At first I was very skeptical with „friends with an old book“. I could not imagine how this friendship could develop with a book I would not even be able to understand since I do not speak even a single word Italian apart from ciao and grazie.
But luckily I did not had to read or even look at my book for the first task. It was more a technical approach and only about how to research and locate a book.
The second exercise was all about how to read an old book. This was also a subject of our visit to Einsiedeln. I never thought of using a „snake“ or a book pillow before, because I was not aware of how fragile old books or books in general can be. It was also interesting to simply look at the book for 20 minutes since I do not understand any Italian. At this point I was very glad that my book has a lot of pictures that you understand without reading the accompanying text. To this point in the semester we had already discussed the classical order in the lectures as well as in other courses. I think this understanding of the orders was the key to why I knew what the book was about without having to read and translate the text. Without knowing the keywords „Doric“, „Ionic“, “Tuscan“, „Composite“ or „Corinthian“ I would probably have been lost as well as without any illustrations.
The third task had me struggling a lot. I did not know how to search for translations, abridgments and reprints. After a while I finally found some but I was not sure if I got every single one there is and I also did not have five yet. This really frustrated me but I had the feeling that I had checked every source I could and decided to just hand in the task. In the end I think the goal was to gain a better understanding of the book and its relevance and I think I achieved that even though I might did not get every translation, reprint or mentioning.
I thought that the fourth task would be fun since I would finally be able to understand the text in my book, alas, it did not went that smoothly. After some technical difficulties, I managed to use the OCR reader. Unfortunately it did not work that well. Nevertheless I think it is great that we learned how to use an OCR reader as a tool and I hope that this will come in handy some time in another situation.
For the fifth task we were put in groups based on the subjects of our book. I think that we found some interesting similarities in our library called „the Italians“ such as the origins of architecture or its geometry. As the title of our library suggests, all five books are written in Italian. Oddly enough, the words that the matrix had out together for our group were mostly in French. I still do not get that and I think that our word cloud is really random but the five books somehow still match with each other.
In conclusion I would say that task two and five have been the most interesting for me, since I really got to use the book without actually have to read it and they helped me to rediscover the quality of a physical book compared to some extra screen time. The other tree tasks were more about formalities I think, which can be interesting as well but it just tends to be drier. Over all the experience was worth the effort.