Old Combination Room, Trinity College, Cambridge

Thursday 24 November 2011

Organisers: David McKitterick, James Raven and Alex Walsham

Supported by the Trevelyan Fund, Faculty of History and the Cambridge Project for the Book Trust

This symposium brings together scholars from Cambridge, the UK, the US and Europe to reflect on recent developments in and approaches to the History of the Book and to discuss both the potential and the problems posed by the ever-growing number of electronic resources available to scholars working in this broad and flourishing field. The last 15-20 years have seen the commissioning and publication of a series of histories of the book (Britain, Ireland, America, etc): these enterprises have borne considerable fruit and extended our knowledge of the worlds of manuscript production, printing, publishing and textual consumption within particular national contexts. But their self-imposed parameters have also restricted our understanding of initiatives and interactions that cut across these boundaries and connected people who were members of other types of imagined communities, including churches and sects and the wider republic of letters that united scholars across borders, continents and oceans. They have eclipsed other dimensions of the topic that demand attention in the context of burgeoning interest in transnational and global history. Building on these reflections, the second aim of this symposium is to consider how major digitisation projects and other databases are transforming how historians study past cultures of communication, as well as other related themes.

10am          Coffee

10.30-12.45 Session I: Histories of the Book

America: David Hall (Harvard Divinity School)

Britain: David McKitterick (Trinity)

Ireland: Toby Barnard (Hertford College, Oxford)

France: Dominique Varry (Lyon)

12.45-1.45 Lunch

1.45-4.00                     Session II: New Resources

Universal STC: Andrew Pettegree (St Andrews)

The Electronic Enlightenment: Glenn Roe (Oxford)

Bibliopolis: Paul Hoftijzer (Leiden)

Old Bailey Online: Tim Hitchcock (Hertfordshire)

Digitised newspapers: Mark Curran (Leeds and Munby Fellow)

4.00-4.30 Tea

4.30-5.30 Round Table Discussion and Future Directions

All welcome: please advise Alex Walsham if you wish to attend (amw23@cam.ac.uk)

Thursday, 12 January 2012 6.30pm – 8.00pm, followed by a drinks reception

British Academy, 10-11 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1

Chair: Paul Webley, Director and Principal of SOAS, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

Speakers:

Deborah Shorley, Director of Library Services, Imperial College London

William St Clair FBA, Co-founder and Chairman Board of Directors, Open Book Publishers, and Senior Research Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge

Alice Prochaska, Principal, Somerville College, University of Oxford

All the above mentioned speakers have an interest, and experience of this mode of publishing. The first speaker has made statements concerning open access. William St Clair is a powerful voice in Open Book Publishers, committed to free open access of all their texts on the internet. Paul Webley has a particular interest in open access founded in his commitment to accessibility for students and scholars throughout Africa and Asia.

Key questions to be addressed: Can the scholarly world continue to support a system where monographs are published in 3-figure numbers at best, to be read only by the well-endowed in favoured centres of the world? Is it true that having text accessible on the web encourages rather than depresses sales? Is such a project financially feasible, and what are the costs and benefits? Is this the way forward for the democratisation of global knowledge?

Attendance is free, but registration is required for this event. Please visit our website: www.britac.ac.uk/events.

1st Annual Conference
Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK
27-28 March 2012

Call For Abstracts

The 1st Annual Conference of CoDE: Cultures of the Digital Economy will be held at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK on 27-28 March 2012. Participants from a range of scholarly disciplines are invited to present research related to digital culture and the digital economy. Confirmed keynote speakers are Dr Jussi Parikka and Dr
Astrid Ensslin, whose biographies are included below. Paper abstracts of up to 300 words can be submitted to
code@anglia.ac.uk until 31st January 2012. In particular, abstracts related to the following conference themes are
sought, though abstracts addressing other aspects of digital culture are also welcome:

Theme 1. Materiality and Materialism
It is straightforward enough to understand computation as a relationship between material objects (hard drives,
screens, keyboards and other input devices, scanners, printers, modems and routers) and nominally immaterial ones (software, programming languages, code). This approach to the „stuff‟ of the digital risks ignoring a set of crucial questions around the relationships digital technologies construct with a range of material objects: from the „analogue‟ world modelled in weather systems and battlefield simulations to the body of the information worker interacting with spreadsheets and databases; from the range of artefacts that form the subject of the digital humanities to the materials, bodies, spaces and places of art practice and performance.

