Book Traces with Special Collections

Book Traces with Special Collections at the University of Miami
Presented by Andrew Stauffer
Teaching with annotations discussion by Amanda Licastro

Monday, October 26, 2020 at 3 p.m.

Join Special Collections at the UM Libraries for a presentation from Andrew Stauffer, Associate Professor of English at the University of Virginia and co-PI for Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Strategic Planning Grant, about Book Traces, a crowd-sourced project that supports the discovery, cataloging, and preservation of unique artifactual materials found in books held in American college and university library collections. The program includes a teaching with annotations discussion from Amanda Licastro, Assistant Professor of Digital Rhetoric at Stevenson University.

About the Presentation
Andrew Stauffer presents on Book Traces, a crowd-sourced project that supports the discovery, cataloging, and preservation of unique artifactual materials in American college and university library collections. The project assumes that marginalia and other readers’ marks in books constitute a valuable evidentiary record touching on many disciplines. The Book Traces Project hosts events all over the country to help find traces of history left by the readers who came before us.
The practice of textual embodiment changes when students publicly engage in social annotation in online spaces. Commenting on texts digitally opens up the possibility for knowledge sharing and community building, as well as trolling and unproductive debate. In this discussion, Amanda Licastro, Ph.D., demonstrates a three-pronged approach to teaching close reading in online spaces: first, exposing students to historical and current research on reading practices, then engaging students in social annotation, and finally facilitating the transfer of digital literacy practices from the use of online annotation tools to original multimodal compositions.

About Book Traces