Interactive Book Symposium

NYU Libraries

A symposium that unfolds the history of the book as a material object through its interactive features.

This symposium accompanies The Interactive Book, an exhibition curated by <a href="http://www.juliepark.space/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Dr. Julie Park</a>, Assistant Curator and Faculty Fellow, NYU Special Collections.About The Interactive BookThe history of the book is a story about the interactions between humans and a material object. Today’s digital books appear to bring to reading new levels of interactivity, with their touch screens, hyperlinks, and text annotation features. But the form and function of books have always entailed interaction, from wax tablets to pocket diaries and three ring binders, making the reader do things in the process of engaging with them. In showing how books have prompted specific actions from people through time, this exhibition reveals as much about books and their different parts as the lives and worlds of the people who owned, lived and interacted with them.<h3>Dialing It In: Interactive Renaissance Shortcuts</h3>Suzanne Karr Schmidt, George Amos Poole III Curator of Rare Books &amp; Manuscripts, Newberry LibraryPremodern books with moving parts, (especially flaps and dials), aimed to impress with printed ingenuity, but also to simplify. Many offered solutions: whether for scheduling quandaries; for offering tactile learning; or even for planning one's future. This talk touches on several intentionally hands-on publications whose authors delivered the very latest improvements for the sake of their reader's edification and amusement.<h3>Interacting with Early Modern Recipe Books</h3>Marissa Nicosia, Assistant Professor of English, Penn State University, Abington CollegeWhat would happen if we approached recipe books as usable cookbooks? This paper takes up this question by considering cooking as a method for manuscript study and presenting examples from my ongoing Cooking in the Archives project. Since I started the project in 2014, I have become increasingly interested in cooking as an interpretative practice. In this paper, I will reflect on cooking as a method for understanding historical recipes now as well as in their original contexts. To do this, I will bring together frameworks from disparate fields: ethno-bibliography, embodied ethnography or carnal sociology, and work on historical reenacting and historical interpretation. I will argue that cooking is not only a valuable method for recipe studies, but a method that we cannot ignore if we are invested in thinking about histories of book use.<h3>Before Pop-Ups: Children’s Interactive Books in the 18th and 19th Centuries</h3>Jacqueline Reid-Walsh, Associate Professor of Education (Language &amp; Literacy Education) and Women’s Studies, Penn State University, State CollegeMany people today associate the modern pop-up book with children, and often use the term to refer to all types of movable books for this market. Yet they often don't realize that for hundreds of years books with movable components have been directed towards Anglo-American children for education and pleasure. In this talk I examine several notable kinds; 18th-century turn-up books, also called metamorphic pictures or harlequinades; early 19th-century paper doll books with movable heads; and complex, late 19th-century “mechanical books.” I examine the affordances of each type: flaps and accordion folds, tabs and slots, and combinations of two- and three-dimensional devices. In each case the actions of the book are controlled by the child reader-viewer-player or interactor.<h3>Selfing in the Postcard Album</h3>Gabrielle Dean, William Kurrelmeyer Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts, The Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins UniversityThe modern picture postcard developed in the late nineteenth century as an expression of new governmental, technological, and commercial possibilities: postage costs and mail services; printing and photography; tourism and travel. The picture postcard offered a new medium not just for communication but, through its image options, self-expression. Often, nineteenth-century postcard collectors gathered their bounty into albums, to exist alongside or in combination with other kinds of paper-based personal collections: photographs in photo albums; resonant ephemera in scrapbooks; signatures, poetic extracts, and other textual mementoes in friendship albums. The postcard album references and in a sense incorporates a mode of interactivity—the writing and sending of postcards—that other albums don’t offer, supplementing that primary mode with another, the construction of a “book” through the curation and management of widely available material. “Selfing” in the postcard album is a process that does not lend itself to a final product—and the interactivity these albums facilitate is, likewise, both more constrained and more open-ended.All presentations are hosted on <a href="https://zoom.us/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Zoom</a>. Live closed captioning will be available. <aside>Image: <a href="https://bobcat.library.nyu.edu/permalink/f/ci13eu/nyu_aleph004032221" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Jewish Calendar Book</a>, 1722, NYU Special Collections.</aside><aside></aside>

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