Collaborations

As part of the Project’s 2018-19 exploration of “Print and Impression,” M&K partnered with the printmaking studio of the Art and Art Education program at Teachers College, Columbia University. Focusing on the cultural context, materials, and techniques of “making inscriptions and impressions,” we explored the category of “the print” and looked at its early history. Along with Expert Maker Ad Stijnman, M&K partnered with the Art and Art Education program’s printmaking studio at Teachers College, Columbia University with the help of Program Manager Samantha Clay-Reagan, Adjunct Assistant Professor Mahbobe Ghods, Printmaking Studio Assistant Carolin Rechberg, and TC student Courtney Treglia.

In preparation for the Fall 2018 course, the M&K Team had a short training session in July 2018, learning five printmaking and printing techniques in five days with Stijnman and the team from Teachers College – working in both the M&K lab and in the printmaking studio. In October 2018, the laboratory seminar students had the opportunity to try their hand at the techniques, learning skills in woodblock carving, metalpoint, engraving, etching, linocut, and printing in both intaglio and relief.

View the October 2018 and July 2018 albums to see our process and results.

The collaboration between M&K and the Columbia University Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Lab (CGUI), led by Professor Steven Feiner, developed an augmented reality (AR) toolset to complement M&K’s Digital Critical Edition of BnF Ms. Fr. 640. These interactive tools helped communicate the practice-based experiential knowledge generated in the Making and Knowing Lab, allowing readers to experience the M&K lab space and the process of reconstructing historical techniques through cutting-edge visualization technologies, including Microsoft HoloLens and Google Tango devices. This research was supported by a grant from Columbia’s Collaboratory Fellows Fund and resulted in a suite of collaborative teaching initiatives: a new course, GR8975 What is a Book in the 21st Century? Working with Historical Texts in a Digital Environment (Spring 2017); a reorientation of COMS W4172 3D User Interfaces and Augmented Reality (Spring 2018 and 2019); and a second new course, ENGL84031/HISTGU4031/COMS4495 Transforming Texts: Computational Approaches to Text Analysis and Visualization (Spring 2019).

Please visit our Digital webpage for more information on our Digital Humanities courses.

CGUI Participants

Name	Department	Institution
Pamela Smith	History, Center for Science and Society	Columbia University
Naomi Rosenkranz	Center for Science and Society	Columbia University
Tianna Uchacz	History, Center for Science and Society	Columbia University
Donna Bilak	History, Center for Science and Society	Columbia University
Joel Klein	History, Center for Science and Society	Columbia University
Steven K. Feiner	Computer Science	Columbia University
Mengu Sukan	Computer Science	Columbia University
Carmine Elvezio	Computer Science	Columbia University
Xin (Amy) Xu	Computer Science	Columbia University
Noah Zweben	Computer Science	Columbia University

The Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) at Columbia has supported the Making and Knowing Project’s Laboratory Seminar since 2014, providing expert consultation and assistance in the course’s unconventional teaching program. Crucially, the CTL managed and guided the students’ (and Project’s) use of media, experimentation with emerging technologies, and digital laboratory field notes.

Through the Columbia Provost’s Hybrid Learning Course Redesign and Delivery program, M&K was extremely fortunate to work with the Center for Teaching and Learning in designing and implementing a new course in the Digital Humanities, HIST GR8975: What is a Book in the 21st century? offered in Spring 2017. For this digital seminar, M&K and CTL developed a rubric for digital literacy specific to this course, one which articulates baseline standards and professional competencies in digital scholarship required of graduate students entering the job market and develop a model of how digital literacy might be taught and demonstrated at Columbia. As a result, this collaboration has not only resulted in the development of a competency roadmap specific to the digital seminar, but also has contributed to the creation of a recently announced resource, CTL’s Digital Literacy Competency Calculator by which students and instructors can conceive and customize the learning experience.