Theme 2. Performance, Production and Play
Innovative aspects of our interaction with performances and the production of artefacts for continuous engagement
have evolved exponentially through the digital age, particularly with the development of ideas related to play and
serious gaming, which brings novel opportunities for creative expression, not to mention innovative approaches
related to parallel disciplines in science, education, healthcare and business. The collaboration between performance, production and play and adjacent academic fields is of particular interest given the cross-disciplinary requirements of the Digital Economy Act.

Theme 3. Digital Humanities – Archives, Interfaces and Tools
Digital Humanities works at the intersections of traditional research and technological innovation. Its techniques have helped to prove that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, for instance, and have even been used by the FBI to
determine the authorship of sensitive documents. Today scholars in the digital humanities are primarily concerned to offer a gateway to previously hidden records of culture and heritage. A high-resolution digital photograph of a Chaucer manuscript, for instance, reveals its delicate pen strokes, and when placed on the internet, can pave the way for school children, university students, and those interested in culture generally, to learn about medieval literature from primary resources.

See www.anglia.ac.uk/code for details of CoDE projects and affiliated staff.
Email: code@anglia.ac.uk

Keynote Speakers

Jussi Parikka is Reader in Media & Design at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton), Adjunct Professor in Digital Culture Theory (University of Turku, Finland) and Honorary Visiting Research Fellow at Anglia Ruskin University. His writings have addressed accidents and the dark sides of network culture (Digital Contagions, 2007 and the co-edited volume The Spam Book, 2009), biopolitics of media culture (Insect Media, 2010, the co-edited special issue of Fibreculture “Unnatural Ecologies”, 2011 and the edited online book Medianatures: The Materiality of Information Technology and Electronic Waste, 2011) and media archaeology (the co-edited volume Media Archaeology, 2011 and the forthcoming book What is Media Archaeology?, 2012). He is currently finishing editing a
collection of the German media theorist Wolfgang Ernst’s writings, to be published in 2012.
Website and blog: http://jussiparikka.net

Astrid Ensslin lectures in Digital Humanities at the University of Bangor. Her research interests are in the fields of digital discourse, semiotics, narrative and communication. Most of her current research revolves around digital fiction, videogames and virtual worlds, language ideologies in the (new) media and specialised language corpora. She has a BA/MA (Distinction) from Tuebingen University (2002), a Postgraduate Teaching Certificate from Leeds University and a PhD (s.c.l.) from Heidelberg University (2006). She convenes Bangor University’s Digital Economies Cluster, is the founding editor of the MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities and Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds and Co-Investigator of the DFG/AHRC learner corpus project, ‘What’s Hard in German?’ (2009-12), and of the Leverhulme Digital Fiction International Network (DFIN) (2009). She was Programme Leader of the AHRC collaborative postgraduate training scheme, CEDAR (2008-10). Astrid’s most recent monograph is The Language of Gaming (2011); she has published widely, and other work includes Canonizing Hypertext: Explorations and Constructions (2007) and, with Eben Muse, Creating Second Lives: Community, Identity and Spatiality as Constructions of the Virtual (2011). Her forthcoming work will be published by MIT Press, and will be on Literary Gaming.

5th-7th June 2012
University of Sussex
www.sussex.ac.uk/cems/emnews

The Centre for Early Modern Studies at the University of Sussex is to host a multi-disciplinary postgraduate conference on News in Early Modern Europe. We invite proposals for individual papers of 20 minutes or panels of up to three speakers that address any aspect of this theme. Although the conference is particularly directed towards postgraduates, we welcome scholars at all levels of their career.

Plenary speakers include: Joad Raymond (University of East Anglia), Andrew Pettegree (University of St Andrews).

