I’ve just had a first chance to look round the new exhibition at Cambridge University Library, entitled ‘Books and Babies: Communicating Reproduction’. A spin-off from a Wellcome-funded project entitled ‘Generation to Reproduction’, the exhibition packs several thousand years of human thinking about human replication into a single room.

We’re greeted by a stomach-churning image from William Hunter’s Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus (1774), in which the sensitively-rendered, soft-fleshed foetus nestles in the clinically-carved meat of a dissected female pelvis. Representations of the womb, and battles for control of the female body, remain prominent in what follows. Display cabinets offer us snapshots of the history of midwifery, evolutionary and eugenic thinking, theories of population explosion and practices of birth-control, the abortion debate, the development of ‘test-tube babies’… I was sorry not to see some space given to once-commonplace theories of spontaneous generation (the sun breeding maggots in a dead dog, or serpents out of the Nile mud), but there is at least a medieval bestiary to illustrate the question of whether weasels conceive through the mouth and give birth through the ear or vice versa.

It’s not all books–there are also letters, newspapers, comics, scratched scientific notes, DVD-boxes, small fertility statues, and several condoms and pregnancy testing-kits. But the exhibition does raise interesting questions about the role that different media have played in disseminating ideas. At several points it made me scared about the power that print has had to lay claim to objectivity and to influence thought. The density of a scientific illustration, such as that in the 1934 Gesetz zur Verhütung… (a commentary on the Nazi sterilization programme); or the simplicity of a graph from 1916 showing the disparity between falling birth-rates in upper- and middle-class Hampstead as contrasted with stable rates in working-class Shoreditch; or the photographic feats of a Cesare Lombroso, inventing the discipline of criminal anthropology by juxtaposing scores of heads of ‘delinquent man’ in 1889–these remnants of bygone pseudo-science send shivers down the spine.

The shivers are somewhat allayed by the case devoted to Aristotle’s Masterpiece, a cobbled-together book promising to disclose the secrets of sex and childbirth, which was a furtively-thumbed classic from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Here the curators pause to think about individual readers of the text, from James Joyce’s Molly Bloom in Ulysses to an otherwise unknown French woman who married a London waterman in the mid-nineteenth century. Elsewhere attention to provenance yields bizarre results, when Luther and Melanchthon’s 1523 pamphlet depicting the pope-ass and the monk-calf (two ‘monstrous births’ which are taken to reveal the corruptions of the Catholic church) turns up in the library of the mathematician and eugenicist, Karl Pearson. Could he have seen the Reformation as a clash of good and bad bloodstocks?!

The exhibition is on until 23 December, and there is a website at http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/exhibitions/Babies/

Eating Words: a one-day CMT workshop

Gonville and Caius College. Cambridge, 13 September 2011

Some of our most material interactions with texts are grounded in the very food that we eat. Comestibles are eloquent objects; they come stamped with words, festooned with decorative designs, and wrapped in packaging that is at once visually and verbally loquacious. The kitchen has long been a textual domain, regulated by cookery books and recipe collections and noisy with inscriptions on pots, pans, plates and pastry-moulds. This one-day workshop will explore numerous aspects of the relationship between writing, eating and domestic life across a broad swathe of history, in order to illuminate the unsuspected power of words and pictures in a paradigmatically practical locale and to shed light on the textual condition more broadly.

Plenary Speakers: Deborah Krohn (Bard Graduate Centre) & Sara Pennell (Roehampton University)

To download a flyer, click here. A draft program is available here. A booking form is available here.

From ‘Pseuds Corner’ in this week’s Private Eye, citing a health spa advertisement:

“For £22, Groupon guests will be able to enjoy a two-pronged availing assault to smooth [sic] and sate the human form. The thoughtful therapists will help turn over a new page of person parchment with a moisturising exfoliation scrub before thoroughly kneading the mortal dough with a full body massage”.

Followed by a gruelling work-out for any metaphors that may lie hiding in your folds? I can’t wait!