M&K collaborates with two projects at Cambridge University’s Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH): Genius Before Romanticism: Ingenuity in Early Modern Art and Science (PI: Alexander Marr) and Making Visible: The Visual and Graphic Practices of the Early Royal Society (PI: Sachiko Kusukawa). Both CRASSH projects visited M&K and the Center for Science and Society in September 2017 for a joint symposium and a lab visit, where they joined M&K students in the exercise of breadmolding. In turn, M&K visited Cambridge in June 2017, taking part in a workshop investigating the making of azurite pigment at the Fitzwilliam Museum led by Spike Bucklow as part of Genius Before Romanticism’s “Ingenuity in the Making” theme, followed by a seminar at CRASSH on the theme of ingenious objects, processes, and materials. M&K staff were then fortunate to visit a Making Visible team session at the Royal Society to view a selection of fascinating technical and artisanal documents.

CRASSH Participants

Name	Department	Institution
Pamela Smith	History, Center for Science and Society	Columbia University
Naomi Rosenkranz	Center for Science and Society	Columbia University
Tianna Uchacz	History, Center for Science and Society	Columbia University
Donna Bilak	History, Center for Science and Society	Columbia University
Joel Klein	History, Center for Science and Society	Columbia University
Alexander Marr	History of Art	Cambridge University
Raphaële Garrod	Genius Before Romanticism	Cambridge University
José Ramón Marcaida	Genius Before Romanticism	Cambridge University
Richard Oosterhoff	Genius Before Romanticism	Cambridge University
Sachiko Kusukawa	History and Philosophy of Science	Cambridge University
Sietske Fransen	Genius Before Romanticism	Cambridge University
Katherine Reinhart	Genius Before Romanticism	Cambridge University

 

This partnership between M&K and the Frick Collection in New York City was a knowledge exchange initiative sparked by the Lab Seminar’s investigations of historical materials and techniques. Moreover, M&K’s material reconstructions of 16th-century medal casting techniques coincided with the Frick’s acquisition of a large collection of portrait medals showcased May–September 2017 in the exhibition, The Pursuit of Immortality: Masterpieces from the Scher Collection of Portrait Medals. This shared interest resulted in investigatory viewing sessions at the Frick to look for evidence of casting methods described in detail in Ms. Fr. 640, as well as the creation of a video (directed by former M&K student Diana Mellon) detailing the process of portrait medal casting featured in the Frick’s exhibition.

Explore the Frick’s website
Learn more about the exhibit
Read about the new acquisition
Watch the video

Frick Collection Participants

Name	Department	Institution
Pamela Smith	History, Center for Science and Society	Columbia University
Naomi Rosenkranz	Center for Science and Society	Columbia University
Tianna Uchacz	History, Center for Science and Society	Columbia University
Donna Bilak	History, Center for Science and Society	Columbia University
Joel Klein	History, Center for Science and Society	Columbia University
Charles Kang	M&K Student, Art History and Archaeology	Columbia University
Diana Mellon	M&K Student, Art History and Archaeology	Columbia University
Sofia Gans	M&K Student, Art History and Archaeology	Columbia University
Jonah Rowen	M&K Student, Architecture	Columbia University
Rozemarijn Landsman	M&K Student, Art History and Archaeology	Columbia University
Aimee Ng	Italian Renaissance Art	Frick Collection

Lan Li, a 2016-2019 Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience, designed and taught undergraduate and graduate seminar course on histories of science and technology in East Asia (the first to be held at Columbia University). Students explored what it means for historians to engage in experimentation and the pedagogical value of burning, breaking, and substituting materials. Beyond reading texts, the course also involved a practical component as students engaged with knowledge production by actually making things. This practical assignment, in lieu of a written research paper, was modeled after the Making and Knowing Project. Reconstructions included armillary spheres, techniques for repairing ceramic, and a “simple and convenient x-ray.” The second practical component of the course involved translating broader research questions into a podcast. Podcasts include essays on plastic surgery, mapping mountains, and ritualized cremation.

