When we were introduced to the idea of Friends with an old book, in the first place i was very confused what the goal of this lecture is. I personally didn’t get how it should work becoming friends with a book. A book that is very old and whose content I’m probably not even able to decipher. Despite that, I was excited by the idea of touching such an old deed.
The first task was a bit hard for me since not only I’m not that good in online researches but also i wasn’t paying attention in the introduction lecture. But it was manageable and it helped me a lot with not being afraid of confusing online libraries. So all in all a good start.
But the first hurdle was just around the corner. My book was only available in Einsiedeln and I was a bit furious, since i’d rather have had it in Zurich. But a friend of mine and I made our way to Einsiedeln on a cold and foggy day in November, and I didn’t regret it. It was nice walking into that warm, cozy library. Must be nice to work there. But i think it would be nicer for the years following, if the books could be encountered in the same visit as the Grundlagen-excoursion to Einsiedeln. That would be a bit nicer and I personally believe that the students would be more motivated that way.
It was very nice touching the book physically. The vellum felt very special and suddenly i thought about human skin. I googled about the usage of human skin in vellum production and that lead me to a few very disrupting newspaper reports about related topics, dating not only back to the early days of book binding but also into days not so long gone.
I was very pleased to find out that my book consisted mostly of beautiful drawings and also a few short text passages in italian. I had Italian for a few years in school and it was nice to understand a big part of my book, to which i got infact a bit closer through the physical touch and the dispute.
For the second last tasks we had to use ocr, which was a great way to try out Adobe OCR and its features.
The only task i didn’t really like in the retrospective was the last one. The idea of it is great but i think to realise it into a drama is quite difficult. Also to organise in a group of five online wasn’t that easy. Besides, i kind of felt that i really liked my book but wouldn’t like the others that much in such a short amount of time, which lead to me not really succumbing to them. Nonetheless, it was nice to get to know other people of our year, so that was an advantage too.