‘SHARING THE WONDER’— a collaborative approach to promoting, preserving and sharing the content of special collections

A one day conference at Queens’ College, Cambridge on 12th September 2011

The uniqueness and specialised appeal of our collections offers little protection from financial constraints. Many are under threat – of dispersal, of neglect and even disposal in favour of digitised copies – and this conference focuses on ways in which colleagues are sharing their expertise and knowledge to ensure their collections ‘work’, that is, that they continue to be relevant and available to meet the needs and interests of their varied audiences – be these scholars or the public at large.

Speakers will include:
Dr Stella Panayotova, Keeper of Rare Books & Manuscripts at the Fitzwilliam Museum, and mainstay of the ‘Cambridge Illuminations’ project to exhibit, catalogue and publish information about  the entire body of illuminated manuscripts held in the Colleges and other parts of the University.

Dr Alison Walker, retired head of the National Preservation Office at the British Library, who is coordinating a project to catalogue the dispersed library of Sir Hans Sloane that forms the 18th century core of the British Museum and Natural History Museum libraries.

Natalie Adams, Senior Archivist at the Churchill Archives who is involved in a commercial project to make Sir Winston Churchill’s papers available online.

We will also hear from the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College, which has collaborated with Stanford University to make its entire manuscript collection online; and from conservators at the Cambridge Colleges Conservation Consortium, who will describe how their work helps to keep special collections ‘in working order’ and also offers unexpected insights into the history of the book.

The cost of attendance is £25 and the programme includes lunch and a visit to a choice of special collections within a few minutes walking distance of Queens’ College.

To Book, please complete the form here.

This week has offered plentiful opportunities to reflect on the current state of work in the digital humanities. On Monday, the CMT held its first joint workshop with the Cultures of the Digital Economy Research Institute at Anglia Ruskin. One of the contributors to this event, Eugene Giddens (ARU), spoke about digital editing in his neck of the woods, early modern literary studies, characterizing it as almost entirely a history of failure. Fantasies nurtured in the 1990s—dreams of hypertext editions that would allow one to move fluidly between different versions of a work, exposing the many contingencies of the textual condition—have come to nothing. We have no online Shakespeare to can compete with the massed ranks of Ardens, Riversides and Nortons. We have few compelling online editions of other authors, major or minor. And in the rare cases where such editions have been completed, the bells and whistles (say, video-clips from modern performances of playtexts) may do more to obstruct than to facilitate engagement. Publishers seem to have despaired of finding a viable financial model for the online edition, while they continue to commission the familiar printed behemoths. Meanwhile scholars flock to sites that dump low-grade but plentiful facsimile images on the web. ‘Early English Books Online’ is the one unqualified success-story of digital editing in this area, and it isn’t (in the standard sense of the word) an edition.

Having absorbed some of the force of this analysis, it was surprising to go on a second collaborative event, a workshop on ‘Digital Editing and Digital Editions’ run at CRASSH on Wednesday. The speakers at this event were mainly upbeat about digital editing projects, one of them—John Rink of the Cambridge Music Faculty—having worked on an extremely complex and interesting project to create a variorum edition of Chopin (see http://www.ocve.org.uk/index.html and, relatedly, http://www.cfeo.org.uk/dyn/index.html). The miraculous interface for this project does things that Shakespeareans can only (continue to) dream of, allowing bar-by-bar comparison between the various original manuscripts and early printed scores, all of them testifying eloquently to this particular composer’s inability to stop improving and improvising, and to the material circumstances in which his works took shape. Funded by the Mellon Foundation, the site continues to grow and may in future incorporate audio performances to further diversify and enrich its content.

The other presentation at this event was similarly inspiring. Here Eleanor Robson of Cambridge’s Department of History and Philosophy of Science explored ORACC (http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/index.html), the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus, an ever-expanding archive of cuneiform texts that was initiated in the 1990s and which has continued to grow ever since. Hosted by the University of Pennsylvania, ORACC was developed without direct funding, mostly it seems as a means of facilitating the research projects of its founders. The site offers an enticingly open, free-form model for online editing (Robson patiently explained that the site’s acronym alludes to ORAC, the supercomputer-sidekick of the intergalactic renegades in the 1980s sci-fi series Blake’s 7). This vast, intricately-coded archive of cuneiform texts has a very direct impact on teaching and draws together numerous research collaborations with sites and institutions across the US, Europe and the Middle East.