View the projects and podcasts on the course website

Kelly Lemons is pursuing her PhD in English Education at Teachers College (Columbia University). She is studying the development of creative play spaces in the teaching of college writing and beyond – namely how adolescent and adults learners can benefit from playing with modalities, avatars of creativity, and a dialogic community of learning. Her work with the Making and Knowing Project focused on the pedagogical underpinnings of making, writing, and research – how these forces might connect into a third space that forms from the “real” of a focused object of research (a historical manuscript of artisan recipes) and the “imagined” of methods of reconstruction (both physical and theoretical) – and how this third space fosters creativity in a unique learning and research community.

From March-September 2018, the Musee des Augustins hosted an exhibition on Toulouse in the Renaissance. The exhibition featured BnF Ms. Fr. 640, which was compiled in the Toulousain milieu around the turn of the seventeenth century. M&K’s life casts of plants and insects, produced according to the recipes in Ms. Fr. 640, were exhibited alongside the manuscript. The M&K team also co-hosted the symposium “Du Manuscrit au Livre. L’écriture des Savoir-Faire à la Renaissance” (From the Manuscript to the Book: The Writing of How-To in the Renaissance) held March 15-17, 2018 in Toulouse, France. This event brought together curators and scholars of the French Renaissance.

View our event Flickr album

Co-organized by M&K and the Science History Institute in 2014-15, the Network brought together a number of researchers engaged in reconstruction at the Institute, Columbia, and nearby universities for discussion and a lecture series. In October 2015, M&K and the Science History Institute held a Reconstruction Workshop which brought together speakers and panelists in interdisciplinary conversations about the use or role of reconstruction in research. This workshop considered conceptual and methodological issues of historical reconstruction, as well as case studies demonstrating the kinds of knowledge that reconstructions can yield. It examined questions of methodology and evidence in reconstructions, e.g., what protocols and principles ought to guide the design of reconstructions? What is the status, as historical evidence, of the emergent knowledge produced by reconstructions? How should subjective, experiential knowledge be integrated into scholarly writing, and how can we take advantage of new modes of publishing (e.g. digital humanities)?

Reconstruction Network Participants

Name	Department	Institution
Pamela Smith	History, Center for Science and Society	Columbia University
Naomi Rosenkranz	Center for Science and Society	Columbia University
Tianna Uchacz	History, Center for Science and Society	Columbia University
Donna Bilak	History, Center for Science and Society	Columbia University
Joel Klein	History, Center for Science and Society	Columbia University
Joel T. Fry	Curation	Bartram’s Garden
Vanessa Sellers	Humanities Institute	New York Botanical Garden
Jennifer Rampling	History	Princeton University
Sven Dupré	History and Art History	Utrecht University
Andy Roddick	Anthropology	McMaster University
Brian Boyd	Anthropology	Columbia University
Lawrence M. Principe	Chemistry, History of Science and Technology	Johns Hopkins University
Steven Turner	Medicine and Science	Smithsonian National Museum of American History
Marjolijn Bol	Conservation and Restoration	University of Amsterdam
Michele Marincola	Conservation	New York University
Elisabeth Berry Drago	Public History, Art History	Science History Institute
Elaine Leong		Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
Michelle DiMeo	Digital Collections	Science History Institute
Giuseppe Gerbino	Music	Columbia University
Loren Ludwig		Independent Scholar
Robin Bier		Les Canards Chantants
Graham Bier	Music	Bryn Athyn College
Ken Albala	History, Food Studies	University of the Pacific
Sarah Kernan	History	Ohio State University
William R. Newman	History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine	Indiana University

The Refashioning the Renaissance Project at Aalto University in Finland combines theoretical perspectives and practical hands-on work to investigate how fashion emerged and developed among new social groups in sixteenth and seventeenth century Western and Nordic Europe. Former Making and Knowing Postdoctoral Scholar Sophie Pitman currently serves as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Refashioning the Renaissance. In March 2019, Making and Knowing collaborated with Refashioning the Renaissance for a dye workshop. The groups experimented with materials commonly used in the early modern period for dyeing red, including the widespread madder, the expensive kermes and the potent cochineal.

Learn more via Refashioning the Renaissance’s post and view their video below.

