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>

*Book History Research Network: a one-day colloquium*

*Institute of English Studies (University of London), 25 November 2011*

At a moment when the rise of e-Readers foretells the end of the printed book, the founder of the Internet Archive Brewster Kahle launches an initiative for the preservation of the book. He is creating a storehouse for physical books in specially-adapted containers on the West Coast of the United States in order to preserve them as “backup copies” for posterity. His idea came about as a reaction against the notion that books can be put beyond use (or thrown away) as soon as they are digitized.

While the future of the book is certainly an important topic for consideration, an initiative such as Kahle’s also begs the question how did past the past envision the future of the book – or of the predominant medium of the time. Victor Hugo’s phrase, ‘ceci tuera cela’, spelt a new paradigm of mistrust when the printed book suddenly disrupted the foundation of manuscript culture and the transmission of the written. Although the digital revolution is possibly the most radical change in the history of writing, one can wonder how
other similar transitions fared: from the scroll to the codex, from manuscript to printed book, from printing on the handpress to machine and offset printing, from writing by hand to writing on the typewriter
and the wordprocessor? More fundamentally, do the concerns of fifteenth-century critics of print like those of Abbot Johannes Trithemius of Sponheim have anything in common with twenty-first-century anxieties about the triumph of digital technology? Is access to knowledge and preservation, which champions of the digital revolution invoke, really a new concern? How much of the (old) culture of the book is retained in the new digital media?

This colloquium, therefore, wants to consider not just what “will be”, but also “what would have been” – the future perfect of the book. We invite proposals (no more than 250 words) for 20-minutes papers on any topic in book history relating to the future of the book considered at any moment in history.

Deadline: 15 October 2011.

Topics may include:

-competing technologies: scroll v. codex/paper v. screen/writing v. typing

-manuscript culture in the age of print

-the Gutenberg revolution as devolution

-the library of the future in the past

-old books and new media

-mass digitization or digital archive

-book collecting in the digital era

-/mise-en-page /and digital design

-hypertext and other outmoded technologies

-readers and e-readers

Organizers:

Cynthia Johnston

Research Student

Institute of English Studies

cynthia.johnston[at]postgrad.sas.ac.uk

Dr Wim Van Mierlo

Lecturer in Textual Scholarship and English Literature

Institute of English Literature

wim.van-mierlo[at]sas.ac.uk

Alternate Tuesdays, during term time
CRASSH
Michaelmas Term 2011: 12.00-14.00
Light lunch provided

The eighteenth century was the century of ‘stuff.’ Public production, collection, display and consumption of objects grew in influence, popularity, and scale. The form, function, and use of objects, ranging from scientific and musical instruments to weaponry and furnishings were influenced by distinct features of the time. Eighteenth-century knowledge was not divided into strict disciplines, in fact practice across what we now see as academic boundaries was essential to material creation. This seminar series will use an approach based on objects to encourage us to consider the unity of ideas of the long-eighteenth century, to emphasise the lived human experience of technology and art, and the global dimension of material culture. We will re-discover the interdisciplinary thinking through which eighteenth-century material culture was conceived, gaining new perspectives on the period through its artefacts.

11th October: Professor Simon Schaffer and Professor Nick Thomas on the Nature of “Artefacts”
25th October: Dr Kim Sloan and Dr Charlie Jarvis on the Understanding of “Botany”
8th November: Dr Richard Dunn and Dr Alexi Baker on the Universe of the “Telescope”
22nd November: Dr Catherine Eagleton and Dr Martin Allen on the Meaning of “Money”

THINGS poster

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.

An Interdisciplinary Research Colloquium in the Arts and Humanities
Supported by Pembroke College and the Faculty of English

Pembroke College, Saturday 24th September 2011

For more information, or to register (£5), please contact Katarina Stenke (ks446@cam.ac.uk)

Draft Program:

8.45am-9.15am: Registration.

9.15am-9.30am: Welcome.

9.30am-10.40am: Panel One – The Fragments of History.
Mario Wimmer (ETH Zürich, Swiss Institute of Technology), ‘Archival Bodies and philological factish’
Mark Williams (Faculty of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic), ‘Austin Clarke and the de-fragmentation of Irish myth’

10.40am-11.00am: Coffee Break.

11.00am-12.10pm: Panel Two – Fragmentation and Authorship.
Joanna Bellis (Faculty of English), ‘Fragmentation or assimilation? The case of a fifteenth-century war poem’
Ian Goh (Faculty of Classics), ‘Lucilian Satire: Already Fragmentary in the Roman Republic’

12.20pm-1.30pm: Panel Three – Fragments and Knowledge.
Cassie Gorman (Faculty of English), ‘Not quite ‘ALL THINGS’: Thomas Traherne and the Commentaries of Heaven (c. 1670-74)’
Sarah Weaver (Faculty of English), ‘Fragments as Raw Material: Julius Charles Hare and Guesses at Truth’

1.30pm-2.30pm: Lunch.

2.30pm-4.10pm: Panel Four – Micro-Fact and Micro-Fiction.
Lucy Bell (Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages), ‘Collecting Fragments: Augusto Monterroso’s Anthology of Flies and the Aesthetics of Micro-Fiction’
Rebecca Varley-Winter (Faculty of English), ‘Frightening fragments: Félix Fénélon’s ‘novels in three lines’ and photographic captions’
David Jiménez Torres (Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages), ‘Part or Whole? The Journalistic Article as Fragment’

4.10pm-4.30pm: Coffee Break.

4.30pm-6.00pm: Fragments across the Disciplines: Round-table Discussion
Chaired by Charlotte Roberts, Harriet Phillips and Katarina Stenke

6.00pm: Wine Reception.

*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>).

“Text, Image and the Digital Research Environment: Parker Library-Keio EIRI Conference on Medieval Manuscripts and Printed Books”

Friday 9 September 2011

Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge

The Parker Library and the EIRI Project at Keio University (Tokyo) are co-organising a one-day conference focusing on new and future advances in digitisation and digital resources and on the ways in which they are creating new research environments for medieval manuscripts and rare books. Papers will range from individual research papers to institutional projects. More information about speakers and the registration is available at:

http://parkerkeio2011.wordpress.com/

For further information, please contact: 　Gill Cannell and Suzanne Paul (Parker Library): parker-library＠corpus.cam.ac.uk 　Satoko Tokunaga (Keio University/Corpus Christi College): satoko＠flet.keio.ac.jp

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

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

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