tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-88566978059933191852024-03-13T08:17:40.064-07:00Digital RiffsAndrew Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07861908988990764618noreply@blogger.comBlogger40125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8856697805993319185.post-78298236551180464792015-11-16T11:51:00.000-08:002015-11-16T11:51:32.695-08:00Help Save the British Records Association<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="letter-spacing: -0.003em;">One of the distinctive features of many London squares and terraces are the black metal stubs on house walls and steps, where metal fences were cut down to provide scrap metal to make weapons during the Second World War. In his recent fascinating book, </span><em class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="-webkit-font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1; letter-spacing: -0.003em;">Waste into Weapons: Recycling in Britain during the Second World War </em><span style="letter-spacing: -0.003em;">(Cambridge University Press), Peter Thorsheim describes how these recycling drives affected many other materials, including paper and books. Paper was an important ingredient in such wartime products as land mines, bullet cartridges, shipping containers, radios and of course propaganda and information posters. The demand for paper was immense throughout the war.</span></div>
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Thorsheim reports how in September 1941, Princess Elizabeth (the future Queen Elizabeth II) made a broadcast congratulating the people of Britain for contributing 400,000 tons of waste paper to the war effort, but she explained that more was needed: ‘Tucked away in our bookshelves and cupboards and offices there are masses of books, magazines, old business records, and papers of every sort laid by in case they may be wanted some day. That day has come! Your country wants them now. Keep your family Bible of course and anything of historical or special value; but from the rest you can each contribute your special share of the ship loads that these old books and papers would save’. (Thorsheim, pp. 184–5).</div>
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Officials were keen to help out by identifying waste paper in official archives. Local councils were urged to release for repulping all papers and books which it was not necessary to retain. Sir William Davison MP noted the ‘vast accumulation of ancient files of papers’ held by government departments and declared that wartime provided a perfect chance to get rid of all this useless clutter. Despite injunctions not to destroy material of historical significance, many financial records created by the East India Company were pulped. In deciding to recycle all correspondence of their Education department over ten years old, Aberdeen Council decided specifically to ignore any historical interest of this material. Surrey County Council proposed to pulp most of its papers and documents which were more than three years old. The destruction was not limited to public authorities. In January 1941, <em class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="-webkit-font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">The Times </em>cleared nineteen tons of ledgers and other business records from its offices. (Thorsheim, p. 186). In 1942, King George VI donated to a waste drive more than a ton of waste paper, consisting of a ‘large consignment of old books and manuscripts from the royal library’. The drive to recycle every scrap of paper was so intense that it was even suggested that blank endpapers should be cut from books. (Thorsheim, p. 184).</div>
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Thorsheim suggests that the destruction caused to Britain’s libraries and archives by these salvage paper drives was worse than that caused by enemy action. Voices of protest were raised. The bookseller W. Foyle lamented that ‘many priceless, rare and irreplaceable books’ were being destroyed, and described how recently he had identified in material sent for waste ‘a perfect copy of von Gerning’s <em class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="-webkit-font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">Tours along the Rhine</em> with colour plates by Ackermann together with other fine books’. The archivist Joan Wake said the destruction of records was being undertaken with a Teutonic thoroughness, stating that ‘If English history does not matter, all this destruction does not matter in the least and the sooner we boil down the Domesday Book to make glue for aeroplanes the better’ (Thorsheim, p. 182).</div>
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Joan Wake was speaking at a meeting of the <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://www.britishrecordsassociation.org.uk" href="http://www.britishrecordsassociation.org.uk/" rel="nofollow" style="background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 22px; background-repeat: repeat no-repeat; background-size: 2px; text-decoration: none;">British Records Association</a>, which took the lead in trying to minimise the damage to historic archives caused by the wartime paper drives. The British Records Association had been founded in 1932 and took over work on records preservation which had been begun by the British Records Society three years previously. Changes in legislation concerning land tenure meant that solicitors no longer needed to retain many deeds and other records relating to property, and there was a risk that much of this material would simply be destroyed. The Records Preservation Section of the British Records Association offered a free service for appraising and sorting such records. This work has continued to the present day, and hundreds and hundreds of endangered records and historic papers have been saved by the work of the British Records Association during this time.</div>
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Much of this early rescue work by the British Records Association was undertaken by volunteers and historically the British Records Association has always been an inclusive body welcoming as members anyone interested in archives. While the Sociey of Archivists (now the <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://www.archives.org.uk" href="http://www.archives.org.uk/" rel="nofollow" style="background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 22px; background-repeat: repeat no-repeat; background-size: 2px; text-decoration: none;">Archives and Records Association</a>)has taken the lead in the UK in professionalising the management of archives and in representing the interests ofv archivists as a profession, it has always been the British Records Association which has represented everyone with an interest in archives, such as owners of records, university scholars, family and local historians, and local councillors. Apart from its records preservation work, the British Records Association organises a well-supported conference, publishes an excellent journal <em class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="-webkit-font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">Archives</em>(recently spasmodic in appearance, but about to issue a chunky double issue) and produced a very useful series of handbooks called <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://www.britishrecordsassociation.org.uk/product-category/publications/" href="http://www.britishrecordsassociation.org.uk/product-category/publications/" rel="nofollow" style="background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 22px; background-repeat: repeat no-repeat; background-size: 2px; text-decoration: none;"><em class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="-webkit-font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">Archives and the User</em></a><em class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="-webkit-font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;"> </em>which includes such indispensable introductory volumes as Paul Harvey on <em class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="-webkit-font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">Manorial Records</em>, Elizabeth New on <em class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="-webkit-font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">Seals and Sealing Practices</em>and Nat Alcock on <em class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="-webkit-font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">Sources for the History of Houses</em>.</div>
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I was Treasurer of the British Records Association for ten years from 1984 to 1994, and I was immensely saddened to hear that it is currently proposed that the Archives and Records Association should take over the British Records Association. It is suggested that there is a need for a single voice to speak for archives. I fear I don’t agree. The ARA was established as a professional association and it is still dominated by professional concerns. Unlike the British Records Association, the ARA is not open to anyone interested in archives — only working archivists can become full members, but others can only become affiliate members.</div>
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Can we be sure that professional archivists will indeed speak out on key issues affecting archives nowadays? To my mind, our modern equivalent of the risk from the wartime waste paper drives is the digitisation and effective commercialisation of vast swathes of public archives by companies such as Ancestry and Findmypast. Professional archivists, anxious to demonstrate that their archives are fully up-to-date and go ahead, are often complicit in this process and enthusiastically sign up with Findmypast and others, somehow believing they are increasing access. We need a body that is distinct from the archival profession to speak out and act on such matters. The British Records Association could be such a body, as it was during the Second World War.</div>
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When I visit any archive nowadays, it is full of family historians who are clearly enjoying their engagement with the records and would be keen to help preserve records and make them more widely available. The nature and significance of the archive is a fashionble research subject among a wide range of literary and historical scholars in the wake of Derrida’s and Foucault’s speculations on the matter. Archives as institutions seem more vibrant than ever. Surely there is scope for an inclusive, outward-looking advocate for archives which seeks to develop as wide a membership base as possible?</div>
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I am not convinced that the ARA, bowed down with the pressing professional concerns that affect many archivists, can grow into such a body. The BRA could become such a body, but it will need to stop resting on its wartime laurels, and take some hard decisions. It will need to become a low subscription, high membership body (as it was in the 1930s). It will need to become a less London-focussed and more regionally based body. It should become a prominent voice of UK archives on social media (there is no such voice at present) and should forge links with other constituencies, such as the digital humanities). It should create an innovative open access journal to replace <em class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="-webkit-font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">Archives</em>. Its handbooks coulds be freely available on the web.</div>
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While digital media have made it easier than ever to engage with archives, paradoxically the archives community seems to be becoming more inward-looking and less willing to engage with the full range of those who are interested in and enthusiastic with archives. Help change that by saving the British Records Association.</div>
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The acting chair of the British Records Association, Julia Sheppard, sent this message to the H-Albion list earlier this month which explains how you can help:</div>
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“The British Records Association brings together in equal partnership, all those with an interest in archives and their use, to explore and highlight their value to the research and wider community and the importance of their preservation. The membership consists almost equally of individuals and institutions, and includes historians, historical and research groups and institutions, custodians, and owners of archives. The BRA provides a forum for direct dialogue between its members to promote the use of archives, as evidenced by its highly successful annual conference. -the next ‘In a League of their Own’, is on 26 November <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://www.britishrecordsassociation.org.uk/events/annual-conference-26-november-2015/" href="http://www.britishrecordsassociation.org.uk/events/annual-conference-26-november-2015/" rel="nofollow" style="background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 22px; background-repeat: repeat no-repeat; background-size: 2px; text-decoration: none;">http://www.britishrecordsassociation.org.uk/events/annual-conference-26-november-2015/</a> . It also plays a vital role in raising the profile of archives through its publications, including the authoritative journal, <em class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="-webkit-font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">Archives</em>.</div>
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There is now the threat of a take-over by the Archives and Records Association (ARA). Following a Council meeting, a proposal to abolish the organisation and transfer its functions and assets to the ARA is to be put to an Extraordinary General Meeting on 18 November. A group of concerned members believe this action is not in the best interests of the BRA or of the wider research community.</div>
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The BRA has the membership, ability and finances to continue to be a viable and useful body. Members now face a vote which could bring an end an organisation which has existed since 1932 and deprive the research and archives sector of an important independent voice.</div>
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If you are a member and have not received papers, please contact the BRA Office Manager at <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="mailto:info@britishrecordsassociation.org.uk" href="mailto:info@britishrecordsassociation.org.uk" style="background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 22px; background-repeat: repeat no-repeat; background-size: 2px; text-decoration: none;">info@britishrecordsassociation.org.uk</a>. Please contact me at <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="mailto:mail@joolsonline.co.uk" href="mailto:mail@joolsonline.co.uk" style="background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%); background-position: 0px 22px; background-repeat: repeat no-repeat; background-size: 2px; text-decoration: none;">mail@joolsonline.co.uk</a>, if you would like more information.”</div>
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So — if you are a member of the British Records Association, come along on Wednesday at 2pm at Swedenborg Hall in London and make your views known.</div>
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If you are not a member of the British Records Association, but would be interested in joining a revived and reformed BRA, please write to me or to Julia Sheppard.</div>
Andrew Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07861908988990764618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8856697805993319185.post-30173866769174141072015-09-24T14:35:00.000-07:002015-09-24T14:44:00.255-07:00Acts of Reading, Redux<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 11px;">
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<i>Contribution to a panel at a British Library 'Digital Conversation', 24 September 2015</i><br />
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Six months ago, at Bronwen Thomas’s suggestion, I submitted a guest entry to the blog of the Digital Reading Network, which I called ‘<a href="http://www.digitalreadingnetwork.com/my-acts-of-reading-professor-andrew-prescott-ahrc-leadership-fellow-for-digital-transformations/" target="_blank">My Acts of Reading</a>’. In the entry, I tried to describe my relationship at different points of my life with reading. The importance of reading as a social and cultural activity is illustrated by the way in which so many of our memories are bound up with it. I am sure many of us remember our parents reading to us or the excitement of first gradually mastering how to decipher a book. One of my most vivid memories of Christmas is of a bitterly cold day in the 1960s - opening my presents, finding a book there, and going back to the warmth of my bed to read the book. For most of us, reading is bound up with our very personality. By changing the nature of our engagement with reading and writing, digital technologies are transforming some of the most fundamental and distinctive features of human behaviour.</div>
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Another vivid reading memory is from 1993, when I was shown the World Wide Web for the first time by Tim Hadlow, the remarkable Systems Administrator here in the British Library. The way in which the web combined text and image in new configurations made it obvious that here was something that was going to change much of my intellectual and cultural world. I was very pleased to be part of the team which, under the leadership of another remarkable librarian, Graham Jefcoate, helped put together the British Library’s first website ‘Portico’. I became involved in a number of projects for digitisation of manuscripts, particularly the <i>Electronic Beowulf. </i>In those early years, digital images and text were a specialist tool that one used at work for formal research. This began to change as JSTOR arrived and more academic journals became available online. From about 2000, I began to notice how more and more of my reading was taking place online and increasingly this online activity was not just simply at work. The point, in about 2006, when printed newspapers became a weekend indulgence was a significant landmark. </div>
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However, I held out for a long time against reading books online. Although one of the strategies I adopted as a librarian at Lampeter in west Wales to deal with high levels of student demand for particular books was to buy e-books, for my own reading, both academic and leisure, I tended to prefer an old-fashioned printed book, notwithstanding many friends urging the virtues of a kindle upon me. The change occurred for me last year when I was reading <a href="http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300119107" target="_blank">Mark Ormrod’s monumental biography of Edward III</a>. Mark’s book is a wonderful piece of historical writing, but Edward III lived for a very long time and this biography is a very big book. Carrying the large book around was beginning to give me a backache. I really couldn’t face carrying the printed volume around any more, and purchased the e-book to read on my ipad. It was a revelation. I found I got much more pleasure from reading the e-book than from reading the printed volume. This wasn’t simply due to the convenience and simplicity of the e-book - something about the backlighting of the text and the physical nature of the tablet seemed to encourage me to read more. My reading became rebooted.</div>
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So, my blog entry for Bronwen describing my late conversion to e-books was six months ago. How have things changed? Do I still feel that the e-book has transformed my acts of reading? </div>
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Certainly, my e-reading enthusiasm continues unabated. My home is in a remote part of west Wales, but the rural buses have recently installed wi-fi, and it is wonderful that, if I finish my book during a bus ride, I can download another. But I suppose, after six months, I do have other more critical reflections on my e-reading.</div>
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1. There are limits to my e-reading. I described in my original blog how I find I still need to transcribe medieval documents if I am to use them effectively in my research. For my leisure reading, I find that poetry still seems for me to work better in print - maybe because like whisky it needs to be sipped. </div>
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2. Although most of my everyday reading is now electronic, my academic research is mixed medium. Some of the books are use aren’t available digitally, but the biggest barrier to my more extended use of e-books in research is that academic books are so tremendously expensive, no matter whether they are printed or electronic, so any extended research means consulting books in a library. Although librarians have been experimenting with e-books for many years now, we still have not worked out how to best make e-books available. Our e-book collection to Lampeter was always very cumbersome to use, and the digital rights management in packages like Adobe Digital Editions makes the borrowing of e-books very fiddly. We need an academic book equivalent of iPlayer, which would enable me to be able to borrow academic books as easily as I can download a biography from Amazon on my Welsh bus. </div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">3. Likewise, I find it frustrating that I can’t so easily share books I am enthusiastic about with my friends if the books are in electronic form. Amazon has a mechanism for lending e-books to friends, but I must admit I haven’t yet used it, and not all my friends are as keen on e-reading as I am. </span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">4. Although older books are readily available in electronic form through the Internet archive or Project Gutenberg, I must say that since I became an e-reading convert, I think I read many more recently published books - not necessarily a good thing, I think. </span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">However, much as I enjoy my e-reading, I am increasingly struck by how </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">un</i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">transformative it is. I use my phone or tablet very happily for activities I did before using a variety of devices: listening to the radio, checking e-mail, watching movies, hearing music, taking photographs, reading. But I don’t use my phone for anything that I </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">didn’t</i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> do before.</span></div>
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This leads to my final reflection. Pleased though I am with e-books, they are very boring products. You just get an html presentation of the book’s text. The illustrations are tucked away at the end - there aren’t even any hyperlinks from the text to the illustrations. I recently bought an e-book in which the illustrations are left out. But part of the exciting thing about the digital medium is the opportunity to have much more richly illustrated texts. When I read about medieval manuscripts I want lots of pictures of them. But, all too often, my e-book is just bare text - the Thames and Hudson paperback on <i>The Medieval Papacy</i> that I bought in 1974 was much more richly illustrated than my e-book.</div>
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One of my dystopian fears for our digital future is that it will turn out to be populated by pdfs of journal articles. All the potential richness of the digital medium will have been ignored in favour of producing homogenised factory production line scholarship. And, while I retain my e-book enthusiasm, what I want is more books like that being currently produced by Tim Hitchcock and Bob Shoemaker, based on their work on the Old Bailey Proceedings, which will allow the reader access to the records and documents on which the book is based. I understand that the production process for this book has been difficult and protracted, but it is precisely the possibility of presenting books in a different way that makes a digital environment exciting, and I hope that the future of e-books will be more media rich and varied than the plain and frankly crude html wrappers with which we are presented at the moment.Andrew Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07861908988990764618noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8856697805993319185.post-28665218203787112042015-09-06T12:01:00.002-07:002015-09-06T12:01:59.443-07:00Big Data: Some Historical Perspectives<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<em class="markup--em markup--p-em">This was a contribution to a plenary panel at the </em><a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://www.epip2015.org" href="http://www.epip2015.org/"><em class="markup--em markup--p-em">European Policy on Intellectual Property</em></a><em class="markup--em markup--p-em"> conference organised by </em><a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://www.create.ac.uk" href="http://www.create.ac.uk/"><em class="markup--em markup--p-em">CREATe</em></a><em class="markup--em markup--p-em"> at the University of Glasgow in September 2015. In the nature of a short contribution to a panel on a wider theme, it barely scratches the surface of the possibilities implied i the title, but here it is for the record. </em></div>
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It is already very evident from our discussions here that a distinctive feature of research into intellectual property is the emphasis on historical understanding. Petra Moser’s keynote yesterday was a wonderful illustration of how intellectual property researchers find historical data which has a wider cultural significance and is more than simply a lab for exploring different models of access. It may seem that, since big data is meant to present issues of scale and potential that we haven’t encountered before, historical perspectives won’t be particularly helpful. What I want to suggest here that we perhaps need to widen our historical terms of reference, and not restrict ourselves to precise historical precedents and analogies. </div>
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Sometimes, big data requires big history (although we should also be aware of the <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://historyonics.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/big-data-small-data-and-meaning_9.html" href="http://historyonics.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/big-data-small-data-and-meaning_9.html">caveat of Tim Hitchcock about the dangers of thinking exclusively on a large scale</a> — we need both microscope and macroscope).</div>
