Today the Cambridge Digital Humanities Network gathered to hear a presentation on ‘The Evolution of e-Research’ from Dave De Roure, Professor of e-Research in the Oxford e-Research Centre. Truth to tell, I still feel very much an interloper in the e-Research universe. Or perhaps not so much an interloper as someone lowering himself with trepidation into a freezing cold swimming pool. I’ve not quite adjusted to the idea that the humanities academic is going to be useful in future principally as a miner of data rather than as a reader of books. Nor do I hold out much hope that I’ll be able to learn all the acronyms before they become obsolete, in about three weeks’ time.
Today’s most provocative acronym came courtesy of a project called Structural Analysis of Large Amounts of Music Information, or (yes) SALAMI. The aim of SALAMI was to analyse 23,000 hours of digitized music, breaking it down (or slicing it up) into its constituent elements–intros, verses, choruses, bridge passages and outros (sic) for pop music, more complex categories for classical (‘outros’ become ‘codas’). Quite what the ultimate purpose of the exercise was, or what new research has been made possible by it, was a little unclear, although one can certainly imagine that interesting patterns might emerge over time. There are, though, some important senses in which music is not like salami…
A second musical project to which De Roure drew attention has just been launched by the Bodleian library. What’s the Score? invites any musically-literate person to mark up pages from the library’s collections of mid-Victorian piano sheet music, which have hitherto been uncatalogued. First investigations suggest that it’s quite a fiddly operation. It will be interesting to see whether this latest effort at crowd-sourcing reaps results.
In other news, the website of the Cambridge Digital Humanities Network has just gone live–click here to take a look!
Yesterday the West Road Concert Hall was packed for the libraries@cambridge conference, entitled ‘Blue skies … thinking and working in the cloud’. What will university libraries look like in 2020, 2040, 2060? Will there still be research libraries, or will they have gone the way of the dodo? Will they be operating in a society that looks more like the wild west, a walled garden or a beehive? (Those are among the scenarios for 2050 explored by the ‘Libraries of the Future‘ project). Will they have any books in them, or will they be beautiful light-filled atria full of bean-bags and plasma screens, open to endlessly spatial reconfiguration as users flow through them? Will academics still write books, or will they create online content? Will we need subject librarians if interdisciplinarity and specialization have annihilated the very concept of a subject? These were just some of the questions raised in the first two hours… (Answers on a postcard, please!)
Recent years have witnessed an increasing interest in the study of material culture, a fascination with the ways in which our lives shape and are in turn shaped by physical objects and environments. This theme focuses on the interrelations between the textual and the material, and explores the processes by which texts are produced, circulated and consumed, as objects alongside other objects, or sometimes on or in objects (since the things we live among are often notable for their loquacity).
As soon as academics became aware of the internet, they became excited about the possibilities for new kinds of readerly engagement that it might open up, whether through hypertext editions that would encode multiple versions of variant texts, searchable ebooks that would hugely expedite research, or digital facsimiles that would allow unprecedented access to previously restricted materials. Two decades and many experiments later, it is time to assess how far we have travelled. Is it possible to extrapolate rules for a successful digital edition or curatorial project? What challenges do readers and scholars face in dealing with new technologies, and how might they be overcome? What might curators and editors of films, of music manuscripts, of theatrical ephemera, of cuneiform inscriptions learn from one another? And does the future lie with the increasing capitalization of the digital sphere, or with an efflorescence of open-access initiatives?
This theme focuses on rare book and manuscript libraries—with which Cambridge is unusually blessed—and explores the nature of their relationship with a variety of publics. What purposes will special collections come to serve in the twenty-first century? How might libraries best exhibit their collections and publicize their activities? Do new technologies create fresh possibilities for reaching out both to the academic community and the general public, or do they instead prove a costly distraction from the core business of curating and managing special collections? How might we increase the frequency and scale of academic collaborations with libraries?
Few medieval manuscripts have retained their original binding; fewer still have retained such interesting features as the one visible below. Originally stitched into the spine, this simple leather strip is a material witness to fifteenth-century reading processes. It marks the page and, courtesy of the little numbered rotating paper disc, also reminds the reader to which column of text he should return upon reopening the book.
