User:Joca/Reader Joca

Who is the Librarian?

The gendered image of the librarian and the information scientist

Chapter 2 of Reflections on Book Scanning: A Feminist Reader

Abstract

Looking at the past and comparing it to the present, where some librarians insist on calling themselves information specialists/brokers/managers.

Why is there a stereotype of librarianship as a female job, although its infrastructure (catalogoging systems like the Dewey System) still reflect the male-centric culture of which the profession was part of in the past

Articles

Article 1

Melvil Dewey

Article 2

Hope A. Olson

Design

Book block

As I had never worked with the Espresso Book Machine before, I wanted to try it out within this project. The Espresso Book Machine is a combination of a printer and a book binding machine, which is able to print books on demand in print runs as low as one. To achieve its speed and to keep the printing affordable, a lot of aspects are standardized. For example, there is one kind of paper to print on, and the size of the book has to be between 114mmx127mm and 200mmx266mm.

In the design of this reader, I was interested in finding a non-conventional format that could be printed using the Espresso Book Machine. I got inspired by the Dwarsligger. By changing the orientation of the pages, and the use of a special binding, the Dwarsligger makes it possible to create more compact and durable books.

Within this project, I found the change in orientation interesting for different reasons: The 'horizontal' pages of the Dwarsligger makes turning the pages of the book reminiscent of reading and scrolling down a text on a screen. Next to that, OCR software like Tesseract is able to process text in just one orientation at a time. By having the texts and the annotations in different orientations, readers can change their focus from one to the other. And the orientation they choose to scan the book in, influences which text is recognized by the OCR software.

In my tests this worked out quite well, and the results improved when I gave a different color to the annotations.

The idea is that readers can change the orientation of the book, to change their focus from the articles to the annotations made in the byline. The annotations refer to other articles in the chapter, make connections to other chapters and add context. This is done in the form of e.g. short biographies of the authors, images and abstracts of the texts.

This is also relevant in the context of scanning, as the software is only able to read text in one direction at a time. Scanning the book in a certain way influences the text that will be scanned. I tested it with some proof prints and it works quite well! Having different colors improves the recognition of the different orientations of the text by the software. Next to that it gives the annotations a distinct look that sets it apart from the body text.

Cover

Raw audio to image -> link to experiments in prototyping

Production

width:176mm, height: 125mm (B5, horizontal).

Horizontal spine, +- 200 pages, glue binding, softcover

Libre typefaces: PT Serif & PT Sans Caption (by Alexandra Korolkova, in collaboration with Olga Umpeleva and Vladimir Yefimov)

This reader is printed and bound at Betty, the Espresso Book Machine of the American Book Center in Amsterdam.