Movable Books Research Articles

Pop-up books and kinetic art: creating vocabulary for motion and movement art forms

ABSTRACT This paper examines the art forms that use motion as the main medium. It focuses on the various kinds of movable books that share the capacity for physical transformation and are collectively known as pop-up books. In the last 30 years, contemporary art museums have included them in their publishing programs; museum bookstores have increased the number of special displays, creating a physical neighborhood with kinetic artworks, which are primarily associated with motion-based art. Consequently, the problem of the relationship between the two arises. Despite the common forms and themes they tackle, there is a distinct gap between kinetic art and the pop-up book in theoretical discourse. It manifests itself, first, in vocabulary, as a lack of clear definitions and terms; second, through the isolation of the theoretical studies in these two domains. Referring to ideas of Frank Popper and George Rickey on kinetic art and focusing on the spectator’s perspective, I seek to define the elements of a common vocabulary. Based on a comparative study of kinetic artworks and pop-up books, I propose a classification of art forms from two perspectives – the first relying on motion and physical mechanisms and the second centered around the effects of movement.

An Analysis of the Semiotic Resources of Contemporary Movable Picturebooks

Although research has been published on the history of movable books (also referred to as pop-up books) ranging from early volvelles, to accordion books, to other threedimensional texts, the materiality of picturebooks , research on the semiotic resources, including interactive and design features, visual images, written text, and the materiality of contemporary movable books, has not been forthcoming. Research on children's literature, specifically research on contemporary picturebooks, needs to consider the range of interactive, tactile, visual, and textual modalities available to authors, illustrators, and designers of movable picturebooks and their potential role as pedagogical resources for engaging developing readers' attention and interest. This article presents an analysis of semiotic resources focusing on the material, interactional, and design resources used to represent visual and textual narratives in contemporary, award-winning movable picturebooks.

Local Wisdom-Based Movable Book as A Teaching Material to Enhance Nationalism in the 21st Century

Local Wisdom-Based Movable Book as A Teaching Material to Enhance Nationalism in the 21st Century. Objectives: This research investigates the effectiveness of movable book local wisdom based as a teaching material in improving students’ nationalism. Methods: Quasi-experiment was used with a non-equivalent control group design. The population of this study is the fourth-grade primary students. The data were measured using n-gain and independent t-test. Findings: The result shows that the n-gain of students’ nationalism in the experimental classes 1 and 2 were higher than the control class, such as 0.40, 0.39, and 0.29, with a moderate category for experimental classes and a low category for control class. Moreover, t-test results also showed that the value (p) was 0.000, so it significantly differences in students’ nationalism between experimental and control classes. Conclusion: Therefore, it can conclude that the movable book local wisdom-based teaching material can improve fourth-grade elementary students’ nationalism character effectively. Keywords: 21st century, nationalism, local wisdom, teaching material, movable book. Abstrak: Movable Book Berbasis Kearifan Lokal sebagai Bahan Ajar untuk Meningkatkan Nasionalisme Siswa di Abad 21. Tujuan: Penelitian ini mengkaji tentang efektifitas movable book berbasis kearifan lokal sebagai bahan ajar dalam meningkatkan nasionalisme siswa. Metode: Kuasi-eksperimen menggunakan disain non-equivalent control group. Populasi penelitian ini adalah siswa kelas IV SD. Data diukur menggunakan n-gain dan independent t-test. Temuan: data menunjukkan bahwa n-gain nasionalisme siswa pada kelas eksperimen 1 dan 2 lebih tinggi dari pada kelas kontrol yaitu 0.40, 0.39 dan 0.29 termasuk dalam kategori moderat untuk kelas eksperimen dan rendah untuk kelas kontrol. Selain itu hasil t-test juga menunjukkan bahwa nilai (p) adalah 0.000, sehingga hasil karakter nasionalisme siswa kelas eksperimen dan kontrol adalah signifikan. Kesimpulan: Movable book berbasis kearifan lokal terbukti efektif untuk meningkatkan karakter nasionalisme siswa kelas IV SD. Kata kunci: abad 21, nasionalisme, kearifan lokal, bahan ajar, movable book. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23960/jpp.v12.i1.202205

