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inspiration library gems

Inspiration From the Archives

Over the past four weeks I have been making selections from our archives of some of the most wonderful publications I have had the privilege of commissioning, supporting or creating. Here is the first batch of selections, spanning both diffusion.org.uk and bookleteer’s own Public Library, added to each day on our Twitter account and searchable by the hashtag #makingreading. All are free to download, print out and make up, and some can be read online in their bookreader form:

  1. Dispersals by Gair Dunlop (2013)
  2. making/do by Jane Prophet (2011)
  3. The New Worker’s Songbook Songwriters’ Workbook for New Worksongs! by Tor Lukasik-Foss (2011)
  4. If London Were Like Venice Oh! That It Were!” by Somers L. Summers (1899/2012)
  5. Phantom Tomes from an imaginary library by Clara Angus Lane & Giles Lane (2017)
  6. Blakewalk 3 by Tim Wright (2009)
  7. Spaces and Places of Convergence by Anne Galloway (2006)
  8. Dominion Dundas by Seth (2009)
  9. Whisker Issue One by Hazem Tagiuri et al (2013)
  10. Aerial Stories: notes about gravity, bodies and the view out the window by Louise K Wilson (2005)
  11. Out of it, Into It by Deborah Levy (2002)
  12. Bottle Orchestra by Tony White (2007)
  13. Hackney Rebel by Dawes Gray (2014)
  14. An A-Z of The Ting: Theatre of Mistakes – A by Marie-Anne Mancio (Part 1 of a 16 book set, 2009)
  15. The Robinson Institute by Patrick Keiller (2002) 
  16. The Cabinet of Alchemical Curiosities by Joyce MajiskiZea Morvitz (2019)
  17. Waiting For Crisis by Will Davies (2009)
  18. The Psychogeography of Zeros and Ones by Stewart Home (2002)
  19. Picnic: order, ambiguity and community by Kevin Harris (2011)
  20. Voiceover by Mohini Chandra (2002)
  21. Poets from the Horizon: Scrapbook of Words by Poets of New Horizons Centre, Peter Baxter & Rosie Knight (2015)
  22. Single Step Guide to Success – Day Planning by Heath Bunting (2006)
  23. The Life and Adventures of the Celebrated Walking Stewart: including his travels in the East Indies, Turkey, Germany, and America by a Relative (1822/2010)
  24. specious spacious by William Firebrace (2002)
  25. Travelling Through Layers by Alice Angus, Giles Lane & Orlagh Woods (2009)
  26. Systems/Layers by Nurri Kim & Adam Greenfield (2011)
  27. Areopagitica by John Milton (1644/2013)
  28. Professor Starling’s Thetford-London-Oxford Expedition by Professor William Starling (Andrew T Hunter), Lisa Hirmer, Leila Armstrong, Josie Mills, Hazem Tagiuri & Giles Lane (3 books, 2012)

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news

Making Custom Notebooks

We have been making custom project notebooks for many years – they are very popular with participants in workshops or when doing field work as we can make them bespoke for the purpose, and the participants can personalise them as they wish.

Our TK Reite Notebooks project is perhaps the classic example, but we have made many others, such as the recent Field & Group Notebooks for the Antarctic Cities Youth Expedition.

Here is a simple guide to help understand the steps in the process.

Download the PDF here.

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news

Republic of Learning

Giles Lane and Rachel Jacobs have put together two bookleteer books documenting Republic of Learning workshops about responses to climate change. We’ll be adding more books as the series continues.
View the collection here.

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news

Antarctic Cities Youth Expedition Notebooks


Giles Lane has designed a set of personal field notebooks and a group workbook for the participants of the Antarctic Cities project’s Youth Expedition to Antarctica. Five young people each representing one of the “Gateway Cities” have been selected to spend a week at the Chilean Base in Antarctica this February. Look out for the results soon!
“View the Collection here.”

