9 March 2015 10.00am — 6.30pm

The Bodleian Libraries are hosting a one-day hackfest celebrating the release of 25,000 texts from the Early English Books Online project into the public domain. The event encourages students, researchers from all disciplines, and members of the public with an interest in the intersection between technology, history and literature to work together to develop a project using the texts and the data they may generate.

The EEBO-TCP corpus covers the period from 1473 to 1700 and is now estimated to comprise more than two million pages and nearly a billion words. It represents a history of the printed word in England from the birth of the printing press to the reign of William and Mary, and it contains texts of incomparable significance for research across all academic disciplines, including literature, history, philosophy, linguistics, theology, music, fine arts, education, mathematics, and science.

We’re looking for all kinds of people to participate; those with an interest in data visualisation, geospatial analysis, corpus linguistics, written and spoken word, web applications and programming, data/text mining, art, film and more are welcome. You don’t have be an expert to join, but you do need to be enthusiastic and prepared to help develop a project.

The hackathon will take place during the day (10am-5pm), with a reception to follow at 5pm. Prizes will be given to the best of the day’s projects.

More information about the project is available from the EEBO-TCP website.

Participants in the day’s event are encouraged to consider entering their ideas into the online Early English Books Ideas Hack, which seeks to explore innovative and creative approaches to the data and identify potential paths for future activity. Submissions for the Ideas Hack close on 2 April.

Roughly a century ago, T. J. Cobden-Sanderson marked the end of the Doves Press by throwing the beautiful typeface that he had created into the River Thames. Inspired by the example of William Morris’s Kelmscott Press, and modelled on type created in Venice in the 1470s, the font had been used to print works by Shakespeare and Milton, as well as a five-volume Bible.

Now, remarkably, an enthusiast for the Doves typeface, who had already gone to the trouble of creating a digital version, has gone fishing for the font, and has recovered  no fewer than 150 pieces from their watery bed in the Thames. You can read the full story here.

Here is another entry in our (very occasional!) series of gravestone errata: the memorial stone of Godfrey Washington (1670-1729), who was the great-uncle of the first President of the USA, George Washington. This stone is mounted on the north wall of the parish church of St Mary the Less in Cambridge, where Washington is buried, having been Vicar, and Fellow and Bursar of the neighbouring Peterhouse. The stone attracts a fair number of pilgrims, who note the eagle, stars, and stripes of the Washington coat of arms, from which the emblem and flag of the USA are said to derive. On closer inspection, however, there is apparent confusion over the year in which he died:

What is the story behind this error? Is it really a careless mistake on the part of the stone carver, who perhaps lost concentration as he reached the end of his work? (Compare the story of American author Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose gravestone proclaimed him winner of the 1978 ‘Noble’ Prize for Literature…). There’s something especially surprising about errors and corrections in gravestone inscriptions. As texts, they are literally monumental and often sacred sites, and our expectations of their permanence and finality make any errors and corrections stand out as particularly affronting.

National University of Ireland, Galway, 21-22 May 2015

http://digitalmaterial.ie

Plenary speakers: Jerome McGann & Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

Digital Material is a conference that considers the intersections of digital and material cultures in the humanities. How has the long history of studying material objects prepared us for understanding digital culture? To what degree does materiality inflect and inform our encounters with the digital?

Recent years have seen an intensification of interest in both digital and material cultures. This broad trend has been mirrored in the academy by the growing prominence of digital humanities and the renewed focus on materiality and material objects within humanities disciplines. At the same time, libraries, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions are grappling with the theoretical and practical implications of preserving and exhibiting their material collections within increasingly digital infrastructures, while adapting to the challenges posed by born-digital materials.

The conference invites discussion of a series of related issues: does a reinvigorated interest in material culture represent a conservative reaction to the perceived threat of digital culture, or is it evidence of an embrace of the innovative affordances of the digital? How do digital media represent the materiality of texts and objects? Does the digital constitute its own form of materiality?

