Presenters and Abstracts

Laken Brooks (Ashe County Arts Council)

“Beyond the Dungeon and Onto the Page – Adapting D&D Narrative Approaches for Embodied Reading”

In this presentation, I posit that open-access 3D print designs and soundscape elements can reinforce Leah Meisemer’s concept of the Correspondence Zone, which Meisemer describes as an author-reader relationship in which both readers and authors engage with one another (almost as co-authors) to adapt, interpret, and reinterpret stories. What benefit might we find in promoting 3D designs and soundscapes for e-books or books printed in a flat paper format?

Reading is a bodily act, which comics and zine authors like Meisemer have long known. An author working with comics knows that visual media engages all of a reader’s body, not just a reader’s eyes. For example, a reader may tilt the book or move their head to read a panel that is printed upside down. A reader may use their finger to trace a text bubble that moves from one panel to another. Therefore, readers retain more information when they use multiple bodily senses to engage with a book. Tactile and auditory formats can encourage readers of all abilities and ages to engage more deeply (and bodily) with texts. However, multisensory printing approaches (like embedded audio elements, embossed letters, raised scenery, pop-up elements, and touch-and-feel elements) are expensive in a publishing industry that relies on flat-printed pages. How can we bridge this gap to incorporate multisensory elements into more texts beyond the comics and graphic novel genre? 

The two narrative enhancement strategies I examine (soundscapes and 3D modeling) are commonly used tools within the Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) community. The dungeon master (DM – who we might compare to a lead author or head storyteller) invites the table of adventurers (who are co-authors in their own right) to interact with soundscapes and tabletop models or maps. This communal style of  world-building and storytelling can inspire similar methods of Correspondence Zones outside of Dungeons and Dragons, as readers can explore deeper connections with a text, with an author, and with other readers when they create and share tactile models of their favorite characters and setting soundscapes.

Erica Fretwell (University of Albany)

“The Tactile Print History of Experiential Learning”

This talk excavates the occluded contribution that the invention of tactile print in the early to mid 19th century made to Progressive Era pedagogical reform, especially the philosophies and practices of experiential learning advocated by John Dewey and Maria Montessori. Montessori in particular derived her object-oriented pedagogy from disability educators who developed didactic exercises and materials that enacted learning as proprioceptive doing or making. The 20th-century turn to pragmatic ‘experience’ and its life in the primary classroom is thoroughly indebted to the proliferation of disability practices and tactile print forms that drew the body into the process of knowledge-making.

Jen Hale and Susanna Coit (Perkins School for the Blind)

“Designed for touch: Preservation approaches at the Perkins School for the Blind Archives”

Tactile print presents unique preservation and access challenges to those charged with managing archival collections. Jen Hale and Susanna Coit, Archivists from the Perkins School for the Blind, will discuss how they preserve tactile books in their collections, using storage and housing strategies tailored for these objects. They will also present considerations for making these texts available to researchers that take into account their large size, condition, and unique features or inserts. Through a combination of these efforts, the Perkins Archivists strive to balance access with preservation, to help highlight these important tactile resources and underrepresented history.  

Taylor Hare (Baylor University)

“The String Alphabet in Nineteenth Century Scotland”

Scotland has played an important role in the history of reading by touch. The first tactile book printed in English was published in Edinburgh in 1827, and soon after this the Glasgow Asylum for the Blind became a key supplier of raised print to schools for visually disabled students on both sides of the Atlantic. During these early days of Scottish tactile bookmaking, however, some students in Scotland practiced another, less well-known method of reading and writing by touch: they tied knots in rope.

In this talk, I will share preliminary research into the use of the “string alphabet” credited to David McBeath and Robert Milne, two blind men with connections to the Edinburgh Blind Asylum. Drawing on records held at the University of Glasgow and the National Library of Scotland, I’ll explain how this short-lived method of reading and writing was accomplished and in what contexts it took place. I’ll also point to key unanswered questions about its origins, functionality, and possible connections with forms of string-based inscription used in other parts of the world.

