The Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge preserves many of the manuscript sources associated with British polar exploration, including journals, logbooks and correspondence. Some of these documents are on display at the recently renovated Polar Museum, based at the Institute, but the SPRI has also begun to make some material available online, beginning with Scott’s diary from his last ill-fated expedition to the South Pole in 1910-1912.

In his entry for Christmas Day in 1911, after making his usual notes on the weather conditions and the party’s progress, Scott writes of the feast the explorers enjoyed that night: ‘We had four courses. The first, pemmican, full whack, with slices of horse meat flavoured with onion and curry powder and thickened with biscuit; then an arrowroot, cocoa and biscuit hoosh sweetened; then a plum-pudding; then cocoa with raisins, and finally a dessert of caramels and ginger. After the feast it was difficult to move. Wilson and I couldn’t finish our share of plum-pudding. We have all slept splendidly and feel thoroughly warm – such is the effect of full feeding.’

For many, the text itself will not be unfamiliar – the diaries, gifted to the nation by Scott’s family, are in the British Library, and have appeared in many print editions since 1913. What makes this publication project different is the combination of different communication methods and media – using a linked blog, Twitter account, and photostreams to document the expedition day-by-day in this centenary year, the SPRI staff are hoping to see whether modern communication methods can provide a better understanding of the past. As the introduction to the project explains, ‘reading the journals over a few days is a very different experience from following the daily events of the expedition as they happen. It is hoped that the blog will enable readers to gain a deeper appreciation of the challenges faced by the expedition and the sacrifices made by Scott and his men. This is our first attempt to bring the diaries of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration to a worldwide audience by electronic means.’

The commemoration of a centenary, as for any anniversary, is about marking time, and so it is appropriate that this project particularly emphasises the dimension of time. Being given a daily excerpt from a document which is about the daily act of writing and recording is indeed very different from racing through a print edition at one’s own pace, and the online media of blogs and Twitter timelines allow this dimension to be explored in a new way.

Books for children are often some of the most experimental when it comes to physical form and the material potential of paper and card. More is to come here on this topic, but for now, here is a peep at one of well-known author/illustrator Jan Pienkowski’s beautiful scenes in his telling of the Christmas story, The First Noel. Through the layering of intricately cut pieces of card, Pienkowski’s pages form cavernous spaces, reminding us of the essentially three-dimensional nature of the book as object.

… went on display earlier this month for just three hours (12-3 pm) in a replica Victorian post office in the replica Victorian town of Blists Hill, at Ironbridge in Shropshire. Then it was returned to its resting place in the British Postal Museum and Archive, and was replaced with (you’ve guessed it) a replica.

Christmas being all about replication, it is striking how unfamiliar this item is. It is single-sided, apparently because it is really a glorified calling-card. It was printed in an edition of 1,000 using the relatively new technology of lithography, and coloured by hand. The image on the card is a triptych, featuring sober grisaille scenes of Christian charity to left and right. In the colourful middle section a family seated round a table raises a seasonal toast to the card’s recipient; a small child, encouraged by one of the adults, has already started downing his wine. (This last detail reportedly raised hackles in the Temperance League).

The card was commissioned in 1843 (the year of A Christmas Carol) by Henry Cole, a man whose extraordinary administrative skills must have prepared him well for the rituals of Christmas-card sending. Having reformed the public records, Cole helped invent the penny post; produced timetables for the Railway Chronicle; wrote children’s stories under the pseudonym of Felix Summerly; organized the Great Exhibition; and subsequently initiated the Albert Hall and the fabulous suite of museums in South Kensington. After reading about his life in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, it comes as a mild relief to learn that Cole ‘cared little for his personal appearance’; something, at least, had to give. The DNB suggests that Cole’s Christmas card may have been an offshoot of his work for the Post Office, offering support to those who suspect that all the seasonal greetings are really just another way to sell stamps.

Cole was still sending his card of 1843 in the 1860s, and was keen in later life to lay claim to the invention. Nowadays the few surviving copies retail for up to £8,000 each. You can read more here or here.

One of the most lovely Christmas cards I received this year was this one, produced  by the Fitzwilliam Museum, which features an illumination from a fifteenth-century French Book of Hours (MS 69).

