When you travel to south east asia, let’s say to vietnam, exploring both unfamiliar and alluring surroundings, you’ll face history in very specific aspects. You may furthermore find yourself in informal verbal exchange amid local students, honest and communicative human beings, who somehow slip out from their environment by talking english with western aliens. You now may explore other aspects of history as well as other interpretations of a discipline called history. You nonetheless probably start to relate with, to like or to dislike the situation you’re in the middle of. You may share your motives for what you do and discuss the reasons for your travel. You may get to know somebody by actively listening to somebody’s history, whereby you were invited to catch a glimpse of diversity. However this physical and mental travelling belong to you, is pretty much only partly under your control. Knowing that may inspire or bother you.
Confident that some clever and passionate employees at the gta had racked their brains to find interesting and well conceived methods for students to get in touch with an old book, this little journey started. Obviously the nerv-racking effort to mix the so-called different worlds of analog and digital not only have fallen on sympathetic ears. The attempt to remove both the real and the intellectual dust on books got additionally challenged by the fact, german and english aren’t the only languages anybody talks. Even about topics like architecture. But as doubtful chances are the only true one’s, some very, very, very old books had been retrieved from the depths of peculiar libraries existing in unknown buildings. At half-time most of the initial clamor settled down due to the fact that the material such old and distinctive books deliver, started to build up traces in time. The initial lack of understanding shifted, at least to some extent, into a appreciation of the rich content different people in a similar situation have created. By using basic methods and approaches which at no point forced to construe the personal experience in any (seriously) biased way. This is, I suppose, a profound statement. And in many ways way more important to admit than the usual play of individual scoring.
The chosen format of collecting the content is both brave and challenging. From a certain point on, I guess there’s a risk of losing control over such an amount of data. The current somehow bulky shape is hardly accessible, without knowing what to search for.
Despite the reasons why many decisions at this department result in a questionable balance of quantity and quality, this task-based procedure may win with less uniformity – or straightforward: less tasks but more diverse. This doesn’t have to mean creating even more elaborated things should be the goal. It’s all there. What have been introduced in the last part may play a role in a earlier stage to sort (out) the content in the collection. Powerful cross references probably can make a difference to remove the (undeserved) dust.