About Me

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I am Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Glasgow and Theme Leader Fellow for the 'Digital Transformations' strategic theme of the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I tweet as @ajprescott.

This blog is a riff on digital humanities. A riff is a repeated phrase in music, used by analogy to describe a improvisation or commentary. In the 16th century, the word 'riff' meant a rift; Speed describes riffs in the earth shooting out flames. The poet Jeffrey Robinson points out that riff perhaps derives from riffle, to make rough.

Maybe we need to explore these other meanings of riff in thinking about digital humanities, and seek out rough and broken ground in the digital terrain.

13 January 2013

The Deceptions of Data

At Friday's conference organised by the estimable Orietta da Rold at the University of Leicester to mark the launch of the interesting Manuscripts Online project, I was telling a story of a nineteenth-century facsimile of a small late fourteenth-century manuscript in the British Library. The facsimile is a beautiful piece of craftsmanship,...

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11 January 2013

The Function, Structure and Future of Catalogues

This is the text of a keynote lecture to the conference at Leicester University on 11 January 2013 marking the launch of Manuscripts Online: www.manuscriptsonline.org. THE FUNCTION, STRUCTURE AND FUTURE OF CATALOGUES The story of the British Library is full of remarkable personalities.  One of the most striking of...

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