Jonathan Hope from Strathclyde University gave a presentation to the Renaissance Graduate Seminar at the English Faculty last night about DocuScope, a major collaborative project based at Carnegie Mellon University for the ‘computer-aided rhetorical analysis’ of texts. The team behind DocuScope includes computer scientists, linguistics specialists, and literary scholars, and the idea is based on a system (or a ‘text analysis environment’, as the project website puts it) that was originally created for the analysis of students’ creative writing. In essence, a teacher could run writing samples through a computer programme, and use its statistical analysis of rhetorical features as the basis for further discussion with students – getting them to think about why one writing sample features a much greater frequency of a certain linguistic feature than others, for example.

In its current shape DocuScope is much more mind-bogglingly complex. Hope illustrated this by showing us what its analysis of the whole known corpus of early modern drama looks like.  I won’t try to explain how the system actually works (you can read expert accounts elsewhere, like here) but it was interesting to see the forms of output that can be generated, such as dendrograms, which arrange the works according to how similar they are to each other, and depict strong and weak connections between texts based on their linguistic features. The entire corpus of Shakespeare’s plays has also been filtered through this mysterious machine, and Hope showed us some of the colourful visual representations of these results. According to DocuScope’s categories of rhetorical analysis, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merry Wives of Windsor are least similar to other plays, and The Merchant of Venice is least dissimilar.

Some of the limitations and possible pitfalls of this tool are obvious, others less so. But the point of DocuScope is clearly to raise questions, not provide answers – indeed, Hope referred to it as ‘a problem factory’, which serves to provoke further debates. DocuScope has much potential; in the future it could, for example, provide another slant in investigations of authorship or dating of texts. One more general point that Hope’s paper raised was the growing necessity for scholars in the arts and humanities to develop their skills of statistical interpretation. An understanding of how statistics may be used and abused will increasingly become essential for teachers and researchers working with digital tools and resources.

This week saw the premiere at the London Film Festival of ‘Anonymous‘, a film directed by Roland Emmerich which explores the theory that the works attributed to William Shakespeare were actually written by Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. The 17^th Earl of Oxford was proposed as an alternative author in the early twentieth century by J. Thomas Looney, and although academic consensus rejects the idea, Looney continues to inspire some lively conspiracy theories today: see http://shakespeareidentified.com/ and http://www.shakespearefellowship.org/, for example…

Whereas conspiracy theory websites are by their nature niche, a film soon to be on general release has the potential to reach a great many people. Might cinema-goers up and down the country be so taken in by actor Rhys Ifans’s portrayal of the Earl of Oxford that the authorship rumours will become universally accepted, and Shakespeare pulled down from his pedestal? The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon is concerned and defensive, so much so that this week it launched an original publicity stunt to coincide with the London Film Festival screening of the offending film. On the road signs near his place of birth that proudly proclaim Warwickshire as ‘Shakespeare’s County’, Shakespeare’s name has been temporarily crossed out (see picture here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-coventry-warwickshire-15440882). With this very public protest the Trust draws attention to what it sees as an attempt to rewrite English culture and history, their censored road signs emblematising the idea that Shakespeare can’t simply be crossed out and replaced with another name.

A great time was had by all who attended the CMT ‘Eating Words’ colloquium at Gonville and Caius College yesterday. A more detailed report of the day will follow, but in the meantime, I was amused to read this message in the email bulletin from my local Freecycle this morning:

‘WANTED: Any Culture, Cookware or Crockery. I am moving into my first house and as you can imagine it is an exciting but costly time. If anyone has any old Culture, cookware or crockery I would greatly appreciate it.’

As yesterday’s second plenary speaker Sara Pennell revealed in her fabulous exploration of religion in the early modern kitchen, there is indeed a lot of ‘old Culture’ to be found amongst pots and pans and other kitchen essentials…

a full report on the ‘Eating Words’ colloquium can be found on the ‘About’ page–click on the tab to the right.

I recently came across the above catalogue for a Sotheby’s auction held in July 2010 called ‘Books for Cooks: From the Collections of Stanley J. Steeger’. The sale featured over 150 items from the sixteenth century to the present day: all manner of manuscript and printed books related to food and cooking including early medicinal texts extolling the virtues of garlic and vinegar, a set of four continental volumes about olives and olive oil from the eighteenth century, nineteenth-century notebooks filled with recipes for puddings and jellies, and some first editions of Delia Smith.

Obviously it is in the interests of any auction house to make their lots appear as desirable as possible, and to this end this catalogue is a glossy book with luxurious paper, lots of photographs, and an elegant font. The description of each item is accompanied by a photograph, either of its title-page, an interesting illustration, or its binding. As well as these photographs, however, the pages of this sleek catalogue feature imposed images of food and drink stains and spillages: a scattering of lentils here, a glistening globule of marmalade and a smear of what looks like fresh pesto there, as well as the casual traces of a glass of red wine. So subtle are modern photography and printing techniques that these tasty spillages look as though they really could be licked off the page.

