PhD funding: School of English, University of Leicester, UK

A PhD fee-waiver scholarship in the School of English at the University of Leicester is available for a research student. PhD proposals should be in the area Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century Literature, or The History of the Book in the Early Modern Period.

The award is for a student registering in October 2011 and covers fees up to £3,732 (the equivalent of Home/EU fees) for 3 years. Only new PhD students are eligible. The financial package covers full-time Home/EU fees only, but international and part-time students are encouraged to apply. Successful international students would themselves pay the difference between the Home/EU fee award and the international fee. Details can be found at
http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/english/postgraduate/funding

Postdoctoral Fellow in the History and Future of the Book (2011-12, renewable)

The Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) project, funded by a Major Collaborative Research Initiative grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), seeks a post-doctoral fellow in the History and Future of the Book, with expertise in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities. This position is based in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. The successful candidate is anticipated to work closely with team members at U Toronto, Acadia U, U Saskatchewan, U Victoria, U Western Ontario, and beyond. The postdoctoral fellow’s work will bridge between digital humanities and the history of books and reading, collaborating with INKE’s Textual Studies team, consulting with project stakeholders and potential stakeholders, and liaising with other INKE researchers located in North America and the UK. The fellow will be expected to teach a light course load in the Faculty of Information and the collaborative program in Book History and Print Culture, to be remunerated in addition to the fellowship’s salary.

The original ad may be found here: http://www.ischool.utoronto.ca/alumni-careers/work-at-the-ischool

to Dan Wakelin, who is leaving Cambridge to take up the Jeremy Griffiths Professorship of Medieval English Palaeography at Oxford. Dan has been a convenor of the History of the Book/HMT seminar for many years, and has been a key player in the CMT from the start. We will miss him greatly, but hope that this will be the start of many a collaboration.

“…of things which they were not in quest of”: digital serendipity and digital design

In the simplest terms, the Bodleian Libraries’ Electronic Enlightenment Project digitizes letters, largely of the 18th century. More intriguingly, it uses what we call “scholarly technology” to reconstruct what may be the world’s first global, social network – stretching from the early 17th to the early 19th centuries! And in that process, rediscovers conversations and correspondents previously lost, or only available to the most erudite researcher. In this presentation, we will introduce our concept and application of “scholarly technology”, and consider how the design and development of this kind of digital resource can result in a system so culturally dense as to positively encourage serendipitous discoveries.

SPEAKERS: Dr Robert V. McNamee, Director

Mark Rogerson, Technical Editor

Electronic Enlightenment Project, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

DATE: 5 May, 2011. 5.15-6.30pm. Helmore 201, East Road, Anglia Ruskin University

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

THE BOOK PUBLISHING HISTORIES SEMINAR SERIES

Seminar 1: Renaissance Texts and Publishing

Monday 23rd May 2011 5-6.45pm, Morison Room, Cambridge University Library

Professor Jane Taylor (Durham University) on matters of taste in sixteenth-century publishing

and

Professor Eugene Giddens (Anglia Ruskin University) on preparing digital editions of early modern literature

For more information please contact Dr Leah Tether: leah.tether@anglia.ac.uk

Elegies for that soon-to-be-defunct artefact, the book, frequently wax lyrical about its most evanescent quality: the smell of the pages. Robert Darnton, in The Case for Books, refers to a survey of French students in which 43% of respondents said that the lack of scent put them off electronic books; he also reports that one French online publisher distributes a sticker that gives off a ‘fusty, bookish smell’, to ease the transition to the new medium. You can buy ‘a revolutionary new aerosol e-book enhancer’ (see http://smellofbooks.com/) for the same purpose. Or you can join around 100 other people mulling on the mystique of the bookish aroma at LibraryThing (http://www.librarything.com/topic/10361).

For Richard Lanham, ‘our cultural vitals are isomorphic with the codex book. Its very feel and heft and look and smell are talismanic’. A friend of mine once complained that modern writers overuse the word ‘heft’–presumably because, in its simplicity and unfamiliarity, it carries some of the physical weight that it describes. And I’ve always felt that the book-smell argument was a rather desperate, last-ditch defence of the book. Surely we can do better than that!

But now the final nail is being hammered into the coffin of my cynicism, as the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld announces a new perfume, ‘Paper Passion’, based on the smell of the book, and sold encased in a hollowed-out hardback. The genuine bibliophile will be able to wear the scent of the codex on their person, and the nostalgia that clings to paper, dust and glue will be sublimated into the stuff of love.