Wednesday’s meeting concluded with a round-table discussion chaired by Andrew Zurcher (Faculty of English) which aired questions of longevity (making digital projects last), interoperability (making them talk to one another), impact (making them useful), and respectability (making them count on a CV). The Cambridge Digital Humanities Network will be carrying these discussions forward in the coming months and years: watch this space for more information. Meanwhile, the CMT is hosting two lunchtime meetings in the next couple of weeks (see this site, under ‘Events’) to discuss nascent digital projects.

for further discussion of the CRASSH workshop, see the intranet Members’ Forum (click on the sidebar tab)

Two ‘brown bag lunches’ to look at & hear about grant applications currently in the pipeline.

1. Wednesday 1 June, 1-2 pm   Green Room, Gonville and Caius College

Dr Lauren Kassell (History and Philosophy of Science) on the Simon Forman Casebooks project.

2. Wednesday 8 June, 1-2pm   Senior Parlour, Gonville and Caius College

Dr Claire Preston (English) on the Thomas Browne edition.

Protest on the Page: Print Culture History in Opposition to Almost Anything*

(*you can think of)

Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture, Madison, Wisconsin, September 28-29, 2012

Protest has a long and varied tradition in America. The conference will feature papers focusing on authors, publishers and readers of oppositional materials, in all arenas from politics to literature, from science to religion. Whether the dissent takes the form of a banned book by Henry Miller or documents from Wikileaks, conference presentations will help us to understand how dissent functions within print and digital cultures.

Proposals for individual twenty-minute papers or complete sessions (up to three papers) should include a 250-word abstract and a one-page c.v. for each presenter. Submissions should be made via email to printculture@slis.wisc.edu. The deadline for submissions is January 31, 2012. Notifications of acceptance will be made in early March 2012.

For information, contact:

Christine Pawley, Director, Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture cpawley@wisc.edu

Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities

DIGITAL EDITING AND DIGITAL EDITIONS

A half-day workshop on new developments in the field of digital editing in Music, History, Philosophy and Literature

Speakers: Andrew Webber (German and Dutch, Cambridge), John Rink (Music, Cambridge), Eleanor Robson (HPS, Cambridge), Jane Winters (Institute of Historical Research), Andrew Zurcher (English, Cambridge)

1-5 pm, Wednesday 25 May 2011

CRASSH, 17 Mill Lane, Cambridge

Please email Anne Alexander (raa43@cam.ac.uk) to reserve a place.

Further information at www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/1638

The English Department in the School of Liberal Arts at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis seeks to fill a research associate position in Shakespeare Studies, beginning in August 2011 (with a one-year contract, renewable up to four years). The research associate will join a team working on a new multi-platform edition (print and digital) of Shakespeare’s Complete Works, to be published by Oxford University Press (general edited by Terri Bourus, John Jowett, and Gary Taylor).

Preference for Ph.D. in hand, but ABD candidates will also be considered. Candidates must have training in, and enthusiasm about, early modern bibliography and/or textual studies, performance or book history. We will begin considering applications immediately and continue until the positions are filled.

Applications, including a cover letter, c.v., and three letters of recommendation, should be submitted online as Word or pdf files, addressed to Dr. Terri Bourus at tbourus@iupui.edu. We hope to conduct Skype interviews of select applicants before June 30, 2011. IUPUI is an EEO/AA Employer, M/F/D.

Book Encounters, 1500-1750

Friday 1 July 2011, Corsham Court Centre, Bath Spa University

Bath Spa University’s newly formed Book, Text and Place (1500-1750) Research Centre is pleased to announce its inaugural conference, ‘Book Encounters, 1500-1750’. In keeping with the Centre’s focus on early modern literary culture, place, and the history of the book broadly defined, this conference explores a wide variety of encounters with the book: from different cultural and geographical sites of production, circulation and reception to various disciplines and periods within early modernity.

Conference fees: £30; £20 students (note: a conference subvention covering fees for students has been generously provided by The Bibliographical Society; students interested in attending the conference should contact Chris Ivic c.ivic@bathspa.ac.uk)

Information on the Book, Text and Place (1500-1750) Research Centre is available at http://www.bathspa.ac.uk/schools/humanities-and-cultural-industries/researc h/book-text-and-place/