The manuscript in question – Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton MS 14 – is a fine fifteenth-century copy of Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon, and it once belonged to the community of Carthusian monks at Sheen, on the banks of the Thames. It is the only Polychronicon manuscript I have seen so far with a contemporary bookmark. That these manuscripts usually come with scholarly apparatus designed to aid skim reading and ready reference – alphabetical indices, running book and chapter numbers, and marginal chronologies – suggests that this bookmark cannot have been unique among copies of Higden’s universal chronicle. It is a rare illustration of the union of material and textual book design, and the response of bespoke medieval book producers to the common intellectual needs of their customers.
The bookmark is an element of codicological culture that has been borrowed by digital media and, particularly, the internet (a fact which, ironically, makes Google searching for articles on medieval bookmarks problematic). Nowadays, however, we are exhorted not just to ‘bookmark’ a webpage, but to ‘like’ it too. The once private reminder is being superseded by a public advertisement that disseminates a text through cyberspace (though to a degree ultimately dependent upon one’s privacy settings), and in a format and forum that then invites comment. Similarly, the Kindle e-reader allows e-books to be ‘e-annotated’: through ‘public notes’, marginalia can be shared and exchanged over the internet (though, again, this is limited by a Twitter-style system of ‘following’).
The hermetic life of a Carthusian did not perhaps encourage such discourse, but the frequent annotation in the margins of the manuscript above is suggestive of some level of intellectual exchange, however indirect then or untraceable now. The boundaries of that reading community were circumscribed physically by the cloister walls and materially by the movement of books within. Now, there are – potentially – no boundaries to reading communities. With the advent of e-readers, the anarcho-democratic ethos of the internet is now more closely tied to the book and to the text: freedom in the virtual margins, the power to broadcast, a limitless audience. The capacity of readers of e-books to not just record their thoughts but to disseminate them too may mean that much that was once private thought or evanescent orality is now cached and backed-up, and awaits future students of the ‘reading experience’. The ‘weightless text’ supports a heavier and heavier paratext of commentary, analysis and opinion, informed or not.
Where does authority lie in this digital world, this twenty-first-century Tower of Babel? How is authority constructed and maintained? Can the critic or academic maintain his status in a forum where comment is free – or should he or she even attempt to do so? In a recent article on the ‘patchy’ quality of the Coen brothers’ films, Will Self opined that ‘…the job of a serious cultural critic mostly consists in telling the generality of people that their opinions…simply aren’t up to scratch’. Ironically, the patchiness of Self’s own argument was quickly highlighted on the comments pages by some sharp-eyed readers, some of them no doubt the kind of ‘upper’ or ‘lower-middlebrow’ viewers whose opinions he had disdained so aristocratically. The article presents no critical engagement with specific interpretations or reviews except his own. In targeting ‘the generality’, does it do any more than represent Will Self’s self-will? And is that any more authoritative than the opinions he criticised?
Surely the job of the ‘serious cultural critic’ is to engage with and persuade, not just to tell – but then, perhaps, who is there to tell? The internet gathers together opinions so diverse and diffuse that it may be impossible to address them except in the most general terms. By transcending physical printed media, and by circumventing the complex and often slow publishing infrastructure through which debate has traditionally been channelled, the internet has removed nearly all ‘barriers to entry’ that once monitored or mediated the public sphere. In doing so, it has made available great opportunities for the advancement of knowledge through collaborative endeavour or adversarial dialectic. The internet has facilitated the freedom to comment, and has thus accentuated – though by no means created – a situation in which control over a text rests in no single pair of hands. That command over Scripture Martin Luther sought to reassert in his 1525 pamphlets Admonition to Peace and Against the Rioting Peasants. ‘Every man his own Bible reader’ he had once said, before the rise of heterodox interpretations of the vernacular holy text and the use of scriptural justification in the enactment of social revolution. How will these old issues of authority, interpretation and debate play out in the new age of ‘Every man his own Kindle reader’?
Yesterday I learnt that, if I want to look at a book in the Middle Temple library, I’ll have to pay £30 for the privilege. ‘As a private library, we are forced, by the rules of the Inn, to charge non-members for access’. I immediately started fuming; if every library in the land starts charging for access, a lot of serious research is going to become impossible. But perhaps this is the future, and we’re all going to have to get used to it. Are other libraries already routinely charging their academic users? Are librarians contemplating the introduction of charges, as budgets get squeezed and educational institutions become more and more private?
