Left: Mark is an Open Educational Resource card game centered on early modern printers’ marks. Logo by Amy Chen, founder of Human(ities) Game Lab. Right: A mobius strip from Emily Martin’s artist’s book what Desdemona Never Says, Naughty Dog Press, 2014.

Friday, October 26. “Teaching Materials: Book Arts, Card Games, & the Social Life of Early Modern Texts,” Margaret Sheppard ✧ “Youth Voices and Printing at the Phoenix Indian School,” E. Haven Hawley ✧ “Presence, Intimacy, and Rag Paper in 19th-Century America,” Jonathan Senchyne

Ms. Sheppard discussed the premise of books as inherently social objects and the promise of “doing rather than thinking” to better understand the social lives of book materials. She discussed empirical bibliographies (“the very act of turning the page can prompt reflection”), artist books (“performance rendered in print”) and card games (“adaptability, portability, collaboration”) as modalities for learning about the past as well as discussing our own “material moment” in the digital age. She showed examples such as openthresholds.org where tactility lies in the digital interface itself, opening new, oblique perspectives and modes of navigation. Her work around an open source educational resource—the card game MARK—prompted much interest and many questions.  [Read more]