History of Material Texts Seminar Series
Thursday 27 May 2010, 5.30 p.m.
Subha Mukherji (Downing) will speak on ‘The voice of things: some archival evidence’, and Christopher Burlinson (Jesus) on ‘Maps and letters in the early modern archive’.
Room SR-24 in the Faculty of English, 9 West Road, Cambridge.
All welcome. For further details, contact Daniel Wakelin (dlw22@cam.ac.uk) or Sarah Cain (stc22@cam.ac.uk). .
On Friday 21 May at 5pm in the Morison Room, University Library there will be a CMT seminar on extra-illustration. Dr Luisa Cale and Dr Lucy Peltz will explore the origins and rise of extra-illustration and examine some important examples of this creative practice. Extra-illustrated materials from the UL’s collections will be available for inspection.
The seminar coincides with the final week of the Folger Library’s exhibition of extra-illustration, ‘Extending the Book’:
If you’d like to attend the seminar, please email Mina Gorji (mg473@cam.ac.uk).
Lambeth Palace Library is one of the earliest public libraries in England, founded in 1610 under the will of Archbishop Richard Bancroft. This exhibition draws upon the Library’s incomparably rich and diverse collections of manuscripts, archives and books, some of which will be on display for the first time. It reveals how the collections have developed since 1610 and explores the history surrounding the people who owned, studies or used them as aids to prayer and devotion.
The exhibition is open 10am to 5pm, Monday to Saturday from 17th May to 23rd July 2010. For more details and booking information, please visit www.lambethpalacelibrary.org.
The exhibition is open 10am to 5pm, Monday to Saturday from 17th May to
23rd July 2010. For more details and booking information, please visit
www.lambethpalacelibrary.org.
I work with manuscript and printed material dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These texts often have complicated material histories, especially in those early, hectic days, weeks, months, and sometimes years during which they were created, read, annotated, copied, and then placed somewhere for safe keeping – or, perhaps, passed on to a new owner who read, annotated, and copied them all over again. From time to time I have edited materials like these for scholarly publication, and during the course of research I have generated an enormous amount of data about them, most of which now exists (if it exists) in scribbled forms on scraps of paper. When someone comes along in thirty years and wants to re-assess manuscript and printed materials, that scholar will need to repeat the entire process of discovery that led to my original conclusions, before (very likely) she surpasses them to form her own, better ideas. Wouldn’t it be nice, I often think, if we could find a way to create durable records of our research in real time? If we could generate not only scholarly editions, but research spaces in which users could follow us on our journey from the first encounter with, say, a 1581 manuscript letter, all the way to our final judgments about the nature of that letter’s contents, its relationship to other extant letters, the history of its circulation, and so on?
This sort of technology is probably a long way off, though I think I can see how it might work. An observing computer would follow our train of thought, possibly by logging it at key nodes (much as you might tag essential features in an electronic image you are manipulating onscreen), and then display in some intuitive interface a map or narrative that linked those nodal points together in a history, drawing on three-dimensional video, audio, and other kinds of sensory recording. A user could ‘read’ – or experience – a transcript of the process of my research. Don’t worry: they’ll have medication to cope with the outcome.
But we’re not there yet. In the meantime, we have Tales of things, a new service launched by the TOTeM project (a collaboration between Brunel University, Edinburgh College of Art, University College London, University of Dundee and the University of Salford, funded by the Digital Economy Research Councils UK), at http://www.talesofthings.com. Tales of things is conceptually a simple venture, but one that may have huge consequences. The website encourages you to start tagging the physical objects around you (that is, in the real, material world) with scannable tags – probably printed onto a sticker – each showing a unique identifer. This identifier will permanently link the physical object to a web page, where you can tell the tale of that thing: record its history, your history with it, or whatever you fancy. If someone else encounters the thing, and scans the code with their mobile phone or other device, they can then log onto the website and read your comments, and the comments of anyone else who has encountered and written about that thing, using its unique identifier. We’re now used to attaching metadata to electronic objects. Make no mistake: metadata just got a whole lot weirder.
Tales of things may seem to offer an alternative to the material text, inasmuch as it allows us to create textualized materials. But it offers an exciting glimpse of what may be the future of manuscript study, or bibliographical research on old printed materials, for people like me. If we could put an electronically scannable tag on a British Library manuscript – or, if you’re glue-shy, just tuck it into the mylar sleeve that will (budget constraints permitting) one day hold and protect that manuscript page – we could link the physical object to a store of metadata to which everyone in the world could have instant, unfettered access, all the time. After a day in the National Archives looking at Spenser’s letters, I could load every single byte of my typed notes onto a central server, carefully disposed by object, at the expense of only a very little labour – probably as little as a few clicks.
