus of already digitalized books (https://omeka.org/). For each item (for example, a rare book), you can include images, PDFs, documents and so on. Omeka is like a catalogue that allows you to work with both visual and descriptive components. I think distance learning in book history is a preparation for the future: not just to teach what to do with the specific materiality of one rare book, but to learn how to manage our research interests within the largest library that has ever existed.
Omeka can be a great tool for creating exhibits and catalogs. And I definitely agree that thinking about distance learning now can help us build tools for new ways of creating global communities around book history, putting books and us in conversation with each other. Does anyone have any examples of class uses of Omeka in assignments? Or examples of Omeka exhibits that are great for browsing?
A quick side bar: I think this discussion would also introduce students to rare book twitter or other social media platforms and allow them the opportunity to follow who they find interesting on these platforms (and for us to cultivate new followers). A small side benefit to moving everything online, but one that might have lasting value for everyone, and may as a result introduce a student to our areas of expertise and get them thinking about future careers or grad school.
Our small cuneiform and papyri collections, along with medieval manuscript leaves have been digitized, so these would be available to students for use. These are regularly used by one of our design faculty. I know he would be disappointed that students wouldn't have face-to-face experience with the materials (something we value), but beyond their physical value the students would be able to do much related to their assignments. This also opens the possibility of an online discussion about questions of value, e.g. a chance to introduce students to other facets of value, many of which are expressed in the SAA glossary. This, in turn, might lead to another discussion about cultural value and the idea of repatriation and current discussions, for example, in the EU about the Elgin Marbles. So our online exploration of "early printed fun" would then expand to other topics and more crowd-sourcing opportunities to identify articles in the literature that address these topics, provide readings for students, and additional class discussions.
After providing a historical background--and this assumes that I'm teaching and not supporting a faculty member in their teaching--I might invite students to explore and suggest their own online resources, i.e. I'd use the class to crowd-source and build a list of materials. I might suggest HathiTrust, Smithosonian, LC, Princeton's book binding exhibit, etc. as starting points, or suggest broad areas under which students could group their results, e.g. early forms (cuneiform, papyri), medieval manuscripts (plus their production and use), early printing, artists' books, typography and design, etc. Then I'd let them go to it and see what they come up with. I like the idea suggested in another comment about Omeka exhibits as another source. There are some amazing online exhibitions out there that would assist in instruction and offer additional discussion points with students.
Finally, just a note: this is a discussion for people exploring what is possible, not for people stating what is flat-out impossible. Yes, shifting suddenly to teaching online is very difficult, especially in some of our work which focuses explicitly on in-person handling. But most of us don't have a choice about how to proceed, so comments about the impossibility of trying will be deleted.
I am going to assume, despite your twitter comments, that this is a genuine request for help. And so my suggestions would be to start with the readings that I've assumed you assigned students to start thinking about the printing processes. There are a variety of videos out there demonstrating the basics of the hand-press, including some from the Plantin-Moretus Museum. (I've listed a bunch on EarlyPrintedBooks.com/resources.) It's possible to look at lots of images of incunables online, including many different copies of the Gutenberg Bible and the Nuremberg Chronicle (links to those on http://sarahwerner.net/blog/digitization-examples/). Looking at different copies--even online--can be a starting place to talk about the ways in which incunables were designed to be finished by hand, but also to talk about why many extant copies don't have the initials and rubrication finished. If you want a quick and easy one-stop-shop for different examples of some early printed features, like initial letters or woodcuts or registers, you can find some basic features on EarlyPrintedBooks.com; choose one of the tags and there will even be a description of what those things are. You're not going to be able to give students a sense of what it feels like to handle these books, but there are videos of people handling them, which can at least be a way to start to talk about the size and the weight of paper. You just need to think about what your goals are, explore how those goals can be met given the resources we have, and then adjust as needed.
Twitter invites to keep comments short and nasty. But no: this is not a cry for help. I am currently teaching the art of describing books and looking at how users made their own paratexts like I always do and did for the last 13 years: hands on in the library where I am also the curator. Of course I use online sources like the ones you mentioned. A simple movie on printing tells more than any description. When all libraries are locked down it is of course very well to have the resources you mentioned. My remarks were more in general. I have the idea that some people thought or think that internet sources can replace teaching hands on, with real books and that we should start today to make little movies about what we are doing. To put in in perspective: our Dutch online university takes a year to design and implement an online course.