Please send abstracts of papers (of no more than 200 words) or panel theme with list of speakers and abstracts to Simon Davies (S.F.Davies@sussex.ac.uk) by 31st January 2012.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

News in print
Manuscript news
The changes in news reporting across the period
Reading the news
Politics in the news
Religion in the news
Censorship and regulation
News and the state
Sermons and the delivery of news
News and the stage
News ballads
News from capital to provinces / from city to country
The international exchange of news
The reporting of new ideas and discoveries
Sensational news
The consumption of news across genders
Specialist news
Coteries and news networks
Secrecy vs sharing
Private vs public
Current events in literature
News and credit
The relationship between news and history
Digital approaches to working with early modern news

University of Northampton, 18-19 April 2012

Keynote speakers include:
Helen Clifford, University of Warwick
Yme Kuiper, University of Groningen
Ruth Gill, Historic Royal Palaces

The country house can be seen as a palimpsest: generations of owners adding their own material objects and layers of meaning. This presents challenges to both historians and curators – how to understand the relationship between new and old goods; how to assess the meaning of goods in different contexts, and how to present a coherent narrative of the house and its contents to the visitor today. Linked to this is the need to see the country house as dynamic: a lived and living space which was consciously transformed according to fashion or personal taste, but which was also changed by accident, decay and dispersal. Moreover, the country house was a nexus of flows as goods were brought in from the estate, the surrounding area and more distant centres – most notably London. How do these links shape our understanding and interpretation of the country house? In paying more attention to the processes of consumption, attention is focused on social and economic aspects of the country house – a broadening of perspective which can offer a more rounded view of the elite. The country house is often seen as a symbol of wealth and power, but the economics of running such properties (in the present as well as the past) and the experience of everyday life (of owners as well as servants) deserve more attention.

This conference seeks to address such questions, drawing on comparisons with other European countries to throw new light on our understanding of consumption and the country house. More broadly, it seeks to bridge the persistent divide between historians’ interpretations of elite consumption and the material culture of the country house, and attempts by owners, managers and curators to interpret and present the country house to visitors.

We invite papers discussing any aspect of consumption, material culture and the country house, both in the past and the present. However, we would especially welcome those focusing on:
Supplying the country house: food and drink, furniture, local and imported goods, etc.
The country house as lived/living space – room use (then) and using rooms (now); the (different?) role of men and women; the relationships between and spaces of masters and servants
Collecting or consuming – motivations to consume; the economics of acquisition; European and oriental influences
Old and new – the role of fashion; buying second-hand; the emerging taste for antiques; the country house as palimpsest; rearranging the furniture (by owners and for presentation)
Material culture and the country house interior – aesthetics of interior design; the meaning of goods and their arrangement (past and present)
Continuities and contrasts: comparisons between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; of London and provinces; across Europe
The impact of the country house visitor in the past and present: changing attitudes; national differences; broadening markets and access to houses
Interpreting and presenting the country house: using new technologies and approaches (e.g. live interpretation); different approaches across space and time

If you would like to present a paper, then please send a c.300 word abstract to: Prof Jon Stobart: jon.stobart@northampton.ac.uk by 15 December 2011.

A Conference organised by the Material Texts Network at Birkbeck, University of London
Saturday June 2, 2012
Call for Papers

The Material Texts Network at Birkbeck convenes and encourages innovative work on the materiality of texts. We invite 300-word proposals, from scholars working in any period and discipline, on the theme of ‘Missing Texts’. Papers might consider

Texts or works that have been erased, over-painted, defaced, cancelled, or destroyed
Missing works that exist only through photographs or other archival traces
Texts or works that are better known through photographs, and are themselves rarely on display
How do we know a text is missing? How do archives record missing texts? If a missing text must leave a trace to be felt as missing, are texts ever really missing?
Texts or works overlooked for ideological, or other, reasons, in catalogues, inventories, & canons
The role of missing texts in literary works
The fetishisation of the ‘missing’ ur-text in textual studies and editorial procedures
Pages torn from books, lost quires, blanks, unfilled miniatures, incomplete jottings on fly-leaves
Letters, in which only one side of the correspondence is preserved
The use by authors of the topos of the lost text, the text-in-the-making, the text-never-finished (‘all this will be properly explained in our forthcoming masterpiece…’)
What happens when we find a long-missing text or work? How do we identify and read it?
How do scholars address the loss of archives when writing, for example, histories of African and Asian nations where there are more Western texts than local ones? What kind of scholarship develops around these gaps?
How do missing texts relate to redactions?
Why do texts go missing in archives? What are the historical moments of great archival loss (for example, the archives destroyed in the 1755 earthquake of Lisbon, or the losses in German libraries during the World War II)
Are texts more likely to go missing in particular media (manuscript more than print? Print more than digital?)
Can a text ever go missing in the digital world?

