Almost two semesters have been passed since I get started contacting my old book, which has already been a kind of friend for me. Even though, it is not a friend in a regular meaning. Normally having a new friend is for me at least to learn someone personally and to be able to comprehend basically what she or he tried to express. However, it does not work in the current case with my old book. Because of the language barrier, I could barely understand any details written in it. Nevertheless, I spent a lot of time on those tasks on studying its size, format, organization, etc. Comparing it with reality, it is like being familiar with someone’s outfit, height, weight, and even how is he organically made of but not understanding a single word from him, which is rare for me.
The half of my book consists of full-page plane geometrical drawings, because it is a kind of glossary of stone-cutting in architecture. It surprised me a lot how highly developed is mathematics, geometry, and also the dawning skills 400 ago. It brings me even a little shame and confusion since after so many years studying there is still a huge distance to reach the level in the sixteenth century.
The most exciting part of the whole should be meeting my old book in reality. Having this book on a pillow and turning the pages carefully, I felt a huge honor to be one of its readers in the past 400 years. Seeing how decorative is ever page organized and how well is it kept through the entire centuries, it awakens a respect for books as carriers of knowledge and influencer in history.
Despite the language problem, I did not have much difficulty in searching and discovering it. I was just getting a bit nervous because of the output in task 4, as I was trying to optimize the quality of the OCR scan. But in the end, it became a big surprise in task 5, that we are therefore divided into groups to discuss the similarities among us. At that moment I started realizing that I had known a lot about the book and its author, while the conversation among us was held fluently and rich in content. Moreover, we are truly attracted by the books from each other. There were a lot of aspects shared and compared.
Basically I am impressed by this exercise. It thought me plenty of knowledge and the importance of analog print, which is definitely underrated today. On top of that, seeing them being linked and analyzed with each other through today’s digital technology is really inspiring and satisfying. It is like giving them a reborn in the twenty-first century.