My compliments for your website! I will certainly use it for my teaching as of next week! And I will order and read your book - and if it is what I think, I am going to use that too. I wrote a book that seems similar (Wat is een boek? What is a book?) in Dutch.
But as I said: digital means, how well designed they may be can at this moment not replace a hands on course. It is not about ‘what it feels’ but simply about being able to study a book in detail. What I said about medical doctors goes for librarians and book historians too: you can not learn it without extensive experience with the real stuff.
I saw a twitter commentary about medical doctors being trained using a computer. I helped to design such a course 25 years ago. But a surgeon still needs at least four years of training under supervision on real patients. And so do curators, bibliographers and bookhistorians.
Thanks, Sarah, for starting this thread, and to everyone for all the excellent ideas!
Since all the teaching I do right now is for classes visiting the collections, I might take the excuse to reach out to some of the courses I have scheduled and see if they want to think up ways to tie some of what they would want their students to see into comparison with other online resources.
If I can put in a shameless plug for a resource, the Archaeology of Reading (https://archaeologyofreading.org/) has transcribed and translated annotations from a small sample of early modern books by two sixteenth-century English readers. As part of my work with the project I designed small exercises to walk people through some of the topics and the platform without just giving them a sequence of "how to" steps to follow. Those are available here: https://archaeologyofreading.org/pedagogy/.
If anyone wants to use them (or the project in general), I'm happy to talk about possible collaborations, answer questions, or help plan, and would love to hear feedback!
If I'm supporting a faculty member with their instruction, then I need to work with lists of materials they've suggested from past sessions (thus the value of having long-term working relationships with faculty) and see if we can find online surrogates that students might use. The difficulty in at least one class scenario is that students are interested in questions of provenance. The older acquisitions ledgers that exist in our university archives have not been digitized, nor have our shelflist cards (which we saved decades ago during the conversion to an online catalog and contain dealer and other information, e.g. price) so these are inaccessible for student use. In the same way, an online surrogate will not contain copy specific information, e.g. stamps, notations, marginalia, so all we have to work with is what might exist in an online copy specific to another institution.
I’m leading a MA module with two-hour sessions: one hour of discussion/lecture plus one hour to examine and discuss rare printed materials related to the topic. A key pedagogical benefit is that students learn how to handle early modern books—and how to identify and interpret evidence within them, and how to use that evidence critically. A typical session might involve students comparing pairs of books, then presenting their pair to the class, followed by time for self-guided exploration and discussion about the artefacts.
I’m at a loss. I’ll have to change the structure, fine—but the next session is about printing techniques for illustrations, and digital facsimiles can be too lo-res or ‘flattened’ by, say, bright ring lighting and post-processing. Perhaps that ’digital facsimile vs original object’ should be the topic of this object session?
But I wouldn’t know how to sustain that discussion over many sessions without entirely changing the structure and learning aims of the course.
Yes! This is part of what I keep coming back to. Adjusting one or two sessions of a course to work with digital examples can be done. But for a module like yours, virtual teaching is an entirely different thing and you'd have to shift the course. And how do we do digital-v-original if you haven't had the opportunity to walk through originals? Maybe what we need is a list of images that do something to highlight the different ways that digital images are created. I'm thinking about the raking light image I include in my book--which I'm just now realizing isn't on the website! I'll have to add it. But in the meantime you can see it here--the same page under raking light and flattened light: https://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/1ti279
Good idea! Re digital image creation, I find that students tend to enjoy discussing EEBO: It’s a digital facsimile! But it’s not, it's a scan of a microfilm! It can make text easier to read! But it can erase text (well, marginalia), evidence of use, and colour! It helps them to understand why imaging techniques aren't neutral conveyors of 'the truth', but very different ways of recording specific aspects of artefacts.
On the topic of 'walking through originals': after the printing techniques session, I scheduled a class visit to the British Museum's Enlightenment Gallery. I want to discuss the role of book collections in the shift from curiosity cabinets to (gentlemanly) research libraries while inside one. It's helpful for students to compare artefacts to the printed versions displayed alongside, considering whether/how printing techniques shaped knowledge. Like the EEBO discussion, but historical, and even harder to replicate off-site—especially because I now have zero time to source images or create a presentation.