This collaboration between M&K and the Glass Department of Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) brought together the M&K team and students with the RISD Glass professors and students as well as consultants from the Corning Museum of Glass and the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, the Universiteit Utrecht ARTECHNE group, independent glassblowers and artists, and the Brown University Geochemistry Department. Over the course of three days, the group focused on testing variations of the “ruby gems” recipes found in Ms. Fr. 640, part of a larger collection of recipes in the manuscript for creating various colored gems by making colored glass. The ruby recipe describes building a furnace that can be heated to a high temperature and combining calcined pebbles (quartz), gold, and minium (lead tetroxide) in a crucible to be heated for an entire day. While the author-practitioner notes his failed attempts at creating a beautiful red glass, he offers some suggestions for possible revisions to his process that could be more successful. The workshop attempted a number of these variations and tried to draw connections to other early modern efforts at producing the historically elusive “gold ruby glass,” which relies on a difficult technique known in antiquity but subsequently lost and recovered only sporadically until the late seventeenth century when it was codified in print. In consultation with materials scientists, physicists, and geochemists as well as practicing glass artists and industrial glass makers, the workshop also sought to understand the material basis for creating red leaded glass using gold.

View our Flickr album
Read a RISD article about our collaboration

RISD Participants

Name	Department	Institution
Pamela Smith	History, Center for Science and Society	Columbia University
Naomi Rosenkranz	Center for Science and Society	Columbia University
Tianna Uchacz	History, Center for Science and Society	Columbia University
Donna Bilak	History, Center for Science and Society	Columbia University
Joel Klein	History, Center for Science and Society	Columbia University
Ana-Matisse Donefer-Hickie	M&K Student, Material Culture	Bard Graduate Center
Reid Cooper	Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences	Brown University
Glen Cook	Materials Science	Corning Museum of Glass
Dedo Von Kerssenbrock-Krosigk	Glass History	Museum Kunstpalast
Rachel Berwick	Glass	Rhode Island School of Design
Jocelyne Prince	Glass	Rhode Island School of Design
Hunter Blackwell	Glass	Rhode Island School of Design
Anna Riley	Glass	Rhode Island School of Design

RISD Glass Department Students

Raghvi Bhatia Camille Cady­Mccrea Kelly Eriksen Yiyi Wei Yufei Liu Jorge Placios Wen Zhuang

Ximo (Momo) Xiao Yidan Zeng Felicia LeRoy Evan Voelbel Maia Chao Ipek Kosova Songlin Li

Michael White Cindy Del Rio Riley Embler Jane Robertson Anya Petit

Princeton International School for Mathematics and Science (PRISMS) and M&K worked together to develop PRISMS high school student Olina Liang’s 2-year Research and Innovation Project on metalworking and casting techniques. Olina used the insights from M&K’s annotations on moldmaking and metalworking as well as the Project’s translations of Ms. Fr. 640 to inform her own investigation into artisanal making techniques, molding sands and binders, and technical analysis of her casts using scanning electron microscope (SEM) technology. Her results were published in the Journal of Chemical Education article Recipe for Developing High-School Research Projects Illustrated by a Student’s Interpretation of Historical Metal Casting.

A second student, Helen Zhang, reconstructed the golden pigment-making process detailed in folios 76v and 104r and used the self-made pigments in a copy of Gustav Klimt’s 1907 painting The Lady in Gold. She then compared the manuscript-based historical pigments against the market historical pigment, by doing a series of scientific tests (eg. spectrophotometry test, pH test, RGB test, and light fastness test). She presented her results at the Mercer Science and Engineering competition and received an Honorable Mention in the Chemistry and Materials category. See her poster and final paper for more information.

