Книги на въображението
Books of imagination

“My Book-Dream” and “The Alternative Book Bodies” Education Projects Methodology

Author(s): Milena Tsvetkova
Subject(s): Social Sciences, Media studies, Library and Information Science, Education and training, Communication studies, Theory of Communication
Published by: Факултет по журналистика и масова комуникация, Софийски университет „Св. Кл. Охридски”
Keywords: book science; book research; media studies; scientific studies of reading; creative communication; media reception; book as a media; publishing projects
Summary/Abstract: This is an educational publication, intended to cover the university demands in the fields of academic disciplines, such as book studies and reading, of book-knowledge and book-publishing industry, which are taught courses at the Faculty of Journalism and Mass Communication, Sofia University, Bulgaria. It is a collection of creative concepts and designs produced by the students, studying Book publishing and Creative Communication, MA Program, FJMC, Sofia University. The concise review represents 6 stages of project activities occurred in a 6-year time period (2007-2013); it consists of totally 77 educational projects of 76 university students; one of them participated with 2 original projects consequently in two Post-Gutenberg Book Annual Student Competitions. Methodology and findings of the project lab-experiment concerning both concepts - My Book-Dream and Alternative Book Bodies, have been bases on the notion that in the field of book studies, similar to each other scholarly field, a futuristic creative thinking should be developed. Methodology, due to the educational tasks’ creative nature, is recommending design activities to be organized around the imagination techniques. The usage of this approach requires an interactive relationship between the book knowledge and visual anthropology, visual sociology and architecture anthropology and emphasizes on the very strong influence of artificial lifestyle environment (e.g. hybrid products such as book-alley, book-sleeping room, book-building, book-furniture, etc.) on human psyche and behaviour. Students interpret their projects in the frame of the norms and from the standing point of the standards they learned about during the taught course named The Book as a Media; it occurs a kind of visualization of the cohesion between the reader and the book (an intimate act of reading) or a subjective image of the ideal reading (the environment and the channel needed for the text perception). Creative interpretation of the book as an object stimulates the process of producing its objective associations and metaphors as book-aphorisms. The contribution of this publication refers to the application of specific methods for visual and spatial thinking while developing futuristic creative art abilities and skills in the respective field. Each separate project may become a reason numerous discussions to be held out, for ex. debate concerning such questions as what would be the image of the future book and how will it function tomorrow?; what would be the new opportunities to carry on, pass on, interpret and create information?; what would be the new content management forms?; what is the chance for the visual book based on the universal international language – the visual one, to survive, having in mind the background of the many voices and many languages of the multiple cultures (in synchrony with the popular cases concerning book-polylingua and wordless or ‘mute’ books)?; what is the chance of the space-figurative book as a counterpoint of the present flat two-dimensional carrier – the print sheet of paper or the display (as a reflection of the spherical book or book-globe, the dream of the renown film experimentator Sergey Eisenstein), etc. Each producer and publisher would be able to use this publication in order to develop creative projects and innovative ideas of his/her own. The publication may provoke initiation of new research directions and new ways to rethink this key technology of knowledge verbalization and memorization – the phenomenon called THE BOOK.

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