Across a module, major revisions to content and delivery might require committee approval. It’s difficult to pivot after a syllabus is out, but surely pandemics make for extenuating circumstances.
We've seen a spike in interest in using our crowdsourced transcription software from a campus that has been shut down, and it only occurred to me yesterday that this might be correlated.
I can definitely see that connection! And if the experience is already set up, with materials and software, now would be a great time for teachers and students to explore it. It doesn't need to be done synchronously, it can lead to useful conversations about what old texts look like, and maybe generate questions about how transcription from a digital image is different from working with a text in hand!
I guess I'll add this: I created am exercise for how to work with digital images about a year ago, when I was building out EarlyPrintedBooks.com. Long-time readers/followers know that I really believe that digital images are different creatures than analog books, and this exercise was designed to get students to start thinking about that. http://www.earlyprintedbooks.com/whats-a-digital-image/
Hi, all! I'm super excited to have this conversation and to see what's possible now and what we might need to build for the future. One online discussion along these line was prompted by a tweet from Haven Hawley. There are some great suggestions in that thread: https://twitter.com/ehh_ptr/status/1235346170458836992.
I'm often amazed by what students have in their own collections; could be a great chance to share and discuss them virtually; looking at how the market is structured online might be interesting, e.g., could students identify items (and perhaps ethical issues) of things on Ebay, etc.
several ideas have been posted in this twitter thread: https://twitter.com/john_overholt/status/1237004943434735616
Home with what I hope is just a cold, drinking tea, so thought I'd jump in and try to do something productive today. My initial thought is to look at rare materials created or existing in the midst of epidemics, i.e. give our current situation an historical context. I can't get the plague mask that was on display in the Luther exhibition a few years ago at the Morgan, MIA, and Emory as a starting point. From there I might try to point to some of the research I believe has been done on trying to identify medieval manuscripts that were present at the sites of plague. Bottom line, I'd maybe begin with a short reading list that provides an historical perspective on epidemics and the items/materials that have survived and are now available for us to study. Tim Johnson UMN Minneapolis (in case this post doesn't ID the poster).
I like all of these suggestions, and in your other comments, too, about how the topic of epidemics can provide a compelling set of explorations! There's definitely a lot to be said for bringing in current concerns to look through historical artifacts. And I guess an opportunity, since everything would be through digital examples, to incorporate artifacts from other institutions rather than using only our own examples.
It would also provide an opportunity to introduce students to research portals such as the one we created for African American materials, Umbra Search: https://www.umbrasearch.org/
I’m writing from Argentina. Since our libraries are very different to those from the USA or the UK, we are very used to work with online rare materials and books and their specificity. I think that today many possibilities of working with this kind of materials are related to learn how to deal with digital archives and the increasing number of digitalized rare books. For example, Omeka is a very useful platform to create particular corpus of already digitalized books (https://omeka.org/). For each item (for example, a rare book), you can include images, PDFs, documents and so on. Omeka is like a catalogue that allows you to work with both visual and descriptive components. I think distance learning in book history is a preparation for the future: not just to teach what to do with the specific materiality of one rare book, but to learn how to manage our research interests within the largest library that has ever existed.
Omeka can be a great tool for creating exhibits and catalogs. And I definitely agree that thinking about distance learning now can help us build tools for new ways of creating global communities around book history, putting books and us in conversation with each other. Does anyone have any examples of class uses of Omeka in assignments? Or examples of Omeka exhibits that are great for browsing?
We've just started one: http://gallery.lib.umn.edu/
A quick side bar: I think this discussion would also introduce students to rare book twitter or other social media platforms and allow them the opportunity to follow who they find interesting on these platforms (and for us to cultivate new followers). A small side benefit to moving everything online, but one that might have lasting value for everyone, and may as a result introduce a student to our areas of expertise and get them thinking about future careers or grad school.
That's a very good point!
