Paper Emersions. Pop-up books, toys, and ephemera

Third meeting of the itinerant seminary series. Convenors:  Ilaria Ampollini, Dipartimento di Filosofia Piero Martinetti; Elisa Marazzi, Dipartimento di Studi storici Federico Chabod.

4 and 18 March 2025 | Trento
Palazzo Paolo Prodi, Via Tommaso Gar 14 | Aula Piscopia

UNUSUAL SOURCES IN HISTORICAL RESEARCH

4 March 2025 | 4pm Ilaria Ampollini (Università di Milano) Card games and board games: circulation of scientific knowledge along unexpected paths (18th-19th centuries)

18 March 2025 | 4pmElisa Marazzi (Università di Milano) Movable books et similia. Publushers, distribution and consumption (19th-20th centuries)

Lectures within the Ph.D. Course Culture d’Europa. Ambiente, spazi, storie, arti, idee (Università degli Studi di Trento)

A substantial part of studies in the field of visual history concerns ‘unconventional’ sources, which remain largely uninvestigated to date. Among these, widely circulated illustrated prints and ephemera occupy a predominant place (Milano, 2018; Twyman, 2008). Also, boargames have only recently being valued as a source for historical studies (Spanos, 2021; Seville, 2019; Keene, 2011), despite the existence of pioneering work dating back a long way (Shefrin, 1999a; Shefrin, 1999b; Girard, Quetel, 1982). Another example is pop-up books, both in the very first versions dedicated to a learned audience (astronomy and anatomy texts, which can be found as early as the 16th century, see Giacomelli, 2023, 2024; Crupi, Vagliani, 2019), and in the typically 19th-century versions aimed at children (Reid-Walsh, 2017).

The seminary cycle Paper Emersions wants to focus on these kinds of sources, using ‘emersivity’ as a privileged perspective to study them.

The term ‘emersivity’ refers to how a given medium transcends its physical boundaries, thus creating an effective interference between media space and the space of the observer (or reader, or user). This is what happens today with augmented reality applications, through which the ‘real’ space comes alive with objects and content that are visible thanks to state-of-the-art optical devices – such as hololens for augmented reality. However, it is easy to see how this same characteristic can also be found in the past, in all those paper media featuring sophisticated technologies (Modena, 2022; Pinotti, 2021).

Emersivity also calls into question themes and problems of the history of science, of books and of reading: the need to understand, study and communicate natural phenomena stimulated the overcoming of the two-dimensionality of the printed page, proposing technical challenges that lead to challenge and transform the relationship with the book, based on tangible interaction.

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