An item on this morning’s Radio 4 news programme Today asked listeners: ‘what is on your mantelpiece?’ This was a question first asked by the pioneers of Mass Observation—the project to map the everyday life of the British, initiated in 1937. As part of the effort to construct an ‘anthropology of ourselves’, observers were asked to “write down in order, from left to right, all the objects on your mantelpiece, mentioning what is in the middle” and then to do the same for other people’s houses, taking note of the age, class, and wealth of the householders, and enclosing photographs.

A researcher who has spent long hours in the Mass Observation archive, Rachel Hurdley, commented with a certain weary over-familiarity: “At first the eye can glaze over, because you’re thinking: right, this is going to have a clock; it’s going to have candlesticks; it’s going to have letters behind the clock or underneath the candle on the left-hand side; it’s going to have ashtrays which aren’t used as ashtrays, they’re used to dump collar studs in, sewing stuff, needles; there’s going to be a perpetual calendar; and no doubt there’s going to be smoking paraphernalia and stuff for the fire”. But then Hurdley got caught up in thinking about the letters, and what they meant at a time when there might have been several deliveries of mail each day, and when the envelopes on the mantelpiece might have been part of a dynamic system, a to-do list that represented a serious part of one’s engagement with the outside world. “Whereas now we have emails and iphones and twitter and blogs and god knows what”, then we had a shelf above the fire. “The mantelpiece was like your ipad today”.

Yet the mantelpiece is also a place for display, and the report suggested that such domestic displays are unusually intimate, laying bare the soul; as either Gilbert or George put it, “in five seconds you know exactly what sort of person you are dealing with”. There was also an absorbing discussion of the competition between hearth (or gas-fire) and television-set as the centre of the living-room. All of this might push one to think about the associations between fire, smoking and reading that cluster around those older mantelpieces. Do the candles, the ashtray, the fireplace and the letters connect up–did they connect up? Or were they disparate, chance collisions of unrelated objects, most of them less for use than show?

All the news these days seems to be about libraries closing down, and as an academic I hear more and more of my colleagues saying that they don’t need to go to the library any more. So it was interesting–on a weekend visit–to be confronted by the new £190m ‘Library of Birmingham’, which is due to open next year. The second largest library in the country after the BL, it’s an extraordinary building, sitting proudly alongside the Rep Theatre and Symphony Hall, wrapped in a whimsical lacework that irresistibly draws the gaze. Let’s hope it pulls in the punters too.

Thursday 31 May, 12.30-2, Faculty of English (room tba)

Professor Sukanta Chaudhuri (Jadavpur University) will give a paper entitled

‘Tagore’s Text: An Online Variorum’

Sukanta Chaudhuri is the author of numerous books, including The Metaphysics of Text (Cambridge, 2010). He was a co-founder and Director from 2004-2010 of the Jadavpur School of Cultural Texts and Records.

Today the Cambridge Digital Humanities Network gathered to hear a presentation on ‘The Evolution of e-Research’ from Dave De Roure, Professor of e-Research in the Oxford e-Research Centre. Truth to tell, I still feel very much an interloper in the e-Research universe. Or perhaps not so much an interloper as someone lowering himself with trepidation into a freezing cold swimming pool. I’ve not quite adjusted to the idea that the humanities academic is going to be useful in future principally as a miner of data rather than as a reader of books. Nor do I hold out much hope that I’ll be able to learn all the acronyms before they become obsolete, in about three weeks’ time.

Today’s most provocative acronym came courtesy of a project called Structural Analysis of Large Amounts of Music Information, or (yes) SALAMI. The aim of SALAMI was to analyse 23,000 hours of digitized music, breaking it down (or slicing it up) into its constituent elements–intros, verses, choruses, bridge passages and outros (sic) for pop music, more complex categories for classical (‘outros’ become ‘codas’). Quite what the ultimate purpose of the exercise was, or what new research has been made possible by it, was a little unclear, although one can certainly imagine that interesting patterns might emerge over time. There are, though, some important senses in which music is not like salami…

A second musical project to which De Roure drew attention has just been launched by the Bodleian library. What’s the Score? invites any musically-literate person to mark up pages from the library’s collections of mid-Victorian piano sheet music, which have hitherto been uncatalogued. First investigations suggest that it’s quite a fiddly operation. It will be interesting to see whether this latest effort at crowd-sourcing reaps results.

In other news, the website of the Cambridge Digital Humanities Network has just gone live–click here to take a look!

