In an Age of AI, Students Gather to Learn Bookbinding
by Karen Close,
Director, University Communications and Media Relations –
To hear them speak of it while in each other’s company is a rare treat.
English professor Amber Dunai and anthropology professor Christine Jones are colleagues in the best and most authentic sense of the word. One begins a thought and the other finishes it. One offers an observation and the other adds context. Their conversations move easily between literature, history, culture and teaching, punctuated by the kind of laughter that comes from years of intellectual friendship.
That friendship ultimately inspired Fall Focus 2026: Going Analog, a one-day program inviting students to step away from screens and reconnect with hands-on forms of creativity, learning and expression.
In an era defined by artificial intelligence, digital connectivity and endless streams of information, the idea may seem almost contrarian. One of the day’s featured activities invites students to do something many have never done before: bind a book by hand.
Yet neither Dunai nor Jones sees the event as a rejection of technology.
In fact, they argue the opposite.
Most people use the words “digital” and “technology” interchangeably, Jones explained. Humans, however, have always relied on technology. Clay tablets, inscriptions in stone, fabrics transformed into paper and paper transformed into books all represented technological innovations in their own time.
The question is not whether people should use technology, they explain. The question is how different technologies shape the way people think, learn, create and connect.
The idea began to take shape during a conference attended by both professors. Between presentations and conversations, participants were invited to engage in a variety of analog activities including writing, games, and crafting.
What struck Dunai and Jones was not a sense of nostalgia, but a growing cultural curiosity. Why, in an age when so much of life occurs through a screen, are people increasingly drawn to activities that require patience, presence and physical engagement?
“The rest,” they laugh, “is history.”
By the end of the summer, the pair had transformed that curiosity into Fall Focus.
Scheduled for Sept. 16, Going Analog will feature a student bookbinding workshop, a lecture on the aesthetic value of crossword puzzles, a student organization mixer, open houses in the university archives and makerspace, and a faculty roundtable exploring the relationship between analog and digital practices in contemporary life.
Taken together, the activities ask participants to consider what might be gained by occasionally slowing down.
The bookbinding workshop offers perhaps the clearest example. Students will begin with folded sheets of paper grouped into what bookbinders call signatures, individual sets of pages that form the building blocks of a book. Decorative endpapers will be placed at the beginning and end of the volume, protecting the interior pages from the cover while adding an element of beauty and craftsmanship.
Using an awl, a slender metal tool with a sharpened point, participants will carefully create tiny openings in the cover. Through those openings, a bookbinder’s needle threaded with sturdy binding thread will pass again and again, patiently stitching the signatures into place.
Nothing about the process is rushed.
There are no shortcuts. No automation. No instant results.
Each step builds upon the last. Individual sheets become signatures. Signatures become sections. Sections become a book.
For Dunai and Jones, that is the point.
Going analog is not about choosing the past over the future. It is not about rejecting innovation. Instead, it is an invitation to think more deliberately about the tools people use and the ways those tools shape their lives.
No doubt, students will each leave with a personalized book sewn by their own hands. And maybe, just maybe, as their patience and attention to detail begin to take shape, they will glimpse a time when craftsmanship and artistry mattered as much as the words between the covers. In doing so, they may find new places for that appreciation in their own lives.