The Pop-Up against Coronavirus Project: Child-Made Movable Books Evoking Smiles, Tears, and Hope

In this essay I discuss the Pop-Up against Coronavirus Project, initiated by the Fondazione Tancredi di Barolo based in Turin Italy. It is a research, conservation and educational foundation devoted to movable books, especially pop-up books. Their work with children is in conjunction with their museum of School and Children’s books (Museo della Scuola e del Libro per l’Infanzia). When the outbreak of the coronavirus in Italy in late February 2020 prevented the academic conference they had organized from occurring, the foundation immediately turned their attention to working cross culturally with and for children, engaging Italian, Chinese and later Dutch artists and paper engineers to devise working models of different types of pop-ups. I give an account of the inception of the project, discuss the materials provided on their site, and examine some of the images of the homemade artifacts made by children and their families in Italy and China.

IbisPaint X Apps in Creating Collaborative 3D Learning media of Pop-Up and Movable Books

The IbisPaint X Apps was an application with a concept of “share the fun of drawing” that had a function to draw many detailed designs. This study aimed to investigate how was the role of IbisPaint X Apps in supporting the process of creating collaborative 3D learning media of pop-up and movable book. This study was a library research. The procedures of study were used the theory of Mary W. George that implemented nine stages. The sources of data were taken from national and international journals, Indonesian and foreign textbooks. The results of study showed that IbisPaint X Apps could be used in creating collaborative 3D learning media of pop-up and movable books because it had complete features and could create good and detailed pictures. This collaboration created a 3D learning media that was more interesting, unique, and had two working mechanisms.

Playing with the Book: Victorian Movable Picture Books and the Child Reader, by Hannah Field, Gaming Empire in Children’s British Board Games, 1836-1860, by Megan A. Norcia

Reviewed by: Playing with the Book: Victorian Movable Picture Books and the Child Reader by Hannah Field, and: Gaming Empire in Children's British Board Games, 1836–1860 by Megan A. Norcia Andrea Korda (bio) Playing with the Book: Victorian Movable Picture Books and the Child Reader, by Hannah Field; pp. 248. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019, $120.00, $30.00 paper. Gaming Empire in Children's British Board Games, 1836–1860, by Megan A. Norcia; pp. xii + 261. New York and London: Routledge, 2019, $128.00, $39.16 paper, $39.16 ebook. Movable picture books and board games both fall along a continuum between books and toys. As Robin Bernstein explains, these types of material objects "jumble together in children's rooms, in their beds, and in their play" (qtd. in Field 9). Two recent books take up such objects and, taking Bernstein's work as a starting point, treat them as "scripts" for childhood play, showing that they "are not so much played as coauthored by the child who engages with them" (Norcia 12). By addressing the child's active role in play, the books' authors, Hannah Field and Megan A. Norcia, participate in ongoing discussions about historicism and the possibilities for accessing past experiences of childhood. Yet they differ in their ultimate emphases. While Norcia's Gaming Empire in Children's British Board Games, 1836–1860 focuses on the ideologies generated and upheld by the notion of board-game-as-script, Field's Playing with the Book: Victorian Movable Picture Books and the Child Reader considers the agency of children as they engaged the scripts of movable books. Close attention to embodied engagement and agency is a strength of Field's Playing with the Book, which attends to the format of books in order to account not only for the intellectual act of reading but also for the embodied, physical actions required of readers. Chapter 1 demonstrates Field's method through examples of movable books that include instructions on how to handle the book, considered alongside "unconventional archival traces of children's reading—coloring-in, rips, tears, and other marks of damage" (27). [End Page 144] These nontextual traces render the books' historical users visible to today's researchers, while also hinting at their agency by providing evidence that users deviated from prescribed ways of handling books. Subsequent chapters of Playing with the Book show how different movable formats shape users' reading experiences and contribute to the books' meanings. One consistent theme is that movable books prompt ways of reading that resist linear narrative unfolding, or even eschew conventional reading altogether. Chapter 2 looks at panorama picture books—constructed with folded paper that can be extended to reveal a sequence of pictures or a continuous frieze—and shows how the format disrupts conventional understandings of narrative sequence. Chapter 3 considers pop-up books, which invite the reader to investigate and manipulate an illusion of depth by looking into the illusion as well as touching its surfaces. The books therefore call attention to readers' bodily interactions as well as their agency in disrupting the illusion. Chapter 4 addresses dissolving-view books published by German publisher Ernest Nister, in which interlocking slats of paper are moved from one position to another in order to reveal two different pictures. The pictures were not always clearly connected, with the result that readers are encouraged to take an active role in filling in the gaps between the pictures. The question of agency is at the forefront of chapter 5, which focuses on mechanical books created by German illustrator Lothar Meggendorfer. Children pulled a tab to control the repetitive gestures performed by laborers, such as blacksmiths or domestic workers, thereby placing the child in "a position of power, one that inculcate[d] a number of adult types while assuring a child reader of her own mastery over the book" (180). Paying attention to the racialized as well as working-class types found within these books, which were luxury items that catered to middle- and upper-class audiences, Field demonstrates that the power afforded to the child was not only a mastery over the book but also a sense of control and superiority...

