You are warmly invited to join us for the second Annual Digital Humanities Lecture, on 29 April 2015, to be given by Professor Jonathan Hope. The lecture will be held in ArtsTwo Lecture theatre, Queen Mary University of London, at 5.30pm, and will be followed by a wine reception. Please register here to attend.

Books in space: hyper-dimensional reading

Digital tools allow us to ‘read’ vastly more text than any human could manage in a lifetime. They also allow us to make comparisons between texts, genres, and periods based on projections of those books into multi-dimensional spaces. Some have hailed the advent of ‘culturomics’ – but what kind of ‘reading’ is this, and how can we ‘read’ spaces which are beyond the imaginative capacity of human minds? I’ll consider the promise, and the opportunities, of digital methods applied to large collections of texts – and I’ll also consider how these tools and methods might change the nature of our object of study. Most of my examples will be drawn from Shakespeare and the Early Modern period.

De Montfort University, Leicester, 8 September 2015

Plenary speakers: Dr Natasha Alden (Aberystwyth University) and Prof. Ian Gadd (Bath Spa University).

Reflecting on the seismic cultural and political shifts of his own time, Francis Bacon pinpointed ‘printing, gunpowder, and the compass’ as the technological drivers which had ‘changed the appearance and state of the whole world’. Bacon’s identification of communicative (print), violent (gunpowder) and technological (compass) forms of cultural expression and exchange as world-shaping continues to resonate, shaping the production and interpretation of texts.

We welcome papers of between 15 and 20 minutes’ length on topics including but not limited to:

• Textual and visual representations, interpretations of and responses to conflict
• Adaptations which respond to past and/or present conflicts (including conflicts within academic disciplines)
• Conflictual relationships between artistic, critical and intellectual movements
• Processes and agents shaping the design, production, dissemination and consumption of texts
• Theoretical and bibliographical methodologies
• Intellectual conflicts surrounding the emergence of new media and technologies
• Competing or contradictory representations of conflict through identical or different expressive forms
• State involvement in the production, dissemination and consumption of texts in times of conflict
• The evolution of media forms and their impact on conflict-based studies

Proposals of up to 250 words should be submitted online athttps://gradcats.wordpress.com/call-for-papers/ by Friday 5 June. Alternatively, email them to gradcats@outlook.com.

Bursaries are available. See https://gradcats.wordpress.com/ for details.

This conference is jointly hosted by De Montfort’s Centre for Textual Studies and Centre for Adaptations.

Friday 20th March 2015; Richmond, American International University in London

Lecture Theatre, 17 Young Street, London W8 5EH

Artists’ books are collaborations. They are often composed of both words and images, and are produced in a combination of media. They can be seen as mixed media dialogues that involve more than one person.

This one day conference examines the collaborative process (author and artist, text and image, maker/bookbinder and artist, etc.) that is fundamental to many examples of artists’ books or book art. The conference focuses on contemporary works and addresses the following fundamental questions: What kinds of dialogues feature in contemporary artists’ books? How does this collaboration affect the production and dissemination/display of the work made?

Programme

practice & production

Chair: Professor Estelle Thompson

11:00 – 11:10 Introductions

11:10– 11:30 Dennis de Caires and Nina Rodin, ‘The Book As A Shared Space’

11:30 – 11:50 Richard Bevan and Tamsin Clark, ‘Coverage and 4th smouldering waste and slightly horny, slightly pleated back, published in 1963’

11:50 – 12:10 James Keith and Clare Bryan, ‘A Matter of Speculation’

12:10 – 12:40 Discussion and Questions

12:45 – 2:10 Lunch

display & dissemination

Chair: Dr Deborah Schultz

2:15 – 2:45 Keynote Speaker: Maria White ‘The artist’s book: some collaborations’

2:45 – 3:05 Tamsin Clark, ‘Tender Books’

3:05 – 3:25 Professor Estelle Thompson, ‘A Frame of Mind with Hand in Glove’

3:25 – 3:45 Discussion

3:45 – 4:05 Coffee Break

4:05 – 4:25 David Stent, ‘Collaboration in These Weak Kindnesses’

4:25 – 5:05 NEUSCHLOSS (Charles Danby, Joanne Tatham & Tom O’Sullivan, and Louise O’Hare) In Conversation.

