Teaching Materiality with Virtual Instruction

Posted by Kate Ozment

When the majority of North America and parts of Europe switched to virtual instruction in March, Twitter became a quick and useful way for teachers of bibliography, book history, and material culture all over the world to swap ideas. This post attempts to put as many of these exchanges as I could locate in one place and give a kind of organization to the chaos. Take all my reservations about the completeness or thoroughness of this list. At best, I hope to preserve some of the smart thinking that we have been doing online in one place. For most of these, I would suggest that the authors would be happy to talk more about their experiences if you contact them directly. Also feel free to drop your own ideas in the comments.

Access to Primary Materials

• Megan L. Cook’s herculean effort to put digital repositories in one place has yielded this invaluable Google doc. Use it to locate digital surrogates and some born-digital media for your courses (thanks to Jason W. Dean for tweeting)

• Martine Van Elk’s Early Modern Female Book Ownership allows students to see a plethora of example of women’s engagement with material books; the blogs are short and informative, and you can find more with #herbook on Twitter

• Sarah Werner’s “Digitization Examples” post is a very good overview of the platforms available and to read the paratext of a digital surrogate; particularly useful for descriptive bibliography exercises

• Devin Fitzgerald is posting images of and information about non-Western books

• The Universal Short Title Catalogue posted this nifty graft about European Print Centers from 1450-1650

• Iberian Books has a lot of very useful visualizations of books in the area (thanks to Alex Wingate for tweeting)

• It’s also worth noting searching the #bookhistory hashtag on Twitter is marvelously useful

Online Media of Historical Practices / Handling Archival Materials

• The University of Edinburgh Centre for the History of the Book has a lot of open-access instructional videos of topics from key phrases to format to bindings to scholarly editions

• Cait Coker’s Sammelband post on representations of printing in popular media like Outlander

• The film Papermakers is digitized here (thanks to John Overholt for tweeting)

• Megan Peiser is filming CC’d videos on book history topics like marginalia using Oakland’s Hicks Collection, which is heavy on womens’ writing

• Cambridge University Library is posting the 2020 Sandars Lectures on YouTube; other Sandars lectures are available on this website (thanks to Steven Van Impe for tweeting)

• Rare Book School has its backlog of video lectures on all aspects of rare books and book history (thanks to Molly Hardy for tweeting)

• A lecture titled “Divine Art, Infernal Machine” from print historian Elizabeth Eistenstein in 2011, posted by the Library of Congress (thanks to Museum of Printing for tweeting)

• University of Chicago posted a YouTube series on censorship last year (thanks to Ada Palmer for tweeting)

• The British Library has posted Ann Blair’s Panizzi lectures (thanks to Liesbeth Corens for tweeting)

Exercises

• Megan L. Cook suggests sending students on a “digital scavenger hunt” through online repositories; Katherine D. Harris offered Book Traces as one such repository, and students would be able to contribute to the project

• Devin Fitzgerald suggests using Yellowback Cover Art (from UCLA Special Collections) to teach English cover design from 1840-1900; they can filter by date to trace differences; more info on the collection here

• Shannon K. Supple suggested a synchronous option of cameras and Zoom to explore bibliography and codicological study; these could also be video taped and posted for asynchronous viewing; others like Marta Kvande said document cameras are particularly good for this

• Lynne M. Thomas suggests using a digital surrogate for collation

• Brian M. Watson goes through several ideas including working through library catalogues and stack explorers

Help Docs and Discussions

• The Bibliographical Society of America has put up a webform to ask for help on teaching and research remotely

• Brian M. Watson provided insight for making these lessons accessible for hearing-impaired students

• Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities from Rebecca Frost Davis, Matthew K. Gold, Katherine D. Harris, Jentery Sayers, eds. has just been published through MLA (thanks to Katherine D. Harris for tweeting)

• FemTechNet’s “Feminist Pedagogy in the time of Coronavirus” (thanks to Liz Losh for tweeting)

• Sarah Werner hosted a chat on “Teaching with Rare Materials in Epidemics” with a lot of excellent advice

• The American Library Association posted a guide for “Handling Library Materials and Collections During a Pandemic” (thanks to Fletcher Durant for tweeting)

A lot of librarians, curators, and rare book experts have also offered to Skype or Zoom into classes and talk to your students. I’m not going to link them and inundate them, but consider relying on each other more so than we otherwise might.

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About the Author

Kate Ozment is assistant professor of English at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Currently, she is working on a book project on women’s history of bibliography. Look for her work in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Early Modern Women, and Authorship. Contact her at: keozment (at) cpp (dot) edu.

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