The Pop-Up against Coronavirus Project: Child-Made Movable Books Evoking Smiles, Tears, and Hope

In this essay I discuss the Pop-Up against Coronavirus Project, initiated by the Fondazione Tancredi di Barolo based in Turin Italy. It is a research, conservation and educational foundation devoted to movable books, especially pop-up books. Their work with children is in conjunction with their museum of School and Children's books (Museo della Scuola e del Libro per l'Infanzia). When the outbreak of the coronavirus in Italy in late February 2020 prevented the academic conference they had organized from occurring, the foundation immediately turned their attention to working cross culturally with and for children, engaging Italian, Chinese and later Dutch artists and paper engineers to devise working models of different types of pop-ups. I give an account of the inception of the project, discuss the materials provided on their site, and examine some of the images of the homemade artifacts made by children and their families in Italy and China. © 2021 University of Winnipeg. All rights reserved.

A prehistory of the interactive reader and design principles for storytelling in postdigital culture

This article examines historical examples to illuminate a prehistory of the interactive reader in analogue media, tracing a rich genealogy that is helpful for understanding and designing current works such as augmented reality (AR) books. In addition, a set of generative design strategies to help shape current practice are discussed, based both on formal qualities and characteristics of historical examples and the authors’ own experiences as designers working in mixed reality over many years. Theoretical framing is provided to persuasively make the case for the relevance of historical works for designers today. From medieval manuscripts, to Renaissance medical texts, to seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century movable books, to the elaborate paper engineering of twentieth century and contemporary pop-up books, the history of the active reader and interactive book design is long and fascinating, and is presented here as an important and direct source of inspiration for digital designers today. Finally, recent interactive book projects designed by the authors are discussed and analyzed for both continuities and disruptions of historical interactive book design strategies, and a framework is presented for conceptualizing the postdigital interactive reader today.

Volvelles of knowledge. Origin and development of an instrument of scientific imagination (13th-17th centuries)

This contribution reconstructs the history of volvelle in movable books; books created for a wide range of different purposes (teaching, mnemonics, play, divining, etc.) including mechanical or paratextual devices demanding or soliciting the interaction of the reader. The investigation runs from hand-written books, considering some specific editorial genres, including calendars, books of fate, anatomical flap books, navigation handbooks etc.

