9 March 2015 10.00am — 6.30pm

The Bodleian Libraries are hosting a one-day hackfest celebrating the release of 25,000 texts from the Early English Books Online project into the public domain. The event encourages students, researchers from all disciplines, and members of the public with an interest in the intersection between technology, history and literature to work together to develop a project using the texts and the data they may generate.

The EEBO-TCP corpus covers the period from 1473 to 1700 and is now estimated to comprise more than two million pages and nearly a billion words. It represents a history of the printed word in England from the birth of the printing press to the reign of William and Mary, and it contains texts of incomparable significance for research across all academic disciplines, including literature, history, philosophy, linguistics, theology, music, fine arts, education, mathematics, and science.

We’re looking for all kinds of people to participate; those with an interest in data visualisation, geospatial analysis, corpus linguistics, written and spoken word, web applications and programming, data/text mining, art, film and more are welcome. You don’t have be an expert to join, but you do need to be enthusiastic and prepared to help develop a project.

The hackathon will take place during the day (10am-5pm), with a reception to follow at 5pm. Prizes will be given to the best of the day’s projects.

More information about the project is available from the EEBO-TCP website.

Participants in the day’s event are encouraged to consider entering their ideas into the online Early English Books Ideas Hack, which seeks to explore innovative and creative approaches to the data and identify potential paths for future activity. Submissions for the Ideas Hack close on 2 April.

Roughly a century ago, T. J. Cobden-Sanderson marked the end of the Doves Press by throwing the beautiful typeface that he had created into the River Thames. Inspired by the example of William Morris’s Kelmscott Press, and modelled on type created in Venice in the 1470s, the font had been used to print works by Shakespeare and Milton, as well as a five-volume Bible.

Now, remarkably, an enthusiast for the Doves typeface, who had already gone to the trouble of creating a digital version, has gone fishing for the font, and has recovered  no fewer than 150 pieces from their watery bed in the Thames. You can read the full story here.

National University of Ireland, Galway, 21-22 May 2015

http://digitalmaterial.ie

Plenary speakers: Jerome McGann & Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

Digital Material is a conference that considers the intersections of digital and material cultures in the humanities. How has the long history of studying material objects prepared us for understanding digital culture? To what degree does materiality inflect and inform our encounters with the digital?

Recent years have seen an intensification of interest in both digital and material cultures. This broad trend has been mirrored in the academy by the growing prominence of digital humanities and the renewed focus on materiality and material objects within humanities disciplines. At the same time, libraries, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions are grappling with the theoretical and practical implications of preserving and exhibiting their material collections within increasingly digital infrastructures, while adapting to the challenges posed by born-digital materials.

The conference invites discussion of a series of related issues: does a reinvigorated interest in material culture represent a conservative reaction to the perceived threat of digital culture, or is it evidence of an embrace of the innovative affordances of the digital? How do digital media represent the materiality of texts and objects? Does the digital constitute its own form of materiality?

Proposals are invited on any aspect of the conference theme, including:

• What is meant by ‘digital materiality’?
• What is lost and gained when we study material objects through their digital surrogates?
• Relationships between digital texts and material texts.
• Creation, curation, and preservation of digitised and born-digital artefacts.
• Digital archives and material archives.
• What parts of our digital culture will future scholars unearth?
• Do digital objects embody their culture in the way that material objects do?
• Does memory inhere in the material better than in the digital?
• The digital collector: can we be possessive about digital artefacts?
• Object lessons: digital and material pedagogy.
• Representations of the intersections of digital and material cultures.
• Technology, equipment, storage, media; matter, substance, simulation, virtuality; cloth, fabric, pulp, bits, bytes.

Proposals may include:

• 20-minute papers (abstract: 300-400 words).
• Panels (individual paper abstracts plus 250-word overview).
• Roundtables (abstract: 300-400 words plus names of speakers).

All participants should include a short biography (100-200 words) with their proposals.

Submit proposals at http://digitalmaterial.ie before 31 January 2015. Successful proposals will be notified of acceptance by 21 February 2015.

Seminars in the History of Material Texts

Thursdays at 5.30 pm, SR-24 (second floor), Faculty of English, 9 West Rd

22 January– William Zachs (University of Edinburgh)

‘Authenticity and Duplicity: Investigations into Multiple Copies of Books’ NB This session will be held in the Milstein Lecture Room, University Library, and will start at 5 pm.

5 February — Victoria Mills (University of Cambridge)

‘Travel Writing and Tactile Tourism: The Tauchnitz Edition of The Marble Faun’

19 February — Leslie James (University of Birmingham)

‘Transatlantic Passages: journalistic technique and the construction of a black international in West African and Caribbean colonial newspapers’

All welcome.

A series of three seminars, on Wednesdays at 5pm in GR06/07, Faculty of English, 9 West Road.

This series will discuss the practices and principles of editing nineteenth-century literary works. Hosted jointly by the Centre for Material Texts and the Faculty of English, it includes classes on different types of editions and their specific editorial challenges.

