One of the windows of the Cambridge University Press bookshop is currently staging a display of beautiful creations by book sculptor and paper artist Justin Rowe. Based on the traditional carol, the collection consists of a work for each of the twelve days of Christmas. From the interiors of books, Rowe brings forth delicate, intimate scenes in paper, of dancing ladies, drumming drummers, and milking maids. On close inspection, some of the scenes have an unsettling, dark element too – why are the ten lords leaping off a bibliographical cliff? I particularly like his use of gold leaf, one of the traditional materials for book ornamentation, which both reinforces the material origins of his creations as books, and transforms them into something else. You can see photographs of these and other works on Rowe’s own website.

‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ are being raffled for Romsey Mill, a Cambridge charity, and tickets are for sale inside the CUP shop.

Jonathan Hope from Strathclyde University gave a presentation to the Renaissance Graduate Seminar at the English Faculty last night about DocuScope, a major collaborative project based at Carnegie Mellon University for the ‘computer-aided rhetorical analysis’ of texts. The team behind DocuScope includes computer scientists, linguistics specialists, and literary scholars, and the idea is based on a system (or a ‘text analysis environment’, as the project website puts it) that was originally created for the analysis of students’ creative writing. In essence, a teacher could run writing samples through a computer programme, and use its statistical analysis of rhetorical features as the basis for further discussion with students – getting them to think about why one writing sample features a much greater frequency of a certain linguistic feature than others, for example.

In its current shape DocuScope is much more mind-bogglingly complex. Hope illustrated this by showing us what its analysis of the whole known corpus of early modern drama looks like.  I won’t try to explain how the system actually works (you can read expert accounts elsewhere, like here) but it was interesting to see the forms of output that can be generated, such as dendrograms, which arrange the works according to how similar they are to each other, and depict strong and weak connections between texts based on their linguistic features. The entire corpus of Shakespeare’s plays has also been filtered through this mysterious machine, and Hope showed us some of the colourful visual representations of these results. According to DocuScope’s categories of rhetorical analysis, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merry Wives of Windsor are least similar to other plays, and The Merchant of Venice is least dissimilar.

Some of the limitations and possible pitfalls of this tool are obvious, others less so. But the point of DocuScope is clearly to raise questions, not provide answers – indeed, Hope referred to it as ‘a problem factory’, which serves to provoke further debates. DocuScope has much potential; in the future it could, for example, provide another slant in investigations of authorship or dating of texts. One more general point that Hope’s paper raised was the growing necessity for scholars in the arts and humanities to develop their skills of statistical interpretation. An understanding of how statistics may be used and abused will increasingly become essential for teachers and researchers working with digital tools and resources.

Launched today, the British Newspaper Archive digitizes millions of newspapers published between (roughly) 1700 and 1950. Sadly, it’s a subscription service–but also a godsend to research in innumerable fields. Click here to have a look.

A conference organized jointly by ‘Print Networks’ and the Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester

University of Leicester, 10-12 July 2012

Guest speakers: Adam Fox, University of Edinburgh Author of Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500-1700 Sheila O’Connell, British Museum Author of The Popular Print in England

CALL FOR PAPERS & CONFERENCE FELLOWSHIP
Offers are invited for conference papers of 30 minutes’ duration. The theme of STREET LITERATURE: CHEAP PRINT, POPULAR CULTURE AND THE BOOK TRADE is broadly defined. Papers may relate to aspects of the production, distribution and reception of ‘street literature’ (chapbooks, ballads, broadsides, newspapers, popular prints and other cheap printed matter) in the British Isles, or in other English-speaking parts of the world, between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, inclusive.

An abstract (up to 650 words) of the offered paper and a biographical statement (up to 100 words) should be submitted, preferably as an email attachment, by 31st January 2012 to: jh241@le.ac.uk

A Conference Fellowship is offered to one or two postgraduate students (or independent scholars of equivalent status) whose research falls within the conference theme, who wish to present a paper. The fellowship covers the cost of attending the conference and assistance towards costs of travel. A summary of the research being undertaken, accompanied by a letter of recommendation from a tutor or supervisor, should be sent to jh241@le.ac.uk or posted to the address below by 31st January 2012.

The papers presented may be considered for publication and must therefore comprise original work not presented or published elsewhere.