Movable text

During the early adoption of e-books, this unfamiliar digital format was made more palatable through analogy to the printed book. Texts were divided into ‘pages’ that could turn on screen, and e-book repositories were referred to as ‘libraries’. However, as digital texts have increasingly taken on characteristics of digital systems, the metaphor of the printed book has lost currency. Given the limitations of this conventional metaphor for the digital text, I propose an alternative conception, one that is as archaic in origin as the printed-book metaphor, yet surprisingly robust for describing the customizable texts of today’s Academy: the metaphor of movable text. The image derives from German printer Johannes Gutenberg’s 15th-century innovation for the mass production of books, a mechanical system that used paper, ink and the relatively cheap and reusable display of cubed, metal letters that could be arranged and rearranged into words on a tray ready to be pressed into print. This metaphor of book-as-movable text is useful in that it captures how the form of the academic textbook is now entangled with its process, as much as its context. But, how does this metaphor apply to the academic text in particular? If a movable academic book asks to be interpreted, does the mobility of meaning that it creates defy such interpretative engagement? In this article, I argue that when automated texts are effectively scaffolded by cultural critiques, they can support deep research processes. To become more effective, these searches demand focus as much as evaluation and thus drive towards the crafts of collation, synthesis and eventual reconfiguration.

Coming to Life: Movable Books Delight Children for Centuries

One of the gems of the Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature is its large collection of old movable books and toys created to delight thousands of people, young and old alike.

Coming to Life: Movable Books Delight Children for Centuries

One of the gems of the Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature is its large collection of old movable books and toys created to delight thousands of people, young and old alike.

“Mirabili visioni”: from movable books to movable texts

This contribution reconstructs the history of movable books, books created for a wide range of different purposes (teaching, mnemonics, play, divining, etc.) including mechanical or paratextual devices demanding or soliciting the interaction of the reader. The investigation runs from hand-written books to the most courageous paper-engineering experiments of the 20th century Avant-Garde, considering some specific editorial genres, including calendars, “libri di sorti”, anatomical books, navigation handbooks etc., and animated children's books. In particular, it demonstrates how the happy season for animated paper production and publishing of the 19th century would not have been possible without the scientific inheritance of optical studies and vision sciences, precursors a short time before the invention of the Lumiere brothers (1895). The study also examines some literary works using combinatorial mechanisms, experimenting the semiotic potential of expressive codes and very different techniques and materials: the reference is to books of Futurism and Dadaism, the artists' book, and other avant-garde texts from the second half of the 20th century.

Paper engineers and mechanical devices of movable books of the 19th and 20th centuries

L’articolo esamina l’evoluzione dei pop-up books destinati all’infanzia, nel periodo compreso tra la fine del Settecento e la fine del Novecento e, in particolare, la personalita artistica di alcuni editori/paper engineer ( Dean and Son, Lothar Meggendorfer, Ernest Nister, S. Louise Giraud, Vojtĕch Kubasta). Il contributo illustra inoltre il funzionamento di alcuni dispositivi cartotecnici da loro progettati e realizzati. Resta deliberatamente escluso dall’indagine il pop-up book digitale, che presenta caratteristiche e problematiche diverse rispetto al libro cartaceo e che pertanto esulano dall’ambito di interesse del saggio.

Upper Elementary Students Creatively Learn Scientific Features of Animal Skulls by Making Movable Books

Arts integration in science has benefits of increasing student engagement and understanding. Lessons focusing on form and function of animal skulls provide an effective example of how handicrafts integrated with science instruction motivate students and support learning. The study involved students ages 9-12 during a week-long summer day camp. Students applied animal skull concepts of eye positions of predators and prey, relative eye sizes of nocturnal animals compared to tunnel-dwellers, shapes and functions of different types of teeth, and terminology and functions of different bones, openings, and structures of animal skulls in making moveable book pages. These pages featured pop-up constructions, a lift-the-flap page, and a turning wheel behind cut-out windows in a page to convey the skull concepts. Additional creativity was incorporated through making a three-dimensional cover related to the Mexican Day of the Dead with skulls made from pieces of recycled plastic bottles, drawing figural-transformations, and creating animal skull models from household or discarded materials. The lessons included classification of images of skull features on cards and examination of realistic animal skull models. Pretest-posttest science content results indicated large gains with a very large effect size; attitude surveys and student work showed high motivation and creativity.