There’s a delicious irony embodied in this auction catalogue. ‘Fine’, ‘old’, and ‘rare’ books are considered more valuable the better condition they are in – a first edition of Delia Smith covered in dried ketchup smears would be of no interest to Sotheby’s. Yet books about food and cooking often appeal to our senses with lavish photos of the food in the recipes they contain. And in my house, recipe books are the only books I don’t mind accruing traces of various culinary ingredients – in fact, it’s usually inevitable that they will when I use them in the kitchen. It’s easy to find favourite recipes in my mum’s copy of the Cranks recipe book because it always falls open at certain flour-encrusted pages. While potential bidders are being wooed by Sotheby’s with these mouth-watering visual teasers, the items they may be tempted to buy will be also be delectable, but not quite so sticky…

for the CMT’s forthcoming colloquium on the theme of  ‘Eating Words’, see the ‘Events’ page

‘Fame, Fortune, & Theft: The Shakespeare First Folio’ is the theme of the current exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Prized by scholars, collectors, and others for centuries, many of the 232 surviving  First Folio editions of Shakespeare’s works have their own intriguing life stories, and this exhibition brings together books, documents, and objects to tell some of the most interesting ones. One of my favourite exhibits was an Elizabethan-style casket commissioned in 1866 by Angela Burdett-Coutts, with compartments for her First Folio and 1640 edition of Shakespeare’s poems. The oak from which it was carved came from a tree in Windsor Park which fell in a storm and was given to Burdett-Coutts by Queen Victoria; this ancient tree is mentioned in The Merry Wives of Windsor and the casket features four tiny carved figures from the play.  There’s also a replica of the glass box containing the ashes of Edwin Forrest’s First Folio, effectively destroyed by a fire at his home in Philadelphia in 1873. As these two objects suggest, the exhibition conveys a strong sense of how much the First Folio has mattered to people as a material text, as something to be bought, collected, coveted, stolen and preserved, even in dust and ashes.

‘Fame, Fortune, & Theft’ is open until 3 September 2011, and much of it is available to view online here.

The ‘Books and Babies’ exhibition in Cambridge’s University Library (see Jason’s post below) chimes nicely with the theme of a conference I attended last week in Washington, D.C.  The 19^th annual conference of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP) brought together papers from scholars, teachers, librarians, rare book dealers, and others, focussed around issues of ‘The Book in Art and Science’. Such a theme obviously generated a lot of interest from historians of science; the first keynote lecture, given by Jonathan Topham of the University of Leeds, considered ‘Why the History of Science matters to Book History’, and the rest of the conference saw presentations on seventeenth-century midwifery texts, the history of botanical illustration, the development of nineteenth-century scientific journals, wartime medical text books, and prehistoric beasts in children’s literature, amongst a great many others. I received the most unusual lecture ‘hand-out’ I have yet experienced, a miniature envelope of old American postage stamps, each one related to the history of medicine.

Across many of the arts and humanities disciplines, discussions and debates about the ever-evolving digital world and its relationship to us and to non-digital media are commonplace at the moment. The atmosphere at the SHARP conference was no different, and many conversations were had about the advantages and disadvantages of the  different manifestations of digital media in and beyond academia (is Twitter a good way to communicate about and participate in conference proceedings, for example…?).

One of the most interesting cases was brought  by Mark Curran and Simon Burrow of the University of Leeds, who have created the French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe project, a database which collates information about the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel (STN), a celebrated European publishing house which operated between 1769 and 1794. Hundreds of diligent hours have resulted in an online resource (to be made freely available to all imminently) which ‘tracks the movement of around 400,000 copies of 4,000 books across Europe.  It details, where possible, the exact editions of these works, the routes by which they travelled and the locations of the clients that bought or sold them’. The possibilities offered by this resource are numerous, and the project overview, available here, gives a sense of the almost overwhelming potential of the database. Speaking in the final plenary session at the conference, on ‘Digital Technology’, Curran surprised (and shocked, I think) many in the audience by revealing that although he had dedicated the last five years of his life to this project he is much more excited, ultimately, about the book he is writing. Digital resources are great tools, he reminded us, but they are not in themselves the end of the story. Such tools can be employed to assist us in the creative and dynamic processes of academic research, but in these enthusiastic times of fast-paced digital development, there is sometimes a danger that such tools can be viewed as ends in themselves.

(CMT members: Mark Curran will be taking up the Munby Fellowship in Bibliography in October 2011, so you may get to meet him in person and debate all things digital with him soon!)

The darkened exhibition space of the former Reading Room at the British Museum is currently the sanctuary for an arresting display of ornate, glistening objects. The glorious Treasures of Heaven exhibition, which opened on 23 June, brings together sacred riches connected with the Christian devotion to saints from the Museum’s own collection as well as more than 40 other institutions worldwide, including the Vatican. The exhibition enables visitors to see at close hand a fascinating array of reliquaries – gorgeous containers embellished with precious metals and stones in which relics were displayed – as well as Roman burial plaques and bowls, medieval pilgrim badges, and many other artefacts associated with the culture of saints and holy remains.

The exhibition has made headlines already with rumours that curators are having to wipe kiss marks from the glass cases left by visitors for whom these artefacts are not art objects, but sacred things, still to be venerated. Professor Eamon Duffy’s detailed review of the exhibition, available here, beautifully evokes the power that these holy fragments of bone and other materials have had throughout two thousand years of Christianity, as ‘the seeds of transcendence, trophies and tokens of the imperishable glory in store for all whom Christ had redeemed’.

