A little birb wanted some love and attention while her favourite human was not at home, so her spare human brought her up to hangout while working. Spare human was reminded that birb time is not conducive to work time.

Hoping a fellow Kobo user can help me. I've been reading books and articles that I downloaded from my university library on my Kobo. I download from the library then transfer them to my Kobo via DropBox. I was reading and suddenly got this notice and lost access to everything.

Here is an example that has braille! The braille is in Dutch and the image is called The Talking Hand. The print object is at Perkins School for the Blind.

And it worked! The text is extremely subtle, but that's accurate to the materiality of the book. It's difficult to see visually—the sparkly filament doesn't help, but I used what was already loaded for this test print—but the texture is there. I'm really pleased with how this turned out.

It has been kind of a frustrating day, but my new cane just arrived and it's so pretty! 😍 I've only had plain-looking canes before, because I thought it would be a temporary need. Now that I know it's permanent, I figured why not get something more stylish.

I bought a label maker (for work purposes). This is the first label I made. Pippin is living up to it. She chirpped happily when I applied it.

There is a pair of Canada geese who live on the U of A campus. Yesterday, I saw one goose attempt to attack someone—they got away, don't worry. Today, this is in the campus-wide email newsletter. Respect the geese! They own the campus, we just borrow it.

More 3D scanning, now at Perkins. This book is in the incredibly rare Hughes type. I knew the tactile characters on this page would render, but what surprised me was that there is a bit of bite from the ink-printed characters that are visible on the scan as well. Curious if that bite will print!

The BlueSky algorithm is at it again. 🙃 (In case the whole image doesn't show, it's your post directly under one about a magazine article that could have used a fact checker.)

I flipped through the book and picked the page that felt the most tactile, which was still very flat. I didn't get great results, but there are results. Very faint embossed characters are visible on the scan. I tried a couple other pages and other settings on my scanner. This is the best result. 9/

To make this book double-sided, they glued pages together. This type of tactile text couldn't be embossed double-sided. I found a page that had already started splitting, and there's no evidence of debossing on the backside of these pages either. So the flattening is not simply from use. 7/

When this book was sent to be bound, the binder did what they knew how to do. They bound the manuscript in hardcover with a tight, firm spine. To do so, they had the book in a binding press to help sturdy the spine and the binding. Very typical production methods for printed books. 5/

This is an "embossed" page in the middle of this book. The main pages in the book were ink-printed and embossed for the benefit of the sighted teachers at the school. You might notice that it looks significantly less tactile than some other embossed books. It is, unfortunately, no longer tactile. 3/

More adventures in 3D scanning tactile books! Today's object of interest: the first (that we know of) tactile book ever produced for people with visual impairments. This is Essai sur l'education des aveugles, in English: Essay on the Education of the Blind. Produced in 1786 at Haüy's school. 1/

What's really cool in this too is that it has captured all the texture of the paper. This book was embossed using a guide frame to help keep the embossed text on straight lines. You can see the evidence of that guide frame in the texture of the paper.

I'm spending this morning cleaning up some of my 3D scans from my trip to Musée Louis Braille. Starting with the book I've posted about before, which was embossed by Louis Braille in 1838. I love how the scanner is able to pick up the details of holes in the page and the rough edges of the paper.

Definitely not a tech bro. Thanks for sharing! Interesting concept.

Hi, folks! I'm looking for books embossed in moon. I'm particularly interested in finding as many copies, editions, and variations (even incomplete sets) of "The Gospel of John" that are in moon type, but if your library or archive has ANY moon books, please let me know? Example of moon type below.

There isn't on his actual tomb—you wouldn't be able to reach the tomb easily to touch it. There is braille on the placard just outside the room (pictured above) and there's a table placard with braille info as well where the bust is sitting (pictured here).

Braille didn't start to become well used until shortly before his death in 1852. When he died, he would have had no idea that we'd still be actively using his code in 100+ languages 200 years later. These photos are from his tomb in the Pantheon in Paris, France.

This morning, someone asked me what the most interesting thing was that I saw on my recent archives trip. I had a lot to choose from, but this is definitely the coolest. A book that was embossed by Louis Braille himself in 1838, which is held by le Musée Louis Braille in Coupvray, France.

Birb says hello.

From rare book (physical) to 3D scan (digital) to cleaned-up 3D model (digital) to 3D printed object (physical). This was a really fun process to think through texture and materiality of a tactile book object. This was a test, and I learned a lot from the process. More to come later this year!

The @sharpweb.org email just went out, so I can post about it now! SHARP awarded me the very generous 25th-Anniversary Fellowship to support research travel for my project "A History of Tactile Writing and Reading." I'm so grateful to SHARP, the awards committee, and the book history community.

Do better, Edmonton. This is ridiculous. I know we live in a snowy area but leaving sidewalks inaccessible like this is awful. I was already having a bad pain day and I had a suitcase with me. I couldn't even walk around it in the street without serious backtracking.

I took my 3D scanner to Bruce Peel today to work with this moon bible that they acquired a couple months ago. It was able to pick up on the texture of the text extremely well. I stuck the guide markers on acid-free paper and placed them on to help with the scan but not damage the book.

If you want English braille, it would be ⠃⠕⠕⠅. The screenshot image shows the same word with ghost dots so you can better see the characters' positions in the braille cell.

I could just use two flat circles and say they form two halves of a sphere, but in my head it looks better if they're bent/shaped that the spherical implication is obvious. Each half is split into quarters, and each quarter is further quartered (like a colour wheel, which is what I currently have).

I'm not super familiar with the Bible because I grew up in a non-religious household. The spine and title page tell me that it's the New English Bible John in three volumes. So I assume it's only a portion of the Bible? Judging by the amount of text, it doesn't seem like the whole Bible.

The Bruce Peel special collections library at UAlberta recently acquired a Bible in moon, and I'm so excited—you might even say that I'm over the moon about it. It's a 1960s reproduction of a mid-1800s volume (moon was invented in the 1840s). Unfortunately. It's only volume 1 (of 3).