DigiTwins for Post Digital Books

The School of Arts Digital Twins studentship seeks to explore how a studentship might investigate the making of digital surrogates, or twins, of items in Oxford Brookes Library and Special Collections, particularly the Chris Fowler Artist Book collection, with an emphasis on how sensors may be deployed within the making of twinned/surrogate publications.

Surrogates, to scale copies of fragile or rare publications, are sometimes used in libraries and special collections as a way to enable researchers to access books and other objects, which are otherwise difficult to handle or access, but how might these be rethought via the critical frameworks and material possibilities of post-digital publishing and artist books.

The project also seeks to research how we might create a satellite, or a digital sibling, of the library within the new building in Headington Hill, to host the surrogate publications produced within the studentship, but also
reimagine the collections, catalyse engagement with them, and become a living laboratory for making post-digital publications – a hybrid Library-Lab space.