Our small cuneiform and papyri collections, along with medieval manuscript leaves have been digitized, so these would be available to students for use. These are regularly used by one of our design faculty. I know he would be disappointed that students wouldn't have face-to-face experience with the materials (something we value), but beyond their physical value the students would be able to do much related to their assignments. This also opens the possibility of an online discussion about questions of value, e.g. a chance to introduce students to other facets of value, many of which are expressed in the SAA glossary. This, in turn, might lead to another discussion about cultural value and the idea of repatriation and current discussions, for example, in the EU about the Elgin Marbles. So our online exploration of "early printed fun" would then expand to other topics and more crowd-sourcing opportunities to identify articles in the literature that address these topics, provide readings for students, and additional class discussions.
After providing a historical background--and this assumes that I'm teaching and not supporting a faculty member in their teaching--I might invite students to explore and suggest their own online resources, i.e. I'd use the class to crowd-source and build a list of materials. I might suggest HathiTrust, Smithosonian, LC, Princeton's book binding exhibit, etc. as starting points, or suggest broad areas under which students could group their results, e.g. early forms (cuneiform, papyri), medieval manuscripts (plus their production and use), early printing, artists' books, typography and design, etc. Then I'd let them go to it and see what they come up with. I like the idea suggested in another comment about Omeka exhibits as another source. There are some amazing online exhibitions out there that would assist in instruction and offer additional discussion points with students.
I do not see how I can explain how incunabula are made, explored and described online.
Finally, just a note: this is a discussion for people exploring what is possible, not for people stating what is flat-out impossible. Yes, shifting suddenly to teaching online is very difficult, especially in some of our work which focuses explicitly on in-person handling. But most of us don't have a choice about how to proceed, so comments about the impossibility of trying will be deleted.
I am going to assume, despite your twitter comments, that this is a genuine request for help. And so my suggestions would be to start with the readings that I've assumed you assigned students to start thinking about the printing processes. There are a variety of videos out there demonstrating the basics of the hand-press, including some from the Plantin-Moretus Museum. (I've listed a bunch on EarlyPrintedBooks.com/resources.) It's possible to look at lots of images of incunables online, including many different copies of the Gutenberg Bible and the Nuremberg Chronicle (links to those on http://sarahwerner.net/blog/digitization-examples/). Looking at different copies--even online--can be a starting place to talk about the ways in which incunables were designed to be finished by hand, but also to talk about why many extant copies don't have the initials and rubrication finished. If you want a quick and easy one-stop-shop for different examples of some early printed features, like initial letters or woodcuts or registers, you can find some basic features on EarlyPrintedBooks.com; choose one of the tags and there will even be a description of what those things are. You're not going to be able to give students a sense of what it feels like to handle these books, but there are videos of people handling them, which can at least be a way to start to talk about the size and the weight of paper. You just need to think about what your goals are, explore how those goals can be met given the resources we have, and then adjust as needed.
Dear mrs Werner,
Twitter invites to keep comments short and nasty. But no: this is not a cry for help. I am currently teaching the art of describing books and looking at how users made their own paratexts like I always do and did for the last 13 years: hands on in the library where I am also the curator. Of course I use online sources like the ones you mentioned. A simple movie on printing tells more than any description. When all libraries are locked down it is of course very well to have the resources you mentioned. My remarks were more in general. I have the idea that some people thought or think that internet sources can replace teaching hands on, with real books and that we should start today to make little movies about what we are doing. To put in in perspective: our Dutch online university takes a year to design and implement an online course.
My compliments for your website! I will certainly use it for my teaching as of next week! And I will order and read your book - and if it is what I think, I am going to use that too. I wrote a book that seems similar (Wat is een boek? What is a book?) in Dutch.
But as I said: digital means, how well designed they may be can at this moment not replace a hands on course. It is not about ‘what it feels’ but simply about being able to study a book in detail. What I said about medical doctors goes for librarians and book historians too: you can not learn it without extensive experience with the real stuff.
I saw a twitter commentary about medical doctors being trained using a computer. I helped to design such a course 25 years ago. But a surgeon still needs at least four years of training under supervision on real patients. And so do curators, bibliographers and bookhistorians.
Sincerely yours
Paul Dijstelberge
Epidemiology Materials have same characteristics as other ephemera (epidemic = "over," out go Materials.
One last, "add,"
Details of the immune system's workings are still ring worked-out.
To add, in wireless conversations, "vintage-style "contributions" may be being created, right now.
