Join Dr. Julie Park, Assistant Curator and Faculty Fellow, NYU Special Collections, as she introduces the history and concept of the interactive book through items featured in the exhibition The Interactive Book.

About The Interactive Book

The history of the book is a story about the interactions between humans and a material object. Today’s digital books appear to bring to reading new levels of interactivity, with their touch screens, hyperlinks, and text annotation features. But the form and function of books have always entailed interaction, from wax tablets and pocket diaries to three ring binders, making the reader do things in the process of engaging with them. This exhibition unfolds the history of the book as a material object through its interactive features. In it you will find a pocket book of herbal remedies with a hand-written index made by its owner, paper wheels that tell calendrical time if you move them, and an inscribed family bible passed down several generations. In showing how books have prompted specific actions from people through time, this exhibition reveals as much about books and their different parts as the lives and worlds of the people who owned, lived and interacted with them.

Julie Park, Princeton PhD, UCLA MLIS, is the author of The Self and It (Stanford University Press, 2010), editor of special issues for such journals as Word and Image (forthcoming), and co-editor of Organic Supplements (University of Virginia Press, 2020). Her book My Dark Room (under contract, University of Chicago Press), takes the camera obscura as a conceptual model for understanding the designs and experiences of interior spaces in 18th-Century England. She is now writing a book on the materiality of life writing and self-inscription formats in the eighteenth century, Writing’s Maker. She has been the recipient of many research awards, including long-term fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Huntington Library.

The lecture will be introduced and followed by conversation with Lisa Gitelman, Professor of English and of Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU. There will also be general Q&A.

This event is presented on Zoom. Live closed captioning will be available.

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