In this scene of the nativity, the infant Christ is not in the arms of his mother, but lovingly propped on the knees of Joseph. Meanwhile, the Virgin Mary rests in bed, holding an open book, perhaps her own Book of Hours. The juxtaposition of baby and book makes this tiny scene at once ordinary and extraordinary, a beautifully intimate depiction of the Word made Flesh.

Our second stocking filler from the CMT is the manuscript of Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol, which you can find in an online facsimile here. Held in the Pierpont Morgan, just round the corner from the New York Public Library, the manuscript gives a wonderful sense of creativity on the wing, with numerous crossings-out, interlinings, second- and third-thoughts darkening the page.

Towards the end of the tale, the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come shows Scrooge his neglected gravestone, and Scrooge asks: “Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?” He answers the question himself: “Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead … But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!” And a few lines later, he begs: “Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!” Dickens is, as ever, busily crafting every sentence as he goes; in that last sentence he first writes ‘change’, then alters it to the more intense ‘sponge away’. Scrooge’s desire to rewrite his own ending chimes with the creative act that unfurls before our eyes.

The notes to this edition tell us that the sentence by which Dickens clarified that Tiny Tim did not die was added as an afterthought. The manuscript leaves this crucial matter suspended in an unforeseeable future.

On Christmas Eve exactly one hundred years ago, two children left a letter for Father Christmas in the chimney of their family home in Dublin. The letter stayed in the chimney for many decades, until it was discovered by the current owner of the house. Miraculously, it has survived with only a few scorch marks. ‘I want a baby doll and a waterproof with a hood and a pair of gloves and a toffee apple and a gold penny and a silver sixpence and a long toffee’, the author of the letter instructed. I wonder if Father Christmas obliged? Read more about it in this article from last week’s Irish Times.

This is the first in a special series of festive material texts – if the elves aren’t too exhausted, we hope there will be one for each of the twelve days of Christmas…

Happy Christmas from all at the CMT!

Grade 7, £27,428 – £35,788 pa

Limit of tenure: 1.5 years from date of appointment.

Cambridge University Library is seeking to appoint a suitably qualified candidate with an interest and relevant experience in digital libraries or digital humanities to work within its digital library team from early 2012. The Foundations Project is a strategic initiative of the Library, which aims to establish a state-of-the-art infrastructure for the production, preservation and online delivery of digitised content from its world-class collections. The first iteration of the digital library is online at http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/.

The appointee will work within a core team of six, including another metadata specialist, with whom they will share a portfolio. Reporting to the Library’s Digitisation and Digital Preservation Manager, they will concentrate on metadata and transcription aspects of the project, supporting the broad requirements of the Foundations Project and the particular needs of several associated projects, particularly a JISC-funded mass digitisation project based on the fascinating archive of the Board of Longitude. This role will provide an opportunity for the appointee to work at the forefront of digital library and digital humanities initiatives.

For further details on the post and how to apply, please see: http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Vacancies/index.htm

Queen Mary Principal’s Studentships cover tuition fees and a maintenance allowance of around £15,000 per year. Applicants from the UK, European Union and overseas are eligible to apply. We are pleased to announce that we will offer one Principal’s Studentship shared between English and French in the field of early modern textual cultures of Western Europe. This studentship will be awarded for study commencing in autumn 2012.

The successful candidate will be jointly supervised by Prof Adrian Armstrong (French) and Dr Warren Boutcher (English). S/he will undertake research in the area of western European textual cultures, in the period 1450-1600, engaging with cultural products in at least two vernacular languages (English, French, Dutch, Italian). Appropriate topics might include, for instance: polyglot emblem books; translations of particular literary genres; the transmission of particular authors or books across countries; or the multilingual output of a single publisher.

For more information click here.

Read all about it! Wrongdoing is in the eyes of the beholder?