But what of material texts? One of the most remarkable objects in the exhibition is a twelfth-century German portable altar, made of porphyry and bound in gold, which contains relics of over forty saints. The names of the saints are written on the underside of the altar, and curators have opened it to reveal the contents: each tiny relic individually wrapped in a piece of silk or linen, and neatly labelled with the name of a saint. Another reliquary, a triptych from Rome commemorating the miraculous mass of St Gregory, opens to reveal a central icon surrounded by many tiny glass-covered compartments, each containing a relic wrapped in cloth accompanied by a fragment of paper again bearing the name of a saint.

The exhibition does not provide any further historical information about these tiny material texts, these faded labels purporting to certify which saints were enclosed within the reliquaries. Relics are traditionally touched and kissed by the faithful, but these labels, hidden or locked behind glass or metal, cannot easily be read, and the reliquaries have to be literally taken apart for them to be deciphered by curators. Ironically, while the relics themselves often seem  dehumanised, as unidentifiable dusty fragments enclosed within dramatically rich containers, these small scraps of handwriting are moving reminders of the human hands which have come into contact with these objects over many hundreds of years.

Treasures of Heaven is at the British Museum until 9 October 2011.

One of the most well-hidden libraries in Cambridge must be the Cory Library at the University Botanic Garden, a collection of over 9000 horticultural works dating from the seventeenth century to the present day. This book cupboard at the Botanic Garden, in which some of these volumes must once have been kept, is now left empty inside the humid glasshouses, but a lovely archive photo of it in use can be seen here.

The National Horseracing Museum in Newmarket, Suffolk unexpectedly revealed some interesting material texts when I visited recently. Newmarket is famous as a horseracing town, but it is particularly important in the racing world not so much for its racecourse (a feature of over fifty towns and cities in the UK) but for its training ground, the Heath, a grass-covered chalk incline just outside the town which has remained unchanged since it was first used to train racehorses in the late seventeenth century.

Horseracing has taken place in Britain since Roman times. The breeding of fine horses has long been associated with royalty, but it was not until the later seventeenth century that horseracing as we know it today became central to the British sporting scene. I had (perhaps naively) expected the museum to explain more than it did about the social history of horseracing as an essential part of the life of Newmarket and many other racing towns.  Instead, the museum feels more like a shrine to the equine form, which is probably a better reflection of a sport concerned not just with the competitive racing of horses, but ultimately with the complex art of creating the finest possible equine physique. This obsession with the body of the horse is extended by association to the bodies of jockeys; among the many artefacts linked to jockeys that were afforded a relic-like status in the museum’s velvet-lined glass cases, the most macabre was the pistol with which the famous local jockey Frederick Archer fatally shot himself in 1886 at the age of 29.

While displays of stuffed horse heads, preserved horse feet, and equine enema equipment are all of limited appeal to the non-specialist, the museum is more interesting for the rich tradition of material texts associated with horseracing it reveals. There are some lovely examples of race cards, race tickets, and betting slips from the last few centuries, which provide a glimpse into the particular social and cultural context of this sport. The most significant material texts associated with horseracing, however, are the incredibly complicated graphs and diagrams of ‘sire lines’, essential reading material for any true connoisseur. These texts are the very foundation of this sport, enabling the precise genetic origins of individual horses to be traced back across hundreds of years. Sire lines have a revered status, informing the decisions of breeders, owners, trainers, bookmakers, and the many other people integral to this sport.

The pictures above show Derby silk scarves, which throughout much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were produced annually in connection with the Epsom Derby, one of the most famous horse races. Printed with the name of the year’s winner, they also feature an elaborate collage of the names of all previous winners since the inauguration of the Derby in 1780, along with the details of each individual horse’s parentage.  These souvenirs exploit the iconic status of sire lines and the very poetic language of horse naming, turning intricate textual charts and diagrams into a highly aesthetic object.

As discussions and debates about the virtues and shortcomings of the increasingly popular digital book and e-reader rumble on, it has seemed inevitable that sooner rather than later, someone would write a book about a world in which people no longer know what a book is. The latest offering from the American children’s author and illustrator Lane Smith, It’s a Book (currently featured in the window of Heffers), is the first I’ve seen, and is a lovely, tongue-in-cheek contribution. Monkey sits absorbed in a book, while Donkey asks ‘What do you have there?’, and bombards him with more questions: does it scroll, blog, tweet, text, need a password, or do wifi? Where’s the mouse, and surely it must have to be charged?

‘No heavy message, I’m only in it for the laffs’, writes Smith in his explanation of how he came to write this book.  What I really enjoyed about It’s a Book is its clever simplicity. It is not a judgemental defence of the book as opposed to the computer screen, and it does not sentimentalise the materiality of the book, which one might expect it to do. Monkey’s repeated response to Donkey’s persistent questioning – ‘No. It’s a book’ – leaves enough space for the reader, child or adult, to consider for themselves the many virtues of the object they are holding.