Are you an early career humanities scholar with an interest in information technology and digital tools?

Would you like to know more about how digital approaches are changing the humanities?

Would you like to discuss your research in a friendly and relaxed environment?

If your answer to any of these questions is yes, then “Digital Humanities for Early Career Researchers” is for you! The group is part of the University of Cambridge Digital Humanities Network, and aims to bring together interested early career scholars, providing a forum for them to discuss their work and, if necessary, get assistance with digital issues. No previous digital experience is required, and all disciplines are welcome. As long as you’re interested in the digital, we would love to meet you!

Join us for our first meeting on Wednesday, 19th October 2011, at 6 PM in The Castle Inn, 38 Castle Street. We will probably be there for a while, so come in anytime between 6 and 7 PM. This will be an introductory session for us to get to know each other, talk about our research and discuss how digital approaches might be useful to our work. No registration is necessary, but it would be nice if you could e-mail gpr26@cam.ac.uk so we get an idea of numbers. If you are interested in the group but can’t make the first meeting, please do e-mail us anyway so we can include you in any future events!

All are welcome, and hope to see you there!

Kind regards
Gethin Rees
Jenna Ng
The Digital Humanities for Early Career Researchers team

Reflecting on last Thursday’s History of Material Texts Seminar, given by John Rink from the Faculty of Music, brings me out in a fit of overblown adjectives. Rink has been at the helm of two extraordinary digitization projects, Chopin’s First Editions Online and The Online Chopin Variorum Edition. His talk took us through the bewildering profusion of different witnesses to Chopin’s scores–compositional drafts, presentation manuscripts, engravers’ manuscripts, proofs, multiple editions issued simultaneously in France, England and Germany–each of which might contain revisions–and printed copies marked up or elaborated by Chopin whilst he was teaching. That level of variability is an editor’s nightmare. (Even the celebrated ‘Funeral March’ from the Second Sonata was rethought and became a mere ‘March’ in some editions). But it’s meat and drink for a hypertext edition, which allows users to move between different versions, cross-compare, and put together their own text from the surviving evidence.

That said, the amount of work which goes into preparing such an edition–in terms not just of acquiring photographs of sufficient quality from archives across the world, but also of marking them up, bar-by-bar, so as to facilitate meaningful comparison between them–is prodigious. The results, though, are hugely worthwhile, since the application of new technologies raises fundamental questions about what a work of music actually is. Did this improvisational composer work towards a final, perfect goal, or did his pieces go on growing endlessly in different environments and different moments? How did publishers (including the women who actually engraved the music) go about regularizing and rationalizing Chopin’s sometimes idiosyncratic drafts? And how much license do performers today have in interpreting the textual evidence?

In questions, Rink suggested that it was fine for performers to pick and choose, in an informed way, from the different witnesses. He saw the quest for musical authenticity as often the enemy of important freedoms, imposing a rigid historicism on playing which in fact always takes place in the present. But he would presumably not condone re-opening Chopin to radical improvisation… How far should we go in our celebration of textual fluidity?

The New Yorker recently published an article about ‘the rise of bulletproof couture’, alerting us to the fact that every world leader worth his or her salt now has defensive panels sewn into a stylish coat or jacket. They’re mostly supplied by a company in Colombia and rely on a miracle formula that improves on Kevlar, the traditional petroleum-based monomer used in bulletproof jackets, which was invented by accident in a lab in the 1960s. The company ships its goods all over the world and is adept at adapting to local tastes–so it has safari vests for Nigeria, tunics for Dubai, and ecclesiastical vestments for Latin America. The churchmen have it easy–they can also buy ‘a bulletproof blanket, which can be thrown over a pulpit’ and ‘a large bulletproof Bible, which a priest can use, mid-sermon, as a protective shield’ (Sept 26, 2011, p. 71).