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Let’s go back a long way, to 1086, when William the Conqueror, who had won the English crown at the Battle of Hastings twenty years previously, gave orders that a detailed survey should be undertaken of his English dominions. The Anglo-Saxon chronicle described how William sent his men to every county to enquire who held what land. The chronicler was horrified by the amount of information William collected: ‘So very thoroughly did he have the inquiry carried out that there was not a single hide, not one virgate of land, not even — it is shameful to record it, but it did not seem shameful for him to do — not even one ox, nor one cow, nor one pig which escaped notice in his survey’. Collating all this information required William’s clerks to develop innovative data processing techniques, as they prepared a series of summaries of the data, eventually reducing it to two stout volumes. The motives of William in collecting this information are still debated by historians, but the data was immediately put to use in royal courts and tax collection. Within a short period of time, this eleventh-century experiment in big data had become known as Domesday Book — the book of the day of judgement, from which there is no appeal — just as there can today be no appeal from the algorithms that might be used to set our insurance policy or credit rating.</div>
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Domesday Book was the first English public record and is a forcible reminder that anxieties about government data collection are nothing new. 2015 marks the anniversary of the grant of another celebrated English public document, Magna Carta. King John is remembered as the tyrant forced to grant Magna Carta at Runnymede, but his reign was also important because many of the major series of records recording government business began in his reign. John’s reign saw an upsurge in the use of technologies of writing and mathematics in the business of government. One important thread in the Magna Carta story is that it was both a reaction to, and at the same time an expression of, this growth in new technologies of government. It’s intriguing that Tim Berners-Lee and others have called for a Magna Carta for the world wide web to address issues of privacy and openness. There are a number of problems with this. One is, of course, that Magna Carta is linked to a common law system — it hasn’t even been adopted by the whole of Britain, as Scotland with its roman law system has always had a semi-detached relationship with Magna Carta. The other is that granting that the embedding of Magna Carta in English political life was a complex process, spread over several centuries and involving two civil wars.</div>
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In considering the issues of governance, ethics and identity posed by big data, this kind of longue durée approach can be very helpful. Jon Agar’s wonderful book, <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/government-machine" href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/government-machine"><em class="markup--em markup--p-em">The Government Machine: A Revolutionary History of the Computer</em></a> describes how the conception of the modern computer was influenced by the type of administrative processes developed by government bureaucracies in the nineteenth century which sought to distinguish between high level analytical policy work and routine mechanical clerical labour. Charles Babbage’s work was a sophisticated expressions of this nineteenth-century urge to identify and mechanise the routine. Closely linked to this urge to mechanise government was a concern, in the wake of the industrial revolution and the growth of population, to gather as much statistical information as possible about the enormous changes taking place. In a way, data can be seen as an expression of modernity. Another key big data moment was the 1890 United States census when the huge quantity of data necessitated the use of automatically sorted punch cards to analyse the information. Jon Agar vividly describes the achievements of this analogue computing and the rise of IBM. His account of the debates surrounding the national registration schemes introduced in wartime and the anxieties about linking these to for example employment or health records illustrate how our current concerns have long antecedents.</div>
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However, I think looking at big data concerns in this way does more than simply remind us that there is nothing new under the sun. It is also helpful in clarifying what is distinctive about recent developments and in identifying areas which should be policy priorities. First is the ubiquity of data. </div>
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For governments from the eleventh to the twentieth century, data was something gathered with enormous clerical and administrative effort which had to be carefully curated and safeguarded. Data like that recorded in Domesday Book or records of land grants was one of the primary assets of pre-modern governments. Only large organisations such as governments or railroad companies had the resources to process this precious data — indeed one of the changes that is very evident is the shift in processing power, and perhaps we should be talking more about big processing rather than big data. Data was used in order to govern and was integral to the political compact. Now data is ubiquitous and comparatively cheap to acquire and process, this framework of trust no longer applies. Moreover, the types of organisations deploying data have changed. In particular, it is noticeable that the driving forces behind the development of big data methods have frequently been commercial and retail organisations: not only Google and Amazon, but also large insurance, financial and healthcare corporations. This is a contrast to earlier developments, both analogue and digital, where governments have been prominent and private sector involvement more limited.</div>
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The <em class="markup--em markup--p-em">Oxford English Dictionary </em>draws a distinction between the term big data as applied to the size of datasets and big data referring to particular computational methods, most notably predictive analytics. Predictive analytics poses very powerful social and cultural challenges, especially as more and more personal data such as whole genome sequences becomes cheaper and more widely available. How far can your body be covered by existing concepts of privacy? And is the likely future path of your health, career and life a matter of purely personal concern? In many ways, it is this idea of prediction which most forcibly challenges many of our most cherished social and cultural assumptions. Predicitive policing — an early contact by the police with people considered likely to commit crimes — is already being tested in some American cities. Predictivity almost dissolves privacy because it shifts the way in which we look at freedom of choice. It starts to become irrelevant as to what my reading or music choices are if they can be readily predicted from publicly available data. How we cope with a society in which many of our actions can be predicted is one of the chief challenges posed by big data. As my colleague Barry Smith, from the AHRC’s Science in Culture theme, has emphasised, the neuroscience surrounding predictivity — the way in which the brain copes with this predictivity — will become a fundamental area of research. As predictive analytics shades into machine learning, these questions will become even more complex, since we will start to see the distinction described by Agar between analytic work and routine labour breaking down in large organisations, posing major social and cultural challenges.</div>
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Finally, it is worth noting that generally the most important large data sets (censuses, tax records) have been about people, but increasingly big data will become about things. For example, machine tools frequently have sensors attached to them which enable the state of the tools to be monitored remotely by the manufacturer. This might encourage the manufacturer to monitor use of their products by clients in ways that could have commercial implications. The monitoring of medical implants will raise even more complex issues. A hint of the kind of complications that these developments might raise was given in the concurrence of Justice Alitto in the US Supreme court judgement in US v Jones 2012, which concerned the use of GPS tracking devices by police. Struggling to imagine how the framers of the US constitution would have viewed such devices, and imagined the analogy of ‘a case in which a constable secreted himself somewhere in a coach and remained there for a period of time in order to monitor the movements of the coach’s owner’.</div>
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For the Anglo-Saxon chronicle complaining about Domesday Book, the objects of the king’s greed were evident: land and animals; our future anxieties may be very different because our chief anxiety may be about objects linked to us in much more distant and complex ways.</div>
<br />Andrew Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07861908988990764618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8856697805993319185.post-73938527392329881842015-07-26T11:14:00.000-07:002015-07-26T11:14:20.976-07:00Digital Humanities and the Future<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>This was a talk I gave at the University of Sussex on 20 November 2013. Parts of it are now out of date (for example, there is now a lot more to say about the REF as far as the intellectual direction of DH in the UK is concerned), but other sections are perhaps useful, so it may be worth sharing by means of this late blogging. The illustration shows the Banksy mural 'No Future Girl Balloon' which appeared on a house in Southampton in 2010 but was painted over shortly afterwards.</i><br />
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Talking about the future is always a rash endeavour. <a href="http://www.uky.edu/~kiernan/DL/chuck.html" target="_blank">Charles Henry has described</a> how in 1876 an article in the journal <i>Nature</i> envisaged the value of the telephone chiefly as a new form of home entertainment. It was anticipated that Alexander Graham Bell’s invention would ‘at a distance, repeat on one or more pianos the air played by a similar instrument at the point of departure. There is a possibility here...of a curious use of electricity. When we are going to have a dancing party, there will be no need to provide a musician. By paying a subscription to an enterprising individual who will, no doubt, come forward to work this vein, we can have from him a waltz, a quadrille, or a gallop, just as we desire. Simply turn a bell handle, as we do the cock of a water or gas pipe and we shall be supplied with what we want. Perhaps our children may find the thing simple enough’. While this is interesting as an anticipation of streamed music, as a discussion of future of the telephone, it was wide of the mark.<br />
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Dreams of the future frequently drive the way technology develops. H.G. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Brain" target="_blank">Wells’s dream of a ‘World Brain’</a>, described by him in a lecture in 1936, reflected his own intellectual preoccupation with synthesis and the search for grand narratives rather than any technical possibilities. Yet Wells’s interest in whether microfilm could be used to develop such a world brain inspired subsequent researchers to experiment with new technologies as they appeared, and influenced Arthur C Clarke when he proposed in 1962 a world library powered by supercomputers. At the recent Digital Economy conference at Media City in Salford, a BBC speaker showed a video describing a vision of future communications technology enunciated by Captain Peter Eckersley, the first Chief Engineer of the BBC, in 1926. The vision described by Eckersley in 1926 for television and pervasive media eerily prefigured the kind of technologies which are only just now, nearly a century later, appearing in a domestic context. When this video was shown, a member of the audience remarked that in a way the video was a condemnation of the BBC, since it suggested that it had not developed its engineering vision since 1926, and had for nearly hundred years been relentlessly pursuing the realization of the dreams of its first chief engineer. Regardless of how we view this criticism, the examples of Eckersley’s 1926 vision and of Wells’s dream of a world brain illustrate forcefully how the most important driver in technological development can be the human imagination and dreams of a future state.<br />
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For the digital humanities, part of its promise is always the claim that is on the side of the future. The digital native will effortlessly succeed the clumsy digital immigrant, and so technology will pervade all aspects of humanities research. This assumption of the inevitable triumph of digital technology underpins some of the most strident claims made on behalf of digital humanities in recent years. Digital humanities has been claimed as ‘the next big thing’ on the intellectual landscape, the successor to the critical theory which has dominated since the 1950s. In 2009, William Pannapacker wrote, after the MLA Convention, that ‘Among all the contending subfields, the digital humanities seem like the first "next big thing" in a long time, because the implications of digital technology affect every field’. Pannapacker continued: ‘I think we are now realizing that resistance is futile. One convention attendee complained that this MLA seems more like a conference on technology than one on literature’. These assumptions of the inevitable triumph of the digital humanities have fed into a visionary discourse of DH which, stressing its interdisciplinary and collaborative aspirations, sees it as a means of renewing and transforming the academic practice of the arts and humanities. Mark Sampler has famously commented that ‘The digital humanities should not be about the digital at all. It’s all about innovation and disruption. The digital humanities is really an insurgent humanities’. Likewise the Digital Humanities Manifesto declared that: ‘the Digital Humanities revolution promotes a fundamental reshaping of the research and teaching landscape’.<br />
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This visionary discourse around DH has been immaculately documented and analysed by Patrik Svensson. The way in which the rhetoric of DH frequently becomes suffused with the ‘technological sublime’ has also been emphasized by <a href="http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/content/28/4/629.abstract" target="_blank">Paul Gooding. Melissa Terras and Claire Warwick in a recent article</a>. As Patrik Svensson stresses, much of this rhetoric is not so much a comment on the possibilities of digital technologies but rather using the idea of a digital humanities as a springboard for a debate about the nature of the humanities. Digital humanities has become for some scholars a field in which we can reimagine the humanities, perhaps without reference to the digital at all. Yet there still remains a strong techno-optimistic thread within the digital humanities and an assumption that its time will inevitably come. Patrik Svensson points out how these assumptions echo the theme of the ‘proximate future’ discussed by Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell in their remarkable book, <i><a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/divining-digital-future" target="_blank">Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing</a></i>. Dourish and Bell emphasise how governments, corporations and institutions portray the future as a technological utopia which is always just around the corner, and never here.<br />
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The commercial and political benefits of this constant claim that we are on the verge of a technological utopia are obvious. A good example of the power of the idea of the proximate future is Singapore, where the government seeks to create ‘a global city, universally recognized as an enviable synthesis of technology, infrastructure, enterprise and manpower [with a] new freedom to connect, innovate, personalize and create’. Dourish and Bell emphasise the disconnect between this digital freedom and restrictions on human rights in Singapore, and suggest that this promise of jam tomorrow helps bolster these restrictions. Rhetoric of the proximate future, in the view of Dourish and Bell, has obscured the fact that the future is already here; technological trends identified and developed in units like the Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre twenty or thirty years ago have moved into everyday life and have effected profound transformations on every aspect of our existence. No doubt changes will continue and we will still see many remarkable innovations, but the digital future arrived sometime ago, and it would be better for us to start examining and using more closely what is around us. In talking about digital transformations, we are talking about a process which is current and all around us, not about the future.<br />
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I am a child of Harold Wilson’s white heat of technological revolution. I must admit that listening for fifty years to speeches advising me that technology is about to unleash a revolution unprecedented in human history is a little wearing and jangling on the nerves. In expectation of the coming technological revolution, I was taught in the 1960s a new type of mathematics which required me to learn to use a slide rule and to perform arithmetic with binary numbers. Although I am now a professor of digital humanities, and have had quite a bit to do with computing, I have never since had to perform calculations with binary numbers. However, the fact that somehow the new mathematics left me with a lack of understanding of a number of fundamental mathematical concepts (although I scraped an O level pass) has left me feeling disadvantaged as we start to think about new quantitative techniques in various humanities subjects. I fear that the myth of the proximate future has damaged me. If we see the aim of digital humanities as simply being to promote the use of technology in studying arts and humanities subjects, then I suspect that the claim that we are constantly moving towards a new technological revolution has also been unhelpful. The way in which digital humanities is engaged with promulgating this myth of a proximate utopia is apparent from the way in which the subject constantly reinvents and renames itself: from humanities computing to digital humanities, and now e-science, e-research, web science, digital studies, digital culture.<br />
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At one level, in accordance with Alan Liu’s <i>Laws of Cool</i>, it is perhaps necessary and unavoidable for digital humanities to propagate the myth of the proximate future. At another, this vacuous myth-making may do digital humanities a disservice. A colleague in America recently forwarded to me a remark by a history undergraduate writing a long essay on ‘digital history’, who wrote that: ‘The digital humanities, of which digital history is a subset, is scary because there is no definition of what is meant by the term. Real historians fear its lack of cohesion’. I’m not sure that is necessarily an argument for a tight definition of DH, but it does suggest that the rhetoric might obscure the substance, and be off-putting to precisely the audiences we should be seeking to enthuse.<br />
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Are we overcomplicating DH? I fear so. Let’s return to our roots. In Britain, a key moment in the development of digital humanities took place on the banks of Loch Lomond in September 1996. A meeting was held at the Buchanan Arms Hotel entitled ‘Defining Humanities Computing’. Attending the meeting were representatives of three leading universities which had been involved in the Computers in Teaching Initiative established in Britain in the early 1990s. Many of the names are familiar still: from King’s, Harold Short, Willard McCarty and Marilyn Deegan; from Glasgow, Christian Kay, Jean Anderson and Ann Gow; from Oxford, Stuart Lee, Mike Popham and Mike Fraser. It’s perhaps the nearest thing to a digital humanities summit meeting that has ever taken place in Britain. Among the questions were debated were:<br />
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<li>How should we define Humanities Computing theoretically or pragmatically in terms of current practice? </li>
<li>Where does humanities computing fit within institutions of higher education? How will computing integrate into standard humanities courses? </li>
<li>What should research in humanities computing be about? </li>
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These are questions that are still as pressing as they were twenty years ago, and I fear we still lack cogent answers. It is fair to say that the deliberations on the banks of Loch Lomond were even then heated. For some, computing was something which facilitated and supported academic research, and the role of humanities computing specialists was analogous to that of lab technicians. For others, particularly Willard McCarty, who has been the most persistent and forceful advocate of this view in Britain, it is a field of intellectual endeavour and investigation on a par with more widely recognized academic disciplines such as history, classics or media studies.<br />
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In the course of the discussions in Scotland, Willard drafted the following definition of the field as he saw it then:<br />
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‘HUMANITIES COMPUTING is an academic field concerned with the application of computing tools to humanities and arts data or their use in the creation of these data. It is methodological in nature and interdisciplinary in scope. It works at the intersection of computing with the other disciplines and focuses both on the pragmatic issues of how computing assists scholarship and teaching in these disciplines, and on the theoretical problems of shift in perspective brought about by computing. It seeks to define the common ground of techniques and approaches to data, and how scholarly processes may be understood and mechanised. It studies the sociology of knowledge as this is affected by computing as well as the fundamental cognitive problem of how we know what we know.'<br />
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'Within the institution, humanities computing is manifested in teaching, research, and service. The subject itself is taught, as well as its particular application to another discipline at the invitation of the home department. Practitioners of humanities computing conduct their own research as well as participate by invitation in the projects of others. They take as a basic responsibility collegial service, assisting colleagues in their work and collaborating with them in the training of students.' <br />
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This is a beautifully crafted working definition, which would apply as much to the digital humanities today as to the humanities computing of 1996 (an updated version, supplied by Willard, is <a href="http://digitrans.tumblr.com/post/69165814842/defining-the-digital-humanities" target="_blank">available here</a>) . The clarity of the definition, however, brings to the forefront a number of issues. The simplicity of the insistence that humanities computing is about using technology in humanities scholarship is important. But in 1996, there was still an air of reticence and passivity about this activity. Could computers model and mechanise what scholars did? The focus is on replicating existing scholarly practice in a digital environment. The idea that computers might create new types of scholarship is implicit here, but not actually stated. Likewise, it is assumed that intellectual disciplines are equated to the administrative structures of universities. Disciplines equal departments, it is suggested, and humanities computing only intervenes (in a collegial fashion) at the request of the home department.<br />
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Most of those attending the Loch Lomond event were not members of the academic staff of their respective universities. Most worked in information services or in libraries, in what were in those days in Britain called ‘academic related’ posts. Intellectually and in terms of their academic expertise, these pioneers of humanities computing were without doubt the equals of those in full academic posts. Part of the reason for the meeting at Loch Lomond was to try and create a co-ordinated approach to the anomalous position created by the fact that many of those who were pioneering the use of humanities computing were not themselves academics. Curiously, as far as the UK is concerned, the position of scholars and researchers who do not hold formal academic posts has got worse rather than better. The category of ‘academic-related’ post has been abolished, and Britain has misguidedly emulated North America in insisting in a distinction between academics and professional services staff, who often have significantly poorer career conditions than academic staff. Too often in this process, digital humanities work has been regarded as more appropriate to the professional services. We may trace this diminution in the status of digital humanities practitioners to that very reticence which states that we model the practices and requirements of academics. We shouldn’t. We should be challenging the way in which academic research is conducted, and disrupting cosy disciplinary assumptions. Instead of documenting and modelling what historians have done for generations, we need to show how it could be done differently.<br />
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In essence, we use computers at present to undertake humanities research more quickly, conveniently and cheaply. This reflects the way in which all those engaged in developing the infrastructure underpinning humanities research have sought to try and replicate in a more mechanized environment existing scholarly practice. Very few scholars have tried to break out of these existing models – one such is with us here this evening, Tim Hitchcock. But one Old Bailey exemplar cannot a revolution make. The way in which our digital landscape replicates the older print scholarship reflects the lack of confidence among practitioners of digital humanities in challenging older structures of scholarship and their unwillingness to build really new structures. It is striking how digital projects are often bound by the very old-fashioned structure of the edition. While I was working at King’s College London, much of the Department of Digital Humanities research was about building for individual scholars digital editions of canonical materials (rarely something unfamiliar) ranging from Ben Jonson and Jane Austen to calendars of historical documents. Even in the major prosopographical datasets produced at King’s – some of the most intriguing and potentially transformational work undertaken within the digital humanities – the data is safely locked away behind a web interface which makes the data almost as intractable as if it was printed.<br />
