Portrait of João de Barros in Manuel Severim de Faria, Discursos Varios Politicos. (Évora: Manuel Carvalho, 1624).
Portrait of João de Barros in Manuel Severim de Faria, Discursos Varios Politicos. (Évora: Manuel Carvalho, 1624).
The three rotating boards of the game as they are to be set, pointer included.
The three rotating boards of the game as they are to be set, pointer included.
The woodcut of the Tree of Virtues from the 1563 edition.
The woodcut of the Tree of Virtues from the 1563 edition.
Team biographies
The team works together to hack João de Barros and to iteratively create the digital hack. So far, Celeste Pedro has recreated the game, as is, as a printable (board game) prototype and the team has played the game in order to understand it thoroughly. In the next iteration of the hack, we will take the game apart and remix/adapt it to create something entirely different.

Terhi Marttila - https://terhimarttila.com 
Terhi is responsible for implementing (programming) the digital hack of Barros. Terhi Marttila is an artist-researcher with a PhD in digital media from the University of Porto. Terhi creates playful interactive works that she considers to sit more or less within the realm of digital literature. Her works have been published on raum.pt, nokturno.fi, in the Electronic Literature Collection 4 and shared at various conferences, including ELO, ACM SIGGRAPH SPARKS, Consciousness Reframed, Videojogos, Art of Research, among others.

Celeste is an expert on Barros' book and game. Celeste Pedro is a communication designer graduated from the Fine Arts Faculty in Porto, Portugal. Her main focuses have since been typography and editorial design. She holds a master’s in Design and Intermedia from the University of Barcelona. Her studies on dictionaries design have led her closer to the field of the History of Typography and to the engagement in various language courses, workshops, and summer schools related to the edition of texts and book production. In recent years, she specialised in early printed books and palaeography while conducting her PhD research on the History of Portuguese Print Culture in the Sixteenth Century, funded by FCT. Recently he was a post-doc researcher for the project "From Data to Wisdom - Philosophizing Data Visualizations in the Middle Ages and Early Modernity (13th-17th c.)" at the Institute of Philosophy of the University of Porto, where she now continues her work on medieval and early modern diagrams.

Sandra Veríssimo Simões - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandra-simões-358592122/
Sandra is responsible for translating Barros' work into English. Sandra Simões is a Portuguese translator and language consultant with over 20 years of experience working both with businesses and academic institutions. She is certified by the Chartered Institute of Linguists and holds a Master’s Degree in Medieval Portuguese. 

References
João de Barros, (1540 princeps edition), Dialogo de preceitos moraes co[m] prática delles, em módo de iogo, Lisbon: Luis Rodrigues. can be accessed at https://purl.pt/12149
The book's second edition, Dialogo de Ioam de Barros com dous filhos seus sobre preceptos moraes em modo de jogo, printed in 1563 by João de Barreira (and the only existing copy containing the elements/illustrations of the game), can be accessed at http://purl.pt/15189.

Previous works
Pedro, C. (2019). Oral communication: Trees and Circles: Knowledge Through Practice in a Sixteenth-century Board Game. At The Challenges of Design: Imagination, Aesthetics and New Technology International Meeting, 26 June. At Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto. https://ifilosofia.up.pt/activities/challenges-design
Pedro, C. & Higuera, J. (2020). Workshop: The Game of Moral Precepts. 27-28 Feb. At Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto. https://ifilosofia.up.pt/proj/fdtw/the_game_of_moral_precepts Report: https://ifilosofia.up.pt/proj/fdtw/notes_about_workshop_the_game_of
Pedro, C. (2021). A Sixteenth-Century Board Game by João de Barros. In Illustration and Ornamentation in the Iberian Book World, 1450-1800, (Ed.) Alexander Samuel Wilkinson, 284-314. BRILL. https://brill.com/display/book/edcoll/9789004447141/BP000024.xml
Marttila, T. (2016) Give me a reason. Digital artwork. https://collection.eliterature.org/4/give-me-a-reason
Marttila, T. (2019) We cannot take them all. Digital artwork. https://terhimarttila.com/we-cannot-take-them-all/
Marttila, T. (2020) Speak out. Digital artwork. https://raum.pt/en/terhi-marttila
Marttila, T. (2021) Transplanted. Digital artwork. https://nokturno.fi/en/poem/transplanted/

The first step in the process: a playable and printable prototype of the game, true to Barros' original instructions but with an added fourth circle designed by Celeste Pedro to make the game more playable. cpedro©2021

Back to Top