Not quite by accident, but largely because of an interest in ephemeral literature printed in Spain shown by Hispanists here in the early twentieth century, Cambridge University Library has an impressive and rich collection of what a French colleague has termed ‘no-books’. Usually referred to in English as chap-books, and in Spanish as sueltos, or pliegos sueltos (loose leaves or folded loose leaves), these predecessors of the yellow press provide a fascinating bird’s eye view of popular culture from the 18^th century onwards. They show us, among other things, versions of how forms of wrongdoing (of different kinds, and of different degrees of severity) were perceived, or were presented to the populace as constructed forms of wrongdoing.

The AHRC-funded project ‘Wrongdoing in Spain 1800-1936: Realities, Representations, Reactions’ is now into its first year. The project is broad in scope, and the research of the PI, the Research Associate and the PhD student will focus on particular aspects of the cultural representation of wrongdoing and its relation (or lack of it) to historical realities at the time of production. The work of digitising the sueltos has a bearing on this, as they represent an important tranche of popular literature, and hence of the popular cultural representation of wrongdoing. The UL has a collection of nearly 2000 sueltos, including nearly 200 poster-sized aleluyas, which typically have 48 illustrations and accompanying text in couplets. The digitisation of this material began in May, and will be followed shortly by a similar digitisation project at the British Library. Eventually between the two collections we will have digitised close to 4500 items. Both here and at the BL, these collections have suffered in the past from a lack of attention from cataloguers, so that at present it is difficult for the researcher to scan the material for themes or characteristics. The consequences of digitising and cataloguing will open the way for a new wave of activity in relation to this material. Not only will digitisation of the sueltos be a significant contribution to the stewardship, conservation and enhanced accessibility of a body of cultural material (under an open license, it will be possible to see and use these fascinating items from all over the world, at any point where internet access is possible), but they will also be catalogued in a way that will make it much easier to work with these sources. An innovation is that the project will do this cataloguing not only for UL items, but for those of the BL also. Held in the Cambridge Digital Library, they will be available through a dedicated website, but also through the general catalogues of both libraries, making the material doubly available.

The cataloguing itself began shortly after the imaging. A regular rhythm of meetings between Sonia Morcillo, the UL’s expert Hispanic cataloguer, and Professor Alison Sinclair, the PI, has allowed for extensive discussion of how to flag up the subject-matter. More has been learned about the principles of librarianship by the PI than ever anticipated, not to mention being made aware of linguistic gaps through which concepts might fall, and the sheer range of wrongdoing and other related activity that the material covers. The vocabulary of wrongdoing in the two languages is a minefield. First of all, there is no word as such in Spanish for ‘wrongdoing’ (you can have crime, you can have sin, you can have transgression, but nothing like the collective implication of ‘wrongdoing’). The word ‘crimen’ itself usually refers to murder, or at least to violent crime (graphically referred to as a ‘delito de sangre’, or ‘crime of blood’). There are two distinct words for prison. There is no word for ‘elopement’ as such in Spanish, only ‘fuga’, which refers to general flight. And so the list goes on. A further complication is the preference of cataloguers for distinguishing between ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’. In the case of this type of crime-writing, the distinction is far from clear, as popular accounts in sueltos, as in their close cousin, gutter-journalism, amply demonstrate.

The material in itself is fascinating, whether in the portrayal of one killer whose weapon seemed to be a giant pair of scissors, or in the disturbingly recurrent motif of infants being chopped up, fried and offered to unsuspecting adults (shades here of Titus Andronicus….). This last alerts us to a further element: the resonances with classical culture that can be surprisingly present in this most popular of forms.

For further information about this project, please visit Professor Sinclair’s web page at http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/spanish/staff/as49/

*Research Associate Digital Humanities and Transferable Skills Training*

Six-month post attached to the Digital Humanities Network at CRASSH

Full-time, starting 1 February 2012 or as soon as possible thereafter Salary: £27,428 pa pro rata (Grade 7), fixed term contract, no possibility of renewal.

*Deadline for applications: 9 January 2012*

CRASSH is seeking a postdoctoral Research Associate to lead a six-month project on the digital humanities and Transferable Skills Training. The project focuses specifically on the transferability of digital skills, and aims to increase awareness among early-career researchers of how the digital skills they have learnt in one context (social, academic or professional) can be applied in another.

Apply online here: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/page/1082/ra-digital-humanities.htm