Once the data was on a server – and remember, everyone’s data would be on the same server – we could start thinking about how to solve problems like longevity, file format security, and of course cross-referencing. It’s a lot easier to conserve and migrate data when it’s all homogenous. And it would be trivial (for someone) to write a piece of software that would spider the manuscript data pages, looking for cross-references to other manuscript data pages, and then link them in trees and networks that would help us to understand the relationships between the material texts themselves. Best of all, though, this data would continue to be available in a wiki-like space for other researchers to access, modify, and enhance, potentially forever.
The Tales of things project gives us a tiny peek at what a decentralized library cataloguing environment could look like – or perhaps it would be better to call it a hyper-centralized cataloguing environment, one in which all library collections could be virtually federated, and the historical connections between their associated (but till now sundered) items and collections mapped, and in some sense restored. It allows us to see how the knowledge-moments of individual researchers could, through tagging, join the corpus of scholarly publication and become part of the enduring scholarly record – but a record that could evolve more organically than authored publications will ever allow.
Centre for the History of the Book Conference: Material Cultures 2010
A three-day conference at The University of Edinburgh July 16-18, 2010
ROGER CHARTIER
JEROME McGANN
PETER STALLYBRASS
Following the Material Cultures conferences which took place at The University of Edinburgh in 2000 and 2005, the third in the series is scheduled to take place in July 2010. The key theme of the conference is ‘Technology, Textuality, and Transmission’, though papers relating to all aspects of Bibliography and the History of the Book will be delivered.
http://www.hss.ed.ac.uk/chb/MaterialCultures2010.htm
The conference programme is now available online and registration is open. All enquiries should be sent to materialcultures@ed.ac.uk
The Gathered Text:
a one-day symposium
Friday 3 September 2010
Seminar Room, New Bodleian Library, Oxford
http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/380-gathered-text-conference.html
Keynote speaker: Randall McLeod
Confirmed speakers: John Barnard, Mark Bland, Ian Gadd, Andrew Honey, Peter McCullough, Jason McElligott, David McKitterick, Ian Maclean, Nicholas Pickwoad, Peter Stallybrass, Kathryn Sutherland, Henry Woudhuysen.
The gathering is one of the fundamental units of textual construction during the hand-press book period (c. 1475-1830). So basic is it to the design of early printed texts that it has rarely been considered as a topic for independent enquiry. Gatherings can, however, tell us much about the ways in which early modern texts were constructed and presented to their first readers. The size and format of gatherings, disruptions in numeration or signatures, insertions and cancellations, and the re-use of gatherings in later publications yield crucial information about the cultures of writing, publication and reading during the early modern period. Gatherings can illuminate technical practices such as shared printing, the construction of texts out of pre-existing printed material and the dispersal and re-sale of commercially unsuccessful or contraband texts. They can also help us to gain insight into a range of cultural practices, from censorship to book collecting to literary marketing. Gatherings might even serve a rhetorical function, embodying in material form thematic concerns of the texts that they contain. They offered early modern authors a textual unit that could act as a tool to think with. ‘The Gathered Text’ is a one-day symposium dedicated to exploring all aspects of the gathering in manuscript and print.
Cost: £25 (£15 students) to include tea, coffee, a sandwich lunch and an evening reception.
The Bibliographical Society has generously offered bursaries to assist postgraduate students with the cost of attending this event. If you would like to apply for one of these bursaries, please send i) a description of the ways in which attending the symposium would assist your research; ii) a brief note from your supervisor endorsing your application, to rebecca.bullard@ell.ox.ac.uk
This symposium has been made possible through the support of:
The John Fell OUP Research Fund
The Centre for the Study of the Book (Bodleian Library, Oxford)
The English Faculty, Oxford University
Merton College, Oxford.
It takes place in association with the Centre for Early Modern Studies, Oxford.
To register for this event, please use the symposium website: http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/380-gathered-text-conference.html
or go direct to Oxford University Stores: https://www.oxforduniversitystores.co.uk/catalogue/products.asp?compid=1&deptid=110&catID=707&hasClicked=1
Those attending The Gathered Text may also be interested in the Rare Books Masterclass, featuring a demonstration of the McLeod portable collator, which takes place on Thursday 2 September in the Seminar Room of the New Bodleian Library. This masterclass is free of charge, but registration is required. More information is available at http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/385-rare-books-masterclass-.html.
For any further information about ‘The Gathered Text’, please contact Rebecca Bullard, rebecca.bullard@ell.ox.ac.uk