Pop-up 3D – Digitization and Interactive Visualization of Historical Movable Books in Science-Guided Practice

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Achim Bonte
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 527302005

While the activities of libraries and museums in the field of 3D digitization of cultural assets, which has so far only been explored in rudimentary form, predominantly address static arti-facts, the project planned by the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (SBB) in cooperation with the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (DNB) goes a step further by focusing on movable books in their characteristic interactivity that transcends the modes of conventional book use. For such ki-netic book objects differ from the standard codex in their flexible operating elements – usually pull tabs or turntables – as found in medieval volvelles as well as in contemporary pop-up comics. Game picture books are considered the most popular and most differentiated mani-festation of the media genre of movement books, which has received increasing attention from researchers. In response to the material turn in the humanities and cultural studies, which is shifting the research focus to inscribed artifacts in their dimensionality, the project primarily aims to digit-ize a selection of works representative of the entire typological spectrum of game picture books and to make them permanently accessible in open access – while preserving their specific interactivity. To this end, an exemplary reference corpus of 100 19th- and early 20th-century game picture books from the SBB's public domain collections, relevant to numerous disciplines, will be used to implement a generic concept for the science-driven digitization of kinetic book objects developed by the SBB as part of the BMBF's eHeritage program. In co-operation with NFDI4Culture, in which SBB and the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (SPK) are jointly responsible for 3D digitization, the recommended procedure was recently reviewed for its practical suitability and its scientific adequacy in a dialog with researchers from various disciplines. However, it is not only the SBB's outstanding holdings of historical picture books, which are complemented by the DNB's collection – a form of media rarely collected systematically an-ywhere in the world – as well as the experience of its restoration department with the treat-ment of highly fragile paper mechanics that qualify it for this project. Added to this are the expertise and infrastructures of the Center for Digital Cultural Materialities (ZEDIKUM), which is available to the SPK institutions as a core facility in the fields of 3D digitization and visuali-zation. Particularly in view of the diversity of its collections – according to the secondary pro-ject goal – the SBB sees this project as a contribution to establishing standards for the sci-ence-driven digital replication of dynamic-interactive cultural objects such as astrolabes, reta-bles and automata – ideally with participation in the process of self-organized further devel-opment of the DFG's Rules of Practice for Digitization.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Co-Investigator: Frank Scholze