Half of the effort is, locating your "stuff."
Thanks, Sarah, for starting this thread, and to everyone for all the excellent ideas!
Since all the teaching I do right now is for classes visiting the collections, I might take the excuse to reach out to some of the courses I have scheduled and see if they want to think up ways to tie some of what they would want their students to see into comparison with other online resources.
If I can put in a shameless plug for a resource, the Archaeology of Reading (https://archaeologyofreading.org/) has transcribed and translated annotations from a small sample of early modern books by two sixteenth-century English readers. As part of my work with the project I designed small exercises to walk people through some of the topics and the platform without just giving them a sequence of "how to" steps to follow. Those are available here: https://archaeologyofreading.org/pedagogy/.
If anyone wants to use them (or the project in general), I'm happy to talk about possible collaborations, answer questions, or help plan, and would love to hear feedback!
If I'm supporting a faculty member with their instruction, then I need to work with lists of materials they've suggested from past sessions (thus the value of having long-term working relationships with faculty) and see if we can find online surrogates that students might use. The difficulty in at least one class scenario is that students are interested in questions of provenance. The older acquisitions ledgers that exist in our university archives have not been digitized, nor have our shelflist cards (which we saved decades ago during the conversion to an online catalog and contain dealer and other information, e.g. price) so these are inaccessible for student use. In the same way, an online surrogate will not contain copy specific information, e.g. stamps, notations, marginalia, so all we have to work with is what might exist in an online copy specific to another institution.
This is fantastic, Sarah!
I’m leading a MA module with two-hour sessions: one hour of discussion/lecture plus one hour to examine and discuss rare printed materials related to the topic. A key pedagogical benefit is that students learn how to handle early modern books—and how to identify and interpret evidence within them, and how to use that evidence critically. A typical session might involve students comparing pairs of books, then presenting their pair to the class, followed by time for self-guided exploration and discussion about the artefacts.
I’m at a loss. I’ll have to change the structure, fine—but the next session is about printing techniques for illustrations, and digital facsimiles can be too lo-res or ‘flattened’ by, say, bright ring lighting and post-processing. Perhaps that ’digital facsimile vs original object’ should be the topic of this object session?
But I wouldn’t know how to sustain that discussion over many sessions without entirely changing the structure and learning aims of the course.
Yes! This is part of what I keep coming back to. Adjusting one or two sessions of a course to work with digital examples can be done. But for a module like yours, virtual teaching is an entirely different thing and you'd have to shift the course. And how do we do digital-v-original if you haven't had the opportunity to walk through originals? Maybe what we need is a list of images that do something to highlight the different ways that digital images are created. I'm thinking about the raking light image I include in my book--which I'm just now realizing isn't on the website! I'll have to add it. But in the meantime you can see it here--the same page under raking light and flattened light: https://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/1ti279
Good idea! Re digital image creation, I find that students tend to enjoy discussing EEBO: It’s a digital facsimile! But it’s not, it's a scan of a microfilm! It can make text easier to read! But it can erase text (well, marginalia), evidence of use, and colour! It helps them to understand why imaging techniques aren't neutral conveyors of 'the truth', but very different ways of recording specific aspects of artefacts.
On the topic of 'walking through originals': after the printing techniques session, I scheduled a class visit to the British Museum's Enlightenment Gallery. I want to discuss the role of book collections in the shift from curiosity cabinets to (gentlemanly) research libraries while inside one. It's helpful for students to compare artefacts to the printed versions displayed alongside, considering whether/how printing techniques shaped knowledge. Like the EEBO discussion, but historical, and even harder to replicate off-site—especially because I now have zero time to source images or create a presentation.
Across a module, major revisions to content and delivery might require committee approval. It’s difficult to pivot after a syllabus is out, but surely pandemics make for extenuating circumstances.
We've seen a spike in interest in using our crowdsourced transcription software from a campus that has been shut down, and it only occurred to me yesterday that this might be correlated.
I can definitely see that connection! And if the experience is already set up, with materials and software, now would be a great time for teachers and students to explore it. It doesn't need to be done synchronously, it can lead to useful conversations about what old texts look like, and maybe generate questions about how transcription from a digital image is different from working with a text in hand!