Dr John Hinks Centre for Urban History University of Leicester Leicester LE1 7RH
Email: jh241@le.ac.uk

Old Combination Room, Trinity College, Cambridge

Thursday 24 November 2011

Organisers: David McKitterick, James Raven and Alex Walsham

Supported by the Trevelyan Fund, Faculty of History and the Cambridge Project for the Book Trust

This symposium brings together scholars from Cambridge, the UK, the US and Europe to reflect on recent developments in and approaches to the History of the Book and to discuss both the potential and the problems posed by the ever-growing number of electronic resources available to scholars working in this broad and flourishing field. The last 15-20 years have seen the commissioning and publication of a series of histories of the book (Britain, Ireland, America, etc): these enterprises have borne considerable fruit and extended our knowledge of the worlds of manuscript production, printing, publishing and textual consumption within particular national contexts. But their self-imposed parameters have also restricted our understanding of initiatives and interactions that cut across these boundaries and connected people who were members of other types of imagined communities, including churches and sects and the wider republic of letters that united scholars across borders, continents and oceans. They have eclipsed other dimensions of the topic that demand attention in the context of burgeoning interest in transnational and global history. Building on these reflections, the second aim of this symposium is to consider how major digitisation projects and other databases are transforming how historians study past cultures of communication, as well as other related themes.

10am          Coffee

10.30-12.45 Session I: Histories of the Book

America: David Hall (Harvard Divinity School)

Britain: David McKitterick (Trinity)

Ireland: Toby Barnard (Hertford College, Oxford)

France: Dominique Varry (Lyon)

12.45-1.45 Lunch

1.45-4.00                     Session II: New Resources

Universal STC: Andrew Pettegree (St Andrews)

The Electronic Enlightenment: Glenn Roe (Oxford)

Bibliopolis: Paul Hoftijzer (Leiden)

Old Bailey Online: Tim Hitchcock (Hertfordshire)

Digitised newspapers: Mark Curran (Leeds and Munby Fellow)

4.00-4.30 Tea

4.30-5.30 Round Table Discussion and Future Directions

All welcome: please advise Alex Walsham if you wish to attend (amw23@cam.ac.uk)

Thursday, 12 January 2012 6.30pm – 8.00pm, followed by a drinks reception

British Academy, 10-11 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1

Chair: Paul Webley, Director and Principal of SOAS, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

Speakers:

Deborah Shorley, Director of Library Services, Imperial College London

William St Clair FBA, Co-founder and Chairman Board of Directors, Open Book Publishers, and Senior Research Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge

Alice Prochaska, Principal, Somerville College, University of Oxford

All the above mentioned speakers have an interest, and experience of this mode of publishing. The first speaker has made statements concerning open access. William St Clair is a powerful voice in Open Book Publishers, committed to free open access of all their texts on the internet. Paul Webley has a particular interest in open access founded in his commitment to accessibility for students and scholars throughout Africa and Asia.

Key questions to be addressed: Can the scholarly world continue to support a system where monographs are published in 3-figure numbers at best, to be read only by the well-endowed in favoured centres of the world? Is it true that having text accessible on the web encourages rather than depresses sales? Is such a project financially feasible, and what are the costs and benefits? Is this the way forward for the democratisation of global knowledge?

Attendance is free, but registration is required for this event. Please visit our website: www.britac.ac.uk/events.

Linda Bree came to talk to the History of Material Texts seminar last week, on the subject of ‘Scholarly Publishing and Technological Change’. As someone who knows the world of academic publishing from every possible direction–Linda is Editorial Director for Arts and Literature at Cambridge University Press, and a scholar working on the ‘long eighteenth century’–she is uniquely placed to tell us what is going on out there, and her talk was indeed eye-opening.

As someone who subscribes to the scholarly orthodoxy that new technologies don’t replace old technologies, but force creative adaptation, I had completely missed what to her was the most important feature of the current landscape: digital printing, and Print-On-Demand technology. Although POD can be unreliable (do you really trust Amazon to deliver you a decent facsimile of that novel from 1833?), for scholarly publishers it is transformative. It gives old books a new lease of life (CUP calls its project to digitize its back-catalogue the ‘Lazarus programme’!) and allows supply to be more closely tailored to demand for new books. It also promises to make publishing leaner and greener, since digital files can be printed out in locations across the world, cutting transportation costs. And you may be able to have a book freshly printed by your local bookshop, if something like the Blackwell’s ‘Espresso Book Machine’ takes off more widely.