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It is difficult to escape the impression that digital methods have hitherto chiefly been used as a means of trying to restore dying and endangered forms of editorial scholarship. A good illustration of this is the calendar. This was from the nineteenth century a major means of publishing archival records for historians. Printed volumes contained short and thoroughly indexed summaries of historical record series. The vast size of the record series justified the production of summaries – even in the abridged form the printed volumes represented a huge series. For many areas of historical research, the calendar was the essential tool and the first step in primary research. But they wee enormously expensive to produce and printing costs became increasingly prohibitive. In a desperate attempt to keep the small trickle of calendars flowing, Roy Hunnisett of the Public Record Office produced in 1977 a guide to record publication which gave rules for the preparation of calendars. This is fascinating as a document of late print culture. Hunnisett’s rules are dominated by the need to reduce printing costs and at almost every point are shaped by what was proved to be a doomed method of publishing records.<br />
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As a historian whose research has been facilitated by series such as the Calendar of Patent Rolls or the Calendar of Close Rolls, I applaud enthusiastically the digital revival of this movement for giving access to archival records. But the historians who have led these projects have generally found it difficult to re-imagine how a calendar might operate in a digital environment. What we have is what Her Majesty’s Stationery Office were doing in 1910, with the additional facility of some images of the records. This problem is exemplified by the way in which Hunnisett’s rules, formulated for print, are still used as the editorial basis of the online calendars, although many of the compromises Hunnisett was forced to make were intended solely to reduce printing costs, and thus do not apply in a digital environment. So, how might we imagine a calendar in an online environment? The concept of a calendar assumes that summaries are the only way to explore the vast quatities of information in archival record series. If we accept that assumption of extracting and abridging historical records as a reasonable way of proceeding, then we could think about different strategies and structures for summarizing these records. We could start to produce a variety of more summary tables of information in particular records which could then be displayed and linked in different configurations.<br />
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Instead of the standard and restricted chronological structure of the calendar, we could establish open data repositories containing tables summarizing different aspects of the records, linked to images to facilitate verification. I have for many years worked on the records of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and it was an interest in editing these that first really drew me in to digital humanities work. I have recently stated to experiment with preparing and sharing data relating to the revolt in this way and I think it has some exciting possibilities. The concept of nanopublications – scholarly statements reduced to their smallest possible component and expressed as RDF triplets – might be relevant here, with archival resources being represented by vast linked groups of nanopublications. But this poses many challenges – I would regard my work on the Peasants Revolt as my most important scholarly work. I think I have now reached the stage where I would be happy for it to become a large number of digital tables which I share with whoever is interested – losing in the process a lot of the traditional sense of authorship, ownership and acknowledgement – but it’s taken me a long time to reach that stage, and for many younger scholars this poses profound challenges in terms of careers and academic profile.<br />
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The online calendar stands as an indictment of our timorous approach to existing scholarship in developing the digital humanities. I think it will be clear that, while I enthusiastically subscribe to the view that arts and humanities scholarship should deeply engage with the new technological possibilities and facilities which are all around us, I don’t take the view that the triumph of digital humanities is inevitable. In my most dystopian moments, I fear that the kind of creative engagement humanities scholars have had in recent years with digital technology will in future become more difficult as the digital world becomes increasingly commercialized and locked down. In the UK, it’s worth looking at the awful thing, the Research Excellence Framework (probably the most striking example of academic newspeak I have yet encountered – even worse than examples from Soviet bloc universities in the Stalinist era). The REF defines the status of particular types of academic activity in the UK as strongly as the tenure process in North America. Unlike the tenure process, research assessment in the UK has always gone out of its way to accommodate interdisciplinary research and new forms of electronic communication. In the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise, digital humanities formed part of the panel dealing with Library and Information Management, and DH units did very well. King’s College London, although only its first time in the exercise in this subject, came joint top of the unit of assessment, and in Glasgow the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute was the leading Scottish institution. In order to reduce the breathtaking and grotesque costs of the REF, it was decided to create larger panels this time, so library and information science has been joined with cultural and media studies to form one large panel. Although the rubric for this panel mentions DH, there is no recognized DH specialist on the panel, although organisations like ADHO made nominations. The rules of the exercise have been changed to exclude many research staff as well as working librarians, archivists and information specialists. In some cases, joint DH-Cultural Studies submissions have been necessary. Of course, we don’t know yet what outcome of the REF will be (true in November 2013, but of course we now have the results, and I have offered <a href="http://Are the Arts and Humanities More Digital than the Sciences?" target="_blank">some preliminary reflections on them here</a>), but I think we can already say that, if REF defines the research landscape in the UK, digital humanities does not figure very prominently on it.<br />
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Many of the issues about the future of the digital humanities can be traced back to concerns evident in Willard’s definition from Loch Lomond. The Loch Lomond meeting was very much of its time, in the assumption that a small group of enthusiasts from just three universities could shape approaches as to how digital technology would be integrated into arts and humanities provision of British higher education. The 1990s was characterized by a kind of gold rush, in which individuals and groups felt that they could annex parts of the digital future. A couple of medievalists might hope to shape the digital future of medieval studies by establishing a portal; others sought to control future editorial practice by developing appropriate guidelines. This was analogue thinking par excellence but this mentality of seeking to become recognized as the ‘Mr Digits’ of certain aspects of scholarly activity is still I think evident. And this is true of the digital humanities. Bodies like the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations make digital technologies seem safe, familiar, comfortable and (above all) controllable. Much of our literature (such as Melissa Terras’s remarkable and compelling keynote at DH 2010) assumes that, in the arts and humanities, the digital equates to the formally constituted bodies in ADHO. This is clearly wrong, and dangerous. One only needs look to HASTAC, which has been far more successful than ADHO in attracting young and digitally committed faculty across a variety of disciplines and interests to see the danger in clinging to the structures of forty years ago. But it goes much, much further. As humanities computing pursued research funding, and sought to model itself on scientific research institutes, it forgot about pedagogy. As a result the Association of Learning Technologists sprang up, which is just as large and active as ADHO, but there appears little contact between them. Likewise, other areas, such as museums and archives, have pursued their own digital paths, with only patchy contact with DH. As a community DH is singularly ill prepared to deal with the digital becoming mainstream. Having spent many years predicting that everyone will absorb digital techniques, we are very uncertain what to do when that actually happens, and we become very small cogs in a huge machine. The growth of areas of academic study like digital culture, web science and digital studies illustrate the issues – these are the digital achieving recognition from mainstream academia, and those in the DH community aren’t sure how to accommodate this, no matter how wide we make the tent.<br />
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This leads to the argument which was my starting point in thinking about this talk, namely that the digital humanities are inherently time-limited and must inevitably disappear. This assumes that, once the tools developed by DH have passed into common use, DH will have done its job, and ceases to have a purpose. Once the humanities become digital, there is no further use for the digital humanities. This argument has recently been clearly expressed by Peter Webster of the British Library in a post on ‘<a href="http://peterwebster.me/2013/05/10/where-should-the-digital-humanities-live/" target="_blank">Where Should the Digital Humanities Live</a>?’ Peter wrote: ‘The end game for a Faculty of DH should be that the use of the tools becomes so integrated within Classics, French and Theology that it can be disbanded, having done its job. DH isn’t a discipline; it’s a cluster of new techniques that give rise to new questions; but they are still questions of History, or Philosophy, or Classics; and it is in those spaces that the integration needs eventually to take place’. At one level, this might be an argument that DH should then be more primarily critical, but I think it ignores the extent to which our engagement with digital technology is a continuum. John Naughton has noted how the humanities is the only area which refers to ‘the digital’ in this way. At one level, it reflects an assumption that ‘the digital’ is in some way alien; at another, it assumes that ‘the digital’ represents a series of techniques which came to maturity with the appearance of the World Wide Web in the mid 1990s (it is that has led David Berry and others to suggest that we can talk of the ‘post-Digital’). I think it is an oversimplification however to see that apotheosis of the 1990s as a single transformational moment which we are in the process of coming to terms with. They were part of a continuum of transformation which in my view reaches back to the Industrial Revolution. We know how to make digital editions of classical texts, but how can the new technologies of making help us study the classical period? What use is the internet of things to classicists (a lot, I would say). What about born digital data – something which could be fitted into Willard’s Loch Lomond definition, but wasn’t apparently at the forefront of thinking at that time. In short, it is clear that there are many new technologies and new science coming along which will also offer manifold opportunities and challenges to the humanities. The role of the digital humanities is not to continue to crank up the digital photocopier, but rather to explore these innovations and consider how they enable us to engage with the subject areas of the humanities in fresh ways. In order to achieve this – and ensure their own future – digital humanities practitioners need to take more of an intellectual lead in creating projects.Andrew Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07861908988990764618noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8856697805993319185.post-29957060945887916042015-06-13T11:57:00.001-07:002015-06-13T11:57:29.838-07:00The Origin and Context of the Salisbury Magna Carta<h4 class="normal" style="font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px; margin: 0px; position: relative;">
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<b>THE ORIGIN AND CONTEXT OF THE SALISBURY MAGNA CARTA</b></h2>
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<i>Elaine Treharne (Stanford University) and </i></div>
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This short article, to be expanded for journal publication later this year, presents a discussion of all four surviving versions of the 1215 Magna Carta. It argues that the Salisbury Magna Carta (<i>S</i>) was written not by a centralised administration, but, rather, by a Salisbury scribe working in and for the institution. By analysing the hands in other certain Salisbury (or Old Sarum) manuscripts and documents, particularly <i>The Register of St Osmund</i> (<i>c</i>. 1220), we suggest that similarities between hands in that book and the hand of <i>S </i>show such distinctive shared characteristics as to intimate the Salisbury origin of the Magna Carta. This calls into question scholarly understanding of the methods of dissemination of major administrative texts in the High Middle Ages.</div>
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<b>The 1215 Engrossments of Magna Carta</b></h4>
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Among the highlights of the 800th anniversary celebrations of King John’s grant of Magna Carta was an event at the British Library from 2-4 February 2015 at which the four surviving 1215 engrossments of Magna Carta were brought together for the first time since 1215 (and perhaps the first time ever). This facilitated a detailed comparison of the documents as part of the major <a href="http://magnacarta.cmp.uea.ac.uk/" style="color: #550100; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Magna Carta project</a> funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and directed by Professor Nicholas Vincent of the University of East Anglia and Professor David Carpenter of King’s College, London. The photographs of this ‘unification event’ illustrate how each of the 1215 engrossments differ in size and shape. One of the benefits of the ‘unification event’ is that <a href="http://www.bl.uk/press-releases/2015/february/four-original-surviving-magna-carta-manuscripts-are-brought-together-for-the-first-time" style="color: #550100; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">good quality digital images of each of the 1215 engrossments</a> have been placed in the public domain on the British Library website, facilitating closer study. They remind us how each engrossment has its own distinctive features. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption">BL, Cotton Charter xiii.31a (<i style="font-size: 12px;">Cii</i>)<br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px;"><span style="font-family: Arial; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">London, British Library, Cotton Charter xiii.31a (</span><i style="line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">Ci</i><span style="font-family: Arial; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">), which Professor Carpenter has recently shown was in the archives of Canterbury Cathedral in the 1290s</span><span style="font-family: Arial; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">, is the only engrossment with a Great Seal of King John attached, although the document is badly damaged as a result of incompetent nineteenth-century restoration work following fire damage in 1731. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">The seal in <i>Ci</i> is attached by a vellum tag, which an engraving by John Pine in 1733 suggests was originally in a different position and threaded through a fold at the foot of the document (Collins 1948: 270-1). Presumably the seal was reattached when <i>Ci</i> was ‘restored’ by a British Museum bookbinder named Hogarth in 1836 (Prescott 1997). This seal is now dark red/brown in colour, which suggests it is of white wax, varnished brown. Chaplais observes that by the early thirteenth century, charters 'were normally sealed with the great seal in green wax (cera viridis) appended on twisted or plaited cords of silk strands (usually of two colours, red and green being the most common combination)’ (1971: 15). Chaplais notes a few examples of charters sealed in white wax appended with a tag and adds ‘By the early part of the thirteenth century sealing in white wax was generally reserved for great-seal documents of ephemeral or temporary value’ (1971: 15). The sealing of this engrossment is anomalous, and the possibility cannot be ruled out that the seal was fixed or added to this document when it was acquired for Sir Robert Cotton, but in the present state of this document this is impossible to establish.</span></div>
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The 1215 engrossment which is now London, British Library, Cotton Augustus ii.106 (<i>Cii</i>), is the only one of these four documents in landscape format, but, as Collins emphasized, this document appears to have been heavily cropped when it was bound up for Sir Robert Cotton in a large volume of charters.<br />
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<i>Cii</i> was reported as still being bound up with all the other charters in Augustus ii in 1810 (Collins 1948: 272) and this huge volume was eventually disbound in 1834 to reduce the damage that was being caused to the documents contained in it (Prescott 1997: 406-7). It has been assumed that the three slits at the bottom of <i>Cii</i> were for seals (Breay and Harrison 2015: 67), but Collins (1948: 272) points out that the slits may have been made when the document was cropped and bound into a volume which seems the most likely explanation, a conclusion supported by Carpenter (2015:14). David Casley stated that <i>Ci</i> and <i>Cii</i> were in the same hand. Recent multispectral imaging of <i>Ci</i> may assist in verifying or otherwise Casley’s claim. </div>
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Although the seal in the Lincoln engrossment (<i>L</i>) is now missing, the three holes in a triangular arrangement through a fold at the foot of <i>L</i> indicate that the sealing practice in the case of this document followed that described by Chaplais as normal for early thirteenth-century charters; namely, a seal appended on twisted or plaited cords of silk strands. Unlike <i>Ci</i> and <i>Cii</i>, the twelve-fold folding of the charter is still evident, and on two of the folds is an endorsement, ‘<i>Lincolnia</i>’, in a hand which is apparently the same as that of the text of the charter.<i> L</i> also bears thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Lincoln pressmarks and appears in the Lincoln <i>Registrum</i> of about 1330. As Collins (1948: 265) remarked, ‘There is hardly a peradventure about the pedigree of <i>L</i>’ and there seems little doubt that this is one of the two engrossments of Magna Carta recorded as being dispatched to the Bishop of Lincoln on 24 June 1215 (Rowlands 2009: 1426). </div>
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Despite misguided experiments with steam cleaning by Sir Hilary Jenkinson (Vincent 2010: 7), <i>L </i>preserves diplomatic features which accident and misguided conservation treatment have compromised in the other engrossments. Given that it is also the engrossment with the best attested provenance, it is surprising that it has usually been the 1215 engrossment which has been sent abroad, including a loss-making trip to Australia in 1988, which helped precipitate <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/blue-murder-in-the-cathedral-at-lincoln-a-war-between-priests-long-and-poisonous-as-lady-howe-advises-on-what-cathedrals-are-for-andrew-brown-revisits-the-battleground-1442942.html" style="color: #550100; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">a major dispute within Lincoln cathedral</a><a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/blue-murder-in-the-cathedral-at-lincoln-a-war-between-priests-long-and-poisonous-as-lady-howe-advises-on-what-cathedrals-are-for-andrew-brown-revisits-the-battleground-1442942.html" style="color: #550100; text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc;"></span></a>. The catalogue to the current British Library exhibition describes how <i>L</i> became stuck in America during the Second World War when it was exhibited at the British Pavilion of the New York World Fair and attempts were made by the British government to give <i>L</i> to the American people to encourage the American public to support Britain during the war (Breay and Harrison 2015: 246-9). A suggestion that one of the British Museum copies be given to Lincoln Cathedral to make up for the loss prompted Arthur Jefferies Collins to threaten to resign from the British Museum (ex info M.A.F. Borrie).</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Salisbury Magna Carta (S)</td></tr>
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Of the four 1215 engrossments of Magna Carta, however, the one whose appearance differs most obviously from the others is that in the Salisbury Cathedral archives (<i>S</i>), since it is the only one not in a documentary hand. As Sir James Holt comments: ‘The other three are plainly in a Chancery hand; S not so - not, at least, until the scribe of S is discovered at work in other Chancery documents. His hand is too “bookish”’ (Holt 2015: 374). Collins (1948: 270 n. 3) is even more trenchant: ‘Just as the text of S is inferior to that of the other exemplars, so its script is the least convincing. To my eye it rather suggests a date a decade or so later than 1215 and smacks of an ecclesiastical scriptorium. It seems to me to be similar in type (but earlier than) the hand of the charter of the Dean and Chapter of Salisbury of 1244 in the British Museum, Add. Ch. 7500’. However, Collins noted that Charles Johnson and Hilary Jenkinson, two leading authorities on documentary script, would not rule out the possibility that <i>S</i> was written in the royal chancery in 1215, and Collins emphasized the variability of scripts in later reissues of Magna Carta.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Detail from Salisbury Magna Carta (S)</td></tr>
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Nevertheless, doubt as to whether <i>S</i> was written in the royal chancery has constantly recurred. Claire Breay notes that 'The Salisbury Magna Carta does differ from the others in that it was not written in the hand of a scribe of the royal chancery. This may mean that it was produced by its recipient and presented for authorization under the Great Seal, but its text is as authentic as the other three (Breay 2002:37). In 1981, Daphne Stroud mounted a sustained criticism of the authenticity of <i>S</i>. She wrote that ‘Both in text and script S is the odd man out of the four manuscripts. It is written in the careful and dignified script employed at this period for copying books, not in the business hand normally used for Chancery documents in which Ci, Cii and L are written. It also has more textual variations than the other three’ (Stroud 1981: 51). Stroud noted that it had been assumed that tear at the foot of the document was thought to have been caused by a seal being ripped off but observed: ‘This is a reasonable assumption provided it can be established on other grounds that the document is in all probability genuine, but the M-gap does not by itself constitute proof that S once carried the Great Seal of King John’ (Stroud 1981: 52). Neither Wiltshire nor Salisbury were mentioned in the list on the dorse of patent rolls for the distribution of the writ for the publication of Magna Carta or in the schedule of charters issued. Stroud argued that the chancery never issued a writ or charter for Wiltshire and she proposed that <i>S</i> was not a chancery engrossment of Magna Carta, but a copy made by Elias Dereham, the steward of Stephen Langton who was later a resident canon of Salisbury. Elias took delivery of six engrossments of Magna Carta at Oxford on 22 July 1215 and had ample opportunity to make a copy of the document for his own use in order to preserve the terms of the original grant in the face of the more conservative reissues in 1216 and 1217. Although Stroud admitted that ‘we shall probably never know for certain how, when or why <i>S</i> came to Salisbury’, she suggested that one possibility was that ‘in later years, when the cause of the Charter was won and Elias himself was living quietly at Salisbury with the new cathedral rising under his direction, he still kept his copy of the Runnymede document as a tangible memorial to those few weeks in the summer of 1215 when he played a vital role in the most stirring political event of his time’ (Stroud 1981: 57).</div>
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Daphne Stroud’s article prompted a magisterial review of the issues surrounding <i>S </i>in 1982 by Sir James Holt (1985: 259-64). Holt suggested that the clerical errors in <i>S </i>were within the limits acceptable for a scribe writing such a lengthy document. He felt that Collins’s suggestion that the document might date from the 1220s was over-optimistic about the precision with which scripts can be dated. On the other hand, he felt that Daphne Stroud was being excessively rigid in implying that there was a single business hand for chancery documents and that book hands were not used. Holt stressed the variability of scribal practice evident in royal instruments and noted that, in any case, special measures might have been taken in the unusual circumstances of the summer of 1215 and the royal chancery might have drafted in external scribal assistance. Holt pointed out that the tear at the foot of <i>S</i> was in just the right place if <span style="font-size: 11pt;">it was the seal was attached by silk strands threaded through holes arranged in an inverted triangle or M-shape, a less common method of appending the seal than the arrangement in <i>L</i>, but nevertheless an arrangement occasionally used</span> (although one might expect a fold here if this sealing practice was used<i></i>; Collins 1948: 271 suggests the fold was trimmed off after the loss of the seal). </div>
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Above all, Holt examined the evidence of the <a href="http://www.bl.uk/magna-carta/articles/consequences-of-magna-carta" style="color: #550100; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">dispatch list of writs and charters.</a> Holt highlighted the distinction between the dispatch list for the writs, where the concern was to ensure that the sheriffs of every county were ordered to swear to the Twenty Five and that enquiries into abuses were begun, and the list of charters issued, which was less comprehensive. Holt argued that the list only notes those writs not sent to the sheriff by royal messengers and suggests that Wiltshire does not appear in the list because the writ been sent through normal channels, a conclusion subsequently endorsed by Ivor Rowlands (2009) in his detailed analysis. In the case of the list of charters on the dorse of the patent roll, the omission of Wiltshire is less surprising because only thirteen charters are listed (one for each of the dioceses with bishops in place, suggests Rowlands). Holt also noted that it would be unlikely that the university graduate Elias Dereham, if he was the scribe, would have made the mistake of preferring the future indicative to the more correct present subjunctive.</div>
