http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/may/21/children-do-not-write-letters

This short article was published in The Guardian a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve only just come across it. According to a survey by World Vision, one in five children today have never received a handwritten letter, and about one in four children have never written one themselves. Erasmus would surely be horrified at this symptom of the quick-fix lives we lead in the rich developed world of the twenty-first century. The education expert Sue Palmer (of ‘Toxic Childhood’ fame) offers some wisdom in this piece, although is she right to claim that ‘literacy is the hallmark of human civilisation’? (Answers on a handwritten postcard…)

Palmer’s view of literacy is a limited one – apparently emails and text messages are not evidence of literacy. She emphasises the importance of the physical effort involved in writing a letter by hand, and the pleasure of receiving a material text that can be treasured as an object. I don’t think we can disagree with her on this. True ‘literacy’, then, is firmly grounded in visible, tangible materials of writing and reading. Is this a fair and realistic expectation today, and can we really, like Palmer, relegate less tangible forms of communication to some other category?

Everyone is working very hard in Cambridge at the moment, especially those marking exam scripts. Here’s a more colourful image of industry and creative inspiration – a touching gift worked by a mother for her daughter, whose name we ‘read’ in the windmill.

The scene is quite crudely executed – the sails of the windmill are not at all symmetrical – but we can also see how this text is an inspired and very resourceful piece of work. The whole scene is worked with different scraps of tapestry yarn which don’t quite match, suggesting that the maker possessed limited supplies and simply worked with what materials she had. It speaks of a climate of austerity and ‘making-do’ that we no longer really know, and is a charming illustration of practicality and imagination employed in the making of a personal gift for a loved one, perhaps in restricted financial circumstances.

(Many thanks to my own mother, to whom this framed tapestry belongs. She found it on a market stall some years ago.)

There are many wonderful things to see in Lyon, a city with a vibrant history stretching back thousands of years. Some elements of this history are explored on the distinctive ‘murs peints’ which can be found all over the city. There are over one hundred of these painted walls; impressive works of trompe l’oeil which cover the sides of buildings. I stumbled across the one above, the ‘Fresque des Lyonnais’, which features significant figures from throughout 2,000 years of the city’s history, including Auguste and Louis Lumière, and Antoine de St-Exupéry. Individuals from different centuries converse with each other at windows and balconies, reminding us of the city’s rich creative heritage. In the lower left-hand corner of this wall, there is a painted bookshop…

And here are some of the books for sale, displayed in the window to tempt us inside…

The book titles and names of authors we see here are familiar, but the painted images themselves also play with our sense of reality. These books look tantalisingly real, but the painter reminds us with a few subtle brush strokes that not only are we separated from them by a window, but that the ‘window’ itself is only painted. I was reminded a little of the painted walls of the host’s house in Erasmus’s The Godly Feast. Although the walls in Lyon are not the morally improving images from scripture that cover the walls of Eusebius’s house and garden, they still provoke a similar speculation and wonder at the skill of the painter who renders people and things so life-like that it is as if we could reach out and touch them. Upon seeing the painted walls, one of the guests in Erasmus’s text exclaims ‘Who could be bored in this house?’ In Lyon, it is more a question of ‘Who could be bored in this city?’

I came across this doorway in a quiet back street of Lyon last summer. The words engraved above the date on the stone door frame are taken from Cicero:

‘The truth is, a man’s dignity may be enhanced by the house he lives in, but not wholly secured by it; the owner should bring honour to his house, not the house to its owner’

(De Officiis, 1.138-9, Walter Miller’s Loeb translation).

A man’s honourable character makes his house truly dignified, not the other way round. Engraved above the entrance to a building, this proverbial message is literally embedded in the matter and material about which it speaks.

This photograph presents us with a more elaborate material text, however. Cicero’s moralising words about the relationship between a man and his house, engraved by a seventeenth-century stonemason, are juxtaposed with the spray-can marks of contemporary graffiti. The multicoloured graffiti tags covering the door contrast with the delicate swirl motifs which ornament the letters in the stone above. The wooden door has become a public writing surface which invites the addition of more and more text, the presence of which, convention decrees, is an unauthorized defacement of the door, a dishonouring of private property.

As Juliet Fleming reminds in her landmark volume on early modern graffiti, the media with which graffiti are created usually means that their long-term survival is unlikely. Unlike the engraved motto on this door, which has so far survived for over three hundred years (and whose literary origin takes us back over two thousand years) the graffiti here are temporary, fleeting, and we can see where they have faded or been scrubbed away.

Fleming also reminds us it is ‘the visible placement of modern graffiti that constitutes its scandal as a form of writing that, exceptionally, is understood to be filling space’ (Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England, pp. 33-4). We may not ‘read’ this modern graffiti in the same way that we read the seventeenth-century motto here, but this striking juxtaposition of distinctively early modern and modern forms of text in a very public space illustrates the different moral and aesthetic questions raised as writing negotiates its place in the material around us.

This week sees the broadcasting on BBC Radio 4 of the second part of ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’, a collaboration between the BBC and the British Museum. Over the next eight weeks Neil MacGregor, the British Museum’s Director, will cover 1800 years of history from 300 BC to 1500 AD, as he explores another group of objects from the Museum’s collection.

The online presence of the project is key to the accessibility of the objects. There are short videos about some of the objects, and the 100 radio broadcasts can be downloaded as podcasts. The high quality photographs in the online gallery allow close inspection of each object. Furthermore, other institutions and individuals can participate with their own objects. Already over 350 museums across the UK have registered with 100 objects from their collections, and members of the public can also record details of their own objects online.