Other areas of the picture Bree painted were more murky. The question of how libraries will survive when they are spending their budgets not on buying books but on renting digital content; or of how publishers will survive as the web fosters the illusion (or the ideal) that content should come for free–these were left hanging. In the short term, though, it seems that the physical book will remain the medium of choice for academic monographs. If you’ve got to read a big chunky book full of footnotes, cross-references, and appendices, a book that you may want to scribble on and store away for future reference, ink on paper remains indispensable. For now.

1st Annual Conference
Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK
27-28 March 2012

Call For Abstracts

The 1st Annual Conference of CoDE: Cultures of the Digital Economy will be held at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK on 27-28 March 2012. Participants from a range of scholarly disciplines are invited to present research related to digital culture and the digital economy. Confirmed keynote speakers are Dr Jussi Parikka and Dr
Astrid Ensslin, whose biographies are included below. Paper abstracts of up to 300 words can be submitted to
code@anglia.ac.uk until 31st January 2012. In particular, abstracts related to the following conference themes are
sought, though abstracts addressing other aspects of digital culture are also welcome:

Theme 1. Materiality and Materialism
It is straightforward enough to understand computation as a relationship between material objects (hard drives,
screens, keyboards and other input devices, scanners, printers, modems and routers) and nominally immaterial ones (software, programming languages, code). This approach to the „stuff‟ of the digital risks ignoring a set of crucial questions around the relationships digital technologies construct with a range of material objects: from the „analogue‟ world modelled in weather systems and battlefield simulations to the body of the information worker interacting with spreadsheets and databases; from the range of artefacts that form the subject of the digital humanities to the materials, bodies, spaces and places of art practice and performance.

Theme 2. Performance, Production and Play
Innovative aspects of our interaction with performances and the production of artefacts for continuous engagement
have evolved exponentially through the digital age, particularly with the development of ideas related to play and
serious gaming, which brings novel opportunities for creative expression, not to mention innovative approaches
related to parallel disciplines in science, education, healthcare and business. The collaboration between performance, production and play and adjacent academic fields is of particular interest given the cross-disciplinary requirements of the Digital Economy Act.

Theme 3. Digital Humanities – Archives, Interfaces and Tools
Digital Humanities works at the intersections of traditional research and technological innovation. Its techniques have helped to prove that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, for instance, and have even been used by the FBI to
determine the authorship of sensitive documents. Today scholars in the digital humanities are primarily concerned to offer a gateway to previously hidden records of culture and heritage. A high-resolution digital photograph of a Chaucer manuscript, for instance, reveals its delicate pen strokes, and when placed on the internet, can pave the way for school children, university students, and those interested in culture generally, to learn about medieval literature from primary resources.

See www.anglia.ac.uk/code for details of CoDE projects and affiliated staff.
Email: code@anglia.ac.uk

Keynote Speakers

Jussi Parikka is Reader in Media & Design at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton), Adjunct Professor in Digital Culture Theory (University of Turku, Finland) and Honorary Visiting Research Fellow at Anglia Ruskin University. His writings have addressed accidents and the dark sides of network culture (Digital Contagions, 2007 and the co-edited volume The Spam Book, 2009), biopolitics of media culture (Insect Media, 2010, the co-edited special issue of Fibreculture “Unnatural Ecologies”, 2011 and the edited online book Medianatures: The Materiality of Information Technology and Electronic Waste, 2011) and media archaeology (the co-edited volume Media Archaeology, 2011 and the forthcoming book What is Media Archaeology?, 2012). He is currently finishing editing a
collection of the German media theorist Wolfgang Ernst’s writings, to be published in 2012.
Website and blog: http://jussiparikka.net

Astrid Ensslin lectures in Digital Humanities at the University of Bangor. Her research interests are in the fields of digital discourse, semiotics, narrative and communication. Most of her current research revolves around digital fiction, videogames and virtual worlds, language ideologies in the (new) media and specialised language corpora. She has a BA/MA (Distinction) from Tuebingen University (2002), a Postgraduate Teaching Certificate from Leeds University and a PhD (s.c.l.) from Heidelberg University (2006). She convenes Bangor University’s Digital Economies Cluster, is the founding editor of the MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities and Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds and Co-Investigator of the DFG/AHRC learner corpus project, ‘What’s Hard in German?’ (2009-12), and of the Leverhulme Digital Fiction International Network (DFIN) (2009). She was Programme Leader of the AHRC collaborative postgraduate training scheme, CEDAR (2008-10). Astrid’s most recent monograph is The Language of Gaming (2011); she has published widely, and other work includes Canonizing Hypertext: Explorations and Constructions (2007) and, with Eben Muse, Creating Second Lives: Community, Identity and Spatiality as Constructions of the Virtual (2011). Her forthcoming work will be published by MIT Press, and will be on Literary Gaming.

