Wednesday, 25 January 2012

12:00 – 14:00
Location: CRASSH, 7 West Road [please note new location]

At a symposium on digital editions held at CRASSH in May 2011, we resolved to convene a series of informal, termly meetings to stimulate development of and foster collaboration on digital editing projects in the Cambridge research community. For those interested in, or working on, digital editing projects, this will be a great opportunity to get together, share methodological and conceptual insights, and talk about the field of practice. This event is designed to challenge traditional disciplinary and professional boundaries, and we hope it will appeal to a wide range of participants from the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. If you are in any doubt about participating, please get in touch.

As this is the first meeting of the group in 2011-2012, we will use the occasion to constitute the group and introduce participants to one another. We will also discuss two short readings from a 2009 special issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly, ‘Special Cluster: Digital Textual Studies: Past, Present, and Future’:

• Kenneth M. Price, ‘Edition, Project, Database, Archive, Thematic Research Collection: What’s in a Name?’, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Summer 2009.
• Julia Flanders, ‘The Productive Unease of 21st-century Digital Scholarship’, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Summer 2009.

See http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/3/index.html for the relevant issue, and do feel free to read the other essays in the collection, which might also stimulate discussion.

It would be very helpful if participants could come to the meeting ready to share ideas about their own projects – whether already achieved, or still in embryo. We will suggest and briefly present at the meeting a few resources that present models and challenges to editors working in the electronic environment.

At some point we will decamp for lunch into ‘The ARC’ (the tearoom in the new Alison Richard Building at 7 West Road).

For further information, please contact Jason Scott-Warren (jes1003@cam.ac.uk) or Andrew Zurcher (aez20@cam.ac.uk). We look forward to a lively discussion and creative planning for the rest of the year’s meetings.

The event is free to attend but registration is required.  To book your place please visit http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/1820/ and click on the link.

9 February New Directions in Early Modern Book History

Yesterday the West Road Concert Hall was packed for the libraries@cambridge conference, entitled ‘Blue skies … thinking and working in the cloud’. What will university libraries look like in 2020, 2040, 2060? Will there still be research libraries, or will they have gone the way of the dodo? Will they be operating in a society that looks more like the wild west, a walled garden or a beehive? (Those are among the scenarios for 2050 explored by the ‘Libraries of the Future‘ project). Will they have any books in them, or will they be beautiful light-filled atria full of bean-bags and plasma screens, open to endlessly spatial reconfiguration as users flow through them? Will academics still write books, or will they create online content? Will we need subject librarians if interdisciplinarity and specialization have annihilated the very concept of a subject? These were just some of the questions raised in the first two hours… (Answers on a postcard, please!)

Call for Papers

The 7th Annual Conference of The Association of Adaptation Studies

‘Visible and Invisible Authorships’

27th-28th September 2012

The University of York’s Film and Literature programme, in association with the Centre for Modern Studies and the Humanities Research Centre, is delighted to be hosting the 7th annual international conference of the AAS. The conference provides a lively forum for current thinking on adaptation issues and this year specifically invites reflection on the relationship of acts of authoring to the ongoing lives of adapted texts.

• How have different authorial voices and authorial inscriptions (screen writers, directors, designers, editors, studios, composers, writers, illustrators etc) of inherited tales been present in, and/or effaced by the processes of transmission?

• How might we reflect on these processes of authorial visibility and invisibility in the cultural circulation of adapted texts across media and moment?

• What is it to ‘author’ a contemporary telling of a tale that is already authored, or even that is received from history as, in effect, implicitly but eloquently authorless? And what happens in the process of visiting a revised or renewed authorial inscription upon a work?

• Why do some adapted works slough off almost all authorial designations (or cling to unlikely or peripheral ones) in their cultural reputations while others are emphatically branded in terms of an identifiable authorial voice? In line with the broad interests of the Association of Adaptation Studies, proposals on any aspect of adaptation will be considered.

Papers that speak to the conference theme will be particularly welcome. The deadline for receipt of proposals for papers and panels has been extended to 10 February 2012. Please send abstracts (within the body of your email) of not more than 250 words to film-and- literature@events.york.ac.uk and include a biog-sketch of not more than 100 words.

