{"id":137,"date":"2021-02-02T14:17:42","date_gmt":"2021-02-02T21:17:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/olgasetec540\/?p=137"},"modified":"2021-02-08T21:21:12","modified_gmt":"2021-02-09T04:21:12","slug":"task-4-potato-printing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/olgasetec540\/2021\/02\/02\/task-4-potato-printing\/","title":{"rendered":"Task 4 – Potato Printing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Prior to starting the assignment, I spent a considerable amount of time thinking of a word I was about to bring to material life (Haas, 2013). Besides the time and effort I was going to invest in the process, I also wanted to select a special and meaningful word to share with the world. In the end, I chose to carve the name of the city where I spent my youth and got educated – Minsk. (Ironically, my home country Belarus is often humorously referred to as ‘Potato Land’).<\/p>\n

When I think of studying Belarusian history and culture at school, I immediately reminded of Francysk Skaryna, the first book printer in Eastern Europe. His contribution to our culture was so important that a busy street in the capital city, Minsk, is named after him. When the new library building was finished a few years ago, a statue of Francysk Skaryna was placed in front of it.<\/p>\n

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It took me just over an hour to create two stamps – 40 minutes for the first one, and 20 for the second one. Even though the second stamp took half the time to make, if my goal was to print a leaflet or a poster, the process would have probably taken me a few days.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Most of the letters in my word consist of straight lines intersecting at different angles. The letter shapes in the English alphabet go back to the original alphabet invented in Lebanon in 1700 BCE (Schmandt-Besserat, 2009). While carving the letters with my craft knife, I visualized our ancestors incising the first letters on tablets, and appreciated the simplicity of the shapes.<\/p>\n

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While ‘potato press’ printing was calming and the resulting letters look unique and beautiful, the handcrafting process did take a lot of time. The temporal investment, coupled with eye fatigue and the inconsistent results makes me feel grateful and relieved that we live in a world where handwriting is remediated by print technologies (Bolter, 2001) and access to education is not limited to a wealthy few.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/olgasetec540\/files\/2021\/02\/20210201_172757.mp4<\/a><\/video><\/div>\n

P.S. A video clip of my daughter Alexandra trying to pronounce the word ‘Minsk’ for the first time. Soon she will start to understand that the signs she sees on paper match the sounds of language, and the words these sounds represent<\/em> carry semantic meaning. For now, though, she is only starting to develop her orality, and her thinking is not yet affected by writing (Haas, 2013).<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

References
\n<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Bolter, Jay David. (2001).\u00a0Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print<\/em>\u00a0[2nd<\/sup>\u00a0edition]. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.<\/p>\n

Haas, C. (2013). \u201cThe Technology Question.\u201d In\u00a0Writing technology: Studies on the materiality of literacy<\/em>Links to an external site.<\/span><\/span><\/a>. Routledge. (pp. 3-23)<\/p>\n

Schmandt-Besserat, D. (2009). \u201cOrigins and Forms of Writing.\u201d In Bazerman, C. (Ed.).\u00a0Handbook of research on writing: History, society, school, individual, text<\/em>.Links to an external site.<\/span><\/span><\/a>\u00a0New York, NY: Routledge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Prior to starting the assignment, I spent a considerable amount of time thinking of a word I was about to bring to material life (Haas, 2013). Besides the time and effort I was going to invest in the process, I also wanted to select a special and meaningful word to share with the world. In […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74774,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tasks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/olgasetec540\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/olgasetec540\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/olgasetec540\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/olgasetec540\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74774"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/olgasetec540\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137"}],"version-history":[{"count":26,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/olgasetec540\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":173,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/olgasetec540\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137\/revisions\/173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/olgasetec540\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/olgasetec540\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/olgasetec540\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}