Professor Stephen Orgel of Stanford owns an edition of Horace with annotations that will require a skilled eye to decode… two sample images below. Roll up, roll up!

Text and Trade: Book History Perspectives on Eighteenth Century Literature

Saturday 15 September 2012 at Queen Mary, University of London

Keynote speakers: Prof. James McLaverty (English Department, Keele University) and Dr. John Hinks (Chair of the Printing Historical Society and Honorary Fellow at the Centre for Urban History, University of Leiecester)

This interdisciplinary conference will explore relations between book production, distribution and content to re-examine our notions of textual culture in the eighteenth century. Taking intersections in current scholarship between Book History and Literary Studies as its starting point, it will explore the ways in which we can expand our knowledge of eighteenth-century literary production by revisiting the circumstances of material life in the period.

In the past, book historians tended to separate bibliography and textual criticism from the literary analysis of content, and today the focus on ‘print culture’ remains primarily one of viewing social processes among authors, publishers, wholesalers/ booksellers and readers as primary in book production. ‘Text and Trade’ seeks to broaden this approach by considering the literary and intellectual consequences of these processes. It will do so by examining bibliography and circuits of communication, investigating the link between economic and intellectual trends, and tracing connections between transformations in media and changing perceptions of selfhood.

The book as object is fraught with issues of critical feedback, textual instability, editorial intervention and branding, all of which challenge our notions of author-ity. By focusing on cultural exchange, the conference will pursue questions about the significance and necessity of viewing material culture and print in conjunction. It will address theoretical and historical understandings of the complex ideological, technological and social processes that bear on the creation of print.

‘Text and Trade’ invites papers that seek to bridge the gap between book history and literature via visual culture, education, geography, philosophy and trade. Topics that papers might address include (but are by no means limited to): – the material history of specific texts – literary circulations – information / scholarly networks – the influence of booksellers and publishers on textual creation – trade and craft in literary production – innovation and tradition – sites of textual production, real and imagined – the varieties of printed forms (including manuals, pamphlets, miscellanies, periodicals and chapbooks) and their significance – the marketplace and book production – models of patronage – the textual re-creation of authors by editors, publishers and printers

Proposals for 20-minute papers are due via email by 15 June, 2012 and should consist of a 250-word abstract. Proposals for panels are also welcome, which should consist of a working title for the panel and an abstract for each of the contributors.

To submit proposals or to make informal inquiries please contact the conference organizers, Dr. Jenn Chenkin and Dr. Tessa Whitehouse: textandtrade15sept@gmail.com

Early Modern Seminar, Pembroke College

Dr Mark Goldie, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge

‘John Locke and the History of the Book: Some Speculations’

Thursday 26 April 2012, 17:00-19:00, Thomas Gray Room, Pembroke College, Cambridge.

Conveners: Howard Erskine-Hill and Adrian Lashmore-Davies

All welcome. Drinks served.

Saturday 2 June 2012 — all papers in the Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square. Registration will be £15 on the door (£10 for students)

Programme

9.45-10 Registration
10-10.15 Welcome and introduction (Adam Smyth)

10.15-11.30 Session 1: Manuscripts
Daniel Wakelin (St Hilda’s College, Oxford), ‘“Her faileth thing that is nat yt made”: imagined
omissions in early English manuscripts’
Eleanor Collins (Oxford University Press), ‘Transcribing early modern theatre history: Henry
Herbert’s lost “office-book”’
Karen Britland (Wisconsin-Madison), ‘Acting or sighing: royalist letters and encryption in the
English civil wars’

11.30-12 Coffee and tea

12-1 Session 2: Bodies and sexualities
Jason Scott-Warren (Trinity College, Cambridge), ‘Lambarde’s Pandecta: the book last seen in
Queen Elizabeth’s bosom’
Heather Tilley (National Portrait Gallery), ‘“It ought never to be published”: Old-maidish
scruples and the disappearance of Swinburne’s Lesbia Brandon’

1-2 Lunch (own arrangements)

2-3.15 Session 3: Remembering
Bethan Stevens (Nottingham Trent University), ‘Spekphrasis: writing about lost works of art’
Luisa Calè (Birkbeck), ‘Re-membering the missing collection of Charles I’
Caroline Archer (Birmingham City University), ‘Paris underground: the missing memory of the city’

3.15-3.30 Coffee and tea

3.30-4.30 Session 4: Multi-media
Gill Partington (Birkbeck), ‘Tom Philips’ A Humument’
Patrick Davidson (Steinhardt School of NYU), ‘Reading YouTube Comments: The Diamond Is The Rough’

4.30-5 Roundtable discussion

5 Wine reception

For ten years, the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters (CELL) has pioneered original archival research that illuminates the past for the benefit of the modern research community, and beyond. To celebrate this anniversary, in early November 2012 we will be holding a conference examining the future of the ‘Permissive Archive’.