Accessibility Of Library Services In The Coastal-Karst Region

ABSTRACTPurpose: The analysis shows the geographical accessibility of library services to the population of the Coastal-Karst region and identifies gaps i.e. areas that are not covered or not adequately covered by library services.Methodology/approach: The analysis of accessibility of library services was conducted by comparing geographical locations of local libraries, travelling library stations and movable book collections according to the statistical data on population distribution in settlements in the Coastal-Karst area on the 1st of January 2011.Results: The analysis shows that library services are provided in all municipalities in the Coastal-Karst region. However, 53.5 % or 229 of all Coastal-Karst settlements remain uncovered or inadequately covered by library services, mostly in the area of the Kosovel Library of Sežana (105), followed by the Library of Koper with 72 villages and the Maksa Samsa Library of Ilirska Bistrica with 45 uncovered villages. On the other side the fact that only 21.5 % of inhabitants are left out of library services is encouraging. The establishment of local libraries in Dekani, Sv. Anton and Ankaran and the introduction of an additional mobile library would raise the percentage of population served by the library activity by 18 points (from current 78 % to 96 %). In areas without organized library activities only 4 % of the population of the Coastal-Karst region would be left out.Research limitation: Access to services for users with special needs who are not able to approach the library by themselves will be considered separately. For the same reason, the criterion of development and quality of individual library units was neglected.Originality/practical implications: The results of the research constitute the basis for an appropriate design of public libraries’ network in the Coastal-Karst region in such a manner that it will ensure equal access to library services in geographically disadvantaged areas, too.

Activity and Agency in Historical “Playable Media”

This article examines examples of English movable books produced for and created by children from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries as interactive media. I analyze the interactive design of flap books, slat books, and mechanical books in comparison to contemporary pop-up books. By adapting ideas associated with digital media and applying them back I time, I analyze the design of the movable books in light of their child reader-viewer-players or interactors. By comparing early understandings of interactivity, notably of John Locke, with those of contemporary theorists, I demonstrate how a hierarchical perception of activity and agency occurred. Ultimately, I suggest how we may be able to rethink our valuation of the terms.

Books or Toys? A Traveller’s Tale: Researching Early Movable Books for and by Children in Material and Virtual Collections


 
 
 A number of years ago, I first experienced the thrill of gaining access to the Bodleian Library at Oxford University and being granted permission to see some of the books that compose the famous Opie Collection. This joy as I sat in the New Bodleian Reading room was compounded when the Head of the Special Collections Clive Hurst, upon being told my interest in early children’s literature and culture, brought by an exquisite, little thin mid-18th century volume. When he opened it up it revealed a story of words and etched pictures about a set of characters called Harlequin, Columbine, and Clown that proceeded by means of flaps that could be lifted up and down, the directions for use sometimes being set in the verse or printed on top of the picture. He looked at me and said, ‘Are these books or toys?’
 
 

Wandering the Web -- Pop-up and Movable Books

Wandering the Web -- Pop-up and Movable Books

Moving Books/Moving Images: Optical Recreations and Children's Publishing 1800-1900

Optical shows and devices played a key role in nineteenth-century popular culture. Panoramas, dioramas, peepshows and magic lanterns were a widespread form of domestic and public recreation. The growth of optical recreations as a leisure activity parallels that of popular publishing, and this essay explores the concomitant aesthetic crossover between optical and print media. It particularly focuses on the production of a significant number of illustrated and movable books, usually aimed at a juvenile audience, which exploited the novelty of the latest optical recreation. These children's publications attempted to replicate the viewing experience of peepshows, panoramas and the magic lantern. The pervasive presence of optical recreations in popular culture meant that they exerted a creative pressure upon both the conceptual and material organisation of the book. This essay demonstrates the way that, in so far as it was possible, a raft of novelty books structured themselves as peepshows, dioramas or panoramas.