I have been thinking about the handful of objects from the 100 chosen from the British Museum’s huge collection which present us with ‘text’. The surfaces of some of the objects are decorated with pictorial representations; the illustrations on the mysterious Standard of Ur, for example, give us scenes of war in Mesopotamia over 4000 years ago. Hieroglyphs on an ivory sandal label found in the tomb of the Egyptian King Den (c. 2985 BC) celebrate the wearer’s military conquests. There are wall painting fragments, masks, sculptures, carved reliefs, and statues, all of which present us with anthropomorphic representations. Not so many of the objects actually feature writing, however.

The objects which do display text include a famous cuneiform tablet from Assyria (700-600 BC) telling the story of a great flood, which was sensationally compared with the Biblical flood when it was first translated in 1872; an Indus seal bearing some of the oldest writing from South Asia, as yet undeciphered; an early writing tablet from Mesopotamia; and an Egyptian mathematical papyrus. There is writing which plays with the aesthetic potential of ink on paper, as in the Tughra of Süleyman the Magnificent, and there are mathematical and scientific instruments which combine words and numbers. Text can be found on several maps, on Dürer’s woodcut print of an Indian rhinoceros, and on a broadsheet marking the centenary of the Reformation in Germany. Forms of money emerge as significant textual objects across thousands of years: there are five coins including a coin with the head of Alexander and a penny defaced by Suffragettes, a Ming banknote, and the newest of the 100 objects, a credit card.

In these objects, writing is found on flat surfaces and three-dimensional forms. It is found on the inside and outside of objects. It is carved, engraved, embossed, handwritten, stamped, and printed, and tells us about changing technologies of the word. Many different languages, ages, and civilisations are represented, and the writing on these objects serves many different rhetorical functions too.  The 100 British Museum objects, as well as all of the other objects registered on the website, can be sorted and compared by themes, including ‘Food’, ‘Travel’, ‘Protest’, ‘Body’, ‘Clothing’, and ‘War’. I would like to suggest another theme: ‘Text’. What could we learn by comparing all of the objects which feature writing in some form? In each example, how does the writing relate to the object? How do the specific materialities of these objects shape and inform their function as texts? Should we think about these objects differently from the objects without any text?

PS: The 100^th object is still a mystery: its identity will be revealed in the Autumn. Any guesses?

I recently bought a smart but very old suede handbag, second-hand. The clever design of the bag embraces its function as an object of both practicality and of aesthetic value. I was also attracted to it because of the information on the label – made in the small town of Pitlochry in the heart of Scotland, this accessory is a beautiful example of British craftsmanship, regrettably an increasingly rare phenomenon in our age of cheap imported goods made by exploited factory workers in China and Eastern Europe.

Inside the zipped pocket of this bag, I was pleasantly surprised to discover a tiny material text. It is a return ticket, printed on stiff card and measuring approximately 1×2 inches, for a mountain cable car in Austria. The ticket bears no date, but the price (24 schillings) is a clue to how old it might be – several decades, at the very least. The two holes suggest that the holder of this ticket successfully validated their ticket and made it up and down the mountain. Ephemeral texts like this one are all around us, and ironically it is often such small and disposable material texts as travel tickets, till receipts, and shopping lists, that slip through gaps or are stuffed without a second thought into pockets, and survive by being forgotten, to be discovered unexpectedly at times and places in the indeterminate future.

This particular ticket connects us to a specific tourist attraction (the Pfänderbahn above Lake Constance still exists, by the way, current price ten euros and eighty cents for an Adult return ticket), but what is most interesting about it as a material text is the unwritten story behind its survival and discovery in the personal space of a handbag. The unearthing of such ephemeral texts traces faint but tantalising connections between people and places, inviting us to imagine the journeys a text, no matter how small, has taken to reach us.

I am writing here as a graduate student guest blogger. Over the next few weeks I will be contributing more thoughts and reflections on material texts, not all of them as small or ephemeral as this one!

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.

In our post-plastic age, everyone needs a cotton bag. The CMT’s offering is without doubt one of the most stylish available, and retails for just £2.50. Bags will be on sale at future meetings of the History of Material Texts Seminar (see the ‘News’ section of this site), and at other Centre events. Contact me (jes1003@cam.ac.uk) if you can’t wait to get your hands on one.

Camp-followers of the CMT will take a high-minded interest in the tales that have unfolded over the past week around the historian Orlando Figes. The story–for the latest on which, see http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/apr/23/poison-pen-reviews-historian-orlando-figes–involves the use of the Amazon website for the anonymous posting of ‘reviews’ which appear to have been motivated more by personal animosity and professional rivalry than by the disinterested assessment of a book’s value. One of the academics attacked in the reviews, Figes’ fellow Russianist Robert Service, compared them to the use of anonimki (anonymous letters to the state or the press) in the pre-glasnost Soviet Union. ‘Gorbachev banned anonimki from being used in the USSR as a way of tearing up someone’s reputation,’ he wrote. ‘Now the grubby practice has sprouted up here’. Is that comparison apt or hyperbolic? What exactly is being reinvented in Figes’ posts?

The best blogs have beautiful pictures. This will have to do for now! It’s a sampler created in 1844 by someone named Fanny Benzie, who lived in Tunbridge. I inherited it from my grandmother, though I don’t think Fanny is a distant relative. It has a wonderfully Victorian text about how industry and perseverance will make us happy, citing King Alfred as a model for his hard graft in the secular and spiritual realms.