Speaker at Face/Interface 2025 at Stanford University

I’ll be a speaker at Face/Interface 2025 – Global Type Design and Human-Computer Interaction, a conference organized by Stanford University. 
I’ll be talking about my decade long research on 19th century Italian type, but from the point of view of the method: type historians don’t talk enough about how start a research, how to organize research materials. 

More than showing the results, I would focus on the process of finding primary sources and retrieving information from type specimens, magazines, newspaper articles, local registries. Where do you start if you don’t know what to look for? How do you find primary sources? What is available online? How do you access libraries and private archives? How do you build a database to keep track of information? 

I started my research in 2005 with the aim of filling a gap in Italian type history: not much was known about the hundred years between the death of Bodoni, the famous printer and punchcutter from Parma in 1813, and the raise of Nebiolo type foundry. Starting from a list of specimens given to me by my dissertation advisor, I have been tracking the resources that did not get lost. The project expanded to map the type foundries active in Italy, their production, and the evolution of the local type founding industry, that experienced the transition of mechanization during the Industrial Revolution.

Researching Italian type history: on analog and digital archives, and a scrappy database 

Face/Interface 2025
January 17–18, 2025
Stanford + Livestream 

Organized by SILICON: the Stanford Initiative on Language Inclusion and Conservation in Old and New Media.