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Emily Naish, the archivist of Salisbury Cathedral, has recently made the important discovery that there is a copy of the text of <i>S</i> on ff. 5v-7v of the Salisbury Cathedral cartulary, ‘Liber Evidentiarum C’, compiled before 1284 (Carpenter 2015b). This shows that <i>S </i>has been at Salisbury since the thirteenth century and probably explains the endorsement, read by Collins as ‘Dupplicata’ on <i>S </i>(see Carpenter 2015b, too), which also appears on a number of other Salisbury documents and doubtless indicated that they had been copied into the register. While there has been discussion of the dating of <i>S</i>, there has been no attempt to localize the hand, although Collins hinted that it might be a Salisbury hand in referring to London, British Library, Add. Ch. 7500. Further examination of known Salisbury hands in the first decades of the thirteenth century, though, does indeed seem to strongly indicate that <i>S</i> was written by a scribe from Salisbury Cathedral (or, rather, its pre-1220 institutional precursor at Old Sarum). Moreover, the Salisbury Magna Carta hand is both entirely commensurate with other hands datable to <i>c</i>.1215, and exemplifies that book-hand could be used alongside charter hand within a single institutional context. </div>
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<b>The hand and palaeographical context of <i>S</i></b></h4>
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The hand of <i>S </i>can be compared, in the first instance, with other contemporary documents, including London, British Library, Additional MS. 4838, <i>The Articles of the Barons</i>, issued in 1215 (as well as with the three other 1215 Magna Carta engrossments, of course). Additional MS. 4838 is digitally available at the British Library website (<a href="http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=add_ms_4838_f001r" style="color: #550100; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=add_ms_4838_f001r</a>). It is written in a legible, cursive charter hand, with its slightly backward-looking aspect; and a duct illustrating typical thicker ascenders and curvilinear strokes. Many ascenders are looped and descenders of <i>p</i> and <i>q</i> are tapered, curving slightly to the left. The final foot of <i>m </i>and <i>h </i>often extends below the line. Scribal characteristics include a single-compartment <i>a</i>, as well as double-compartment <i>a </i>with an enlarged bow; <i>d</i> is round-backed; the tongue of <i>e </i>is elongated in final position; <i>g</i>, notably, has a closed, or almost-closed, tail which extends in a loop from the right of the downstroke; the downstroke of <i>r </i>sits on, or descends slightly below, the line. Both long <i>s</i> and a loosely-formed round <i>s</i>, arguably akin to Derolez’s ‘trailing s’, occur. The latter, in particular is important. The lower left limb of <i>x </i>extends under the line and flicks to the right. Ligatures include the 2-shaped <i>r </i>in <i>or </i>combination; <i>ct </i>where the ligature is formed from the top of <i>t</i>’s shaft extending and curving down towards the <i>c </i>on the left. Biting letters include the common <i>d</i>+<i>e</i>, and <i>p</i>+<i>p</i>. Other noteworthy characteristics include the crossed Tironian <i>nota</i>; barred capitals (such as <i>B</i>, <i>C</i>, <i>G</i>, <i>N</i>, <i>O</i>, <i>P</i>, <i>Q</i>); the flat-topped form of suprascript <i>a</i> used to denote abbreviations like <i>qua</i>- or –<i>ra-</i>; and the dashed double <i>i</i>.</div>
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By contrast to this charter hand, and as noted by all scholars who have worked on the four 1215 Magna Carta versions, Salisbury’s charter is written in a mostly textura hand rather than a diplomatic hand. It is available in a rather odd yellowy digital simulacrum here: <<a href="http://www.bl.uk/britishlibrary/~/media/bl/global/pressrelease/2015/february/magna-carta-1215-salisbury-cathedral.jpg" style="color: #550100; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">http://www.bl.uk/britishlibrary/~/media/bl/global/pressrelease/2015/february/magna-carta-1215-salisbury-cathedral.jpg</a>>. There is far less currency than one might expect from a documentary text; its formality is demonstrated in its upright aspect and general restraint. The duct suggests a pen angle of about 30’, and letters are formed with significant consistency. Ascenders are usually tagged or slightly wedged to the left; descenders are short and occasionally finish with a small tick to the right. Significant scribal characteristics include the persistent use of double-compartment <i>a</i>, sometimes<i> </i>with an enlarged bow in final position (‘Carta’, line 5; ‘custodia’) or initial position (line 9 ‘<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 21.466665267944336px;">a</span>liquid’, line 14); <i>d</i> is round-backed with a curve to the right at the end of the ascender, or straight-backed with a finish of equal floreation; the tongue of <i>e </i>is very slightly elongated in final position. The letter <i>g</i> takes a variety of forms and is one of the most important characteristics of this hand: it is either relatively small with an equal sized closed tail and bowl (‘maritagium’, line 14—a typical book-hand type); or, also as in book-hand, it has a closed tail which is angular on the left (line 13, ‘exiget’); or, and most frequently and notably, the tail finishes with a flourish, which loops under the tail-end and sweeps up to the bowl (line 4, ‘Burgo’; line 7, ‘Regni’). The downstroke of <i>r </i>sits on the line, as in textura hands. Occasionally, and, again, interestingly, a small majuscule <i>r</i> occurs, most often in front of variant forms of ‘<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 15.333332061767578px;">R</span>ex’, but also in ‘<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 15.333332061767578px;">R</span>elevium’ (line 8). A slightly later manuscript, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, 275, a composite manuscript that has a thirteenth-century <i>Life of Thomas Becket</i> inserted between later texts (it is <i>c</i>. 1230, given that it’s written below top line), also shows this feature, such as at folio 233aR/11 and 12, ‘<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 15.333332061767578px;">R</span>egis’ (and elsewhere, including in medial position where it is ligatured with a [‘ba<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 15.333332061767578px;">R</span>onia’, f. 233bV, line 25]). Of this form, Derolez (2003:91) comments ‘The majuscule r (R) occasionally present in Praegothica is found much more rarely in Textualis, except in a few early English manuscripts’. He gives an unillustrated example in his footnote 80 of a manuscript, dated pre-1201. It is likely, given the evidence presented here, that this feature is found rather later than Derolez suspects.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 16px;">CCCC 275, f. 233aR/11, 12</span></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 16px;">Forms of </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 15.333332061767578px;">R in Salisbury M</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 16px;">agna Carta</span></td></tr>
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In Salisbury’s Magna Carta, both long <i>s</i> and a loosely-formed round <i>s </i>(perhaps ‘trailing s’) occur. The latter, in particular is important, too, and occurs in many charter hands in this period. The lower left limb of x curves under the preceding letter. Ligatures include the 2-shaped <i>r </i>in <i>or </i>combination; a characteristic form of the crossed 2-shaped <i>r</i>, indicating –<i>orum </i>(line 5, ‘<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 21.466665267944336px;">a</span>liorum’); and <i>ct </i>where the ligature is formed from by a curved stroke extending from the top of c’s bow to the top of <i>t</i>. Biting letters include the common <i>d</i>+<i>e</i>, <i>b</i>+<i>b</i>,<i>d</i>+<i>d</i>,<i> </i>and <i>p</i>+<i>p</i>. Other noteworthy characteristics include the usually crossed Tironian <i>nota</i>, which sit on the line, together with the occasional uncrossed version (lines 5 and 6 ‘7 heredibus’ and ‘7 Barones’ demonstrate each respectively); barred capitals (such as <i>B</i>, <i>C</i>, <i>F, G</i>, <i>H</i>, <i>M, N</i>, <i>O</i>, <i>P</i>, <i>Q</i>); the open-topped form of suprascript <i>a</i> predominantly used to denote abbreviations like <i>qua</i>- or –<i>ra </i>(‘quam’, line 6; ‘libras’, line 8. This seems to be a consistently earlier practice than the flat-topped version of the mark.); the dashed double <i>i</i>; and a consistently curved abbreviation stroke. One final infrequent scribal practice in this text is the conjoining of enlarged <i>a</i><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 21.466665267944336px;"> </span>and round-backed <i>d</i>, where the back of <i>d</i> crosses through the bow of <i>a</i>, as in the image below. This is a feature most commonly witnessed in charter hands.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 16px;">Conjoined 'ad' in Magna Carta </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 16px;">S</i></td></tr>
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There is far more one could say, but this collection of data, taken <i>in toto</i>, is sufficient to build a strong case for the production of <i>S</i>, the Salisbury Magna Carta, by a Salisbury scribe, as we shall demonstrate. A number of comparanda exist to support this claim, among them the existence of multiple Salisbury scribes writing in manuscripts and diplomata that are, and always have been, <i>in situ </i>in the archive that created them. Some of these are closely datable, but, of those I [ET] have examined quickly, most postdate the 1215 date postulated for the Magna Carta. Thus, for example, a small number of membrane slips containing the signed oaths of obedience to Salisbury’s bishop by abbots and abbesses provide approximately dateable writing associated with the institution. These illustrate hands confirming the obedience of Claricia, abbess of the Cistercian abbey of Tarrant in 1228; her successor, Emelina (before 1240); and Richard I of Reading in 1238, among others. Still, together with multiple charters, writs, and other diplomata extant from all aspects of the Salisbury chapter’s business, individual scribal characteristics can be discerned that permit a comprehensive description of script and textual production from the twelfth century to the Reformation (to be published in Treharne 2018). For the earlier thirteenth century, it is perhaps little surprise to learn that a wide variety of hands is exemplified in the corpus of diplomata from high grade book hands to those demonstrating the influence of court hand or evincing considerable currency or lack of calligraphic proficiency. In one remarkable volume, these variable scribal performances are gathered altogether as a witness to the diversity of scribal habits and competencies. More to the point here, these hands offer strong evidence supporting the localization and thus the origin of <i>S </i>to Salisbury itself.</div>
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<b>Registering Rules and Records</b></h4>
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Such a finding emerges from the evidence suggested by a comparison of palaeographical characteristics between <i>S </i>and certain scribes of <i>The Register of St Osmund</i>, now housed in Salisbury Cathedral Archive (see <a href="http://www.sarumcustomary.org.uk/exploring/PDF_files/1%20OCO/OCO-L.pdf" style="color: #550100; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">http://www.sarumcustomary.org.uk/exploring/PDF_files/1%20OCO/OCO-L.pdf</a>). This <i>Register</i>, until recently deposited in the Wiltshire County Record Office, is generally dated to<i> c</i>. 1220, presumably because that is the date of the foundation of the new cathedral building at Salisbury. It may, of course, have been begun slightly earlier in readiness for the move from Old Sarum to the present site, since the volume contains the fullest extant text of Osmund’s Consuetudinary, including descriptions of the roles of the cathedral’s major officers and liturgical rites. It seems likely that the <i>Register</i> was compiled and maintained as both guide to the organizational practices of the cathedral and as a repository of the privileges, liberties and possessions of the institution. Following the Consuetudinary, the volume becomes, effectively, a cartulary with many documents added as the thirteenth century progressed. Taking stock in this way during the years of planning and implementing the move--a move initiated by Richard Poore, bishop of Salisbury 1217 to 1228, and granted in 1219 by papal indulgence--made absolute sense to ensure a secure record intended for the cathedral’s reference and archive.<br />
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The earliest scribe in the <i>Register</i> copied the opening folios containing the Statutes and Regulations of the cathedral. His is a book-hand of greater formality than that associated with Salisbury’s Magna Carta.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Register of St Osmund, pp. ii-iii</td></tr>
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Consistent with other textura of the period, the aspect is generally upright, though sometimes rather backward-tilting; the ascenders and descenders generally compact (and often lacking the flourish seen in S); the pen-angle about 30’. Two-compartment a predominates, and the occasional enlarged a makes a few appearances; straight-backed and round-backed d are used; the small 8-shaped g is most common. Like S, and many other examples, the left limb of x swoops under the preceding letter. There are frequent, but not ubiquitous barred majuscule forms. These increase in number as the manuscript’s earliest scribe works through his multiple stints. His biting letters include d+e and double p. As in S, there is the occasional use of a conjoined enlarged a and d in ‘ad’, where the ascender of round-backed d pierces the bow of a.</div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">In the early pages of the Register, the Tironian nota is not crossed; later hands illustrate varied usage that is sometimes crossed, and sometimes simply 7. The suprascript a with a flat, closed top is most common in the introductory pages, but there are instances, too, of the open a seen in S. The macron, like S’s, is curved. Confirming a date of the first third of the century (and somewhat earlier, indeed) is the ‘above top line’ format of the folio. While the hand is more laterally compressed than that of S, there are distinctive similarities, as one might expect.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">The most notable preponderance of similarities between a scribe of the Register and Salisbury’s Magna Carta comes quite far into the Register in a sequence of texts copied some time after 1222. At pages 111-113, in a section on canonical behaviour, the scribe, whose hand is more cursive than that of S, nevertheless evinces similar forms of enlarged a, trailing s, majuscules, punctuation, and various other features, illustrated below in the conglomerate image. Of most significance, this scribe writes the very notable g with a tail that loops back upon itself to touch the bowl. Now this g is very distinctive, and certainly allies the scribal practice of the Magna Carta hand with that of the Register’s scribe at these pages. It is seen elsewhere too, but always in manuscripts or diplomata that are possibly slightly later than Magna Carta, including, obviously, the Register itself. It occurs in other diplomata associated with Salisbury, including this below--from a document issued to Salisbury by Archbishop Langton in c. 1220 or a little earlier.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 13px; text-align: center;">Document of c. 1220, issued by Stephen Langton in Salisbury Cathedral Archive. Note form of <i>g</i>, <i>S</i>, and also final -<i>s</i>. </td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Other instances of this particular form of </span><i style="font-size: 11pt;">g</i><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">include Duchy of Lancaster,</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> </span><i style="font-size: 11pt;">Cartae Miscellaneae </i><span style="font-size: 11pt;">36, dated to 1229-30, and included as Plate Va in Hector; London, British Library, Royal 14. C. vii, fol. 150, dated 1250-59, and included in Denholm-Young as Plate 12; and in the final lines of CCCC 275, fols. 233a-n, which is post-1230, where the</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> </span><i style="font-size: 11pt;">g</i><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">is part of a final flourish at the foot of the writing grid. Its use in the Magna Carta might, then, be among the earliest recorded instances.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 13px;">Amalgamation of some of the interesting similar features in the (yellowy) Magna Carta <i>S </i>and the <i>Register of St Osmund<br /></i></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">What does emerge from this preliminary examination of Salisbury’s Register and some of the chapter’s documents and diplomata is how very varied scribal hands are in this period, as Holt indeed pointed out. This is particularly so when they are not consistently the highest grade of Gothic textura (quadrata, semi-quadrata, and so on). Not only is it quite difficult to categorize the preponderance of hands beyond the broadest categories, but also, there are dramatic changes in appearance and letter-formation within what are approximately contemporary stints in similar contexts of production. This reflects ‘the proliferation of documents’, as Clanchy says; the concomitant increase in numbers and levels of training of scribes; and the varieties of script commonly used for different kinds of writing (Clanchy 127-34), many manifested differently according to scribal proficiency and time. This is made abundantly clear by the rich diversity of evidence documented in the Salisbury Cathedral Archive. But then the consistent and significant number of similar forms between the Salisbury Magna Carta and other known contemporary Salisbury scribes becomes diagnostic of a shared writing environment. Thus, it is surely to this archival community that scholars should look to identify the common context for the Magna Carta’s production, if not the very scribe himself.</span></div>
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<b>Textual Performance</b></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">In the face of the identification of the scribe of S as a member of the very institution which received and housed the charter, it would be tempting to leap to the conclusion that S is not an authentic Magna Carta and somehow did not deserve its place at the reunification event at the British Library in February. As both Claire Breay and Sir James Holt have previously emphasized, this is not the case. Salisbury, together with other cathedrals throughout England from the twelfth century onwards, had become increasingly meticulous about recording and curating significant diplomata, both within the cartulary or register, and in single sheet format. The identification of the scribe of S as from Salisbury tells us important things about how Magna Carta was disseminated and about forms of textual dissemination and preservation in the Middle Ages. It is indeed salutary, as Nicholas Vincent states, to acknowledge that a solid, if not preponderant, proportion of diplomata produced were written by scribes attached to the beneficiary rather than to the king (Vincent 2004: 31). Moreover, Holt (2015: 374) comments that the use of a book hand in S does not make it any less authentic: ‘In the circumstances at Runnymede and Windsor the Chancery could have impressed extra scribes to help with the lengthy exemplifications which the settlement required (although, if so, none of their work is apparent otherwise): more probably S could have been the work of one of the recipients, a messenger or agent of one of the counties, presented for authorization by the great seal - an acceptable though by now unusual procedure’. We can now suggest that consistently present palaeographical comparanda between some of the scribes of the Register and the scribe of S indeed indicates that S was written by a scribe from the cathedral which retains that version of the Great Charter to this day. The evidence of the tear together with its long attested history at Salisbury suggest that S was produced and then presented for sealing with the Great Seal. It would be an unlikely coincidence that a scribe who had been impressed to help out the royal chancery just happened to write out a copy which is now in his home institution. It is far more likely that recipients were able to present their own copies of Magna Carta for sealing by the Chancery.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">The practice of ecclesiastical scriptoria preparing charters recording grants in their favour was a long-standing one, dating back to the earliest days of the appearance of the charter in England. It might be assumed that with the growth and professionalization of the royal administration in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries that this practice died out, but the variety of scribal forms on royal acta, which persisted on reissues of Magna Carta well into the thirteenth century, suggest that the sealing of documents prepared by the recipient was a more commonplace practice than has been assumed. If S was prepared by a Salisbury scribe, this may explain some of its textual idiosyncrasies, since the Salisbury scribe may have been working from a draft or intermediary copy in preparing his text. The textual relationships between drafts and final version is complex, and one of the great achievements of the Magna Carta project will be to help piece together these relationships.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">We have tended to see the distribution of texts like Magna Carta as a one-to-many relationship, with a single approved text (the letters testimonial) being handed down and disseminated. But there were a number of earlier drafts of Magna Carta, the text of which is preserved in statute collections. This was first pointed out by Galbraith (1967), and David Carpenter (2015a: 19-21) has recently identified many more examples of texts derived from drafts incorporated into statute collections. The dissemination of Magna Carta was many-to-many, with drafts circulating and institutions presenting texts of the charter for sealing. Indeed, analogously, the process of dissemination of this political text reflects the way in which literary scholars have come to appreciate the complex cross-currents and intersections in the spread of literary texts, which do not follow simple hierarchies of descent. In this context, prescriptive ideas of authenticity are not helpful, and it is worth remembering Galbraith’s dictum that for contemporaries, for whom it was the act of making the grant which counted, the documents recording Magna Carta ‘would have meant no more than a carbon copy, or a printed copy of, say, a modern treaty means to-day’ (Galbraith 1948: 123). This outlook was still evident in 1731 when Speaker Onslow’s reaction to the damage to Ci was simply to have a certified copy made in a modern hand, as if it was a property deed which had been damaged. (This vera copia is now shares a pressmark with Ci, as Cotton Ch. Xiii.31b.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Moreover, for many people in thirteenth-century England, it was how they heard Magna Carta which counted. Holt drew attention in 1974 to a French text of Magna Carta made shortly after 1215 in the Cartulary of Pont Audemer which also contains a French version of the writ of 24 June 1215 (Holt 1985: 239-57). Holt (1985: 242) proposes that the Magna Carta of 1215 was ‘the first document of political importance known to have been issued in the vernacular’. This is a problematic claim at a number of levels: it assumes that pre-conquest vernacular texts such as lawcodes were not of political importance; and it ignores suggestions that the content of Henry I’s coronation charter must have been made known in French and English, since it was addressed ‘all his barons and faithful men, as well French as English born’ (Poole 1913: 444-5). It is also worth noting Poole’s hint that the second charter of Stephen of 1136 might also have been promulgated in the vernacular: ‘It looks as though a scribe familiar with the style of French charters had attempted to produce a diploma in the Old English form’ (Poole 1913: 447).</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">French translations of reissues of Magna Carta also survive in other statute collections, such as Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Peniarth 329a (Holt 1985: 243 n. 2). The fact that the Pont Audemer copy of the 1215 also includes a translation of the writ ordering the sheriff to proclaim the terms of the Charter indicate that the translation was made for use in a proclamation. Holt reviews evidence for the use of vernacular languages in proclamations for the thirteenth century. The re-issues of the Charter of 1216, 1217 and 1225, the Provisions of Merton, were also proclaimed in the shire courts. Holt assumes that these proclamations would have been in French and not English, a conclusion supported by Carpenter (2015a: 431): ‘We do not know the language of these readings, but they were probably in French as well as Latin’. In Holt’s view, the use of English for such proclamations began with the 1255 order concerning the excommunication of the infringers of Magna Carta which was to be ‘published clearly and lucidly both in the English and French tongue whenever and wherever it may seem expedient’ (Holt 1985: 242). Holt also notes the well-known royal letters of October 1258 confirming the Provisions of Oxford and promulgating ordinances for the reform of local government, issued in both French and English ‘so that they might be read by the sheriffs and understood and observed intact by all men in the future’ (Holt 1985: 242). In 1300, Edward I ordered Magna Carta to be proclaimed in Westminster Hall both ‘literally’ and ‘in the language of the country’ (lingua patria) (Carpenter 2015a: 431). </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">The assumption has been that Magna Carta would have been disseminated in French and not English, and that the use of English in proclaiming major political documents developed only from the middle of the thirteenth century. However, recent work emphasizing the vibrancy and continued vitality of English in the twelfth century would seem to point towards the possibility that Magna Carta and its thirteenth-century reissues were proclaimed in English as well as French. The process of preparing these translations for proclamation was evidently an informal and ad hoc one, and it was only the chance discovery of the Pont Audemer text in 1974 that documented the French translation. It is worth noting that Poole (1913: 450) was more open than Holt and Carpenter to the possibility that Magna Carta was proclaimed in English in 1215, suggesting that the procedure adopted was similar to that for the Provisions of Oxford. Although Magna Carta was a settlement between John and the nobility and a grant directed to freeman, its ramifications were wide-ranging and in matters such as fish weirs or weights and measures it would certainly have been necessary to convey information about Magna Carta in English. Further investigation of the language of Magna Carta, and linking this understanding to recent scholarship on the history of English during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, is a major area for future investigation; much of the discussion of this topic is still dependent on work done by Reginald Lane Poole and Faith Thompson over eighty years ago.</span></div>