Please send 300-word proposals (for a 20 minute paper) and a brief CV to Dr Adam Smyth (adam.smyth@bbk.ac.uk) and Dr Gill Partington (g.partington@bbk.ac.uk), by 1 February 2012.

*NEW FOR 2011-12* *Practical, short introductions to the UL’s amazing special collections and the rooms that house them*

In response to student feedback, the University Library has created two new training sessions introducing some of the jewels of its special collections, along with practical advice on how to access them. The Rare Books and Manuscripts Reading Rooms house unique material, and for that reason these rooms have extra regulations that may take you by surprise on your first visit! These sessions are designed to help you find out what to expect and how to make the most of the UL’s special collections.

‘Rare Books Room: An Introduction’ and ‘Manuscripts Department: An Introduction’ can be found and booked at http://training.cam.ac.uk/cul/, along with the rest of the UL’s training courses on finding, using and managing information.

The Ephemera Society of America invites applications for the Philip Jones Fellowship for the Study of Ephemera. This competition, now in its fifth year, is open to any interested individual or organization for the study of any aspect of ephemera — material defined as transitory printed documents. It is expected that this study will advance one or more aims of the Society:

— To cultivate and encourage interest in this material; — To further the understanding, appreciation, and enjoyment of ephemera by people of all ages, backgrounds and levels of interest — To contribute to cultural
understanding; — And to advance the personal and institutional collection,preservation, exhibition, and research of ephemeral materials.

The $1,000 stipend can be applied to travel or study expenses. The expected form and outcome of the project and its relationship to ephemera; when and how the outcome will be disseminated; and its benefit to furthering the goals of the ESA should be clearly stated in the application. Stipend money cannot be used to purchase ephemera items.

Ephemera includes a vast amount of paper material such as advertisements, airsickness bags, baseball cards, billheads, bookmarks, bookplates, broadsides, cigar box labels and bands, cigarette cards, clipper ship cards, board and card games, greeting cards, sheet music, maps, calendars, blotters, invitations, luggage labels, menus, paper dolls, postcards, posters, puzzles and puzzle cards, stock certificates, tickets, timetables, trade cards, valentines, watch papers, and wrappers. These are but a handful of examples*. *Please see the ESA website at www.ephemerasociety.org for more information about ephemera.

The Fellowship selection criteria include: 1. the importance of the project; 2. how it will be shared with ESA members and the public; 3. and the project’s relationship to ephemera and the mission of the Ephemera Society of America.

*Applications are due January 15, 2012*. Specific application instructions for this fellowship can be down loaded at
http://www.ephemerasociety.org/JonesFellowshipInst2012.pdf. In order to be considered these instructions need to be followed.

The applicant’s resume should include the applicant’s experience and proven abilities to carry out this project*. The completed application should be sent electronically to: ESAJones@cox.net* Decisions will be reported to the
successful individual or organization by March 1, 2012 and will be announced at the Society’s annual meeting and conference March 17, 2012, in Old Greenwich, Connecticut. The successful candidate is expected to write an
article about the project for an issue of the Society’s *Ephemera *News, and also prepare a presentation about the project for the following year’s annual conference.

*Examples of previously funded proposals are:*

— A study of Charles Magnus, one of the most prolific printers of ephemera during the nineteenth century, who was in some ways simply a job printer, producing a wide variety of books, maps, prints, and single sheet items, but
is worthy of study because so little has been written about him.

— Study of a specific ephemeral object, “The Negro Motorists Green Book” providing insight into the ways that black Americans responded to racial segregation, how they adapted to the changes in American life resulting from
the automobile and the interstate highway system, and how they found ways to confront racism while grabbing onto middle class life.

— An elementary school teacher’s project involving the school community in a project using ephemera to interest children in the social history of various cultures. This project also produced a lesson plan for an assignment that is available for other teachers to replicate.