Wednesday 21st January

Some Varieties of Editing

Prof. Dame Gillian Beer (Clare Hall)

Wednesday 4th February

Working with Manuscripts: Examples from W. B. Yeats and Gerard Manley Hopkins

Dr Catherine Phillips (Downing)

Wednesday 18th February

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Poetry: Editing a Variorum Edition

Prof. Nora Crook (Anglia Ruskin)

All welcome.

The Bodleian Library in Oxford has just received Charles I’s travelling library as a bequest. It looks like a lovely collection of miniature books–just the thing to distract the king’s mind from his troublesome day-job, or perhaps to refresh his mind so that he could be an even more superlative ruler (delete as applicable to your view of seventeenth-century history).

Earlier this month I heard a seminar paper about centaurs, which ranged across the history of thinking about these hybrid horse-people from ancient Athens to sixteenth-century England. Along the way the speaker, Micha Lazarus, referred to Lucretius, who dismissed the possibility of centaurs on the grounds that the life-cycles of horse and human were so different (‘a horse reaches its vigorous prime in about three years, a boy far from it’).

The discussion reminded me of a twelve-line poem by William Empson called ‘Invitation to Juno’, which begins:

Lucretius could not credit centaurs;
Such bicycle he deemed asynchronous.
‘Man superannuates the horse;
Horse pulses will not gear with ours.’

These lines, first published in 1928 when Empson was a student in Cambridge, refer to the myth of Ixion, a mortal king who attempted to have an affair with Juno, wife of Jupiter, but was foiled by her husband who sent a cloud in place of his wife. Ixion’s union with the cloud led to the creation of the race of centaurs, whose nature conjoins two cycles–‘such bicycle’, as Empson puts it. (As punishment for trying to father a demigod, a ‘two-wheeler’, Jupiter fastened Ixion to a single burning wheel).

Like many of Empson’s poems, ‘Invitation to Juno’ reads like a cryptic crossword. It’s bizarrely compressed and requires elaborate decoding. The poem alludes not just to Lucretius, but also to Darwin, Dr Johnson, and the growth of embryonic heart tissue; it’s not surprising that it requires three and a half pages of notes in the latest scholarly edition by John Haffenden. But were Empson’s sources all abstrusely learned? Yesterday I nearly fell off my own bike when I passed this ‘ghost sign‘ on King St in Cambridge.

It turns out that a company called Centaur Cycles, based in Coventry, made bikes from 1876 to 1915 (they were taken over by Humber in 1910, and production moved to Stoke). There are some lovely examples of their advertisements here; the testimonials report that a Centaur is ‘a wonderful machine’ which ‘mounts hills splendidly’–‘a great luxury after a cheap and nasty mount’. Empson was later known for devotion to a clapped-out bike; a student at Sheffield in the 1950s recalls his riding a ‘very old, preposterously rusty sit-up-and-beg bicycle, wobbling stoically amid the smog and tramlines of Western Bank’. Was it, I wonder, the last of the Centaurs, asynchronous as ever? Or did Empson just see this sign (or signs like it), and start thinking about the intricate relationship between man and mount, ravelling up the tangle of allusions in the poem?

Coming back down to earth after the fascinating conference on ‘Failure in the Archives‘ at the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters (University of London) on Thursday. The conference culminated in a lengthy open discussion about how the myth of the ‘invisible archive’–the archive that functions as the neutral holder and transmitter of its materials–could be busted once and for all. This might mean finding ways in which archivists, librarians and curators could be fully credited for their intellectual contributions, so that they would cease to be viewed merely gatekeepers and custodians of the past. There are formidable obstacles to this, mainly to do with the funding pressures that dog the majority of collections. But the conversation seemed to offer a glimpse into a brighter future.

After the conference there was a guest lecture from Natalie Zemon Davis, who is just coming up to her 86th birthday but appears to be more radiant and full of energy than ever. She shared some of her recent work on the slaves of eighteenth-century Surinam, and offered a masterclass in the kinds of patience and ingenuity that are needed to make the archives speak, or sing.

The Cambridge University Library’s exhibition ‘Private Lives of Print: the Use and Abuse of Books, 1450-1550’ opens today, and is accompanied by a beautiful book entitled Emprynted in this Manere: Early Printed Treasures from Cambridge University Library.

As David Pearson pointed out at the launch event for the book, held in the Wren Library yesterday, studies of early printing would once have focused on the production side–identifying publishers, typefounders, woodcut artists and the like. Such matters are by no means neglected here. But both the book and the exhibition focus more on circulation and consumption than on production. They concentrate on illuminators, binders, owners and readers, and show how the books were put to use across the course of centuries.

So we’re invited to imagine Venetian bookbuyers weighing the cost of a Bible against the cost of six chickens or five geese; to witness the future Queen Katherine Parr giving her uncle a prayer book, and asking him to remember his ‘louuynge nys’ when he looks on it; to admire a doctor’s drawing of a foetus in the womb in the margins of a medical book. A student at the University of Padua spills ink on his Livy, and writes fastidiously around it, in Latin: This blot … I stupidly made on the first of December 1482′. The books are often marvels in themselves, but they really come to life in the hands of their owners.

If you can’t get to Cambridge, you can see the ‘virtual exhibition’ at https://exhibitions.lib.cam.ac.uk/incunabula/