A painful story. A couple of weeks ago I was invited to take part in a workshop at the Victoria and Albert Museum, drawing on the expertise of staff and students on the V&A/RCA MA in the History of Design. I had pre-circulated an early modern inventory that is central to my current research, and at the start of the workshop I sent round a few pages of a diary/account-book that is another of my key sources. The discussion went quickly in a very intelligent and not entirely unforeseeable direction. Who (I was asked) was supposed to be reading this account book? How was it bound, and what did the binding materials imply about its status? Was this a pre-bound volume into which entries had been written, or a pile of paper that had been bound up after the event? Embarrassed, I had to confess: I hadn’t actually seen this manuscript. I was in Cambridge; the manuscript was in Washington. Obviously, during the course of my research I *would* get my hands on it and answer those important questions, but the time had not yet come.
This was a curious moment for me, partly because it seemed so bizarre (how could I, who had written a whole book about the importance of books as artefacts, have fallen into this trap?) and partly because it made me feel insufficiently jet-setting (other academics in my field must be flying over to Washington once or twice a year, and dropping into the Folger on a whim). But if I’m honest, my motives for not having yet visited my manuscript are partly ecological–I don’t want to cross the Atlantic again until I have a need sufficient to justify (however thinly) my flight. To some, such agonizing will seem absurd, and they should stop reading now. Others may see that there’s a problem here, a problem which is in any case separable from the environmental concern. (How) can we work on a material text when we can’t actually get to it?
One kind of answer to this question might come from the libraries. Our great research libraries enjoy welcoming scholars from overseas, but they could start thinking of more ways to keep them at bay, or to provide a greater range of academic services at a distance. They could offer cheap, watermarked digital images for research purposes, for example, so that the physical properties of the book can be gauged and interpreted; or they could employ in-house bibliographers to answer detailed enquiries about books (including, say, transcriptions of marginalia). Or they could maintain a register of affiliated scholars who would be willing to act as proxies in the investigation of material aspects of a text (for a small fee, or on a tit-for-tat basis). But libraries have a lot on their plates already. We academics could be advertising our research services for ourselves. Is there, somewhere out there on the web, a bulletin board for this purpose?
It’s true, of course, that nothing can substitute for personal engagement with the real thing, and I shall certainly be going to Washington at some point in the near future. But if there’s an early modernist sitting in the Folger who wants to swap an hour or two of research time with me in Cambridge, please drop me a line (jes1003@cam.ac.uk). Who knows, it could be the start of something…
This page showcases recent research from individual members of the Centre, or larger collaborative research projects that are representative of the aims and interests of the CMT. See also our our ‘Gallery’ pages, and our page on CMT research themes.
Blank Forms for Future Applications
Ruth Abbott and Chloe Steele
This collaborative project brings together visual art and the histories of the book and of information to investigate the use of printed forms. It explores what we do when print cues us up to make additions to a piece of paper by hand, historically, theoretically, and creatively. Its subject is the printed form in its most expansive sense, including all papers that are printed on specifically in order to elicit mark-making, from medical forms and attendance registers to feedback forms and presentation labels, and from administrative forms and pocket diaries to account books and colouring books, as well as more minimally printed papers and pamphlets with lines, squares, or letterheads. In contrast to most recent work in the history of media and information, which focuses on blank institutional examples and therefore emphasises the dehumanising and standardising functions of printed forms, the project centres used examples from personal as well as institutional collections. It thereby uncovers habits of creative repurposing and personalising authorship that accompanied the migration of the printed form into domestic life, and in turn influenced its design and employment in institutional environments. These habits are also explored in the project’s creative dimensions, which comprise artistic responses to and on printed forms by the artist Chloe Steele. Rather than being straightforwardly restrictive, the project suggests that the rigid formats of printed forms have generative possibilities in terms of mark-making. It investigates these possibilities creatively as well as historically, seeking to make visual art and academic research work together to think philosophically about aesthetics, book history, life-writing, and the psychology of making a mark.
Generously funded by a Judith E. Wilson Fund Practice-Led Research Award.
For more information see www.chloesteele.com and the current exhibition of Steele’s work in the first floor foyer of the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge.
The exhibition and project will be launched at the Centre for Material Texts research seminar on 28th November 2024 (5pm, Board Room, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge).