5:05 – 5:30 Wrap-up Session

5:30 Adjourn to Asa Briggs Hall for exhibition and drinks reception

Registration:

It is free to attend the conference, however booking is essential. To secure a place, please email Dr Deborah Schultz: deborah.schultz@richmond.ac.uk
For more information, see the Richmond website, http://www.richmond.ac.uk/about-richmond/contact-us/

9 March 2015 10.00am — 6.30pm

The Bodleian Libraries are hosting a one-day hackfest celebrating the release of 25,000 texts from the Early English Books Online project into the public domain. The event encourages students, researchers from all disciplines, and members of the public with an interest in the intersection between technology, history and literature to work together to develop a project using the texts and the data they may generate.

The EEBO-TCP corpus covers the period from 1473 to 1700 and is now estimated to comprise more than two million pages and nearly a billion words. It represents a history of the printed word in England from the birth of the printing press to the reign of William and Mary, and it contains texts of incomparable significance for research across all academic disciplines, including literature, history, philosophy, linguistics, theology, music, fine arts, education, mathematics, and science.

We’re looking for all kinds of people to participate; those with an interest in data visualisation, geospatial analysis, corpus linguistics, written and spoken word, web applications and programming, data/text mining, art, film and more are welcome. You don’t have be an expert to join, but you do need to be enthusiastic and prepared to help develop a project.

The hackathon will take place during the day (10am-5pm), with a reception to follow at 5pm. Prizes will be given to the best of the day’s projects.

More information about the project is available from the EEBO-TCP website.

Participants in the day’s event are encouraged to consider entering their ideas into the online Early English Books Ideas Hack, which seeks to explore innovative and creative approaches to the data and identify potential paths for future activity. Submissions for the Ideas Hack close on 2 April.

National University of Ireland, Galway, 21-22 May 2015

http://digitalmaterial.ie

Plenary speakers: Jerome McGann & Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

Digital Material is a conference that considers the intersections of digital and material cultures in the humanities. How has the long history of studying material objects prepared us for understanding digital culture? To what degree does materiality inflect and inform our encounters with the digital?

Recent years have seen an intensification of interest in both digital and material cultures. This broad trend has been mirrored in the academy by the growing prominence of digital humanities and the renewed focus on materiality and material objects within humanities disciplines. At the same time, libraries, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions are grappling with the theoretical and practical implications of preserving and exhibiting their material collections within increasingly digital infrastructures, while adapting to the challenges posed by born-digital materials.

The conference invites discussion of a series of related issues: does a reinvigorated interest in material culture represent a conservative reaction to the perceived threat of digital culture, or is it evidence of an embrace of the innovative affordances of the digital? How do digital media represent the materiality of texts and objects? Does the digital constitute its own form of materiality?

Proposals are invited on any aspect of the conference theme, including:

• What is meant by ‘digital materiality’?
• What is lost and gained when we study material objects through their digital surrogates?
• Relationships between digital texts and material texts.
• Creation, curation, and preservation of digitised and born-digital artefacts.
• Digital archives and material archives.
• What parts of our digital culture will future scholars unearth?
• Do digital objects embody their culture in the way that material objects do?
• Does memory inhere in the material better than in the digital?
• The digital collector: can we be possessive about digital artefacts?
• Object lessons: digital and material pedagogy.
• Representations of the intersections of digital and material cultures.
• Technology, equipment, storage, media; matter, substance, simulation, virtuality; cloth, fabric, pulp, bits, bytes.

Proposals may include:

• 20-minute papers (abstract: 300-400 words).
• Panels (individual paper abstracts plus 250-word overview).
• Roundtables (abstract: 300-400 words plus names of speakers).

All participants should include a short biography (100-200 words) with their proposals.

Submit proposals at http://digitalmaterial.ie before 31 January 2015. Successful proposals will be notified of acceptance by 21 February 2015.

Jim Canary (University of Indiana)

Beneath the text in the books and manuscripts of Tibet is a world of artisans that provide the support for the words with paper, pen, and inks. Preserving these texts involves delving into that world to understand how things were done using what materials and how they differ from place to place and in time. As a Conservator and student of Tibetan I have had the opportunity to examine a variety of Tibetan materials and have been documenting the old ways of book production. We will have a look into that world and see the richness of their traditions.

Mond Building Seminar Room, Mongolia & Inner Asia Studies Unit, Free School Lane

4.30-6.00, TUESDAY 28 OCTOBER 2014

ALL WELCOME

http://www.innerasiaresearch.org [1]
Facebook www.facebook.com/miasu.cambridge

Due to exceptional demand for places, the forthcoming AMARC conference has been moved to a larger venue in the Conference Centre at the British Library.

See more at: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2014/10/illuminated-manuscripts-conference-more-places-available.html#sthash.5yaEHFFy.dpuf

July 16th-18th 2015

Newcastle University and City Library, Newcastle

Organiser: Jennifer Richards, Newcastle University with Helen Stark, Newcastle University

Keynote Speakers

Heidi Brayman Hackel (University of California, Riverside), Anne Karpf (London Metropolitan University), Christopher Marsh (Queen’s University, Belfast) with The Carnival Band, Perry Mills, Director of Edward’s Boys (King Edward VI School, Stratford-upon-Avon)

Although it is often acknowledged that early modern books were routinely read aloud we know relatively little about this. Oral reading is not embedded as an assumption in existing scholarship. On the contrary, over the last two decades it is the studious and usually silent reader, pen in hand, who has been placed centre stage. This conference invites contributions that explore the kind of evidence and research methods that might help us to recover this lost history; that think about how reading/singing aloud relates to other kinds of orality; that recover the civic and/or social life of the performed book in early modern culture; and that reflect on how the performance of the scripted word might inform our reading of early modern writing today. We also welcome papers that think through what it might mean to make ‘voice’ central to our textual practice.

We invite proposals (in English) that address the relationship between orality and literacy in any genre in print or manuscript in any European language. The genres might be literary, religious, musical, medical, scientific, historical or educational. We encourage proposals that recover diverse communities and readers/hearers. We also welcome papers that consider problems of evidence: e.g. manuscript marginalia; print paratexts; visual representations; as well as non-material evidence (voice; gesture). We will be particularly pleased to receive suggestions for presentations that include practical illustrations, performances or demonstrations.

Topics might include, but are not restricted to:

• The sound of print

• The physiology of voicing

• Singing and speaking

• Rhetoric: voice and gesture

• Performance and emotions

• Communities of hearers

• Acoustic reconstructions

• Children’s reading / reading to children

200-word abstracts for 20-minute papers from individuals and panels (3 speakers max) to be sent to voicesandbooks15001800@gmail.com. The DEADLINE is Friday January 16TH 2015.

There will be a small number of travel bursaries for postgraduate and early career researchers. If you are interested in applying for support please contact Helen.Stark@ncl.ac.uk. The DEADLINE for the bursaries is May 1st 2015.

17 October

1. David Kaiser, ‘Making tools travel: pedagogy and the transfer of skills in postwar theoretical physics’, in David Kaiser (ed.), Pedagogy and the Practice of Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), pp. 41–74
2. Ursula Klein, ‘Paper Tools in Experimental Cultures’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 32 (2001), pp. 265–302

Supplementary:

• Andrew Warwick, ‘A mathematical world on paper: written examinations in early 19th century Cambridge’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 29 (1998), 295–319

31 October

1. Lisa Gitelman, Introduction and Chapter 3 in Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014)

Supplementary:

• Markus Krajewski, Paper Machines: About Cards and Catalogues, 1548–1929, translated by Peter Krapp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011)

14 November

1. Ben Kafka, ‘Paperwork: the state of the discipline’, Book History 12 (2009), pp. 340–53
2. Ann Blair, Chapters 1 and 2 in Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010)

Supplementary:

• Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, ‘”Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy’, Past & Present 129 (1990), pp. 30–78
• Jeffrey Todd Knight, ‘”Furnished” for Action: Renaissance Books as Furniture’, Book History 12 (2009), pp. 37–73

28 November

1. Nick Hopwood, Simon Schaffer and Jim Secord, ‘Seriality and scientific objects in the nineteenth century’, History of Science 48 (2010), pp. 251–85
2. James Delbourgo and Staffan Müller-Wille, ‘Introduction: Listmania’, Isis 103 (2012), pp. 710–15

Supplementary:

• Papers in both special issues, especially Volker Hess and J. Andrew Mendelsohn, ‘Case and Series: medical knowledge and paper technology 1600–1900’, History of Science 48 (2010), pp. 287–314