‘In an increasingly dangerous world threatened by terrorism and militant regimes, our soldiers, police, journalists, NGO workers and others from all walks of life are increasingly coming under fire, and what better a gift than the Bible which can withstand a bullet!’ So reads one website that offers to sell you a life-saving version of Holy Writ. Purists and completists beware: ‘to keep it light, and an easy fit in the backpack or breast pocket of those in the front line, we have just included the New Testament part of the American Standard Version (1901)’. Another such Bible looks like it doesn’t get much further than Genesis, but comes with a 20% discount for ‘active military with ID’. You can also buy versions with more impressive pedigrees–such as a World War II ‘soldier’s bible with a super hard steel metal cover. It was made to be carried in the left breast pocket to cover the heart. It is inscribed May The Lord Be With You.’ One careful owner…

All of this assumes that you need some special hard-binding to make a Bible bulletproof. But the ‘Iconic Books Blog‘ traces legends about soldiers whose lives were saved by the good book back into the nineteenth century, and finds that the latest examples come from the Iraq war. Meanwhile, don’t trust just any heavyweight book to save you. The latest crop of novels may take a while to read, but they can’t stop a bullet–as is proven here, by the doubtless horribly-biased people at Electric Literature.

Perception, Reception: The History of the Media in Society

Call for Papers for a conference to be held between 4th and 6th July 2012 at Aberystwyth University, Wales, UK. Extended deadline to 17th October 2011

The 4th Media History conference will focus on the ways in which people have understood the social, cultural and political roles of the media from the 15th to the 20th century. The concept of ‘the media’ will be interpreted broadly, so as to include print culture (including the press and publishing), cinema, broadcasting, and other visual and electronic media.

A great deal of work has been done by scholars on the institutional, political and cultural history of various media. ‘Perception, Reception’ will build on this literature to explore the ways in which the media have historically been understood, conceptualised, and imaginatively represented. Thus the conference will not focus on the content of the media as such, so much as the depiction, perception and reception of the media in different contexts over time. How have readers, consumers, and the respective media industries themselves framed arguments about the media as a force for good (or evil) at different points in time? Have contemporaries always seen the media as agents of change, or is there a counter-history of the media to be written in terms of promoting conservatism, deference and order? How have people understood and represented the media in terms of concepts of personal and geographical space, time, or changing belief systems? Can we think ‘internationally’ about perceptions of the media in different states and nations over time, or is the media still best understood and examined in largely local or regional contexts?

We welcome proposals from a range of chronological, geographical and methodological backgrounds. Abstracts, of around 200 words for papers of between 20 to 25 minutes duration, should be sent by close of business on 17th October 2011 to mediahist2012@aber.ac.uk<mailto:mediahist2012@aber.ac.uk>

The Cultures of the Digital Economy Institute (Anglia Ruskin University) & the Centre for Material
Texts (University of Cambridge) present:

BOOK PUBLISHING HISTORIES SEMINAR SERIES

Seminar II: The Impact of Digital Publishing Platforms for Academic Scholarship on Libraries and Readers

Hannah Perrett (Cambridge University Press)
&
Jayne Kelly and Sarah Stamford (ebooks@cambridge)

Tuesday 1st November 5.30-7pm
Lord Ashcroft Building 207, Anglia Ruskin University, East Road, Cambridge
For more information, please contact Dr Leah Tether: leah.tether@anglia.ac.uk

download a poster for this event here

On Tuesday 1 November 2011, Cambridge University Library will be holding its second masterclass as part of the Incunabula Project (http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/deptserv/rarebooks/incunabulaproject.html).

Prof. David McKitterick, Librarian at Trinity College Cambridge, will lead a seminar under the title ‘Mix and match: making up incunabula’.

“When we look at a copy of a book, we make many assumptions. But books may not be what they seem. This class will examine some of the ways in which the make-up of books can be changed and muddled between the time that they leave the printer, and when they are read today. Examples will be drawn from Caxton, and from fifteenth-century printers in Italy and the Low Countries.”

The seminar will be held in the Sir Geoffrey Keynes Room. It will start at 2.30pm and will last approximately 90 minutes, allowing time for questions and discussion. Attendance will be limited in order to allow all attendees a chance to see the books under discussion up close, and to participate in the discussion. Attendance is open to anyone with an interest in the topic.

To book your place, please contact Katie Birkwood (kib21@cam.ac.uk).

