This week you will have the opportunity to present the “life story” of a book in the form of a timeline!
Students will choose a book in their university library (or their private collection) that contains marks of provenance (i.e. evidence of former ownership or use including marginalia, book plates, signatures of former owners, vandalism, etc.). They will then conduct research in an effort to identify former users. Finally students will use Knight Lab’s innovative program TimelineJS to present their research. Each timeline will serve as a narrative of the book’s “life.”
To begin with, students should consult the pdf of this week’s lecture on provenance. This resource will provide you with a guide on how to approach eighteenth and nineteenth century handwriting and also contains information about important genealogical resources on the web that may prove useful in your research.
Once you have gathered as much information as you can about the book’s provenance, you will then plug your findings into the template provided on the TimelineJS homepage. TimelineJS provides a four step instructional guide to building your timeline on their site. Follow each of these steps to create a url that can than be pasted in “text” window of your blog. The timeline should then appear in your blog post.
Here is a basic timeline I constructed on the Badin Bible. This bible was once owned by Rev. Stephen Badin and is now housed in the Hesburgh Library at the University of Notre Dame.
You should include a minimum of four “points of interest” in your timeline (each row in the template equals a single point of interest). Remember, you are constructing a narrative of the “life cycle” of a single book, so you want to present information in a sequence so as to tell a linear story.
Points to include:
- Publication information (place, publisher): Include an image of the book, perhaps its title page, front cover, or spine). Also tell your reader who the intended audience of the book may have been when it was created (who would have read this book at the time it was printed?).
- Owner information: who owned this book at points throughout its life? Included private and institutional owners.
- Marginalia: Is their marginalia or annotation in the book? When were these marks recorded in the book and what do they tell us about how the book was used?
- Current home: Where is the book currently located? What readership does it have now and has the audience changed over time?
Students should strive to develop a dynamic and engaging timeline. Consult the list of media types supported by TimelineJS to see which might suit the information that you would like to include in your timeline. You should include images of provenance where appropriate. TimelineJS supports photo sharing sites including Instagram and Flickr.
You will post your timeline in a blogpost. Include in the post an introduction to your timeline (no more than 500 words). In this introduction tell us about the experience of researching provenance information. Did you successfully track down former owners? Did this project make you think differently about marginalia and annotations?
Have fun with this assignment and please post the assignment to your blog by the end of the day on Monday, 6 February.