PRISMS Participants

Name	Department	Institution
Pamela Smith	History, Center for Science and Society	Columbia University
Naomi Rosenkranz	Center for Science and Society	Columbia University
Donna Bilak	History, Center for Science and Society	Columbia University
Olina Lian	Student	PRISMS
Helen Zhang	Student	PRISMS
Steven Chen	Chemistry	PRISMS
Reuben Loewy	Humanities and Journalism	PRISMS
Laurie Hochstetler	U.S. History and Modern World History	PRISMS
Alkan Nallbani	Art	PRISMS
Roxanne Spencer	Chemistry	PRISMS

 

Through this foundational partnership, the Science History Institute supported a Postdoctoral Scholar on the Making and Knowing Project (M&K) for three consecutive academic years: Joel Klein (2014–2015), Donna Bilak (2015–2016), and Tianna Uchacz (2016–2017). With guidance and oversight from key Science History Institute staff, especially Jody A. Roberts (Director of the Institute for Research), Carin Berkowitz (Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry), and Michelle DiMeo (Director of Digital Library Initiatives), Columbia-Science History Institute Scholars developed projects that bridged their specific expertise with ongoing initiatives at the Institute, transcribing rare book content, creating metadata for newly digitized items from the museum and rare book collections, and leading a reading group and workshop among the community of Science History Institute fellows – ”Material Conversations.” Additionally, the partnership yielded the Reconstruction Network, described below.

Starting in 2019, M&K partnered with the Sako Sakura Gallery for a series of public events. With locations in New York City, Koriyama, and Tokyo, the gallery specializes in Nihonga Japanese art – a painting method defined by its use of natural mineral pigments. Joint events focused on the history and methodology behind making pigments with hands-on experimentation.

In 2014-15, M&K partnered with instructors of the MA in Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage, Tonny Beentjes, Ellen van Bork, and Tamar Davidowitz to author annotations on Moldmaking and Metalworking for the critical edition. University of Amsterdam (UvA) students Michaela Groeneveld, Ingeborg Kroon, Elisabeth Kuiper, and Marianne Nuji worked intensively in the Rijksmuseum teaching labs during the spring semester to produce an annotation on a casting technique now called “incuse reverse casting” and one on the mysterious moldmaking material that Ms. Fr. 640 author-practitioner called “spat.” These students built upon the experiences of M&K lab seminar students of the previous semester Rozemarijn Landsman and Jonah Rowen who had authored an annotation on incuse reverse casting (fol. 92r). The UvA students achieved a successful cast using one of the most interesting techniques mentioned in this entry. In addition, in Spring 2015, Dr. Marjolijn Bol included a unit in her Technical Art History course at the UvA during which students reconstructed Ms. Fr. 640 entries, including “Impromptu masque,” “oil on taffeta,” dragonsblood “enamel,” and other processes. M&K Director Pamela Smith attended their all-day capstone review of their reconstruction experiments at the Rijksmuseum’s Ateliergebouw in May 2015. In the following year, Dr. Bol taught the course again as part of UvA’s newly established Technical Art History program, and in very brief units (only a few weeks), the many students produced admirable short annotations on a wide variety of colormaking entries.

In spring 2016, the University of Glasgow’s School of Culture and Creative Arts instructors Erma Hermens and Martin Richter and students in the postgraduate program in Technical Art History conducted a one-day transatlantic cochineal lake pigment making experiment with students in the Making and Knowing lab seminar. Great fun was had as students held their computer cameras up to their red lake pigments and compared colors in real time between Glasgow and New York City. Since then, the Making and Knowing Project has incorporated red lake pigment making into its skillbuilding exercises in each offering of the laboratory seminar.

In Spring 2018, Vera Keller (Associate Professor of History at the University of Oregon) incorporated M&K into her “Experiment,” which explores the origins of experimental science in early modern Europe (15th to 18th centuries). Students researched Ms. Fr. 640 before reading finished annotations. The class had the chance to Skype with current and former Making and Knowing students, who were able to answer questions and respond to critiques. Additionally, the course included a number of experimental reconstructions, including a “Boyle’s Law” demonstration and growing of Seignette Salts. Students then describe the course of the experiment in a period voice (voice of Boyle or voice of the author-practitioner), and discussed what is at stake in the various literary technologies employed. For more information, please view the attached syllabus.