Seminars take place on Thursdays within term at 5:30 in S-R24 in the Faculty of English, 9 West Road, Cambridge.

For more information, contact Sarah Cain, Corpus Christi College (stc22@cam.ac.uk), Jason Scott-Warren, Faculty of English (jes1003@cam.ac.uk), or Andrew Zurcher, Queens’ College (aez20@cam.ac.uk)

13 October, John Rink (Faculty of Music), ‘The Virtual Chopin’

10 November, Linda Bree (Cambridge University Press), ‘Scholarly Publishing and Technological Change’

*Book History Research Network: a one-day colloquium*

*Institute of English Studies (University of London), 25 November 2011*

At a moment when the rise of e-Readers foretells the end of the printed book, the founder of the Internet Archive Brewster Kahle launches an initiative for the preservation of the book. He is creating a storehouse for physical books in specially-adapted containers on the West Coast of the United States in order to preserve them as “backup copies” for posterity. His idea came about as a reaction against the notion that books can be put beyond use (or thrown away) as soon as they are digitized.

While the future of the book is certainly an important topic for consideration, an initiative such as Kahle’s also begs the question how did past the past envision the future of the book – or of the predominant medium of the time. Victor Hugo’s phrase, ‘ceci tuera cela’, spelt a new paradigm of mistrust when the printed book suddenly disrupted the foundation of manuscript culture and the transmission of the written. Although the digital revolution is possibly the most radical change in the history of writing, one can wonder how
other similar transitions fared: from the scroll to the codex, from manuscript to printed book, from printing on the handpress to machine and offset printing, from writing by hand to writing on the typewriter
and the wordprocessor? More fundamentally, do the concerns of fifteenth-century critics of print like those of Abbot Johannes Trithemius of Sponheim have anything in common with twenty-first-century anxieties about the triumph of digital technology? Is access to knowledge and preservation, which champions of the digital revolution invoke, really a new concern? How much of the (old) culture of the book is retained in the new digital media?

This colloquium, therefore, wants to consider not just what “will be”, but also “what would have been” – the future perfect of the book. We invite proposals (no more than 250 words) for 20-minutes papers on any topic in book history relating to the future of the book considered at any moment in history.

Deadline: 15 October 2011.

Topics may include:

-competing technologies: scroll v. codex/paper v. screen/writing v. typing

-manuscript culture in the age of print

-the Gutenberg revolution as devolution

-the library of the future in the past

-old books and new media

-mass digitization or digital archive

-book collecting in the digital era

-/mise-en-page /and digital design

-hypertext and other outmoded technologies

-readers and e-readers

Organizers:

Cynthia Johnston

Research Student

Institute of English Studies

cynthia.johnston[at]postgrad.sas.ac.uk

Dr Wim Van Mierlo

Lecturer in Textual Scholarship and English Literature

Institute of English Literature

wim.van-mierlo[at]sas.ac.uk

Back in January, Amazon issued a fourth-quarter report that announced that sales of e-books for the Kindle outstripped sales of paperback books by 115:100, and sales of hardback books by 3:1. The inevitable newspaper reports followed, all pretty much drawing the same conclusions. It’s not a question of whether the patient will survive, they agreed; it’s how long he’s got left.

Well, another day, another death knell. Matthew Cain’s report on Channel 4 News last night revealed some troubling statistics. Overall sales of printed books are down 9.44%: paperbacks by 8.97%, hardbacks by 12.71%. As a consequence, publishers have begun to move away from the traditional model of issuing hardbacks a year in advance of paperbacks, with some titles going straight to the smaller and cheaper print format. ‘The most important catalyst for [this]’, Cain concluded, ‘has been the e-book’.

Remember the television advertisements for the Kindle and the iPad? Both Amazon and Apple sought to promote not only the whizzy gadgetry but also the physical sensation of using their products, and their durability (though I doubt any customers have held their new iPad in their hands while riding pillion on a moped, or let their dog lick their new Kindle). Using the Kindle or the iPad may provide a material experience, but does reading with them provide a material textual experience? Publishers, perhaps, have realised this, and are placing new emphasis on the aesthetic pleasure the hardback has to offer, and are promoting it as an object of physical beauty – in opposition, one assumes, to the rather dull featurelessness and intangibility of the e-book.

