I made my first successful bid through ebay for 100 IBM Fortran punch cards. A guilty pleasure, but I'm glad I did it. Matt and I will add them to our growing collection of hands-on pedagogic tools, which in addition to the punch cards include a Mini-Labs science electricity kit (for demonstrating simple electrical circuits); braille instructional paper (for discussions of binary inscription technologies and code more generally); a hard drive salvaged from one of my early PCs; facsimile chainline paper purchased through the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia (for illustrating principles of bibliographic format); and a number of artists' books (especially by Johanna Drucker).
A sundry list at a glance, but taken together the objects reflect our common interests in inscription technology, humanities computing, and the history of the book.
Have any pedagogic curios of your own? I'd love to hear about them.
Posted by karik at July 29, 2003 12:10 PM | TrackBackWhen Hornbake Library at the University of Maryland was clearing out supplies, MITH was allowed to go pick out some furniture. I requested one of the old card catalogue chest of drawers. It now sits in the MITH conference room. I actually have no idea what the history of the card catalogue is, but I thought it would be cool for MITH to have a wood and paper relational database.
I like the analogy between a card catalogue and a relational database: nice. Nicholson Baker has some fine things to say about card catalogues in a little essay he titles "Discards." Hmm: I wonder what those old chests of drawers go for on ebay? (Just kidding, Matt!)
You could probably get them on the cheap from UMD. They had just started clearing out the card catalogues from the basement, where they had been stored since (I think) around 1987.
Most of the cards had been discarded, and the drawers were slowly disappearing. You might get yourself a free set ;)
Thanks, Jason--I just might make an inquiry!