Clare Mullaney (Clemson University)

“Helen Keller, Tactile Reading, and the Plagiarized Story”

When Keller was eleven years old, the Perkins Institute for the Blind accused her of plagiarism. They framed her only work of fiction as stolen work rather than a creative engagement with and adaptive reinterpretation of another author’s story. Moving away from the self rather than towards it, Keller’s life writing depends on her own self-selected editorial network, which consisted of her teacher Anne Sullivan as well as friends and interpreters Nella Braddy Henney and Polly Thompson. These women’s orchestrated choreography of co-composition occasioned texts that evolved from typed manuscripts to Braille to moving hands shaping the manual alphabet to pencil notations in the margins of drafts. This paper unpacks the contrast between the way that teachers (and editors) manufactured Keller as a self-reliant author and the way that Keller’s scrappy manuscripts, which she describes as a “patchwork…made of all sorts of odds and ends,” refute this narrative of singularity and isolation. Keller and her collaborators function as editorial theorists who dismantle the tyranny of the single author–a tyranny that would lead to definitions of plagiarism–through their attention to mediation: the recalibration of textual production to the needs of multiple authoring bodies. Keller’s editorial interdependence models modes of composition that insist on the Socialist imperatives of a shared togetherness.

Erika Piola (Library Company of Philadelphia)

 “Invisible and Visible Touch Art: Reading 19th-Century Raised Printing for the Blind”

Nineteenth-century printing for the blind before the acceptance of Braille challenges our presumptions about the relationship between sight, reading, and knowledge. “Touch art” of the 19th century, these raised printed works described as beautiful by their type designers document kinesthetic experiences that provocatively acknowledge disability as intrinsic to their creation and that are rich for further examination. The intentional physicality of raised printing for the blind serves as a compelling means to explore typography as images received through individuals’ multiple senses. This presentation examines the question of how 19th-century blind readers during this period “read” and “feel” these “beautiful” tactile prints within the context of these works embodying intersectional expressions of art, disability studies, and research materials in historical collections.

Sarah Prentice

“Creating a Tactile Model of Boston Line Type with 3 D Modeling and 3 D Printing”

In 2022, while managing the 3D Printing Service at the University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries, I received an intriguing request from the curator behind what would become the 2024 exhibit The Learning and Labor of the Blind. He wanted to 3D print replicas of a 19th-century Boston Line Type page that visitors could touch and engage with outside the display case. Drawing on the foundational work of Touch This Page! Making Sense of the Ways We Read, I developed a replicable, low-cost workflow built around 3D modeling rather than 3D scanning. I will walk through the full process: digitally tracing the source material, building a 3D model using free software, and optimizing print settings for tactile fidelity.

Amanda Stuckey (Central Penn College)

 “Reading on the Color Line: Embossed Books in Nineteenth-Century Segregated Schools for the Blind”

While raised print reading was a key feature of nineteenth-century blind schooling, not all enrolled students had equal access to reading materials or to reading instruction. Schools in the US South, for example, segregated white and Black learners in departments that purported to be equal, but that extended different resources and instruction to these departments. This talk brings together institutional records, newspaper records, and other inked and embossed materials to study the impact of race-based segregation in state-supported schools for the blind in Maryland, North Carolina, and Georgia. The reading experiences of Black visually impaired students are difficult to reconstruct, due to double erasures and absences in the overlapping archives of the history of Black reading and the history of disability. Yet piecing together archival traces of both histories may begin to recover the environments in which Black readers read. Doing so also suggests that material factors of segregated departments, such as the availability of books, building infrastructures, and even heating systems, whether deliberately or tacitly determined, affected Black readers. In addition to acknowledging the forces frequently invoked in studies of raised print reading, such as assimilation and access, this presentation argues that structural racism must also be recognized and studied as a context that shaped all readers’ experiences of embossed texts.

Vanessa Warne (University of Manitoba)

“Paper, Marble, Metal: Tactile Print and Public Art”

In this talk, Vanessa Warne shares insights and case studies from her recent book, By Touch Alone: Blindness and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Culture. Exploring the reading lives of the first generation of people to read by touch, she argues for the interconnectedness of the history of disability and the history of literacy. This talk also reaches beyond the raised-print page to ask what we can learn about tactile print from public art. What might, for example, marble statues featuring raised-print books teach us about the history of blind people? Surveying two centuries of public art about tactile reading, including work by blind creators, Warne proposes that critical engagement with public art deepens our knowledge not only of the material history of tactile print but also of the experiences of its readers.

Neil Weijer (Bryn Mawr College)

“Containing the Tactile Book: Experiments in Binding for the Blind”

The individuals and institutions that produced tactile books often spoke in terms of the type they had designed–about its effectiveness, efficiency, or aesthetic appeal–and this tendency persists down to the present day.  But the use of raised type had consequences for every other part of the codex, from the gathering of its pages to the creation of bindings that would not flatten their texts. The bibliographical study of early tactile books reveals an almost limitless set of answers to a common question: how much could, or should, tactile books resemble those printed for sighted readers? My presentation shows that understanding and documenting the non-textual features of tactile books can help us critique and expand our own definitions of “the book” as an idea and an object of study.