— The Victorian custom of exchanging snippets of hair.

Autumn 2011

Sponsored by the F M Kirby Foundation

Royal Manuscripts at The British Library

Tuesday, 25 October

5.30pm, Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre

Dr John Goodall (Architectural Editor, Country Life)

The Library and the Architecture of the Book: Manuscripts in the Secular World from 1400 to 1650

Working from the available architectural and physical evidence, this lecture will discuss the ways in which books were stored and used in a domestic context in England from 1400 to 1600.

Two thousand manuscripts from the Old Royal library were presented to the British Museum by George II in 1757. About one hundred and fifty of the most richly illuminated will be displayed in a joint British Library/Courtauld Institute of Art exhibition, Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination, at the British Library from 11 November 2011 to 13 March 2012. Taking this extraordinary collection as their starting point, the Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series for 2011 will explore aspects of the patronage, manufacture, function and collection of books in medieval England and France, and will provide a broad context for these precious survivors of the library of the kings and queens of England.

John Goodall trained as a historian and architectural historian at Durham University and The Courtauld Institute of Art and is Architectural Editor of Country Life, whose former saleroom correspondent is commemorated by these lectures. His scholarship on the domestic architecture of the English middle ages encompasses a wide range of subjects in terms of scale, function and date. His monograph on the foundation of Alice, duchess of Suffolk, God’s House at Ewelme: Life, Devotion and Architecture in a Fifteenth-Century Almshouse, was awarded the Whitfield Prize by the Royal Historical Society in 2001, whilst more recently he has published a major study of the most substantial of all medieval dwellings, The English Castle (Yale/Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2011).

Open to all, free admission. No registration required.

Organised by Professor John Lowden (for further information, please contact Dr Jim Harris jim.harris@courtauld.ac.uk)

Royal Manuscripts at The British Library

Two thousand manuscripts from the Old Royal library were presented to the British Museum by George II in 1757. About one hundred and fifty of the most richly illuminated will be displayed in a joint British Library/Courtauld Institute of Art exhibition, Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination at the British Library from 11 November 2011 to 13 March 2012. Taking this extraordinary collection as their starting point, the Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series for 2011 will explore aspects of the patronage, manufacture, function and collection of books in medieval England and France, and will provide a broad context for these precious survivors of the library of the kings and queens of England.

Tuesday, 11 October
Professor Richard Gameson (University of Durham)
The Earliest English Royal Books

Tuesday, 25 October
Dr John Goodall (Architectural Editor, Country Life)
The Library and the Architecture of the Book: Manuscripts in the Secular World from 1400 to 1650

Tuesday, 8 November
Dr Catherine Reynolds (Christie’s)
Makers of Royal Manuscripts: Court Artists in France and the Netherlands

Tuesday, 22 November
Professor Jeffrey Hamburger (Harvard University)
Script as Image

Tuesday, 6 December
Dr Jenny Stratford (Royal Holloway College/Institute of Historical Research)
England and France: Royal Libraries in the Later Middle Ages

Are you an early career humanities scholar with an interest in information technology and digital tools?

Would you like to know more about how digital approaches are changing the humanities?

Would you like to discuss your research in a friendly and relaxed environment?

If your answer to any of these questions is yes, then “Digital Humanities for Early Career Researchers” is for you! The group is part of the University of Cambridge Digital Humanities Network, and aims to bring together interested early career scholars, providing a forum for them to discuss their work and, if necessary, get assistance with digital issues. No previous digital experience is required, and all disciplines are welcome. As long as you’re interested in the digital, we would love to meet you!

Join us for our first meeting on Wednesday, 19th October 2011, at 6 PM in The Castle Inn, 38 Castle Street. We will probably be there for a while, so come in anytime between 6 and 7 PM. This will be an introductory session for us to get to know each other, talk about our research and discuss how digital approaches might be useful to our work. No registration is necessary, but it would be nice if you could e-mail gpr26@cam.ac.uk so we get an idea of numbers. If you are interested in the group but can’t make the first meeting, please do e-mail us anyway so we can include you in any future events!

All are welcome, and hope to see you there!

Kind regards
Gethin Rees
Jenna Ng
The Digital Humanities for Early Career Researchers team