Collecting the Early Modern Book World
A collaboration between the Centre for Material Texts (University of Cambridge) and the Literature and Translation Research Group (GRUPO HUM 383, Universidad de Granada)
Between 1512 and his death in 1539, Hernando Colón (1488-1539, natural son of Columbus) set about collecting one of the great libraries of the early modern age. ‘Without being a man of great estate’, one of his contemporaries recorded, ‘he travelled throughout Christendom searching out and bringing together books on all subjects’. At the time of his death the collection boasted around 15000 volumes.
His bibliomania took him across Europe — on a single trip in 1530-1 stopping in (inter alia) Rome, Bologna, Modena, Parma, Turin, Milan, Venice, Padua, Innsbruck, Augsburg, Constance, Basle, Fribourg, Cologne, Maastrich, Antwerp, Paris, Poitiers and Burgos — and his meticulous records of his purchases allow us to trace his spending spree in great detail. Besides his own travels, his collection grew through the volumes sent via an extensive network of factors and correspondents in other Spanish and European cities. Unusually for its time, his library sought to collect printed books — considered by many libraries to be mere novelties — as well as precious manuscripts, expensive folios, and also leaflets of no more than ten pages. He also devised detailed and systematic methods for the classification of his volumes, making him one of the founders of modern bibliography. Colón acquired such expertise in book-purchasing that in his will he recommended the sort of itinerary that a good collector should follow in his endeavours to gather books. In line with the imperial ambitions of Charles V, Hernando Colón declared that his intention was to put together a universal library that would gather not just all the published material in Christianity, but also whatever was available beyond its frontiers.
Colón also played a part in many of the central intellectual currents of the day: educated at the Castilian court by the Italian Humanist Peter Martyr, he also travelled with his father to the New World (1502-1504) where he began a lifelong passion for cartography and for anthropological information—which he promulgated in a biography of his father, the Historia del Almirante. Under the sponsorship of the Spanish monarchy he led a team of experts that compiled the first modern topographical description of the country, the so-called Descripción y cosmografia de España, with its companion Vocabulario topográfico. His cosmographical expertise also made him a valued diplomat, and he served in delegations to Italy and elsewhere to defend Spain’s right to its New World possessions and to assert further possessions to the east, in Persia and Arabia.
The core of his collection survives today, as the Biblioteca Colombina within Seville cathedral, and features a world-class collection of incunabula and manuscripts from the age of discovery and Humanism. For all its bibliographical and historical riches, this collection is scarcely known outside Spain as a resource for studying the material and intellectual culture of a key period in European history.
The fact that the collection was built after Columbus’s success in expanding the scope of the material, religious and economic ambitions of the West, also turns his son’s collection into an excellent case study for the intersection between the processes of colonial expansion and the transformations that the cartography of knowledge was undergoing in the early modern world. In bringing to fruition the transatlantic encounter between the wisdom received from Classical Antiquity, contemporary Western intellectual production and the novelties that kept coming from across the ocean, the whole collection pre-empts Francis Bacon’s call for an expansion of the frontiers of the intellect in his Instauratio Magna a century later: ‘Surely, it would be disgraceful if, while the regions of the material globe—that is, of the earth, of the sea, and of the stars—have been in our times laid widely open and revealed, the intellectual globe should remain shut up within the narrow limit of old discoveries’.
The project, led by Jose Maria Perez Fernandez (Universidad de Granada) and Edward Wilson-Lee (Cambridge), has recently won funding from the Cambridge Humanities Research Grants Scheme to hold workshops in Seville and Cambridge. These workshops will disseminate existing knowledge about the library and its founder, and explore the potential of the collection for answering research questions in areas including book history, travel, knowledge organization, and intellectual networks. Details of these workshops will be posted here shortly.
For a report on the December 2013 workshop on Colón’s library, click here.
National Trust libraries: pilot project at Belton House, Lincolnshire
The National Trust owns and manages over 150 properties in the UK that contain collections of books, the majority still housed in the buildings where they were assembled and read by their original owners. Between forty and fifty of the libraries in National Trust properties have been described as being of ‘major national significance’ (Purcell and Shenton, 2005), constituting an unparalleled resource for the study of the history of private book ownership in the United Kingdom. The process of cataloguing the major libraries is ongoing, and the results are being made available to researchers on the COPAC Catalogue as they become available. This pilot study showcases the research potential of these exciting collections, which form an important part of our national cultural heritage.