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There is much more to learn, then, as demonstrated by the brilliant new work of the Magna Carta project team. Our work on the Salisbury origins of its own extant Magna Carta demonstrates that the process of textual dissemination for the 1215 Charter was indeed a complex and multi-faceted one, and that these diplomata were both produced and received in a variety of contexts. For King John’s subjects, it may have been how they heard Magna Carta that counted. For them the ephemeral and live text proclaimed in the towns and meeting places would have been as authentic a Magna Carta as the four original surviving instantiations from 1215 are for modern scholars. That this Great Charter can still generate such interest and debate is testimony to its continuing significance for all of its many successive audiences. <span style="font-size: 11pt;"> </span></div>
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<b>Acknowledgements</b></h4>
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Elaine Treharne should like to thank the Dean--the Very Reverend June Osborne--and the Chapter of Salisbury Cathedral for their permission to work in the Library and Archive. In particular, I should like to thank the Canon Chancellor, Reverend Canon Edward Probert, and the Archivist, Mrs Emily Naish. I owe enormous gratitude to Mrs Naish for many helpful conversations, for her knowledge of the archive, her kindness and her time. </div>
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<b>References and Further Reading</b></h4>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Breay, Claire. 2002. <i>Magna Carta: Manuscripts and Myths</i>. London: The British Library. </span></div>
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Breay, Claire, and Harrison, Julian, eds. 2015. <i>Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy</i>. London: The British Library.</div>
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Carpenter, David. 2015a. <i>Magna Carta</i>. London: Penguin Classics.</div>
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Carpenter, David. 2015b. The Cartulary Copies at Lincoln and Salisbury of the Lincoln and Salisbury Engrossments of the 1215 Magna Carta: <a href="http://magnacarta.cmp.uea.ac.uk/read/feature_of_the_month/May_2015_2" style="color: #550100; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">http://magnacarta.cmp.uea.ac.uk/read/feature_of_the_month/May_2015_2</a></div>
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Chaplais, Pierre. 1971. <i>English Royal Documents, King John-Henry VI (1199-1461). </i>Oxford: The Clarendon Press.</div>
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Clanchy, M. T. 2013. <i>From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307.</i> Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.</div>
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Collins, Arthur Jeffries. 1948. The Documents of the Great Charter of 1215. <i>Proceedings of the British Academy</i> 34: 233-79.</div>
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Denholm-Young, N. 1954. <i>Handwriting in England and Wales</i>. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.</div>
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Derolez, Albert. 2003. <i>The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books from the Twelfth to the Early Sixteenth Century</i>.<i> </i>Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.</div>
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Galbraith, V. H. 1967. A Draft of Magna Carta (1215). Proceedings of the British Academy 53: 345-60. </div>
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Grieve, Hilda E. P. 1954. <i>Examples of English Handwriting, 1150-1750</i>. Colchester: Essex Record Office Publications.</div>
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Hector, L. C. 1966. <i>The Handwriting of English Documents</i>. Dorking: Kohler and Coombs Ltd.</div>
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Holt, J. C. 1985. <i>Magna Carta and Medieval Government</i>. London and Ronceverte: Hambledon Press.</div>
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Holt, J. C. 2015. <i>Magna Carta</i>, 3rd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. </div>
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Parkes, M. B. 1969. <i>English Cursive Book Hands, 1250-1500. </i>Oxford: Clarendon Press. </div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Prescott, Andrew. 1997. ‘Their Present Miserable State of Cremation’: the Restoration of the Cotton Library in C. J. Wright ed.,<i> Sir Robert Cotton as Collector: Essays on an Early Stuart Lawyer and his Legacy</i>. London: The British Library, pp. 391-454</span>. </div>
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Rich Jones, W. H., ed. 1883. <i>Register of S. Osmund</i> (London: Longman & Co.), 2 vols. </div>
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Rowlands, I. W. The Text and Distribution of the Writ for the Publication of Magna Carta, 1215. <i>English Historical Review</i>, 124: 1422-31.</div>
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Stroud, Daphne. 1981. Salisbury’s Magna Carta: Was It Issued by the Chancery? The Hatcham Review 2:12: 51-8.</div>
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Treharne, Elaine. 2018. <i>Collective Memories in Salisbury Cathedral Library and Archives, 1200 to 1600.</i></div>
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Vincent, Nicholas. 2004. ‘Why 1199? Bureaucracy and Enrolment under John and his Contemporaries’, in Adrian Jobson, ed. <i>English Government in the Thirteenth Century</i>. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer. pp. 17-48.</div>
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Vincent, Nicholas. 2010. <i>Australia’s Magna Carta</i>. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia.</div>
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Vincent, Nicholas. 2012. <i>Magna Carta: A Very Short Introduction</i>. Oxford: Oxford University Press.</div>
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Andrew Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07861908988990764618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8856697805993319185.post-18587387112473016302015-06-05T07:14:00.001-07:002015-06-05T07:14:34.936-07:00Are the Arts and Humanities More Digital than the Sciences?<div>
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The SMKE workshop on <em><a data-mce-href="http://www.smke.org/event-scholarly-communication/" href="http://www.smke.org/event-scholarly-communication/" target="_blank">Scholarly Communication in the 21st Century: a Survivor’s Guide</a></em> on 4 June 2015 was very enjoyable and packed with information. I fear my keynote was less a survival guide than a mixture of personal reminiscence and a chance to share my enthusiasm for work I consider forward-looking, such as the artists <a data-mce-href="http://thomson-craighead.net" href="http://thomson-craighead.net/" target="_blank">Thomson & Craighead</a>, and <a data-mce-href="http://www.ruthewan.com" href="http://www.ruthewan.com/" target="_blank">Ruth Ewan</a>. For what they are worth, the slides from my talk are available at: <a data-mce-href="http://www.slideshare.net/burgess1822/doing-the-digital-how-scholars-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-computer" href="http://www.slideshare.net/burgess1822/doing-the-digital-how-scholars-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-computer" target="_blank">http://www.slideshare.net/burgess1822/doing-the-digital-how-scholars-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-computer</a></div>
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The doctoral students and early career researchers who attended this event will have been left in no doubt as to the extent to which academic life and publication expectations in the UK is dominated by the grizzly subject of the Research Excellence Framework (one of the finest examples of Newspeak currently in use in British public life, known affectionately as the REF). The release of the <a data-mce-href="http://results.ref.ac.uk" href="http://results.ref.ac.uk/" target="_blank">results of the REF</a>, sensitively timed for the week before Christmas 2014, led to a rash of abstruse calculations designed to show that particular universities or departments had done amazingly well, demonstrated in a bewildering variety of league tables. The absurdity of the exercise is illustrated by the way in which universities that evidently had very limited interest in research loudly claimed to have centres of international excellence. It’s tempting to suggest that the whole thing is an objectionable and unethical intrusion into academic values, as my friend <a data-mce-href="http://lornamhughes.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/on-ref-2014-why-nobody-wins-unless.html" href="http://lornamhughes.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/on-ref-2014-why-nobody-wins-unless.html" target="_blank">Lorna Hughes argues in her blog</a>, but the outcomes of the REF have to be taken very seriously, as they are not only marketing opportunities for university, but a great deal of funding depends on the REF results, and departments are already being closed down and academics fired or put on teaching-only contracts throughout the UK due to poor REF results. That is the reason UK academics are obsessive about the REF.</div>
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Having said that, the publication of the results of the REF offers a great deal of fascinating information about trends in scholarly research in the UK. Statements by each department outlining their research strategy and achievements (environment templates, in REF speak) and describing the impact of their research outside the academy are available for download on the REF website. Details of each of the thousands of pieces of research submitted by individual researchers are also available as spreadsheets. There is an enormous amount of data from the REF available for crunching, and I’m delighted that my friends at the <a data-mce-href="http://academicbookfuture.org" href="http://academicbookfuture.org/" target="_blank">Academic Book of the Future project</a> at UCL and King’s College London will be undertaking a detailed analysis of this data to investigate trends in scholarly publication. Their results will be very interesting, but in the meantime the initial top level analyses on the REF website offer some intriguing insights into the state of digital humanities in the UK.</div>
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There were four large subject panels in the REF: Panel A was broadly medicine and life sciences; Panel B included chemistry, physics, mathematics, computer science and engineering; Panel C was broadly social sciences and law; while most of the arts and humanities were under Panel D. A large number of sub-panels assess individual disciplinary areas (or again Units of Assessments, UoA, in REF-speak). In the previous research assessment exercise in 2008, there were 15 main panels, and 67 sub-panels. In 2008, those digital humanities centres which submitted to the REF chose the Library and Information Science UoA, and they did very well, with both King’s College London and HATII at the University of Glasgow getting particularly good results.</div>
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There were two big changes between the exercise in 2008 and REF in 2014 which had major implications for digital humanities. First, it was declared that (with some exceptions which we don’t need to go into here) only academics on full research and teaching contracts were eligible for submission to the REF. This was devastating for digital humanities, since a number of digital humanities centres had submitted to the previous research assessment exercises librarians, curators and staff from information services who were publishing books and articles on digital humanities. These were now excluded from the REF. Moreover, research staff who were working on other people’s projects - a very large proportion of the staff in a department like that at King’s College London - were also excluded (again, there were some exceptions, but we won’t go into the theology of it here). In short, anyone who wasn’t occupying a conventional academic post was generally excluded from the REF. For a new discipline which is predicated on different types of posts with new mixtures of skills, this was devastating, and it meant for example that HATII in the University of Glasgow, which had performed very well in the Research Assessment Exercise in 2008, couldn’t muster sufficient critical mass to be entered in REF 2014.</div>
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The second big change arose from the reduction in the number of panels. This meant that disciplines were arbitrarily grouped together to reduce administrative costs. Some of the initial proposals - for example that <a data-mce-href="http://kenodoxia.blogspot.co.uk/2009/09/ref-and-classics.html" href="http://kenodoxia.blogspot.co.uk/2009/09/ref-and-classics.html" target="_blank">Classics should be lumped in with History and Archaeology</a> - produced strong protests. Classics was successful through its national subject association in arguing that it should have a separate sub-panel. Library and Information Science was merged with Cultural and Media Studies in UoA 36: ‘Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, Library and Information Management’ - unlike Classics, the librarians were unable to fend off this change. (Incidentally, the hope sometimes expressed that Digital Humanities will eventually have its own sub-panel in the REF is pie in the sky. With the trend towards merger of disciplines in the REF to reduce costs, Digital Humanities will not have its own sub-panel until it is of a size comparable to such disciplines as History or Chemistry, which may happen one day, but certainly not in my lifetime.) Given that the intellectual relationship of Digital Humanities to cultural and media studies is a contentious subject, the way in which REF is now providing such a strong institutional imperative for DH to become linked with cultural and media studies is striking, particularly as it is not being driven by the DH community itself. The contrast between the success of Classics (through its strong subject association) in arguing for independent status with the failure of Digital Humanities to have much influence on the REF process is also instructive, and suggests that Digital Humanities in the UK should pay more attention to the creation of a strong national subject association, and pay less attention than it has done in the past to international collaboration, which is of little value in lobbying on REF matters.</div>
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It is surprising that this shotgun marriage of Cultural and Media Studies with Digital Humanities in the UK has not been more widely discussed, as I feel it has major implications for the future of Digital Humanities, particularly given the historic prominence of Britain in the subject area. The tactical question for individual universities in preparing their REF submissions was how far their submissions should also fuse the subject areas. For those universities where long-established digital humanities centres, such as the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Sheffield, were not returned to the REF, their work nevertheless features prominently in the environment templates of their partners, such as the <a data-mce-href="http://results.ref.ac.uk/DownloadFile/EnvironmentTemplate/PDF?subId=84" href="http://results.ref.ac.uk/DownloadFile/EnvironmentTemplate/PDF?subId=84" target="_blank">Department of History</a>. In the case of the University of Glasgow, the <a data-mce-href="http://results.ref.ac.uk/DownloadFile/EnvironmentTemplate/PDF?subId=589" href="http://results.ref.ac.uk/DownloadFile/EnvironmentTemplate/PDF?subId=589" target="_blank">submission to UoA 36 </a>by the School of Creative and Cultural Arts makes no reference to Digital Humanities activities, but Glasgow’s Digital Humanities activities figure prominently in the University’s submission to the <a data-mce-href="http://results.ref.ac.uk/DownloadFile/EnvironmentTemplate/PDF?subId=582" href="http://results.ref.ac.uk/DownloadFile/EnvironmentTemplate/PDF?subId=582" target="_blank">English Language and Literature panel</a>. Some institutions take little account of the merger of the panel in their submissions. The <a data-mce-href="http://results.ref.ac.uk/DownloadFile/EnvironmentTemplate/PDF?subId=1101" href="http://results.ref.ac.uk/DownloadFile/EnvironmentTemplate/PDF?subId=1101" target="_blank">environment template for UCL</a> describes the work of the Department of Information Studies there, with Digital Humanities and the work of UCLDH signalled as one of the major research groupings within the Department, with links to engineering, thus providing a fairly traditional view of the role of DH. By contrast, King’s College London made a <a data-mce-href="http://results.ref.ac.uk/DownloadFile/EnvironmentTemplate/PDF?subId=2198" href="http://results.ref.ac.uk/DownloadFile/EnvironmentTemplate/PDF?subId=2198" target="_blank">joint submission of two departments</a>, the Creative Media and Cultural Industries Department, and the Department of Digital Humanities. The environment template (which I helped to write) offers an intellectual synthesis of the two subject areas that responds strongly to the changed constitution of the panel.</div>
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It is difficult to interpret the panel’s ranking of these environment templates, but looking at the outcome, there is clearly a sense that the panel this time preferred environment templates that addressed the whole range of the subject areas and looked to the links between library and information science on the one hand and Cultural and Media Studies on the other. It is unlikely that there will be more panels in the next REF - indeed there will probably be pressure to reduce costs by having yet fewer panels - so Digital Humanities centres and departments hoping to submit to the REF need to take all this into account.</div>
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While the disciplinary position of Digital Humanities as reflected in the REF might seem to be subject to some major challenges, in other ways the REF offers grounds for optimism. The REF web site offers some <a data-mce-href="http://www.ref.ac.uk/results/analysis/submissionsdata/" href="http://www.ref.ac.uk/results/analysis/submissionsdata/" target="_blank">preliminary analysis of the different formats</a> in research submitted to the REF. Not surprisingly, the message across the board is of the dominance of the book, chapters in books and above all the peer-reviewed journal article. Of the 215,507 outputs submitted overall to the REF, 157,021 were journal articles and 28,628 were books or chapters in books. The REF goes out of its way to ensure that research can be submitted in any format, but few institutions took advantage of this. There were 757 physical artefacts submitted, 1746 exhibitions and performances, 1684 other documentary outputs, and 553 others. The proportion of digital artefacts submitted to the REF was very small: just 761 altogether.</div>
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But if we look at just the outputs for Panel D, the panel that covered most of the arts and humanities, something very interesting emerges. Of those 761 digital outputs submitted to the REF, 674 or 88% were from the arts and humanities. In other words, it seems to be scholars in the arts and humanities who are more insistent that their work in digital media is central to their research. The overall output format figures from Panel D were 19527 books or chapters in books; 1707 exhibitions and performances; 874 other documentary formats; 731 physical artefacts; 674 digital artefacts; 471 other.</div>
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It does look as if it is scholars in the arts and humanities who are more likely to experiment with the format of their research and who are disseminating their research in digital form. I’ve made a cut-down version of the spreadsheet giving details of the digital REF outputs, and made it <a data-mce-href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UdU1aO-HqR406cXttaBTlnfZtgrirxXYaoywGUG-_IY/edit?usp=sharing" href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UdU1aO-HqR406cXttaBTlnfZtgrirxXYaoywGUG-_IY/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank">publicly available as a Google sheet</a>. It’s a fascinating browse: not only are there very well-known projects, such as <a data-mce-href="http://www.londonlives.org" href="http://www.londonlives.org/" target="_blank">London Lives</a>, the <a data-mce-href="http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/prism.php?id=1" href="http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/prism.php?id=1" target="_blank">Newton project</a> or <a data-mce-href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EpiDoc" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EpiDoc" target="_blank">EpiDoc</a>, but also many less high-profile projects, and overall this list of pioneering digital research illustrates the variety and creativity in the field. As you browse through the list, you will see that there are issues in the classification which may suggest caution in interpreting these figures. For example, many recordings of musical performances because they were submitted on CD or DVD are categorised as digital artefacts, but I’m not sure they represent digital scholarship as we would understand it. On the other hand, many digital projects were submitted as scholarly editions which were included in the figure for printed books, so it's swings and roundabouts: here's a <a data-mce-href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hkcEszmTt34ZVDRcVspI8WI5adshCHkl0NTCx8oNfN0/edit?usp=sharing" href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hkcEszmTt34ZVDRcVspI8WI5adshCHkl0NTCx8oNfN0/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank">Google sheet of the scholarly editions</a>.</div>
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It would be an exaggeration to claim that the arts and humanities is more digital than other disciplines - after all, many of those printed articles in the other STEM panels describe work on technologies which will enable future digital scholarship in the humanities - but there does seem to be a stronger engagement with digital methods of communicating research in the arts and humanities than elsewhere. Eric Meyer and Ralph Schroeder in their recent book for MIT Press, <i>Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations in the Arts and Humanities </i>likewise report the results of a 2009 survey of 426 humanities scholars, in which 98% considered digital tools useful and 83% considered themselves enthusiasts or advocates for digitisation. Eric and Ralph point out that, surprisingly, there is apparently more enthusiasm for digital methods among humanities scholars than among social scientists. Only 60% of a survey of social scientists considered digital tools useful, and a mere 33% described themselves as enthusiasts or advocates for digitisation. Eric and Ralph suggest that this is because humanities scholars have a closer engagement with primary materials and editions, a pattern that also seems to be echoed in the REF information.</div>
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As government cuts continue to bite, it will be necessary to increase our advocacy for the value of the arts and humanities. Maybe our pioneering of digital creativity and content deserves greater prominence in this advocacy than it has had hitherto.</div>
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Andrew Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07861908988990764618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8856697805993319185.post-48866853191432074572015-03-11T16:16:00.002-07:002015-03-12T01:00:39.850-07:00My Acts of Reading<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Guest blog entry for the <a href="http://www.digitalreadingnetwork.com/category/blog/" target="_blank">blog of the Digital Reading Network</a>. </i></div>
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In an earlier post on this blog, Sue Thomas asked us to consider where and how we read. She reminded us of Alberto Manguel’s comment that ‘the act of reading in time requires a corresponding act of reading in place, and the relationship between the two acts is inextricable’. Sue reflected that this sense of reading and place is being further transformed by the device we use when we read.</div>
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Many of my most vivid memories are associated with reading, from my mother teaching me to read before I went to school, to my father taking me as a child to the children’s library on Saturday morning and the terrifying moment as a first-year postgraduate when I first tried (and failed) to read a medieval document on my own, leaving me wondering what type of career I might eventually have. As it was, I mastered medieval handwriting and went on to work at the British Library. When I first saw the World Wide Web in 1993 (thanks to that remarkable man Tim Hadlow, then the British Library’s Systems Administrator), I immediately felt it would change everything. </div>
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But it was really in the practice of writing that I first noticed the changes. By the time I left the British Library in 2000, I was already writing so little by hand that my handwriting (once a beautiful Italic hand) had deteriorated to illegibility, and I found the way in which universities are (still) so incredibly dependent on a bureaucracy of forms completed by hand a shock to the system. In 2000, I used the computer for writing, e-mail, keeping indexes on databases, looking at images, preparing Powerpoints and checking library catalogues, but not really for reading. Even when I was looking at images of manuscripts, I was viewing them more as objects than as texts to be read. It was from about 2003, as more and more academic journals were becoming available online, that I noticed that I was starting to read academic articles almost exclusively on my computer. This was part of a major and largely unstudied shift which John Regazzi has recently described in his book, <i>Scholarly Communications: A History from Content as King to Content as Kingmaker</i>. Humanities academics abandoned a default mode of checking bibliographies first, then monographs, then articles, and moved instead towards going first to journal articles, increasingly identified through Google. The shape, chronology and disciplinary spread of this change requires further investigation, but in my case there is no question that it turned my normal research procedure upside down.</div>
