Perception, Reception: The History of the Media in Society

Call for Papers for a conference to be held between 4th and 6th July 2012 at Aberystwyth University, Wales, UK. Extended deadline to 17th October 2011

The 4th Media History conference will focus on the ways in which people have understood the social, cultural and political roles of the media from the 15th to the 20th century. The concept of ‘the media’ will be interpreted broadly, so as to include print culture (including the press and publishing), cinema, broadcasting, and other visual and electronic media.

A great deal of work has been done by scholars on the institutional, political and cultural history of various media. ‘Perception, Reception’ will build on this literature to explore the ways in which the media have historically been understood, conceptualised, and imaginatively represented. Thus the conference will not focus on the content of the media as such, so much as the depiction, perception and reception of the media in different contexts over time. How have readers, consumers, and the respective media industries themselves framed arguments about the media as a force for good (or evil) at different points in time? Have contemporaries always seen the media as agents of change, or is there a counter-history of the media to be written in terms of promoting conservatism, deference and order? How have people understood and represented the media in terms of concepts of personal and geographical space, time, or changing belief systems? Can we think ‘internationally’ about perceptions of the media in different states and nations over time, or is the media still best understood and examined in largely local or regional contexts?

We welcome proposals from a range of chronological, geographical and methodological backgrounds. Abstracts, of around 200 words for papers of between 20 to 25 minutes duration, should be sent by close of business on 17th October 2011 to mediahist2012@aber.ac.uk<mailto:mediahist2012@aber.ac.uk>

The Cultures of the Digital Economy Institute (Anglia Ruskin University) & the Centre for Material
Texts (University of Cambridge) present:

BOOK PUBLISHING HISTORIES SEMINAR SERIES

Seminar II: The Impact of Digital Publishing Platforms for Academic Scholarship on Libraries and Readers

Hannah Perrett (Cambridge University Press)
&
Jayne Kelly and Sarah Stamford (ebooks@cambridge)

Tuesday 1st November 5.30-7pm
Lord Ashcroft Building 207, Anglia Ruskin University, East Road, Cambridge
For more information, please contact Dr Leah Tether: leah.tether@anglia.ac.uk

download a poster for this event here

On Tuesday 1 November 2011, Cambridge University Library will be holding its second masterclass as part of the Incunabula Project (http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/deptserv/rarebooks/incunabulaproject.html).

Prof. David McKitterick, Librarian at Trinity College Cambridge, will lead a seminar under the title ‘Mix and match: making up incunabula’.

“When we look at a copy of a book, we make many assumptions. But books may not be what they seem. This class will examine some of the ways in which the make-up of books can be changed and muddled between the time that they leave the printer, and when they are read today. Examples will be drawn from Caxton, and from fifteenth-century printers in Italy and the Low Countries.”

The seminar will be held in the Sir Geoffrey Keynes Room. It will start at 2.30pm and will last approximately 90 minutes, allowing time for questions and discussion. Attendance will be limited in order to allow all attendees a chance to see the books under discussion up close, and to participate in the discussion. Attendance is open to anyone with an interest in the topic.

To book your place, please contact Katie Birkwood (kib21@cam.ac.uk).

Seminars take place on Thursdays within term at 5:30 in S-R24 in the Faculty of English, 9 West Road, Cambridge.

For more information, contact Sarah Cain, Corpus Christi College (stc22@cam.ac.uk), Jason Scott-Warren, Faculty of English (jes1003@cam.ac.uk), or Andrew Zurcher, Queens’ College (aez20@cam.ac.uk)

13 October, John Rink (Faculty of Music), ‘The Virtual Chopin’

10 November, Linda Bree (Cambridge University Press), ‘Scholarly Publishing and Technological Change’

A new book by the anthropologist Tim Ingold is always a reason for me to interrupt whatever I’m doing and to spend the next 24 hours reading, and his Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (Routledge, 2011), does not disappoint. Ingold’s mission is to show us how much our fashionable academic languages and intellectual schemas prevent us from understanding the way the world works. He ranges across the globe, drawing insights from numerous anthropological studies, but also from artists, writers, and musicians, and an eclectic array of thinkers past and present, in order to shake off our misperceptions of what life is. For Ingold, modern thought conspires against us, erecting a series of dyads–nature/culture, mind/body, subject/object–which are visible in (and reinforced by) the worlds we create around ourselves. Asphalt pavements, concrete roads, stiff leather shoes, chairs, prescribed gaits and upright postures all conspire to convince us that we stand over above the world rather than in it. The entrenched dichotomies of modern Western thought need not to be thought across or ‘deconstructed’ but thought around, strenuously, with a lot of help from those who would never have dreamed of making such distinctions, and much detailed reflection on the nature of our own experience.

Ingold would perhaps disapprove of the existence of a ‘Centre for Material Texts’, which risks perpetuating the myth that there is something immaterial, outside the world and supervening on it, when in fact all of experience is equally embodied and disembodied, grounded and dreaming. The early sections of the book do a brilliant job of lancing some of the more cartoonish ways in which we are tempted to talk when we start to think about (what Ingold does not want to call) ‘material culture’. Yet, as in his earlier book, Lines, there is much in Being Alive for thinkers on text–in particular, Part V on ‘Drawing Making Writing’, which traces a dazzling set of connections between the legible, visible and singable letter, between writing, wayfaring, spinning, flying kites and doing anthropology. It’s truly inspirational stuff.

