To be honest, I was a little sceptical about this task at first. I wondered how far we could get to know the book if we didn’t read it at all and how far it would help us to maintain this “superficial friendship” and what kind of knowledge this should convey.
But with the second task my interest in the book began to rise. It was fun to flip through the book in the library and study the illustrations, the text and the layout. Corona imperiale dell’architettura imperiale is in my opinion very beautifully illustrated. It was a very special feeling to hold such an old book in my hands. It was also amazing for me how well you could imagine what the book was about just because of the graphics. Moreover it is very exciting to see how people dealt with the topic of architecture at an early age and what kind of architecture and which aspects of architecture they valued.
I was lucky that my book is one of the “friendly” books. I had little trouble finding information about it. In fact, its text was already available online, so that I could only run it through a translation program for task 4.
In retrospect, I find that almost all exercises are very informative. Except maybe task 3, behind which I personally didn’t understand the purpose that much.
In task 1, I find it nice that we recieved a small overview of the book and the author, as well as the information about the location of the book and the online link, which were useful for other tasks.
Task 2 was my favorite task of the whole year, because the contact with the book was very impressive for me, as mentioned above.
I think tasks 4 part 1 and task 5 are especially interesting in connection with each other. I personally tried to read a bit of the text in task 4 after I had it translated. It was still a bit difficult to understand what was written despite the translation, but nevertheless it allowed me to understand the book a bit better. It was also nice to have another look at the book and to concentrate on smaller details to describe the layout for the task.
I am very impressed with how much information you were able to draw from task 4 for task 5. The word clouds and graphics made me understand the topics that concerned the author even more. I think it was important for us to recall what we learned about our book and interpret its role in a possible scenario with other books. I appreciate that we had the possibility to compare those books in a discussion and to see what other books there are and what kind of topic they treat and what kind of books they are (because some of my groupmates had handbooks, as they called it with definitions of expressions etc. and mine is a continuous text, not so much a handbook).
In conclusion, I think that ‘Friends with an old Book’ is an exciting and interesting part of GTA. I have come to appreciate this book very much and am generally very positively surprised by the whole experience.