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I think this shift towards use of the online article reflects more than the unwillingness of an overweight academic to heave himself out of a comfortable chair and head to the library. It was about the easiest way of finding out the scholarly state of play on a particular subject. Using Google or a word search to find the most recent articles, and then using those articles as a gouging knife to dig out the key issues and literature on a subject is in many ways a more effective process than trying to work out the current state of play from monographs and printed bibliographies, both of which might be considerably out of date. By 2005, I found that, for my academic reading, most of my reading of journal articles was taking place online, but books were still read in the conventional way in bed, on buses, on trains and (for me) above all in libraries. I should perhaps explain that unlike many academics I have never built up a very carefully selected or extensive library. I’ve acquired many academic books over the years, but I suspect that for academic books this was more often than not a means of possessing books or authors I particularly admired, almost as trophies, rather than for use. I have always preferred to work in libraries, and have been lucky enough either worked in libraries or lived in close proximity to major libraries, so my working copies of academic books tend to be library copies. I am assisted considerably in this by having been a member for nearly forty years of the wonderful <a href="http://www.londonlibrary.co.uk/">London Library</a>, with its marvellously liberal lending policies.</div>
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The next change I noticed was in my relationship with newspapers. Newspapers have always been important to me, as a kind of neutral disengaged space of reading, where I can pretend to relate to the world but actually keep at bay (think of the prisoner Fletcher in <i>Porridge </i>whose reading of <i>The Sun</i> seemed to occupy large parts of the day, as if it was a means of both forgetting the prison and remembering the outside world. Not that I’ve ever felt a prisoner, but it reflects the wonderful way a newspaper can keep your brain in a pleasant neutral gear). My childhood days were punctuated by newspapers: the arrival through the letterbox in the morning; the newspaper vendors in cloth caps and mufflers selling a choice of three London evening newspapers in makeshift shelters at street corners<i> </i>on<i> </i>dark foggy winter nights. Reading a newspaper on the top deck of a bus remained a supreme pleasure for me until well into my 40s. Then it changed: I noticed I had stopped bothering with newspapers in the week (I’ve never been one for magazines). I think the combination of television, radio and the web meant that the pretence of reading it to keep up with current events had been stripped away. I became more conscious that I read newspapers purely as a relaxation activity, and somehow that seemed to be something more appropriate for the weekend. So I read newspapers nowadays on Saturday and Sunday, and will indulge myself with a large number - its one of the high spots of the week - but my relationship with this particular act of reading has profoundly changed.</div>
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But I remained stubbornly devoted to the book. I continued to read academic books, and my leisure reading was exclusively in old-fashioned printed book form. In Ceredigion, where I live, the excellent public library service is constantly under threat of cuts, and I like to support it. But I also loved pottering round Waterstones, and my essential pre-holiday preparation was a big book purchase, and as soon as I got on holiday, establishing a drip feed of good books was an essential requirement. I didn’t contemplate a Kindle or an iPad - until last year, I had only purchased one e-book, an academic book that I needed in a desperate hurry to complete some footnotes. Last summer, I was reading Mark Ormrod’s <a href="http://www.apple.com/">magisterial biography of Edward III</a> in the Yale English monarchs series. Mark’s book is a remarkable piece of historical research, but it is 720 pages long. Carrying it around, with laptop and all the other paraphernalia of modern life, started give me nasty twinges in my back. It was clear that a 720 page biography of a king who reigned for fifty years was not something I could any longer contemplate easily reading on buses and trains.</div>
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I had acquired an iPad a few months earlier, and decided that the pain in my back necessitated a switch to an e-book, and acquired Edward III as an e-biography. It was one of the greatest revelations of my life. It wasn’t just that I no longer had to lumber around that huge brick of ink, paper and card, although that was a great relief. The clarity of the screen and the backlighting seemed somehow to make it easier to connect the book and for me definitely made the reading experience more intense. Far from the iPad getting in the way, I seemed to be able to connect with the e-book much more easily. I had the iPad to hand in odd moments when it would have awkward to get the large book out, so I made much quicker progress with the book. Then, after I had flown through <i>Edward III </i>at a rate which thoroughly surprised me, the convenience of getting the next book was just breathtaking. One of the saddest things in life is finishing a good book just as a bus journey is beginning and not then having something to read. But our rural buses in Ceredigion now have wi-fi, and I can get another e-book while the bus is trundling through the West Wales countryside.</div>
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My e-<i>Edward III</i> revelation rebooted my reading habits, and seemed to give my reading renewed enthusiasm and productiveness. Eventually, I crossed what I had previously considered the rubicon, and experimented with reading books on a smartphone. I was amazed once again. The phone offered even greater flexibility with no loss of engagement or clarity. The phone meant I could read in situations where previously it was difficult - I could see what a colleague meant when he said that he was able to read a French novel in a rush hour crowd in the tube, thanks to his phone. Indeed, once I began to read on the phone, it somehow came alive for the first time, and it has become more cemented into my life as a result.</div>
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Yet there is one fundamental area where my reading practices remain unchanged. My doctoral thesis was on the records of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. The three years I spent in the Public Record Office exploring medieval court records and assembling transcripts of the cases were among the most satisfying of my life. My transcription process became very set: a 2H pencil and narrow feint punched 10 x 8 writing paper. I wrote on both sides of the paper and put the archival reference on the top left hand corner of the recto of each page. My notes are probably still one of the most comprehensive collections of materials relating to the revolt, and it was the dream of somehow making all this available online that first drew me into the digital humanities. In a remarkable act of scholarly private enterprise, the legal historian Robert Palmer of the University of Houston has scanned many of the record series I worked on - over eight million images of medieval legal records - which are on a website called the Anglo-American Legal Tradition (<a href="http://www.allt.org/">www.allt.org</a>). I could imagine nothing I would rather spend the rest of my scholarly career doing than exploring this amazing collection of material, and as a result I’ve recently been transcribing legal records again. </div>
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But here’s the odd thing. Although I put it the images on my iPad, I find it very difficult to produce typed notes on them on my laptop, which seems to me what I should now be doing. Although I can read the records fluently enough, somehow I can only process the information in it if I transcribe it - ideally with a 2H pencil, although sadly nowadays I am compelled to use A4 paper. Why do I feel this need to transcribe to process information? Is it because I got into a habit of work and thought at the Public Record Office that I now am locked into? Is it is residual irreducible marker of my digital immigrant status? There are hints that, reassuringly, it isn’t just me. Ségolène Tarte, in studying the processes used by scholars studying papyri, has found that manual transcription is also important for them, and Ségolène has suggested psychological reasons why that might be the case. Younger colleagues at King’s College London who work extensively with digital images report that they also still regard old-fashioned transcription as an important part of their armoury, while Stuart Dunn tells me that pencil and paper are still indispensable tools in looking at old maps.</div>
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So, I think that a handwritten transcription will continue to be important in studying materials like my medieval court records. It will be the last bastion of my professional practice that will remain unchanged, although obviously the availability of Robert Palmer’s marvellous AALT resource does mean that I am not now tied to going to Kew to steep myself in this material.</div>
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What is striking about this process of reshaping my reading practice over the past twenty years is its piecemeal character. It has been a process of gradual renegotiation of my reading habits, according to taste, circumstance and back pain. A lot of current discussion of digital transformations assumes that it will be a sudden, dramatic and disruptive process. A lot of this rhetoric derives from the management theorist <a href="http://www.claytonchristensen.com/key-concepts/">Clayton Christensen</a> (and misinterprets Christensen’s work in my view). The supposed disruption of the music industry by online services is frequently taken as a warning of the fate that awaits book publishers, universities, etc., if they don’t get more switched on and digital. My own experience of changed reading practices suggests that a much more common experience of digital transformation is one of gradually shifting accommodation, experiment and realignment - a piecemeal process, not less profoundly transformative for that, but a quieter slower and more gentle process than the ‘disruptions’ digital enthusiasts sometimes loudly call for, without really thinking about what they are demanding.</div>
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Now, its time for bed, and a good book.</div>
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Andrew Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07861908988990764618noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8856697805993319185.post-3485313291156508562015-01-25T17:08:00.002-08:002015-01-25T17:10:02.180-08:00The Long, the Short and the Very Short<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Whenever I look at newspapers from my youth - the 1960s and 1970s - I am struck by how much more reading there was in them - so many words and so much text, even in tabloid papers. It does seem to suggest that our attention span is getting smaller. Of course, it has been claimed that the internet is to blame for this, but I’m doubtful. And the contemporary taste for bite-size knowledge is actually more powerfully expressed in conventional academic print publication than in the digital sphere. The sad rise of handbooks, companions and encyclopaedias of every imaginable complexion and subject is one of the most unfortunate developments in academic publishing over the past twenty years. The editing of encyclopaedias seems to have become one of the great power-broking positions of modern scholarship. Although I have contributed to some of these companions and am contracted to edit a couple, I’m doubtful about their value. They fragment academic discourse, suggest wrongly that scholarship can be reduce to easily digested chunks, and give a distorted and sense of the scope and structure of particular subject areas. Yet the demand for them seems insatiable, presumably from time-pressed students who want to quickly master the subject without having to read more than the essentials. I wonder whether a great academic masterwork such as Thomas Tout’s <i>Chapters in Medieval Administrative History, </i>published in six volumes over seven years, and embodying a lifetime of archival scholarship, distilled into a powerful overarching thesis interpreting the whole history of later medieval England, would be feasible today - perhaps not. Would anyone read a work like <i>Chapters in Medieval Administrative History</i> if it appeared today, unless they had to do so for the REF?</div>
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One of the most striking manifestations of our current thirst for bite-sized and easily digested morsels of academic scholarship is Oxford University Press’s ‘Very Small Introduction’ series. The list of ‘Very Small Introductions’ currently available reads like the catalogue of a <i>Wunderkammer</i> - a random selection of knowledge ranging from American Politics to the Laws of Thermodynamics by way of Astrobiology, Medical Ethics and Spirituality. It’s an intellectual grab bag, a pick and mix of knowledge. But, having said that, the three ‘Very Short Introductions’ I have read (each one on a plane journey - are they intended as intellectual airport literature?) have been wonderfully written, beautifully crafted by their authors, who convey complex ideas in a stimulating and engaging fashion. Paul Strohm’s Very Short Introduction on ‘Conscience’ is a model of how to convey complex philosophical and cultural ideas in a way that is accessible to the widest audience and encourages you to find out more. In a completely different sphere, Nicholas Vincent’s Very Short Introduction to ‘Magna Carta’ clearly and concisely explains a complex historical phenomenon, while offering nuggets which are new even to experts in the field.</div>
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I have recently read with enthusiasm and admiration John H. Arnold’s Very Short Introduction to ‘History’, a massive and challenging undertaking accomplished with intellectual clarity, beautiful writing, engaging and wide-ranging scholarship, and presenting a liberal and nuanced view of what the writing of history entails and means. What particularly struck me about John’s Very Short Introduction was the way in which he placed primary sources - the letters, diaries, records and other materials which are our postcards from the past - at the heart of his discussion. Exploring, probing and debating the complexities, gaps and deceptions of these sources are the essence of history and the historian’s work, and John provides some inspired and memorable examples of this process. Many recent discussions on the nature of history have emphasised historiography, the debates among historians, as the chief focus of interest, but of course there is nothing more arid than reducing knowledge to the analysis of academic factions and disputes. John forcibly reminds us that history starts with the past and with the survivals we have from the past. </div>
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It is very striking how the digital does not significantly figure in John’s overview. He uses the computerisation of tax records as an example of reading sources ‘against the grain’, but otherwise the digital does not appear. This might be taken as an illustration of the failure of historians to engage with contemporary changes in communication that Tim Hitchcock lamented in <a href="http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bloomsbury/cash/2013/00000010/00000001/art00002" target="_blank">a provocative article in <i>Culture and Social History</i></a> on which Mark Knights, Ludmilla Jordanova and myself have discussed in a <a href="http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bloomsbury/cash/2014/00000011/00000003" target="_blank">recent issue of the journal</a>. But perhaps in a ‘Very Short Introduction’ it is reasonable not to give more attention to digital history - perhaps the digital has so far made little impact on the process of writing history.</div>
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However, historical sources are one area in which the digital is already having a profound impact on the way in which scholarship has to be conceived and conducted. Historans using the archives of the web being created by organisations like the Internet Archive or the British Library will inevitably have to approach these vast and volatile digital sources in a different way to Tudor state papers. An excellent example is one that Tobias Blanke gave me, and which I will have stop using as it is getting repetitive, is the <a href="http://www.georgewbushlibrary.smu.edu/en/Research/Electronic-Records.aspx" target="_blank">e-mail archive of George W. Bush</a> which contains 200 million e-mails. Historians of the Second Iraq War will not be able to explore this by reading it or doing keyword searches for Iraq. New methods will be required, which may increasingly be visual, haptic and quantitative.</div>
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Most of the examples of sources discussed by John Arnold are textual, but in a wonderful passage, he describes a source as ‘anything that has left us a trace of the past. It can be a charter, recording a land transfer; a court case, presenting the pleas of the witness; a sermon, given to an unknown audience; a list of books, shares, prices, goods, people, livestock, or beliefs; a painting or photograph of forgotten faces; letters or memoirs or autobiographies or graffiti; the buildings of the rich, displaying their power or wealth, or the building of the poor, displaying the opposite: stories, poems, songs, proverbs, dirty jokes, opaque marginal comments made by bored scribes or cunning glossators. A source can be a thousand things; it can be a discoloration of a page in an inquisitor’s manual, marked by the imprint of a thousand kisses made in ritual obeisance by those about to be examined. It is a trace of the past’ (pp. 60-1).</div>
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It seems to me that it is the ability of digital methods to support such a multi-faceted, pluralistic and liberal view of the range and nature of historical sources, and thus of historical inquiry, which is the reason why they are of such importance to historians. Using conventional techniques, it was enough for the historian to get to grips with the dusty written historical records so romantically described by Ranke, whose influence on our view of history John discusses very interestingly. Digital tools enable historians to break out of this tower of text, just as (according to John) they have broken out of the political tower in which Thucydides imprisoned them. Digital resources allow historians to engage with an enormous range of sources from film through sound to material objects of all types, and offer the possibility of creating a more media rich history.</div>
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In my recent contribution to the <a href="https://medium.com/genres-of-scholarly-knowledge-production" target="_blank">Genres of Scholarly Knowledge Production collection</a> edited by Patrik Svensson, I tried to give some illustrations of the way in which our engagement with archives is changing and sought to show how historians have greater access to film and sound material which poses complex, and sometimes troubling, issues of interpretation. If someone comes to write another Very Short Introduction to History in twenty years time, they will find it difficult to better John H. Arnold’s discussion, but their discussion will perhaps be of multi-media history which is not only read but also moves, speaks and can be felt.</div>
Andrew Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07861908988990764618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8856697805993319185.post-20273768332443512012015-01-09T02:40:00.000-08:002015-01-09T02:40:25.672-08:00Resurrecting a Lost Lecture<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In July 2003, I was asked to give a lecture at the Institute of Historical Research in London to mark the launch of </span><a href="https://www.british-history.ac.uk/" style="font-family: inherit;" target="_blank">British History Online</a><span style="font-family: inherit;">, which has since established itself as one of the most important digital resources in the humanities. My 2003 lecture was to be the usual crystal-ball gazing sort of thing, and I rashly decided to venture into the world of multi-media. The new services such as British History Online which were becoming available at the beginning of the last decade were very exciting, but they tended to be very text-oriented. This was understandable, as it was difficult enough at that time making large quantities of text available online, but I nevertheless felt it worth making the point that the world wide web offered other possibilities. I wanted to point out that the web offered access to maps and images on a much larger scale. The first online collections of historical films were just beginning to appear, and I wanted to </span>illustrate<span style="font-family: inherit;"> their potential for historians. I imagined how Frederic William Maitland, the Victorian scholar of medieval law who when I was a young scholar was seen as a model of the professional historian, would have reacted to these possibilities. I felt sure he would have been enthusiastic about such resources as </span>Getmapping<span style="font-family: inherit;"> or the </span>British Pathé newsreel archive. I gave the lecture an epigram from Maitland, 'The Web Must be Rent'.<br />
The 2003 lecture didn't go very well. In the course of preparing the lecture, I became doubly enthused by the range of multi-media possibilities for historians, and made the classic mistake of trying to cram too much in - always a problem when using sound and video in a lecture, as they eat up the allotted time. The biggest problem was that I didn't realise that the overhead projectors of 2003 didn't all reliably support video projection and that performances might vary depending on the laptop and video drivers used. In testing my beautiful slides before my lecture, I found there was a black space where the video was supposed to be. I spent the lunch break desperately trying to lash something up to show the videos, but the evident difficulty of showing the film and the poor quality of demonstration undermined my fundamental point that historians could now more easily incorporate film and sound in their work.<br />
Some lectures and presentations are like children, and you want to see them do well in the world, and I wanted the points I made in 'The Web Is Rent' to be more widely accepted. However, it was puzzling to see how the lecture could be made more widely available in the form in which I envisaged it in my mind's eye. Blogging software wasn't as sophisticated then as it is now. I wanted to embed the sound, video and maps more fully into the presentation than a blog would then allow, and didn't want simply to present a series of links. Above all, most of the multimedia material I used was fiercely controlled by licence and was not generally accessible. I tried to identify some public domain videos that could replace the ones I tried to use in the original lecture, but didn't find anything completely satisfactory. I experimented with a number of packages which seemed might offer a low-tech solution to making my lecture more widely available, such as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57rAw7GSF3E" target="_blank">Microsoft Producer</a>, but they would have mostly resulted in something which was itself like a video, which missed my point somehow.<br />
It would of course have been possible in 2003 to create the digital artefact I had in my mind's eye, but it would have involved seeking substantial funding and setting up a project. I was at that time fully preoccupied with other projects, and there didn't seem to be strong enough intellectual justification to seek the research funding that would then have been necessary to take the idea behind my IHR lecture forward - it was after all simply a lecture which sought to make a simple point that new technologies were opening up fresh possibilities for historians.<br />
Although I put the 2003 lecture in my large store of unfinished or half-finished projects, I retained a strong affection for it among my intellectual children. This was partly because it reflected a vision of a multi-faceted history that I remain strongly committed to. The 2003 lecture also marked my first involvement with what has now become almost a default mode of lecturing for me, a more performative activity in which I talk around images, sounds and video which fortunately nowadays (generally) work. I put the slides from these lectures on <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/burgess1822" target="_blank">Slideshare</a> so that my audience can afterwards look at the links for themselves, but otherwise I don't feel the need to create a permanent record of them.<br />
Just before Christmas 2014, Patrik Svensson asked me whether I could contribute to a panel in an event he was organising at the remarkable <a href="http://www.humlab.umu.se/en" target="_blank">HUMLab</a> in Umeå in northern Sweden. The work of HUMLab is fascinating for many reasons, but one particularly interesting theme of HUMLab's work is the way it explores how digital technology can support new spatial configurations for scholarly activity, drawing on approaches from libraries, performance arts, and architecture in rethinking the scholarly space. In asking me to join the panel at Umeå, Patrik explained that there was one condition - the speakers would be making a 'stepped presentation' using the eleven large display screens in the meeting space at HUMLab. A variety of digital objects could be displayed in varying configurations in these screens, but use of Powerpoints or Prezzi was banned. Presentations were to be more like installations than lectures.<br />
In contemplating my contribution to the Umeå event, my mind went back to my 2003 lecture at the Institute of Historical Research. I wondered what would happen if I took some of the materials from 2003 and showed them on the screens in HUMLab. If nothing else, I was intrigued to see what those videos would look like on the high quality displays in Sweden - there was one of President Brezhnev in Afghanistan which I felt was a poignant historical document and I was keen to share. Patrik was particularly helpful in suggesting how such a display could work in the HUMLab space - he had the inspired idea that we could show some of the videos simultaneously, which was for me a highlight. It was a fascinating experiment, and it was exciting to see how different scholars from various disciplines responded to the possibilities of this simple but innovative space. The image at the top of my post shows me in the midst of my talk in Umeå.<br />