Why can’t people learn to sign their names more clearly? It’s the second line of this inscription which is causing headaches…

How the secularization of religious houses transformed the libraries of Europe, 16th-19th centuries <http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/csb/MigrationofKnowledge.htm>

Centre for the Study of the Book, Bodleian Libraries Conference at St Anne’s College, Oxford, 22-24 March 2012

Convenors: Richard Sharpe (Oxford); Cristina Dondi (Oxford); Dorit Raines (Venice)

What impact did the closure of monasteries and the dispersal of their collections have on the shape of libraries, access to libraries, and the preservation or otherwise of books from the past — the intellectual heritage of Europe?

* Monastic collections and the foundation of national libraries

* Dispersal of collections and new reading publics

* Effects on the market for early books and manuscripts

This 3-day conference also examines the historical and bibliographic tools that are available to address these questions, with speakers from 14 countries. See the conference page for the full list of speakers and themes, and to register: <http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/csb/MigrationofKnowledge.htm> .

The University Library has acquired Early European Books Collections 1 and 2 published online by ProQuest.

Complementing Early English Books Online, Early European Books aims to provide researchers and students with access to all works printed in Europe before 1701 and held in the partner libraries, regardless of language, together with all pre-1701 works in European languages printed further afield.

The value of the collections is enhanced by the use of full-colour, high-resolution (400 ppi) facsimile images scanned directly from the original printed sources. Each item in the collection is captured in its entirety, complete with its binding, edges, endpapers, blank pages, and any loose inserts. There is extensive metadata for each work.

Collection 1 is drawn from the Royal Library of Denmark in Copenhagen. It offers a comprehensive survey of its holdings of items listed in Lauritz Nielsen’s Dansk Bibliografi 1482–1600 and its supplement. All of the Royal Library’s Danish and Icelandic imprints produced in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries fall within its scope, from the earliest works printed in Denmark – Breviarium Ottoniense (Odense Breviary) and Guillaume Caoursin’s De obsidione et bello Rhodiano (‘On the siege and war of Rhodes’), both printed by Johann Snell in Odense in 1482 – through to works by the astronomer and alchemist Tycho Brahe (1546–1601).

Collection 2 from the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze focuses in particular on four of the library’s collections:

• The Nencini Aldine Collection: more than 1,000 editions printed by the Aldine Press
• Marginalia: a collection of more than 80 sixteenth- and seventeenth-century volumes which have been identified for the importance of the marginal annotations, including those written by Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) on his own personal copies of works by Euclid, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso and Horace.
• Incunabula: almost 1,200 volumes, including rare first editions of the works of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, and 100 volumes by the controversial preacher Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498).
• Sacred Representations: over 600 sixteenth- and seventeenth-century editions of sacre rappresentazioni, popular verse plays depicting Biblical scenes, episodes from the lives of the saints and Christian legends, which were originally performed in Florence and elsewhere in Tuscany and are considered by scholars to form the foundations of Italian theatre.

Early European Books is available throughout the University and off campus at http://eeb.chadwyck.co.uk/ or follow the  link from the Library’s electronic resources A-Z list.

*Manuscript Identities and the Transmission of Texts in the English Renaissance*

*Friday 25 and Saturday 26 May 2012,*

*Humanities Research Institute, Sheffield University*

As part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project ‘Early Modern Manuscript Poetry: Recovering our Scribal Heritage’, this conference will explore the role of manuscripts in the production of individual and corporate identities in early modern culture, including the commissioning, copying, circulation, and collection of manuscripts. The conference welcomes multidisciplinary approaches and is keen to consider the relationships between manuscript and print identities in the period.

*Topics might include:

* ownership and commissioning; selection criteria (authorial, thematic, generic, miscellaneous); scribal identities; collection and donation; manuscripts and place; the construction of poetic, religious, political, and regional identities in manuscript; coteries; circulation and dissemination; manuscript afterlives; editing

Speakers include: Julia Boffey (Queen Mary, London), Arthur Marotti (Wayne State University), Steve May (Sheffield University), Mary Morrissey (Reading University), Fred Schurink (Northumbria University), Jeremy Smith (Glasgow University), and Henry Woudhuysen (University College, London)

Please submit 200-word proposals for 20 minute papers by *Friday 30 September* to Alan Bryson (a.bryson@sheffield.ac.uk <mailto:a.bryson@sheffield.ac.uk>) and Cathy Shrank (c.shrank@shef.ac.uk <mailto:c.shrank@shef.ac.uk>).

My little sister got married last week: a happy day. And my even littler sister brought along some unusual confetti–heart-shaped pieces of paper cut from the pages of old Mills & Boon romances. It’s made by a company called ‘bookish’ which sells all sorts of book-related things–bookmarks, book-bags, literary t-shirts, Scrabble-piece cufflinks and even the occasional signed first edition.

Their website (http://www.bookishengland.co.uk/pages/about.html) spells out their ethos: ‘We believe in the power of books. The power they have to help us change and grow, and the power they still hold over us years and years after they have been read. We keep almost all of our old books; we’re hoarders and we just can’t bear to get rid of them. We love the memories. Sometimes we cut up knackered old books and make something else out of them; a handbag or confetti or a lovely paper-chain of little bookish men. We love handmade, vintage, upcycled, recycled, repurposed, reused and reloved bookish things.’

It’s a curious statement, on the face of it. Can you be both a hoarder and a recycler? Can you love something and destroy it, even if your aim is to turn it into something else? But the contradiction reveals what is often suppressed–that the love of reading is a love of the particularities and peculiarities of the medium, the seemingly incidental details that colour and flavour the experience.

These Mills and Boon books have been destroyed, but what remains of them is very eloquent. Take a look, with mixed feelings, dry voices, maybe a touch of quiet desperation.