The study investigates the place of Italian books in an English great house, Belton House in Lincolnshire. Belton houses the Trust’s second largest library (over 11,000 titles), assembled by successive generations of the Brownlow family, and the collection has now been fully catalogued. 229 works are in Italian, published between 1500 and 1800, across a variety of genres and subjects. Analysis of the Italian holdings will form the basis for two themed workshops. The first, to be hosted by the CMT in Cambridge in the summer of 2012, will explore the curatorship of great house libraries, in discussion with the curators themselves. The second, to be held at Belton early in 2013, will explore the theme of cultural mobility in the early modern library, considering the social, cultural and intellectual histories of continental books in English collections. An exhibition of Italian books will be held at Belton, displaying the connections between book and place for a general audience.
The PI for this project is Abigail Brundin (Department of Italian). The RA is Dunstan Roberts.
For a report on the conference associated with this AHRC-funded pilot project, click here.
& see also the new post on the University’s research pages here.
MINIARE
MINIARE is a new project focusing on the pigment analysis and broad contextual interpretation of illuminated manuscripts. It is a collaboration between the Fitzwilliam Museum, the Hamilton Kerr Institute, and the Departments of Chemistry, History of Art and History and Philosophy of Science. Discussions with other departments across the university’s six schools are under way. The ultimate goal is to create a Cambridge Centre for the comprehensive scientific, artistic and historical analyses of works of art, extending services and advice to educational and art institutions in Cambridge and beyond.
In a world that seems increasingly small, every artefact documenting the history of ancient civilisations has become part of a global heritage that needs to be carefully preserved and studied. Among such artefacts, manuscripts occupy a distinctive place in as much as they speak to us with the actual words of long-gone men and women, bringing back their beliefs, ideas and sensibilities to immediate life. In this respect, the collections of South Asian manuscripts in the Cambridge University Library are a precious resource, so far little known even to specialists. They comprise more than one thousand documents in Sanskrit and other South Asian languages, written in various scripts and on different supports, such as birch-bark, palm-leaf and paper. A small portion of them were catalogued by Cecil Bendall in the late 19th century, but the collections were enriched by new acquisitions until the 1990s. The collections include works of great rarity in different genres and on a host of subjects, from religion and philosophy to astronomy, grammar, law and poetry. Among its treasures are some of the oldest extant manuscripts from South Asia, dating from the last centuries of the first millennium C.E., which were collected in Nepal, virtually the only region of the Indian subcontinent where the climate allows their survival for more than a few centuries.
The project, funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council grant, will carry out an exhaustive survey of the library holdings, gathering all the basic information for each item in keeping with the current international standards for the cataloguing of ancient and medieval manuscript sources. It will collect data on the physical characteristics of the manuscripts, identify untitled works and attempt to date them on the basis of palaeographic and material features, situating them in their broader historical context. By combining traditional philological methods with advanced information technology, it will make these extraordinary documents available in various formats to the scholarly community of Sanskritists and other specialists of South-Asia as well as to the general public. All the findings obtained from the survey of the manuscripts will be collected in an extensive multimedia archive that will be searchable online through the Library’s new online digital library (http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/). A significant portion of the holdings will be digitized, and the images will be linked to the archive records.
In parallel to the survey and cataloguing, we will investigate this wealth of material through a collaborative effort with fellow Sanskritists in the U.K. and abroad, demonstrating the importance of these primary manuscript sources for the history of pre-colonial South Asia. The research findings will be presented through academic journals and other publications, as well as in two international workshops to be organised in the second and third year of the project, focusing on some of the religious and intellectual traditions that have played a key role in the Indian civilisation.
To learn more about the Sanskrit Manuscripts Project, click here. For a report on the recent two-day workshop on Buddhist manuscript culture, click here.
‘Will not these days be by thy poets sung’
An international collaboration exploring the newspaper poetry of the American Civil War
“‘Will not these days be by thy poets sung’: Poems of the Anglo-African and National Anti-Slavery Standard, 1863-1864″ is a path-breaking digital edition of 138 poems that appeared in two New York-based weekly newspapers during a single year of the American Civil War. Co-edited by Dr Rebecca Weir (University of Cambridge) and Dr Elizabeth Lorang (University of Nebraska-Lincoln), the edition is part of the 2013 issue of Scholarly Editing, the open-access journal of the Association for Documentary Editing. It is available at scholarlyediting.org.