Patrik was not, however, content with merely organising a hugely complex and extremely innovative scholarly meeting. He wanted to convey to the wider world something of the presentations at Umeå. I am very grateful to Patrik for giving me the impetus to revisit my ten year old lecture, as I think it would otherwise have just languished on my hard drive. Of course, we are now at point where blogging and CMS packages can handle the sort of integrated presentation I was straining towards in 2003. Patrick suggested the use of <a href="https://medium.com/about/welcome-to-medium-9e53ca408c48" target="_blank">Medium</a>, which I hadn't encountered before. Patrik favoured the use of Medium because it offers very easy embedding of a variety of digital media, and its collection format enables various contributions to be easily pulled together into a single publication.<br />
As soon as I started working with Medium, I realised that it offered a means by which I could easily share my 2003 lecture. To my surprise, I found that my fundamental message from 2003, that the availability of new digital resources offers the opportunity for historians to use a wider range of sources in different media, remains very relevant. Most of the resources I linked to in 2003 still worked. The most volatile were, inevitably, the multimedia resources - the lecture was given before Soundcloud, YouTube or Vimeo was launched. In particular, the collection from which the Brezhnev film was taken was no longer available online, although I was still allowed to retain my copy of it. In other cases, such as the videos from a National Library of Wales online exhibition, the outdated codecs could no longer be loaded. Nevertheless, I found to my surprise that I could reconstruct most of my old lecture in Medium and it generally holds up well and I think I haven't committed any major copyright breaches in the course of re-assembling these materials. I could readily have replaced those multimedia resources which are no longer current, but in general I have left them even when this compromises quality, as an indication of how far resources have remained available over the period since 2003. I have embedded the Medium collection, '<a href="https://medium.com/the-historian-and-historical-sources-in-a-digital" target="_blank">The Historian and Historical Sources in a Digital Age</a>', at the bottom of this post.<br />
But of course I could not simply use my 2003 lecture in the HUMLab session - it was too long for one thing, and in many ways my message from 2003 has gained in urgency. While the web has flooded our world with images, much scholarly communication has become more textual and humanities scholars seem increasingly to privilege verbal discourse. This problem requires a renewed assault and I tried to use my 2003 materials to address these in my contribution at Umeå, '<a href="https://medium.com/@Ajprescott/digitising-the-historical-record-8a6ff90e3fec" target="_blank">Digitising the Historical Record</a>'. Again, I've embedded links to the whole collection from the HUMLab event at the bottom of this post.<br />
Does this story of how my lecture was lost and then found offer any wider lessons about changing forms of scholarly communication? A few points of wider value do seem to me to emerge.<br />
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<li>The imperatives of funding mean that we give priority in the digital humanities to the funded research project, and by their nature such projects often tend to be large-scale and focussed on the creation of primary resources. But humanities scholarship is much more varied in its character and form than this. Very valuable contributions are made through small-scale, reflective pieces - often expressed in conventional scholarship through the article. My lost lecture was just such a small-scale project - not big enough to seek the serious research funding it needed to see the light of day in 2003, but still making some useful points. In the digital humanities, we seem to be geared mainly towards the larger projects - almost as if we were only able to publish monographs. We need to think about mechanisms to support the article-scale digital activity, and these mechanisms need to go beyond simple reliance on social media.</li>
<li>If my 2003 lecture was a conventional piece of humanities research, twelve years to publication would be leisurely, but not unusual. There is an assumption that digital humanities research will be made available very quickly, but maybe the timescales for digital humanities research are not dissimilar to those of more conventional humanities scholarship. Many of the constraints which affect scholarly timescales in the humanities (lack of time, availability of research materials, need to debate and develop ideas) apply as much in the digital sphere as elsewhere. The kind of delay I had in waiting until a suitable technology was available to achieve the vision of how I wanted my lecture to appear could occur with conventional publication, if you have to wait for a sympathetic journal or article. In the humanities, conventional wisdom assumes that scholarly work takes fifteen or maybe even twenty years to be picked up. Might it be the same with digital humanities?</li>
<li>Although a delay of twelve years in completing a piece of humanities scholarship is not unusual, the kind of multi-facetted publication that resulted is more unusual. Here, I think there is a distinct difference - that rather than just producing one final piece of work whose roots stretch back over twelve years, I have published the 2003 lecture, the Umeå presentation based on it (which itself draws on material from my paper on 'Imaging Historical Documents' in the collection <i>The Virtual Representation of the Past </i>edited by Lorna Hughes and Mark Greengrass, Ashgate 2008, as well as some other presentations), as well as this reflective commentary on the two pieces. This enables me to explore and represent some issues about the stability of scholarly publications using multi-media which I would otherwise have been able to do. </li>
<li>It seems that one way in which our understanding of scholarly communication is changing is that we lay bare the evolution of our scholarship - in my case, anyone who is interested can often trace it from powerpoint to blog text and finally to a more formal publication. This is something that is more difficult to do with the works of a pre-digital scholar like Frederic William Maitland. </li>
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<script async src="https://static.medium.com/embed.js"></script><a class="m-collection" href="https://medium.com/genres-of-scholarly-knowledge-production">Genres of Scholarly Knowledge Production</a>
<script async="" src="https://static.medium.com/embed.js"></script><a class="m-collection" href="https://medium.com/the-historian-and-historical-sources-in-a-digital">The Historian and Historical Sources in a Digital Age</a>Andrew Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07861908988990764618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8856697805993319185.post-61739920590946868022014-05-07T08:26:00.000-07:002014-05-07T09:21:12.857-07:00Digital Humanities and the Quest for Academic Respectability<div style="text-align: center;">
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<i>Intervention at Higher Education Academy Summit 'Towards a Pedagogy for the Digital Humanities', Lewes, 7 May 2014</i></div>
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Andrew Sanders, in his <i>Short Oxford History of English Literature </i>(2000), has outlined the ideological and social influences which shaped the emergence of the study of English as an academic subject in the nineteenth century. Sanders describes how ‘the ancient English universities, once they got round to establishing chairs and then courses of study, felt obliged to make English acceptable by rendering it dry, demanding and difficult’. English had to establish its social respectability by comparison with subjects such as Classics. Sanders notes how English was considered ‘a parvenu subject largely suited to social and intellectual upstarts (a category which it assumed included women). In order to appear “respectable” in the company of gentlemanly disciplines such as Classics and History, it had to require hard labour of its students’. This was achieved partly by an emphasis on the study of Old and Middle English literature which remained fundamental to the Oxford syllabus until quite recently, provoking the celebrated protests of Kingsley Amis and Phillip Larkin, denouncing Beowulf as ‘ape’s bum fodder’. Amis found a note by Larkin in a copy of Faerie Queene which read: ‘First I thought Troilus and Criseyde was the most boring poem in English. Then I thought Beowulf was. Then I thought Paradise Lost was. Now I know that The Fairie Queene is the dullest thing out. Blast it’.<br />
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At Cambridge, of course, a more modern approach to English Literature was pioneered in the 1930s by I. A. Richards and F. R Leavis, but again a concern to affirm academic respectability is evident, through for example Richards’s emphasis on the technique of ‘close reading’ or Leavis’s stress on literature as a force for moral improvement. All academic disciplines share this need to affirm their respectability and to demonstrate their intellectual virility. The dominance of medieval history in British historical studies up to the 1950s likewise reflects an anxiety to show that historical research required hard labour. The forbidding theoretical constructs that have come to surround cultural and media studies convey the message that these disciplines deal in austere abstract ideas and not the fripperies claimed by their detractors. The use of quantification can convey similar messages in many social sciences. These tensions are particularly evident in computer science, which has had to escape from the charge that it was no more than technological tinkering, and where it has been necessary to develop a highly focussed approach to avoid the taint of being considered a support or ancillary activity. These agendas of intellectual respectability can also be developed by integrating dispersed but cognate activities, as for example in Systems Biology, where various quantitative and modelling techniques have been drawn together.<br />
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Digital Humanities is not immune from this need to demonstrate moral and intellectual respectability. Indeed, it is rather disappointing that Digital Humanities mirrors so strongly the processes we see in the Victorian development of the study of English. In what we might call Digital Humanities 1.0, we again see an enormous stress on work with canonical materials. The overwhelming majority of digital humanities projects are concerned with big names, often from the pre-modern period: Beowulf, the Exeter Book, Chaucer, Langland, Shakespeare, William Blake, Jane Austen, Rossetti, and so on. The dominance of the Classics in digital humanities projects suggests that all too often digital technologies have been used to provide an up-to-date and trendy makeover for ailing disciplines. The digital humanities is rarely used to open up access to non-canonical or obscure materials - the culture of the digital humanities has hitherto been dominated by the dead white European male. Moreover, what Digital Humanities 1.0 does to these canonical materials has frequently been very conservative. It is used as a means of continuing academic activities which print technology had rendered uneconomic or unviable. Many of the digital editions so far produced only over limited gains in functionality over conventional print editions - they allow searching and may incorporate images, but otherwise that’s about it. In historical studies, printing costs had caused the great Victorian series of calendars to peter out; digital technologies have allowed them to be revived, but eerily these digital calendars recreate editorial methods designed for print - rather as if a railway locomotive was run on a turnpike road.<br />
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Digital humanities has affirmed its respectability by frequently allying itself with extremely conservative scholarly methods. It has also affirmed its moral character by insisting that its fundamental concern is with research. Digital humanities has had to make its way by seeking soft funding. It has turned this misfortune to its advantage by trying to suggest that it is exclusively concerned with research. Digital humanities centres claim to be something like scientific research institutes, only concerned with advanced research (the term advanced is invariably invoked in discussion of digital humanities methods, even though most of the techniques are fairly standard and quite old hat). Digital humanities is seen as the preserve of a priestly caste concerned only with advanced techniques who do not sully themselves with anything lower than a postgraduate student. The terms ‘e-research’ and ‘e-science’ have been invoked to add to this aura. In the 1990s, those involved with the early days of humanities computing thought it would transform teaching and pedagogy as much as research. Among the pioneering programmes in humanities computing during the 1990s was the Teaching and Learning Technology Programme (TLTP), and the development of new teaching methods was seen as just as important as research. Yet, in the pursuit of research funding, we came to feel that research was the most respectable path and pedagogy seem to have dropped out of the mainstream of academic digital humanities. This is illustrated by the lack of contact between digital humanities organisations and e-learning organisations such as the Association of Learning Technologists.<br />
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I’m glad to say there are signs that this is changing. I would especially single out the work of HASTAC under Cathy Davidson as bringing pedagogy back more centre stage for the digital humanities. Part of the future for the digital humanities has to be a greater involvement with pedagogy. But there are dangers as well as opportunities here. The current DH mania in the United States is closely related to the politically-inspired attacks on humanities funding in the US. There is a clear danger that ‘digital humanities’ is used in the United States as a term to try and persuade tea-party voters that there is a technological and economic value in the humanities. The trouble is that just rebranding the humanities as digital betrays the wider possibilities of the digital humanities. Just browsing through the job adverts from the States where literature posts have been justified but claiming that they will also encompass digital humanities shows that this is a real danger.<br />
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We don’t want a form of ‘digital studies’ which simply treats the web as yet another form of media for analysis. Digital methods offer us the possibility of engaging with and understanding the cultural materials that are the focus of the humanities in new ways. Through a site like the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, we can explore the life of poor people in eighteenth-century London in astonishing detail.In a resource like The Electronic Beowulf we can see letters concealed under conservation work that have remained hidden for 150 years. From the British Library’s digital presentation of the biblical manuscript, the Codex Sinaiticus, we can see the words ‘son of God’ being inserted in one of the earliest copies of the Gospel of St Mark. These are truly exciting possibilities, which can help generate a more exciting and creative form of pedagogy than will ever be feasible through any form of MOOC. A new alliance between the digital humanity and pedagogy can achieve this. <br />
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Andrew Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07861908988990764618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8856697805993319185.post-35017304306730020922014-03-22T10:13:00.001-07:002014-03-22T10:35:12.366-07:00A Modern Memento Mori<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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It's that time and that moment when a laptop gives the greatest pleasure. It's late in the evening. You've cleared a lot of e-mails (although a terrifying number still remain), so you can indulge in some web surfing. There's a good track on Spotify and a glass of wine seems in order. Then, your hand catches the glass, and suddenly there's liquid where it shouldn't be, on the keyboard. You immediately switch off and unplug to reduce the risk of short circuits, and anxiously dry the keyboard.</div>
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I left the keyboard overnight in the hope that, left to dry with minimum risk of damage to the circuits, the laptop would survive. But the secret of the amazing battery life of the Mac Book Air appears to lie partly in its integrated circuitry, and when, full of hope for a resurrection, I went to switch on the laptop the next morning, it was dead. A visit to the Genius Bar (which always feels like dealing with a sinister cult) confirmed damage to the logic board, requiring very expensive repair, and left me contemplating whether it was more financially prudent to have the repair done or buy a new model.</div>
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The death of your computer is a modern <i>memento mori</i>. One moment you rejoice in the joy and pleasure of unlimited internet access; the next your computer is an inert mass of silicon, metal and plastic, and all those plans you had for the following day somehow look hopeless and irrelevant. In the midst of drinking wine and watching You Tube, there is death. Such a moment is a particularly forceful reminder of mortality because we frequently describe our digital connectivity in terms which present it is a kind of irresistible life force in some way disconnected from day-to-day materiality. Yet, as Matthew Kirschenbaum has so brilliantly discussed in <i>Mechanisms</i>, that flow of digits is directed and stored by a funny whirring disc which is in a constant state of decay from the moment that we first state the computer. The death of each hard disc is as inevitable as our own deaths. The computer is not a means of transcending mortality, but a constant reminder of it, and that inevitable moment of disc failure prefigures the larger scale failure which will eventually overtake us all. </div>
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And of course you can back up computers; I don't currently have any means of backing up my mortality. Luckily, on this occasion, I'd been regularly backing up my computer, partly because Mac's 'Time Machine' makes the process of backing up simple. However, to restore from Time Machine, I need another Mac. Whether I go for repair or replacement, it still leaves over a week without a machine which I can use to restore the data. So, temporarily, I'm in almost as bad a situation as if I hadn't backed up the data, although I do have the comfort of knowing that rescue and redemption is not far away.</div>
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It is partly my fault for eschewing a desktop machine. I don't often work with multiple screens and when I undertake image or video work, I use machines in labs or libraries. I haven't had a desktop for a number of years and have relied on laptops. It means that when the laptop dies, I'm in trouble. Why is that desktop computers are so unmemorable? It is now 25 years since I got my first desktop machine. British Library issue at that time was a Dell, which made a noise like a coffee percolator, but otherwise had little to commend it. The British Library subsequently switched to Fujitsu desktops, which felt like they were rejects from the set of a Gerry Anderson puppet show. I gave up using desktops while I was at the University of Sheffield and when I went back to a purely desktop environment in Lampeter (no Wifi and a very locked down network), it felt like using a hammer and chisel. What I tend to remember with affection from my desktop days are odd bits of software (DBase III, Ventura, early web browsers) rather than the hardware.</div>
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On the other hand, I remember all the laptops I have had very affectionately, and the demise of each one was almost like the death of a favourite pet. My first laptop was a rumbustious Dell, and it became a firm and long lived companion. I only needed to change it when it was necessary to have something more high-powered to demonstrate the Electronic Beowulf CD, and the Toshiba laptop I had from 1999 is probably the single computer I have most enjoyed possessing and using. Both these early laptops went into retirement and died of gentle old age. The saddest loss was probably a new Toshiba Satellite Pro which was stolen within a few days of my taking delivery of it. Its successor confirmed my enthusiasm for Toshiba. My attachment for that machine was such that I even attempted surgery on it myself, replacing the keyboard. I worried afterwards that this repair may have contributed to the hard disc failure a few months later.</div>
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One advantage of my accident with the wine is that lack of other backup has forced me to get more to grips with a recently acquired iPad. I can see possibilities with the iPad which had eluded me before and can finally see that it is much more than a consumer object of desire. The iPad is starting to insinuate itself at the centre of my life. Indeed, part of the purpose of this blog post is to test a wireless keyboard and see how far an iPad can be useful backup when a laptop fails. My enthusiasm for Ubuntu has also been reinforced by its ability to resurrect one of my aged Toshibas, which is now valiantly trying to provide help but whose aged and arthritic hard disc is limiting its effectiveness. It's fun playing with these alternatives, but really life is on hold until the replacement MacBook Air arrives. Let's hope its life is a long and virtuous one and that, when the time comes for it to die, it goes gently into the cyber-night.</div>
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Andrew Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07861908988990764618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8856697805993319185.post-32606165694547649332014-02-02T10:11:00.001-08:002014-02-02T10:29:24.093-08:00Dennis the Paywall Menace Stalks the Archives<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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A <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/news/david-cameron-and-al-murray-are-distant-cousins-family-records-show-9093551.html" target="_blank">story that hit the news</a> this week was a report that the Prime Minister David Cameron is distantly related to the comedian Al Murray, and that they both had ancestors who worked for the East India Company. This news item was part of the publicity for the <a href="http://pressandpolicy.bl.uk/Press-Releases/Hidden-history-of-the-British-In-India-677.aspx" target="_blank">release online of 2.5 million genealogical records</a> which are part of the India Office Records in the British Library. The digitisation of this huge historical archive is at first sight exciting news, but there’s a catch. The digitisation was undertaken by the family history company <a href="http://www.findmypast.co.uk/" target="_blank">findmypast</a> and you can only access these records via a subscription. A <a href="https://www.findmypast.co.uk/account/pay/anonymous/step0" target="_blank">full World subscription to findmypast</a> costs over £150, more than a television licence or a premium subscription to Spotify, although admittedly Pay As You Go credits are also available. Fortunately, many public and other libraries offer access to family history services such as findmypast, but this doesn’t fully address the profound issues of ethics, access and public ownership of archives posed by the activities of findmypast and other similar firms.<br />
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Among other new records recently made available by findmypast are <a href="http://blog.findmypast.com/2013/search-19-million-new-british-rate-book-records/" target="_blank">the Rate Books for Westminster and Southwark</a>. I am currently undertaking some research relating to houses in Westminster, so I immediately went to the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth to use their findmypast subscription to check the new records. Rate books are one of the fundamental sources for the study of all aspects of the history of localities in England, and are not just of use for genealogy. One of the annoying things about packages like findmypast is the way in which they assume I’m only interested in my relatives (a matter of surpassing little interest to me), so that accessing other information in the documents available via these packages can be very awkward. As I’m working on some streets in Westminster, what I ideally would like to do is browse images of the relevant sections of the rate books. Although the presentation in findmypast is dreadful for this kind of wider research, I nevertheless found the images are there and that I could browse the sections I want. Except that the NLW library subscription provided by findmypast does not offer access to images or transcripts. The NLW subscription to findmypast, in a kind of digital dance of the seven veils, gave me lists of the names of people who owned property in the streets I was interested in, but when I went to check the images, said I would need to give money to findmypast to learn more. All I was presented with at the National Library of Wales was an extended advert which inevitably resulted in the request that I take out a subscription.<br />
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The subscription structure of findmypast is quite obscure, offering basic levels of subscription, then requiring the purchase of additional credits to undertake such everyday research tasks as viewing an image of the document. I'm not sure at the moment whether the library subscriptions offered by libraries such as The National Archives at Kew or The British Library in London offer users free access to the images, but the description of the 'findmypast.co.uk Community Edition(TM)' on the corporate website doesn't encourage optimism.<br />