5th-7th June 2012
University of Sussex
www.sussex.ac.uk/cems/emnews

The Centre for Early Modern Studies at the University of Sussex is to host a multi-disciplinary postgraduate conference on News in Early Modern Europe. We invite proposals for individual papers of 20 minutes or panels of up to three speakers that address any aspect of this theme. Although the conference is particularly directed towards postgraduates, we welcome scholars at all levels of their career.

Plenary speakers include: Joad Raymond (University of East Anglia), Andrew Pettegree (University of St Andrews).

Please send abstracts of papers (of no more than 200 words) or panel theme with list of speakers and abstracts to Simon Davies (S.F.Davies@sussex.ac.uk) by 31st January 2012.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

News in print
Manuscript news
The changes in news reporting across the period
Reading the news
Politics in the news
Religion in the news
Censorship and regulation
News and the state
Sermons and the delivery of news
News and the stage
News ballads
News from capital to provinces / from city to country
The international exchange of news
The reporting of new ideas and discoveries
Sensational news
The consumption of news across genders
Specialist news
Coteries and news networks
Secrecy vs sharing
Private vs public
Current events in literature
News and credit
The relationship between news and history
Digital approaches to working with early modern news

University of Northampton, 18-19 April 2012

Keynote speakers include:
Helen Clifford, University of Warwick
Yme Kuiper, University of Groningen
Ruth Gill, Historic Royal Palaces

The country house can be seen as a palimpsest: generations of owners adding their own material objects and layers of meaning. This presents challenges to both historians and curators – how to understand the relationship between new and old goods; how to assess the meaning of goods in different contexts, and how to present a coherent narrative of the house and its contents to the visitor today. Linked to this is the need to see the country house as dynamic: a lived and living space which was consciously transformed according to fashion or personal taste, but which was also changed by accident, decay and dispersal. Moreover, the country house was a nexus of flows as goods were brought in from the estate, the surrounding area and more distant centres – most notably London. How do these links shape our understanding and interpretation of the country house? In paying more attention to the processes of consumption, attention is focused on social and economic aspects of the country house – a broadening of perspective which can offer a more rounded view of the elite. The country house is often seen as a symbol of wealth and power, but the economics of running such properties (in the present as well as the past) and the experience of everyday life (of owners as well as servants) deserve more attention.

This conference seeks to address such questions, drawing on comparisons with other European countries to throw new light on our understanding of consumption and the country house. More broadly, it seeks to bridge the persistent divide between historians’ interpretations of elite consumption and the material culture of the country house, and attempts by owners, managers and curators to interpret and present the country house to visitors.

We invite papers discussing any aspect of consumption, material culture and the country house, both in the past and the present. However, we would especially welcome those focusing on:
Supplying the country house: food and drink, furniture, local and imported goods, etc.
The country house as lived/living space – room use (then) and using rooms (now); the (different?) role of men and women; the relationships between and spaces of masters and servants
Collecting or consuming – motivations to consume; the economics of acquisition; European and oriental influences
Old and new – the role of fashion; buying second-hand; the emerging taste for antiques; the country house as palimpsest; rearranging the furniture (by owners and for presentation)
Material culture and the country house interior – aesthetics of interior design; the meaning of goods and their arrangement (past and present)
Continuities and contrasts: comparisons between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; of London and provinces; across Europe
The impact of the country house visitor in the past and present: changing attitudes; national differences; broadening markets and access to houses
Interpreting and presenting the country house: using new technologies and approaches (e.g. live interpretation); different approaches across space and time

If you would like to present a paper, then please send a c.300 word abstract to: Prof Jon Stobart: jon.stobart@northampton.ac.uk by 15 December 2011.