Workshop
Introducing the Tapestry Project with Bob Stein
- Date
- Friday 5 September 2025
- Time
- Address
-
FSW building
Wassenaarseweg 52
2333 AK Leiden - Room
- Rm. 0B.13
On Friday 5 September, CARMA in collaboration with ReCNTR welcomes Bob Stein who joins us all the way from New York City for an in-person, interactive workshop on the Tapestry Project — an innovative scholarly communication platform that he has been developing together with collaborator Dan Visel. We hope you will join us for a collective exploration of the affordances of Tapestries for research and teaching in the social sciences (and of special interest to those working with multimodal and artistic methods.)
If you would like to attend, please email CARMA project lead Andrew S. Hoffman (a.s.hoffman@cwts.leidenuniv.nl) and your attendance will be confirmed via an Outlook calendar invitation.
Workshop Abstract
Although we’re 75 years into the digital era, our knowledge containers are still informed by the metaphors of print: endless scrolls or stacks of pages. Think of print as existing only on one axis — forward or backward or in the case of web pages, up or down. Inevitably this leaves the reader with blinders on, making it difficult to see how the parts fit with the whole. The Tapestry Project aims to enable the creation of non-linear presentations more in sync with the way our re-wired brains are beginning to understand the world — as a multi-faceted assemblage of related ideas — or for that matter, not unlike a curated museum show. This two-dimensional view might potentially change reading practices as much as the move from the scroll to the codex does – and it clearly points the way towards three-dimensional reading environments.
To make a Tapestry you simply drag, drop and resize any number of media objects onto a single zoomable visual field. The arrangement of objects is 100% up to the maker.
The most important thing about Tapestries (here are several examples) is that the individual images in each tapestry are not thumbnails but actual operating media objects . . . web pages are live, movies and sound files play, books and papers open right in the Tapestry, each object has a comment thread, zooming and panning is smooth. The difference between a Tapestry and a list of links is striking.
In the workshop, Bob will introduce the Tapestry platform and walk everyone through the process of designing and creating Tapestries.