Proposals are invited on any aspect of the conference theme, including:

• What is meant by ‘digital materiality’?
• What is lost and gained when we study material objects through their digital surrogates?
• Relationships between digital texts and material texts.
• Creation, curation, and preservation of digitised and born-digital artefacts.
• Digital archives and material archives.
• What parts of our digital culture will future scholars unearth?
• Do digital objects embody their culture in the way that material objects do?
• Does memory inhere in the material better than in the digital?
• The digital collector: can we be possessive about digital artefacts?
• Object lessons: digital and material pedagogy.
• Representations of the intersections of digital and material cultures.
• Technology, equipment, storage, media; matter, substance, simulation, virtuality; cloth, fabric, pulp, bits, bytes.

Proposals may include:

• 20-minute papers (abstract: 300-400 words).
• Panels (individual paper abstracts plus 250-word overview).
• Roundtables (abstract: 300-400 words plus names of speakers).

All participants should include a short biography (100-200 words) with their proposals.

Submit proposals at http://digitalmaterial.ie before 31 January 2015. Successful proposals will be notified of acceptance by 21 February 2015.

Seminars in the History of Material Texts

Thursdays at 5.30 pm, SR-24 (second floor), Faculty of English, 9 West Rd

22 January– William Zachs (University of Edinburgh)

‘Authenticity and Duplicity: Investigations into Multiple Copies of Books’ NB This session will be held in the Milstein Lecture Room, University Library, and will start at 5 pm.

5 February — Victoria Mills (University of Cambridge)

‘Travel Writing and Tactile Tourism: The Tauchnitz Edition of The Marble Faun’

19 February — Leslie James (University of Birmingham)

‘Transatlantic Passages: journalistic technique and the construction of a black international in West African and Caribbean colonial newspapers’

All welcome.

A series of three seminars, on Wednesdays at 5pm in GR06/07, Faculty of English, 9 West Road.

This series will discuss the practices and principles of editing nineteenth-century literary works. Hosted jointly by the Centre for Material Texts and the Faculty of English, it includes classes on different types of editions and their specific editorial challenges.

Wednesday 21st January

Some Varieties of Editing

Prof. Dame Gillian Beer (Clare Hall)

Wednesday 4th February

Working with Manuscripts: Examples from W. B. Yeats and Gerard Manley Hopkins

Dr Catherine Phillips (Downing)

Wednesday 18th February

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Poetry: Editing a Variorum Edition

Prof. Nora Crook (Anglia Ruskin)

All welcome.

20 + C + M + B + 15

In many parts of Europe, it is customary to mark houses with specially blessed chalk on the feast of the Epiphany. The exact number of Wise Men who travelled to Bethlehem with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrhh is not specified in biblical accounts, but they are traditionally named Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar. Their initials are chalked above the front door and they can also stand for ‘Christus Mansionem Benedicat’, ‘Christ Bless this House’.

Here is the final exhibit, with thanks to one of our readers: the illuminated leaves showing the beginning of the gospel of John from the eighth-century St Gall Gospel Book (click on the images to see them in more detail). In literary terms, each of the four gospels begins in a different way – but the drama of St John’s meditation on words and the Word must have been especially inspiring for scribes producing such elaborate, precious versions of the scriptures as this.

Images: Gallica, Bibliothèque Nationale de France

This intimidating piece of metalwork is an iron lectern from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, although you would be forgiven for thinking it was five centuries older. An imposing fortress ornamented with shields supports the book-rest, on which the opening of John’s gospel is cast in relief: ‘IN PRINCIPIO VERBUM’. John 1:14 appears around the base of the book-rest, above the battlements: ‘ET VERBUM CARO FACTUM EST’. The other church furnishings in this very eclectic exhibition have been associated with the altar, and the sacrament of the Mass. Here, however, the words from John are integral to a piece of ‘book furniture’, and the reminder that ‘the Word was made flesh’ underlines the words read from any book opened on this lectern.