The book I “got to know” during the last two deliveries is “De sacris aedificiis a Constantino magno constructis“. As we have already seen, it deals mainly with the sacred buildings of Constantine the Great. Moreover, it is a book that was published in Latin in 1693.
I decided to start with this information to select the words that I would then search for on Alice. First, I set up the Xenotheka Library as Alice’s “brain.”
Not knowing what the difference in results Alice shows on find or explore, I always searched on both and chose the one that generally seemed most suitable.
I chose to start with the word Latin, realizing pretty quickly though that it was too vast for a search. Alice showed me many books that seemed to center little with mine.
I therefore decided to change words and continued with religous buildings. On find I got no results, on explore instead I got thousands. I read a bit the descriptions of the first ones and I found quite quickly a book written by Koolhaas, “Elements of Architecture” which analyzes the structure of religious buildings. It is therefore reminiscent of our book since it too seems to go into the details, even structural, of architecture.
Then I searched for Rome 1693, since the buildings represented in “De sacris aedificiis a Constantino magno constructis” are mainly Roman and the book was published in 1693.
This time I used the brain “architecture library” and under explore again I got a lot of results, under find instead, only one: Geometrical Objects Architecture and the Mathemat written by Gerbino. This book seemed even more similar to ours than the previous one. It talks mainly about altars and churches, the book was written in Rome in the same period of De sacris aedificis and also in Latin (in parallel, however, also in Italian).
After that I went back one last time in Alice’s brain “Xenotheka Library” and searched for “Constantine chirch” I came up with a book that reminded me of mine and also took up a bit of the analysis of the style of construction of churches (along with a bit of history) by Constantine the great, so I decided to add it to the list, but when I read the title I realized that I had already added it. So using different words during the search I found the book written by Koolhaas, Elements of Architecture and it again convinced me that it was similar to the one I had encountered the past few weeks.
I found it very interesting that based on different words written, although I came across the same book two times as recommended similar, the description of it was different the second time from the first.