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news

From Posts to Books

I’ve recently re-worked some of my posts from my personal website into bookleteer eBooks:

Hiding in Plain SightRead Online or Download PDF

A Calculation is Not a JudgementRead Online or Download PDF

The Data Sublime & A Poetics of DataRead Online or Download PDF

Daemons of the Shadow WorldRead Online or Download PDF

View other publications i’ve made on bookleteer here.

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news

Bookleteer’s 10th Anniversary


10 years ago, in early September 2009, Proboscis launched bookleteer and enabled a new approach to making and sharing publications. It combined a simple method for uploading content and generating booklets in our Diffusion eBook formats (originally designed and launched in 2000), as well as our StoryCubes format (originally designed in 2005).

Over the past decade we’ve run a variety of workshops and engagement projects using bookleteer and its publishing formats to enable people to make and share things they value, both here in the UK and abroad. We’ve collaborated with research and academic partners (including museums and libraries) to devise practical toolkits for social and cultural action; as well as creating methods of sharing knowledge, discoveries and experiences outside the usual channels for public dissemination.

Bookleteer has become the foundation for a whole new way for local communities to develop their own self-publishing cultures, such as our work with Reite people in Papua New Guinea on the TKRN project.

There’s still plenty more to be achieved in the next decade…

Categories
examples news

Inspired by Caribou

Canadian artist Joyce Majiski has published another stunning book of artworks, this time, as the eponymous title suggests, inspired by caribou (reindeer). These are the Porcupine Caribou herd – the keystone species that roams across Northern Canada and Alaska – which she has encountered several times in the Ivvavik National Park in the northern Yukon.

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examples inspiration news

A Field Guide to People Centric Practices

A booklet of personal reflections, by Giles Lane, on what a set of principles for working from a people-centric perspective might be.

People centric practice implies not just a human centred approach, but one which encompasses the whole context in which we live and work, and impacts on other creatures and lifeforms that are part of such environments – the more-than-human world. It addresses the whole ecologies of which we are part, on upon which we depend for our very existence. People does not have to mean exclusively human – we might consider other species (trees, birds, mammals etc) as peoples, as some indigenous humans have done, since they constitute their own societies and ways of being in the world. All have as much right to life as each other, it is only human hubris which champions our right to own and exploit everything else as paramount.

The booklet brings together, in a simple way, a set of principles and guides for working based on empathy, common sense, trust and agency. It is centred on establishing and following an ethos – through listening and responding, trusting and being trusted; anticipating consequences and reflecting on what you do. It adds into the mix principles for building trust borrowed from Baroness Onora O’Neill’s 2002 Reith Lectures, as well as the Precautionary Principle, Duty of Care and the Nolan Principles of Public Life. It also includes personal values: passion, intensity, intimacy, pleasure, obligation, responsibility, culpability.

Download on bookleteer, or read the online version.

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inspiration news

A Cabinet of Alchemical Curiosities

Long-time bookleteer, artist Joyce Majiski, has created a new book of postcards exchanged between herself and artist Zea Morvitz during 2014. Its an exquisitely illustrated collaboration across both time and space – Joyce lives in the Yukon, Canada, and Zea lives in Point Reyes, California. The book is part of a current exhibition of their work, “The Art of Staying in Touch” at Sometimes Books in Point Reyes California. See more images of the exhibition on Joyce’s Tumblr.

Categories
education examples news

UnBias Fairness Toolkit Handbook

Proboscis has been working on a research project about algorithms, bias, trust and fairness with the University of Oxford, Horizon Digital Economy Institute (University of Nottingham) and the University of Edinburgh since September 2016. Our role has been to develop a “Fairness Toolkit” intended to stimulate awareness of these issues and to provide mechanisms for people to share their concerns and hopes, as well as for industry stakeholders (IT professionals, policymakers, regulators, activists, researchers etc) to respond, triggering a ‘public, civic dialogue’ about “our future internet, free and fair for all”.

The UnBias Fairness Toolkit is now available and free to download – you can read all about it in the Handbook below: