There are many beautiful things to be seen at the British Museum in Hajj: journey to the heart of Islam, a major exhibition focussing on the pilgrimage that every Muslim must make at least once in their life if they are able to, according to the teachings of the Qur’an. It was at the ancient site of Mecca that the Prophet Mohammed received his first revelations in the seventh century, and the Hajj involves rituals in the sanctuary at Mecca, as well as visits to the other holy places of Arafat, Muzdalifa, and Mina. Amongst the manuscripts, maps, photographs and other exhibits  brought together by the British Museum, some of the most exquisite are examples of the textiles that have been used to cover the Ka’ba, the black cube-shaped building at the heart of the sanctuary in Mecca which is believed to have been built by Abraham, and around which pilgrims must walk seven times. The Ka’ba is veiled in the kiswa, a sumptuous cloth heavily embroidered in gold and silver threads with verses from the Qur’an. The kiswa is renewed every year, involving huge labour and expense.  These sacred surfaces covered in dense patterns of calligraphic Arabic are works of great beauty, and this exhibition allows visitors the rare privilege of seeing them in intimate detail.

Hajj: journey to the heart of Islam ends on 15^th April.

We encourage anyone who works on sacred texts and textiles in the Islamic tradition to consider submitting an abstract for a twenty-minute paper at the CMT’s ‘Texts and Textiles’ conference, to be held in Cambridge, 11-12 September 2012. See here for more details.

from John Banville’s review of the 2nd volume of Samuel Beckett’s letters, in the latest New York Review of Books:

“The so-called trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable … are the masterworks of his middle period and surely his most representative achievement in prose. Here at last he found a means of allowing the darkness Krapp had “always struggled to keep under” to spread over the page like so much spilled ink.”

I seem to have been to a feast of digital humanities talks in the last couple of days… At Thursday’s CoDE/CMT seminar, James Wade (Emmanuel, Cambridge) and Peter Stokes (King’s, London) discussed the digitization of medieval manuscripts, with Wade discussing the transmogrifications of Malory’s Morte D’Arthur as it moved from manuscript to print and into twentieth and twenty-first century editions, and Stokes asking what it means to ‘put a manuscript on the web’, given that such an act is literally impossible. Perhaps (he suggested) we need to stop thinking that we are accurately ‘representing’ the manuscript, and instead admit that we’re engaged in acts of modelling, which need to be tailored precisely to our sense of how the digitized materials will be used. For me this raised the question of how much we know about the ways in which people use digital resources–do we really read things online, or do we just raid them? (Or are reading and raiding much the same thing?)

Yesterday lunchtime I just managed to make time for the CRASSH Digital Humanities Network seminar on ‘Using Social Media Data for Research: The Ethical Challenges’. Here Fabian Neuhaus (UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis) and Dr Sharath Srinivasan (Centre of Governance and Human Rights, POLIS) posed some difficult questions about the viability of gathering evidence from tweets or text-messages. The delight of such sources for the researcher is that they provide very precise details that allow you to locate the point of origin of a message; you can map the way in which people are using these media, and you can perhaps begin to tie up particular behaviours and viewpoints with places, times, and social strata (see http://urbantick.blogspot.com/ for more). But this also makes the data–which is difficult to anonymize–very sensitive and open to abuse.  How do you get ‘informed consent’ to use this material for research purposes in the first place? And what do you do when the police (or, in some circumstances, the local dictators) come to your office and ask if they can share your information?

I needed to check something in Andrew Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’, and, not having my volume of Marvell’s poetry to hand, did what any PhD student would do and quickly searched for the poem via Google.  I am used to the sinister phenomenon of Google linking to adverts connected to the content of my emails, and usually ignore them, but this time I was amused by the commentary Google provided on Marvell’s text. While a supplier of ‘artificial grass’ probably wouldn’t be welcomed by Marvell’s speaker, who criticises ‘all this marble crust’, what would he make of the offers of  tree surgeons – ‘for healthier, tidier trees’ and ‘local clearance work’?

Cambridge University Press has just sent me an email offering a 10% discount on selected titles to celebrate World Book Day. I click on the link and get a truly mouthwatering array of bargains. Core Topics in Airway Management heads the list, followed by Diagnostic Techniques in Hematological Malignancies; Morbid Obesity: Peri-Operative Management (down to £54.90!); Brain Repair After Stroke; Depression in Primary Care: Evidence and Practice... I trust that this list has not been targetted to my specific needs as a forty-something male, but I’m not taking any chances: the cake and champagne are going back in the cupboard.