‘“Will not these days…”’ emerged out of the recognition of several needs. First, the need to expand our analyses of nineteenth-century American literature and literary culture to include a much broader range of poems, authors, and media. This need extends to including more work by African American writers and women writers, as well as acknowledging the tremendous body of anonymous work which decentralizes the author. Second, the need to recover a more complex poetic record of the Civil War, one which recognizes poetry’s vital role in shaping how Americans experienced the war. Third, the need to situate this poetry in its textual and social environments, so as to enable more fruitful reading and examination of the works.
A host of scholars have articulated these needs, and many have made interventions to begin to meet them. Yet the specific textual environments of poems, the multiple identities of poem-texts, and critical readings that combine analysis of both textual and social environments remain woefully underrepresented. Even collections, essays, and monographs that foreground newspapers and magazines as significant publication environments do little more than offer a description of such periodical contexts. That is, in practice, if not in theory, valuable collections like the print anthology “Words for the Hour” (2005) take too much for granted. What comprises a poem in a newspaper? Are two instances of a poem that share the same words, grammar, and syntax printed in two different newspapers the same text? What role do markers such as “original,” “selected,” “written for the” have for the poem-text? How is a poem defined by its relation with other genres within a newspaper?
The editors approached these questions from different angles in individual research projects leading up to the edition. Dr Weir was uncovering a web of Civil War–era alliances and affiliations between publishers and editors, abolitionist and otherwise, which centred on New York City’s Beekman Street, as part of her research for a book on wartime poetry, reprint pathways, and editorial practice in the Anglo-African, the National Anti-Slavery Standard, and the Christian Recorder. Dr Lorang was developing a data model and database for identifying and representing information about newspaper poems, writing about Civil War poems published in various newspapers, and working on editorial projects for the Walt Whitman Archive (whitmanarchive.org) and Civil War Washington (civilwardc.org). The edition therefore draws on individual strengths and areas of intersection.
The first edition of its kind, ‘”Will not these days. . .'” builds on and extends the emerging scholarship that examines the role and importance of newspapers in nineteenth-century American literature, reevaluates decades-long assumptions about Civil War poetry, and recovers a fuller narrative of American literary history. Further, by working with the Anglo-African, a newspaper produced by African Americans for an African American audience, and the Anti-Slavery Standard, produced largely by white abolitionists for a predominantly white audience, the edition sets out connections between the black press and the white abolitionist press, in response to Eric Gardner’s recent and provocative challenge to scholars that “there has been no in-depth examination of how members of the black press traded copies with each other and with white entities, much less how they borrowed texts from the periodicals they read, an act both physical (tied to clipping and readying a piece to be reset in type) and textual (given the possibilities for revising and framing a clipped piece).”
The project is part of an ongoing collaboration, the next phase of which will concentrate on the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s weekly Christian Recorder.
A resource by Paul Russell, Sharon Arbuthnot, Pádraic Moran, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
The early Irish glossaries Sanas Cormaic (Cormac’s Glossary), O’Mulconry’s Glossary and Dúil Dromma Cetta (the Collection of Druim Cett), as well as the shorter texts Loman and Irsan, are important resources for our understanding of the literary and cultural environment of medieval Ireland. These inter-related texts, compiled from the eighth century, comprise several thousand headwords followed by entries that range from single word explanations to extended narratives running to several pages.
Scriptorium: Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts Online
Scriptorium is a three-year (2006-2009) AHRC-funded Resource Enhancement Project, based in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge, and has recently been completed.
We constructed a digital archive of manuscript miscellanies and commonplace books from the period c. 1450-1720 and our website provides unrestricted public access to these images. We have also developed and published a set of online pedagogical and research resources supporting late medieval and early modern manuscript studies.
The collection features manuscripts from a number of college libraries in Cambridge, as well as the Cambridge University Library, the Brotherton Library in Leeds, and other archives, such as that of Holkham Hall in Norfolk.
We have also hosted three conferences: one-day workshops in online manuscript research in July 2007 and 2009, and a larger, two-day conference in manuscript studies in 2008. Proceedings from this conference were published in English Manuscript Studies 16 (2011): click here for more details.