I don’t doubt, then, that e-readers and e-books have had an effect – a material effect, no less – upon the publishing industry. What I would dispute is the assumption – and assumption it is, for there is as yet no hard evidence of a causal relationship – that the rise in e-books has caused the fall in printed books. In media coverage, other factors are rarely discussed. Matthew Cain expressed concern that changes to the hardback could render it ‘a luxury gift item’, but at £15-25 a pop, is it not one already? What effect has the recession, falling real and disposable incomes and economic uncertainty about the future had upon people’s book-buying habits? Have rising commodity prices for wood pulp pushed up the price of books as they have the price of newspapers? What changes have there been to the second-hand book market? When was the last time you bought a brand-new hardback? (I can’t even remember).

So far, the news media have been content to stick to a ‘black-and-white’ style of reporting on e-books: e-media is up, print is down, therefore one caused the other, and the trend will continue. Much more research needs to be done into social and behavioural evidence, particularly on how e-books are being integrated into print culture, before any nuanced conclusions may be drawn about the future of the material text. Which socio-economic groups buy Kindles the most? How many printed books does the Kindle buyer already own? How often do new e-reader owners buy printed books, and how much do they spend? Do they use e-media and printed books in conjunction, and if so, how? What kinds of books are bought as e-books, what kind as printed? Crucially, for the e-reader is still in its infancy, for how long is a new Kindle used, and how does the frequency change over time? Are people buying the Kindle for the books, or for the novelty, or both?

In a short story in Granta 113 (‘Eva and Diego’, by Alberto Olmos), the female narrator explains the compulsion that drove her to buy a new iPod:

I had a salary that allowed me to buy approximately fifteen iPods a month…fifteen monthly temptations to buy an iPod. Consequently, I was one of those people who just had to buy an iPod. I simply have to buy whatever they’ve just invented to be bought…I bought the iPod out of boredom. But out of fear as well. Spending is about the fear of dying…Spending implies a future…

Spending on a gadget like a Kindle might imply a future, but books – physical books, material texts – declare both a past and a future, of the sophisticated but simple codex format, of communities of physical and intellectual experience, and of literary culture that e-readers cannot, in my opinion, hope to replicate.

A new book by the anthropologist Tim Ingold is always a reason for me to interrupt whatever I’m doing and to spend the next 24 hours reading, and his Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (Routledge, 2011), does not disappoint. Ingold’s mission is to show us how much our fashionable academic languages and intellectual schemas prevent us from understanding the way the world works. He ranges across the globe, drawing insights from numerous anthropological studies, but also from artists, writers, and musicians, and an eclectic array of thinkers past and present, in order to shake off our misperceptions of what life is. For Ingold, modern thought conspires against us, erecting a series of dyads–nature/culture, mind/body, subject/object–which are visible in (and reinforced by) the worlds we create around ourselves. Asphalt pavements, concrete roads, stiff leather shoes, chairs, prescribed gaits and upright postures all conspire to convince us that we stand over above the world rather than in it. The entrenched dichotomies of modern Western thought need not to be thought across or ‘deconstructed’ but thought around, strenuously, with a lot of help from those who would never have dreamed of making such distinctions, and much detailed reflection on the nature of our own experience.

Ingold would perhaps disapprove of the existence of a ‘Centre for Material Texts’, which risks perpetuating the myth that there is something immaterial, outside the world and supervening on it, when in fact all of experience is equally embodied and disembodied, grounded and dreaming. The early sections of the book do a brilliant job of lancing some of the more cartoonish ways in which we are tempted to talk when we start to think about (what Ingold does not want to call) ‘material culture’. Yet, as in his earlier book, Lines, there is much in Being Alive for thinkers on text–in particular, Part V on ‘Drawing Making Writing’, which traces a dazzling set of connections between the legible, visible and singable letter, between writing, wayfaring, spinning, flying kites and doing anthropology. It’s truly inspirational stuff.