The scope of archival history is broad, and this conference seeks presentations from a wide range of work which opens up archives – not only by bringing to light objects and texts that have lain hidden, but by demystifying and demonstrating the skills needed to make new histories. Too long associated with settled dust, archival research will be championed as engaged and engaging: a rigorous but permissive field.

We welcome proposals for papers on any aspect of early modern archival work, manuscript or print, covering the period 1500 – 1800.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• The shape of the archive – ideology and interpretation

• The permissive archive: its definition and its past, present and future

• Alternatives to the permissive archive

• Archival research as discovery or construction

• The archive which challenges or disrupts

• Uncatalogued material – how to find it, how to access it, how to use it

• New findings

• Success and failure

• Broken or dispersed collections

• The archive and the environment

• The archivist and the historian

• The ethics of the archive

• The comedy of the archive

• Order and anarchy

Please send 300-word proposals to hjgrahammatheson@gmail.com

Submissions are not limited to the 25-minute paper. CELL will be holding a work-shop on the use of archival materials, and we are keen to hear from scholars with ideas for alternative presentations such as group sessions, trips or guided walks.

Submissions will be peer-reviewed by Professor Lisa Jardine.

The commerce of literature, the literature of commerce: Anglo-French perspectives in the long eighteenth century

What role does literature play in commercial society? To what extent can literature resist or even counter market forces? In what ways does commercial society use the book trade to promote its own system of values? This conference proposes to illuminate the ongoing debates regarding the place of literature within commercial society – topics that have long exercised many working in the arts and humanities on both sides of the Atlantic – from a historical perspective, focusing on the long eighteenth century.

Eighteenth-century writers were acutely aware of living in an age in which social and international relationships were being rapidly reshaped by commercial forces. The world of letters played a crucial role in helping to assimilate, explore and influence this changing world: from histories of civil society to economic philosophy, merchant handbooks and, last but by no means least influential, imaginative literary genres, most notably the emerging modern novel. The eighteenth century was also a period, in which the world of letters itself was dramatically reorganized by these same commercial pressures and interests, bearing witness to the rise of the professional author and the rapid expansion of the book trade across European boundaries and across the seas. It is thus unsurprising that the objects of this growing international trade – the books and pamphlets – should reflect not only on commercial society in general but also on the economics of writing more specifically. While these were developments that were associated with an increasingly global commerce, France and England were key players. Furthermore, their books on trade and their mutual trade in books shows clearly the extent to which these two European powers each singled out the other for particular attention, motivated by conflicting sentiments of admiration, hostility and rivalry.

The conference organizers invite papers that explore from any of the above perspectives the interactions between commerce and literature across the long eighteenth century, in England and/or France and their respective colonies. Comparative studies are particularly welcome. Possible topics might include:
– the book trade: in what ways was the book trade integral to commercial society, offering a vital conduit for the commerce of ideas, including ideas on trade, that in turn fostered networks and attitudes conducive to finance and trade? What impact did the commerce of literature have on the national economy?
– the diverse literatures of commerce and their interactions: merchant handbooks, histories of civil society, economic philosophy, pamphlets…
– reflections on commerce within imaginative literature: what roles are played by plays, poetry, the novel in assimilating, promoting or contesting commercial society? in shaping the profile of the professional author? how are these imaginative genres shaped by market forces?
– Anglo-French connections: trading contacts, commercial and financial rivalries, practices of emulation…

Proposals of no more than 500 words should be submitted to c18anglo.french@gmail.com and the deadline for submissions is 16 April 2012. Prospective participants may wish to contact the organisers to register interest before submitting a full proposal.
Dates: Monday 2nd July – Tuesday 3rd July 2012.
Conference Organisers: D’Maris Coffman and Jenny Mander
Venue: Centre for Financial History, Newnham College, Cambridge
Deadlines: call for papers: 16 April 2012; registration: 15 June 2012
Sponsored by the Newnham College Senior Members Research Fund, the Centre for Financial History, the Trevelyan Fund of the History Faculty and the French Department at the University of Cambridge.