‘On the eleventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me…’ Probably not eleven lords a leaping. Perhaps a book, perhaps a book all about things—last year, Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects; this year, Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes. This remarkable book reconstructs the history of a collection of exquisite Japanese carvings that passed down through the generations of a single illustrious family, from their first acquisition in the 1870s to the present day. History–a global history of trade and nationalism and war–swirls round the netsuke as they pass from Paris to Vienna to Tokyo. And de Waal—an accomplished potter—is uniquely qualified to convey that history in tactile terms, fleshing out ever-changing relations between the carvings and the cabinets, rooms, buildings and cities that held them.

For connoisseurs of material textuality, The Hare offers all the pleasures of digging into a typically happenstance family archive. Among the grainy reproductions in my paperback copy there is the neatly-tabulated page of an opera and theatre notebook from 1916, showing that Wagner, Delibes and Shakespeare continued to enchant Viennese audiences in the middle of the First World War. There is the stylish little card that an uncle who had fled anti-Semitic mitteleuropa for Sunset Boulevard sent out to advertise his new collections ‘of Smart Accessories’—‘Belts, Bags, Ceramic Jewelry / Compacts, Handknit Suits and Blouses’. And many other documents are evoked verbally, as they are fished up from beneath the bed by the author’s father, or as they fall out from the magazines on a bookshelf. So de Waal finds ‘sandwiched between June and July 1966 an envelope containing very old documents, official-looking, in Russian’. He shows the documents to an expert: ‘This is the old paper … they changed this in 1870; that is the stamp, that is the fee. Here is the signature of the governor, always so emphatic—look, it has almost gone through the paper … This is a clerk’s copy, poor writing’. In such hands, ‘the dessicated records … flicker into life’.

Elsewhere, though, de Waal is sceptical about the dessicated record. At one point, sketching his grandmother Elisabeth’s epistolary relationship with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, he turns to consider some books that he inherited from her. He combs through them for clues: ‘comments in the margins, scraps of a forgotten lyric, a lost letter’. But ‘when I do find things, I wish I hadn’t’. There’s a transcribed Rilke poem on a page torn from a diary, ‘black and red like a missal’. There’s a ‘translucent gentian marking a page’ in a Rilke collection, a photograph of the sitting-room in her Proust. ‘I feel like a bookseller judging the sunning of the cover of a book, marking the annotations, assessing its possible interest,’ de Waal comments. ‘It is not only a trespass on her reading, which feels strange and inappropriate, but close to a cliché. I am turning real encounters into dried flowers’. And later: ‘What she loved was poetry, the world of things, hard and defined and alive, made lyrical. She would have hated my fetishising of her books’.

It’s interesting that the word ‘fetishising’ should appear here—and, to my recollection, nowhere else in The Hare—since the word inevitably hovers over any project so closely focused on things. Peter Stallybrass and Anne Rosalind Jones have a fascinating discussion of this subject in their book on Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory; drawing on the work of William Pietz, they trace the roots of the term in European colonialism (it was ‘the natives’ who were guilty of fetishism, whilst colonizers had a properly detached, capitalist attitude to possessions). For Marx, by contrast, fetishization meant the capitalist investment in fungible commodities, the very opposite of attention to the individual object with all of its personal associations, its precious freight of memories.

I wonder whether de Waal’s dealings with his netsuke and his abortive engagement with his grandmother’s books are really so different—why should the first be permissible, the latter out of bounds?

… went on display earlier this month for just three hours (12-3 pm) in a replica Victorian post office in the replica Victorian town of Blists Hill, at Ironbridge in Shropshire. Then it was returned to its resting place in the British Postal Museum and Archive, and was replaced with (you’ve guessed it) a replica.

Christmas being all about replication, it is striking how unfamiliar this item is. It is single-sided, apparently because it is really a glorified calling-card. It was printed in an edition of 1,000 using the relatively new technology of lithography, and coloured by hand. The image on the card is a triptych, featuring sober grisaille scenes of Christian charity to left and right. In the colourful middle section a family seated round a table raises a seasonal toast to the card’s recipient; a small child, encouraged by one of the adults, has already started downing his wine. (This last detail reportedly raised hackles in the Temperance League).