Since 2015, the Making and Knowing Project has had an ongoing collaboration with the Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, where Professor Pascal Julien of the Department of Art and Archeology has conducted and supervised research on the context, contents, and genesis of Ms. Fr. 640. Pascal identified local sites around Toulouse mentioned in the manuscript, sourced local materials for the lab, and supervised the work of Sarah Munoz and Colin Debuiche, who performed archival research for the Project over the 2015–2016 academic year. Colin continued this work in 2017-2019 as the M&K Gerda Henkel Postdoctoral Scholar. Sarah served as the M&K Gerda Henekl Postdoctoral Scholar from 2019-2020. Additionally, M&K’s 2017 Text Workshop was graciously hosted by the Université Toulouse under the coordination of Pascal Julien’s team and with generous support from the Department of Art and Archaeology. M&K is particularly grateful to Colin and Sarah for leading visits to nearby sites and institutions, including hands-on sessions at the Municipal Archives and personalized tours through the Musée des Augustins and the Cathedrals of Albi, Rodez, and Auch.

Making and Knowing collaborated with Dr. Marta Ajmar and the V&A/RCA History of Design postgraduate program to integrate research on Ms. Fr. 640 into the course content of the MA and PhD program. The M&K’s lab seminar students and History of Design students had occasional group Skype meetings to review their respective research and reconstructions. In 2015, Alessandra Chessa contributed an annotation on “Coral Contrefait” (fol. 3r) for the critical edition. In 2016-17, in their course module on “Thinking and Experiencing Techne,” History of Design students and instructor Dr. Simona Valeriani worked with V&A furniture conservators on two varnish recipes, following entries in Ms. Fr. 640 for varnishes (fol. 101v: “The Germans boil the minium in linseed oil, and to give it the consistency of varnish, they mix in heavily pulverized amber and spike lavender oil,” and 73v: “Take two ounces of aspic oil and one ounce of sandarac. Take a clean pot and warm it and then take it out of the fire, and after, put the drugs inside, then put them into a vial and apply it on the wood.”) In 2017, the History of Design program also worked with Hamilton Kerr conservator, Dr. Spike Bucklow, on the grinding of azurite to make a deep blue pigment. See the results of these exciting collaborations in the Programme’s “Thinking and Experiencing Techne” blogs and videos.

Among the Project’s earliest collaborators was Columbia’s Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities (or xpMethod), whose self-styled mission to rapidly prototype speculative ideas brought about the first functional mock-ups of M&K’s Project data (explore these prototypes on the Digital page of this website). xpMethod served as an incubator for innovative approaches to analysis and visualization in the humanities, and M&K also collaborated with xpMethod co-founder Dennis Tenen through the Collaboratory Fellows Fund: a new graduate course in the Digital Humanities, ENGL84031/HISTGU4031/COMS4495 Transforming Texts: Computational Approaches to Text Analysis and Visualization taught in Spring 2019. See Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Lab section above for more information.

In July 2017 and January 2019, Pamela Smith worked with Nussara Tiengate to mount a Weaving Knowledge Workshop at Ban Rai Jai Sook in Chiang Mai, Thailand. These two workshops provided a two-week immersion in traditional Thai weaving for international PhD students. Over two weeks, participants experienced a full immersion in Lanna weaving with help from expert weavers and textile scholars. In 2019, the Making and Knowing Postdoctoral Scholars participated in the workshop.

Participants used indigo, turmeric, stick-lac, and jackfruit bark to dye cotton, prepared and warped their looms, and practiced a variety of techniques, including plain weave, tapestry, and “chok” – a way of creating supplementary patterns which involves the use of a porcupine quill. Visits to Lua and Karen communities near Mae Chaem gave insights into indigenous weaving practice and its context, as well the challenge of articulating embodied craft knowledge

Below are videos created by Lan Li.

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  • Weaving Knowledge: Banraijaisook

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  • Weaving Knowledge: Looms of Banraijaisook

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  • Weaving Knowledge: Thinking, Feeling, and Making

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