Those guys at Amazon had better be very afraid…

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/fashion/karl-lagerfeld-to-create-fragrance-that-smells-of-books-2270503.html

Can anyone read this? Just the signature, not the rest!

One-Day Symposium 5th September 2011, King’s College London

The ‘Digital Resource and Database of Palaeography, Manuscripts and Diplomatic’ (DigiPal) at the Centre for Computing in Humanities at King’s College London is pleased to announce a one-day symposium on digital resources for palaeography. In recent years, scholars have begun to develop and employ new technologies and computer-based methods for palaeographic research. The aim of the symposium is to present developments in the field, explore the limits of digital and computational-based approaches, and share methodologies across projects which overlap or complement each other.

Papers of 20 minutes in length are invited on any relevant aspect of digital methods and resources for palaeography and manuscript studies. Possible topics could include: * Project reports and/or demonstrations * Palaeographical method; ‘Digital’ and ‘Analogue’ palaeography * Quantitative and qualitative approaches * ‘Scientific’ methods, ‘objectivity’ and the role of evidence in manuscript studies * Visualisation of manuscript evidence and data * Interface design and querying of palaeographical material

To propose a paper, please send a brief abstract (250 words max) to digipal@kcl.ac.uk. The deadline for receipt of submissions is 8th May 2011. Notice of acceptance will be sent by 20th May 2011.

— Dr Stewart J Brookes, Research Associate, Digital Resource for Palaeography

Last night, more evidence of the speed with which the world is turning a corner. A play-reading circle that I belong to was doing J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World. In the past, when I’ve turned up to these wine-fuelled evening gatherings with my laptop, I’ve been the only one who hasn’t printed out the text from the web, or else bought a copy of the play. This time round, a laptop, a Kindle and an iPad were already up-and-running when I arrived. As my fellow laptop-user opined, those of us with wires were starting to look old-fashioned.

What play to do next time? Someone wanted Shakespeare, so I suggested The Double Falsehood, an eighteenth-century play that may preserve parts of the lost Shakespeare/Fletcher play Cardenio. It has just been edited for the Arden Shakespeare, so the time is ripe. ‘Oh no, not a book we have to buy,’ came a reply, ‘my house is too full of books already. How can I get rid of my books?’

In the midst of the digital revolution everyone seems to be dreaming about weightless text. Can we have those wonderful words without their associated baggage, the costly pages, the ever-proliferating bookshelves and libraries and siloes that are needed to preserve them? It’s like the fantasy of the house without clutter, the kind of house you see in Sunday supplements: clean lines, glass, light. The risk is that, as the weight goes, the text goes too. Pictures, prefaces, footnotes, fonts, your feeling for what kind of a book this is, your sense of where you are and where you are going–all are liable to disappear in ereader editions.

Of course, the same thing often happens in print. When texts are repackaged for new markets, they lose a lot of the framing, ‘paratextual’ features that gave them meaning in their old locale; this adaptation to the environment is what keeps them alive. But sometimes even a great work of literature leads only a half-life when stripped of its original physical vehicle. Encountering a book in its first incarnation can be a revelatory experience: the very look of the thing, its unconscious cues, its body language, put in you in a frame of mind to appreciate it.

So it’s two cheers for the new technology. Or am I just a luddite?

The New York Public Library is pleased to announce the availability of 20 fellowships to support visiting scholars conducting studies in the Library’s unique research and special collections between June 1, 2011, and June 30, 2012. The Fellowship stipend is $2,500. Scholars from outside the New York metropolitan area engaged in graduate-level, post-doctoral, or independent research are invited to apply. Applicants must be United States citizens or permanent residents with the legal right to work in the U.S. Applications must be received by April 1, 2011, in order to be considered.

Complete guidelines are posted at: http://www.nypl.org/short-term

Fellowships are open to academic and non-academic researchers. All applications should indicate how the Library’s unique collections are essential to the proposed research. Identify specific material(s) to be consulted during the fellowship period and their relevance to the project. Include the location of collection items within the Library’s research divisions and special collection units.

Please visit www.nypl.org/collections/nypl-collections for detailed information about the research resources of The New York Public Library.

The deadline for applications is April 1, 2011.