The card was commissioned in 1843 (the year of A Christmas Carol) by Henry Cole, a man whose extraordinary administrative skills must have prepared him well for the rituals of Christmas-card sending. Having reformed the public records, Cole helped invent the penny post; produced timetables for the Railway Chronicle; wrote children’s stories under the pseudonym of Felix Summerly; organized the Great Exhibition; and subsequently initiated the Albert Hall and the fabulous suite of museums in South Kensington. After reading about his life in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, it comes as a mild relief to learn that Cole ‘cared little for his personal appearance’; something, at least, had to give. The DNB suggests that Cole’s Christmas card may have been an offshoot of his work for the Post Office, offering support to those who suspect that all the seasonal greetings are really just another way to sell stamps.

Cole was still sending his card of 1843 in the 1860s, and was keen in later life to lay claim to the invention. Nowadays the few surviving copies retail for up to £8,000 each. You can read more here or here.

Our second stocking filler from the CMT is the manuscript of Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol, which you can find in an online facsimile here. Held in the Pierpont Morgan, just round the corner from the New York Public Library, the manuscript gives a wonderful sense of creativity on the wing, with numerous crossings-out, interlinings, second- and third-thoughts darkening the page.

Towards the end of the tale, the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come shows Scrooge his neglected gravestone, and Scrooge asks: “Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?” He answers the question himself: “Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead … But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!” And a few lines later, he begs: “Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!” Dickens is, as ever, busily crafting every sentence as he goes; in that last sentence he first writes ‘change’, then alters it to the more intense ‘sponge away’. Scrooge’s desire to rewrite his own ending chimes with the creative act that unfurls before our eyes.

The notes to this edition tell us that the sentence by which Dickens clarified that Tiny Tim did not die was added as an afterthought. The manuscript leaves this crucial matter suspended in an unforeseeable future.

Grade 7, £27,428 – £35,788 pa

Limit of tenure: 1.5 years from date of appointment.

Cambridge University Library is seeking to appoint a suitably qualified candidate with an interest and relevant experience in digital libraries or digital humanities to work within its digital library team from early 2012. The Foundations Project is a strategic initiative of the Library, which aims to establish a state-of-the-art infrastructure for the production, preservation and online delivery of digitised content from its world-class collections. The first iteration of the digital library is online at http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/.

The appointee will work within a core team of six, including another metadata specialist, with whom they will share a portfolio. Reporting to the Library’s Digitisation and Digital Preservation Manager, they will concentrate on metadata and transcription aspects of the project, supporting the broad requirements of the Foundations Project and the particular needs of several associated projects, particularly a JISC-funded mass digitisation project based on the fascinating archive of the Board of Longitude. This role will provide an opportunity for the appointee to work at the forefront of digital library and digital humanities initiatives.

For further details on the post and how to apply, please see: http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Vacancies/index.htm

Queen Mary Principal’s Studentships cover tuition fees and a maintenance allowance of around £15,000 per year. Applicants from the UK, European Union and overseas are eligible to apply. We are pleased to announce that we will offer one Principal’s Studentship shared between English and French in the field of early modern textual cultures of Western Europe. This studentship will be awarded for study commencing in autumn 2012.

The successful candidate will be jointly supervised by Prof Adrian Armstrong (French) and Dr Warren Boutcher (English). S/he will undertake research in the area of western European textual cultures, in the period 1450-1600, engaging with cultural products in at least two vernacular languages (English, French, Dutch, Italian). Appropriate topics might include, for instance: polyglot emblem books; translations of particular literary genres; the transmission of particular authors or books across countries; or the multilingual output of a single publisher.

For more information click here.

*Research Associate Digital Humanities and Transferable Skills Training*

Six-month post attached to the Digital Humanities Network at CRASSH

Full-time, starting 1 February 2012 or as soon as possible thereafter Salary: £27,428 pa pro rata (Grade 7), fixed term contract, no possibility of renewal.

*Deadline for applications: 9 January 2012*

CRASSH is seeking a postdoctoral Research Associate to lead a six-month project on the digital humanities and Transferable Skills Training. The project focuses specifically on the transferability of digital skills, and aims to increase awareness among early-career researchers of how the digital skills they have learnt in one context (social, academic or professional) can be applied in another.

Apply online here: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/page/1082/ra-digital-humanities.htm