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Findmypast is a subsidiary of the Dundee-based firm D. C. Thomson, which I had hitherto thought of merely as the benign publisher of children’s comics such as the Dandy and the Beano and home of comic creations such as Dennis the Menace and Desperate Dan (although the founder of the firm, <a href="http://www.scottish-places.info/people/famousfirst437.html" target="_blank">David Coupar Thomson</a>, was notorious for his refusal to employ trade unionists or Roman Catholics). Findmypast is part of Brightsolid, the IT division of Thomson. Thomson has great hopes that its family history activities will offset the steep decline in profits from its newspaper and other conventional publications, and has <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-23893114" target="_blank">recently reorganised Brightsolid</a>, establishing <a href="http://www.dcthomsonfamilyhistory.com/" target="_blank">D. C. Thomson Family History</a>, in order to build its presence in this sector. This seems a reasonable business strategy – a <a href="http://anglo-celtic-connections.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/over-84-million-genealogists-claimed-in.html" target="_blank">report by Global Industry Analysts</a> states that ‘genealogical enthusiasts are spending between US$1000 to US$18000 a year to discover his or her roots. The growth of the genealogy research market is being spurred by the spending of over 84 million genealogists’. (I would have linked to the original report but<a href="http://www.strategyr.com/Genealogy_Products_and_Services_Industry_Market_Report.asp" target="_blank"> it costs $1450</a>). It is estimated that the family history sector overall as a business is worth $84 billion dollars. According to <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-09-20/ancestry-dot-coms-genealogical-juggernaut" target="_blank">Business Week</a>, ‘genealogy ranks second only to porn as the most searched topic online’. Family history is big business, and the new CEO of D. C. Thomson Family History, <a href="http://www.dcthomson.co.uk/media/brightsolid-realigns-and-appoints-new-ceo-for-online-publishing" target="_blank">Annelies van den Belt</a>, a former TV executive, has declared her intention of ensuring that D. C. Thomson becomes a ‘truly global digital family history business’.<br />
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I suppose I would wish D. C. Thomson well in moving on from Dennis the Menace to history, if it wasn’t for the fact that it involves the theft of public cultural property. D. C. Thomson see partnerships with organisations like the Imperial War Museum, The National Archives, the British Library and The Scottish National Archives as their strong suit in the battle with American behemoths such as Ancestry.com. That means that it is our access to our archives that is being traded to help shore up Thompson’s profits. The argument in favour of a commercial approach to the digitisation of the India Office Records is that bodies like the National Archives and the British Library can’t afford to undertake digitisation on this scale themelves. But if digitisation is locked up behind high paywalls, then it is not a very useful activity. Instead of increasing access, subscription services limit access to those social categories (white, retired, middle class) who can afford comparatively expensive leisure activities. The justification offered by the British Library Press Office that the site can be accessed freely in the British Library Reading Rooms seems to miss a lot of the point of digitisation. To make matters worse, the determination of companies like D.C. Thomson to milk the genealogical market for all it is worth restricts the research use that can be made of the online records by locking them into the narrow types of search required by family historians.<br />
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The problem is not simply paying for access to this material, but also the enormous damage that is being done to public and scholarly understanding of history and culture by the resulting digital divides. In Britain, university access to digital resources depends on licensing deals secured by the excellent work of <a href="http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/" target="_blank">JISC Collections</a> which allow university libraries to acquire packages like Early English Books Online, Eighteenth Century Collections Online and the Burney Newspaper Collections at very reasonable levels which ensure that most universities can afford them. As a result, an accepted canon of scholarly electronic resources has developed, supplemented by major resources available as open access, such the Proceedings of the Old Bailey. However, online publishers specialising in family history, being in a highly competitive and profitable market, are apparently unwilling to strike such deals. A subscription to Ancestry is for most university libraries prohibitively expensive. As a result, university-based researchers give priority to the JISC-licensed resources over the records available via family history firms. The bizarre results that this can cause are apparent from the current situation with British nineteenth-century newspapers. While one tranche of nineteenth-century newspapers in the British Library is available via JISC Collections, the bulk of the historic newspapers have been digitised by Brightsolid and are only available via a <a href="http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/" target="_blank">subscription service</a>. This means that scholars will inevitably (and for no good scholarly reason) privilege the material to which they have free access, thereby creating profound and unnecessary distortions and biases. In this way, paywalls are shaping and distorting scholarship by creating hierarchies in the availability of material and imposing new and unlooked for canonicities.<br />
<br />
The British Library recently (and rightly) got a great deal of praise for making available as open access on Flickr<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary" target="_blank"> one million images from its nineteenth-century books</a>. But one has to question how seriously an institution is committed to open access when, just a month later, it releases such an important part of the national heritage as the registration records associated with British rule in India on a subscription-only basis, and in a form that is really only useful for genealogical research. It is difficult to overstate the devastating implications for future scholarship of the depredations of firms such as D. C. Thomson. Archival records such as rate books are the backbone of the study of English local history, but in the form in which they are presented online, it is very difficult to use them other than for the study of individual family members. It would be wonderful to see the Westminster rate books linked to the London Lives resource, to help further the potential of linked data to trace the lives of everyday eighteenth-century Londoners, but I fear that is unlikely to happen. (Some of the later Westminster Rate Books are linked to London Lives, but the coverage is less comprehensive than findmypast, illustrating once again the confusing and fragmented landscape that is being created by these commercial partnerships). A horrible vision of the future is the <a href="http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/" target="_blank">Scotland's People</a> resource, which is run by D. C. Thomson Family History in partnership with the National Archives of Scotland. This offers free surname search of over 90 million records from such key series as births, marriage and death registers, wills and probate records, and valuation records (containing details of properties), but access to images of the record themselves is largely pay-as-you-go. The business model is presumably one here that was ultimately determined by the National Archives of Scotland (and thus the Scottish Government). Presumably the justification is that it would have been impossible to undertake such large-scale digitisation otherwise, but is digitisation in this way worthwhile? What is the point of digitising and then being able to undertake only the most basic research because of the cost? It seems as if archivists have been gripped by a mania to digitise as quickly as possibly, regardless of the implications for future scholarship of how this is done. <br />
<br />
It is this kind of development that makes me worry as to whether digital technologies will turn out to be a boon or disaster for scholarship. If we end up with the bulk of our archival records only available via the expensive and cumbersome route offered by firms like findmypast, digitisation might prove to be the greatest disaster for scholarship of recent times. <a href="http://melissaterras.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/im-not-going-to-edit-your-10000-pay-to.html" target="_blank">Melissa Terras in an excellent post</a> has recently protested against the insistence by publishers on extracting processing charges for publishing books and articles on an open access basis. However, since we as scholars are the producers of those books and articles, the power to remedy this situation lies in our own hands. The decisions about the use of rapacious family history firms to digitise archives are more difficult for us to influence. Bodies like the British Library are funded separately from universities and are subject to different policy pressures. In the face of the enormous comercial possibilities of family history, the requirements of university researchers look puny. Yet surely we must protest against this enclosure of our cultural commons. We should also congratulate cultural institutions when they do make digital resources available on an Open Access basis. Although I couldn’t get very far with findmypast at the National Library of Wales, NLW has been a staunch standardbearer for the cause of Open Access. The excellent <a href="http://welshjournals.llgc.org.uk/browse/" target="_blank">Welsh Journals</a> and <a href="http://papuraunewyddcymru.llgc.org.uk/en/home?" target="_blank">Welsh Newspapers</a> projects are fully open access. Because of the NLW’s enlightened approach, Scottish students in Glasgow now study <a href="http://cat.llgc.org.uk/cgi-bin/gw/chameleon?sessionid=2014020218253003546&skin=profeb&lng=en&inst=consortium&host=localhost%2b9901%2bDEFAULT&patronhost=localhost%209901%20DEFAULT&search=NOSRCH&function=START&sourcescreen=NOFUNC&pos=1&elementcount=1&u1=0" target="_blank">Welsh wills</a> (freely available) rather than Scottish wills (locked behind a brightsolid paywell) – a lesson for the Scottish government to ponder there, surely.<br />
<br />
In the meantime, I’m nevertheless pondering whether I need a subscription to findyourpast. Except of course that since I work in London, there is an alternative – I can just go to the very pleasant searchroom of Westminster Archives and consult the original Rate Books (or more likely microfilms) there. And, as the depredations of companies like D. C. Thomson continue, I think this is an alternative that many of us might be taking more and more in the future.Andrew Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07861908988990764618noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8856697805993319185.post-38764003848970142522014-01-22T04:36:00.002-08:002014-01-22T04:36:44.284-08:00Charles Babbage and King's College London<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nBe-K4r1jGo/UtLZK_LVSrI/AAAAAAAAAa0/jH11K1F1CaU/s1600/10303288.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nBe-K4r1jGo/UtLZK_LVSrI/AAAAAAAAAa0/jH11K1F1CaU/s1600/10303288.jpg" height="209" width="320" /></a></div>
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<br />
King's College London has the unfortunate distinction of having given away Charles Babbage's Difference Engine. The scientific instrument collections formed by George III and kept at Kew were presented to King's College in 1841 and displayed in the George III Museum in the Strand building, opened by Prince Albert in 1843. The displays also included the Difference Engine built by Babbage with government support in order to calculate the mathematical table required for navigation and other purposes. Sadly, King's decided it no longer wanted Babbage's machine twenty years later, which is why it is now on display in the Science Museum in South Kensington. The story is told by Babbage as follows: <br />
<br />
Charles Babbage, <i>Passages from the Life of a Philosopher</i>, ed. Martin Campbell-Kelly (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1994)<br />
p. 73n: 'The part of the <i>Difference Engine</i> already constructed, together with all the Drawings relating to the whole machine, were, in January 1843 (by the direction of the Government), deposited in the Museum of King's College London. <br />
p. 111: Circumstances Connected with the exhibition of the Difference Engine No. 1 in the International Exhibition of 1862<br />
When the construction of Difference Engine No. 1 was abandoned by the Government in 1842, I was consulted respecting the place in which it should be deposited. Well aware of the unrivalled perfection of its workmanship, and conscious that it formed the first great step towards reducing the whole science of number to the absolute conrrol of mechanism, I wished it to be placed whereer the greatest number of persons could see it daily.<br />
With this view, I advised that it should be placed in one of the much-frequented rooms of the British Museum. Another locality was, however, assigned to it, and it was confided by the Government to the care of King's College, Somerset House. It remained in safe custody within its glass case in the museum of that body for twenty years. It is remarkable that during that long period no person should have studied its structure, and, by explaining its nature and use, have acquired an amount of celebrity which the singularity of knowledge would undoubtedly have produced. <br />
The college authorities did justice to their charge. They put it in the place of honour, in the centre of their museum, and would, no doubt, have given facilities to any of their members or to otyer persons who might have wished to study it. <br />
But the system quietly pursued by the Government of ignoring the existence of the Difference Engine and its inventor doubtlessly exercised its deadening influence on those who were inclined, by taste or acquirements, to take such a course. <br />
pp. 113-4: The appearance of the finished portion of the unfinished Difference Engine No. 1 at the Exhibition of 1862 is entirely due to Mr [William] Gravatt [a civil engineer who worked with Brunel]. That gentleman had a few years before paid great attention to the Swedish calculating engine of M. Scheutz, and was the main cause of its success in this country.<br />
Being satisfied that it was possible to calculate and print all tables by machinery, Mr Gravatt became convinced that the time must arrive when no tables would ever be calculated or printed except by machines. He felt it was of great importance to accelerate the arrival of that period, more especially as numerical tables, which are at present the most expensive kind of printing, would then become the cheapest.<br />
In furtherance of this idea, Mr Gravatt wrote to Dr [Richard William] Jelf, the Principal of King's College, Somerset House, to suggest that the Difference Engine of Mr Babbage, which had for so many years occupied a prominent place in the museum, should be exhibited in the International Exhibition of 1862. He at the same time offered his assistance in the removal and reinstatement of that instrument.<br />
The authorities of the college readily acceded to this plan. On further enquiry, it appeared that the Difference Engine belonged to the Government, and was only deposited with the college. It was then found necessary to make an application to the Treasury for permission to exhibit it, which was accordingly done by the proper authorities.<br />
p. 115 On Mr Gravatt applying to the commissioners [of the Exhibition] for space, it s stated that the engine must be placed amongst the philosophical instruments, Class XIII.<br />
The only place offered for its reception was a small hole, 4 feet 4 inches in front by 5 feet deep. On one side of this was the only passage to the office of the superintendent of the class. The opposite side was occupied by a glass case in which placed specimens of the separate parts of the unfinished engine ... The public at first flocked to see it; but it was so placed that only three persons could conveniently see it at the same time. When Mr Gravatt kindly explained and set it in motion, he was continually interrupted by the necessity of moving sway in ordr to allow access to the very numerous persons whose business called them to the superintendent's office.<br />
p. 125: After the close of the exhibition, Mr Gravatt and myself attended to prepare the Difference Engine for its return to the museum of King's College. To our great astonishment, we found that it had already been removed to the museum at South Kensington. Not only the Difference Engine itself, but also the illustrations and all the unfinished portions of exquisite workmanship which I had lent to the Exhibition for irs explanation, were gone.<br />
On Mr Gravatt applying to the Board of Works, it was stated that the Difference Engine itself had been placed in the Kensington Museum because the authorities of King's College had declined receiving it, and immediate instructions were of course given for the restoration of my own property. <br />
<br />Andrew Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07861908988990764618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8856697805993319185.post-29493543505438749632013-08-17T06:40:00.002-07:002014-01-13T03:26:02.172-08:00How the Web Can Make Books Vanish<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
<span lang="EN-US">I have recently (in the odd moments allowed
to me by that anti-intellectual managerialist nightmare with the Orwellian Newspeak
name, the Research Excellence Framework) been preparing for publication my
keynote talk at the <a href="http://www.shef.ac.uk/hri/dhc2012" target="_blank">first Sheffield Digital Humanities Congress</a> last year, <i><a href="http://digitalriffs.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/made-in-sheffield-industrial.html" target="_blank">Made in Sheffield: Industrial Perspectives on the Digital Humanities</a></i>. This considers
how looking at the history of the Industrial Revolution can help us understand
current digital transformations. Among recent scholarly publications on the
industrial revolution, I particularly enjoyed Emma Griffin’s <a href="http://yalebooks.co.uk/display.asp?K=9780300151800" target="_blank"><i>Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution</i></a> (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2013). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Griffin uses
autobiographies by working men and women to reexamine the debate about the
effects of the Industrial Revolution on the standard of living and quality of
life. Griffin’s introduction discusses the use of quantification in academic
discussion of the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the life of ordinary
people, reminding us of Sir John Clapham’s trenchant dismissal of ‘historians
who neglect quantities’ and E. P. Thomson’s riposte that ‘it is quite possible
for statistical averages and human experiences to run in opposite directions’. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span lang="EN-US">Griffin’s emphasis on the importance of
quantification in the historiography of the Industrial Revolution is itself
very pertinent to current discussion of the role of quantification in
humanities research (and particularly as part of the digital humanities).
Griffin reminds us that sophisticated quantitative techniques have been used by
historians writing about the Industrial Revolution since the 1920s. The
impression is sometimes given by enthusiasts for quantification in the digital
humanities that it offers an escape route from the thickets of theory and will
create more authoritative conclusions. A moment’s glance at the use of
statistics in studying the Industrial Revolution will quickly dispel any such
thoughts. The apparently authoritative statistics on British economic growth
prepared by Deane and Cole, which provided the basis for Rostow’s theory that
there were set conditions for ‘lift off’ into economic growth, were undermined
by Crafts, who questioned the methods used by Deane and Cole and produced
statistics which suggested that it was very difficult to measure substantial
economic growth in Britain in the late eighteenth century, indicating that the
early effects of the Industrial Revolution were limited to particular
industries and localities. The literature about British economic growth rates
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries suggests that quantification isn’t a
route to clarity but rather a means of creating greater uncertainty and
complexity.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span lang="EN-US">Griffin laments the current stress on
quantification among historians working on the Industrial Revolution:
‘Producing graphs and tables is more in vogue than asking how workers felt’ (p.
15). Moreover, Griffin suggests that the picture produced by such measurements is
rather monochrome: ‘However living standards are measured, historians report
stagnation or decline. Evidence of modest rises is gloomily dismissed as a
paltry recompense for the labouring families that had done the most to create
the substantial economic growth that occurred over the period …Today’s intellectuals
understand the industrial revolution in much the same way as the educate elites
who lived through it’ (p. 17).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
Griffin’s view, if one looks at the autobiographies by ordinary men and
(sometimes) women which began to appear in increasing quantities from the
beginning of the nineteenth century, a different impression emerges. Griffin
uses these autobiographies to question some of the accepted criticisms of
industrialization. She finds that, for many people, factory work might offer an
escape from the misery and uncertainty of a subsistence life in the
countryside. She suggests that the growth in child labour had more complex
roots than ruthless economic exploitation. Griffin uses these autobiographical
recollections to reconstruct working class lives as more than economic
abstractions and considers the importance of (for example) sex, religion and
education in making up the quality of life.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span lang="EN-US">Griffin expresses amazement that more use
has not previously been made of these autobiographies: ‘It is surely surprising
that in spite of the ongoing interest in how the industrial revolution was
experienced by the poor, no one has opened the pages of the books and notebooks
where the poor wrote about just that. Historians have measured wages and
working hours with meticulous care, yet none have sought to listen to, or make
sense of, the messy tales that the workers left behind … If we listen rather
than count, we shall start to see the industrial revolution in a very different
light’ (p. 16). There are obvious issues about the autobiographies used by
Griffin as a corpus of evidence, and she is very conscious of these (e.g. p.
25).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Griffin uses just over 350
autobiographies – a slender sample with which to investigate such a complex
phenomenon as industrialization, although it is remarkable that
so many memoirs by ordinary men and women survive. The sample is dominated
overwhelmingly by men – Griffin reports cases in which the idea that a woman’s
life could ever be worth describing was dismissed as ludicrous. Many of these
men had made good as teachers, preachers, poets, engineers or politicians, or
wanted to tell us how they had succeeded, perhaps as a result of the virtues of
temperance. The authors may have had experience of working class life, but they
were rarely simply ordinary people – these memoirs are not the voice of the
poor, by any stretch of the imagination. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span lang="EN-US">Yet these autobiographies are fascinating
and compelling documents. I cannot possibly do justice to them here – I can
only recommend that you read Emma Griffin’s book. Griffin describes how ‘Most
of the autobiographies that have survived appeared in print during or soon
after the author’s lifetime. A few were even commercial successes. <a href="http://archive.org/details/autobiographyofb00burn" target="_blank">James Dawson Burn’s Autobiography</a> was published in 1855, and by the end of the decade had
gone into its fourth edition. Others were published in small numbers by obscure
provincial printers, more for the writer’s satisfaction than in response to any
public demand. John Robinson’s <i>Short Account of the Life of John Robinson</i> was
as short as its title promised – just one page long. Robinson was a printer and
probably published his short account himself. It seems likely that the copy
held by Torquay Central Library is the only one now in existence’ (p. 5). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span lang="EN-US">The lack of a digital dimension to
Griffin’s research is striking. The process she describes is one of finding
forgotten items in dusty archives. Yet the period she discusses – the first
half of the nineteenth century – is one where we assume that digital online
coverage of published books is quite good. These are books which don't present
many copyright problems, and it seems reasonable to assume that many of them
will have been covered already by the mass digitisaton programmes of Google,
Microsoft et al., and be accessible via Google Books, the Internet Archive and so
on. Indeed, perhaps it would be feasible to assemble enough online versions of
these working class autobiographies to use some quantification techniques on
the text, and see how the results compare with Griffin’s qualitative
explorations. What type of language was used in discussing factory work? How
were conditions in towns described? Maybe we could even envisage some sentiment
analysis of these texts. The potential of these documents for quantatitive analysis has already been demonstrated by Jane Humphries, who has used them in this way in her study of <i>Childhood and Childhood Labour in the Industrial Revolution</i> (2010). By mining the digital versions of these autobiographies, perhaps we can dissolve the quantification
/ qualitative polarities in the historiography of the Industrial Revolution,
and develop a new type of discourse about the effects of industrialization. But
the practicability of such an approach would be dependent on the extent to
which our autobiographies are available in digital form. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span lang="EN-US">A key tool in Griffin’s research was a
monumental annotated critical bibliography of <i>The Autobiography of the Working
Class</i> edited by John Burnett, David Vincent and David Mayall, which was
published in three volumes from 1984-9 and lists over two thousand autobiographies
by people of working class origin produced between 1790 and 1945. Griffin notes
that many more items have come to light since these volumes were prepared (p.
248), but they are nevertheless the starting point in attempting to appraise digital
coverage of this material. Many of the items described by Burnett et al are in
manuscript or typescript form, but a very large proportion are published, and
we can hope that many of the earlier items are available online. (On Burnett's Bibliography, see further the <a href="http://www.brunel.ac.uk/services/library/research/special-collections/collections/burnett-archive-of-working-class-autobiographies" target="_blank">archive kept at Brunel University</a>.)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span lang="EN-US">Prior to 1800, the <a href="http://estc.bl.uk/" target="_blank">English Short Title Catalogue</a>, representing decades of intensive bibliographic research, provides
an authoritative record of the printed output of the English-speaking world,
and the ESTC underpins the digital libraries of Early English Books Online and
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (although even the ESTC is not comprehensive. Between 1788 and 1793, Thomas Johnson, an influential designer, carver and gilder, published an anthology called <i>Summer Productions; or, Progressive Miscellanies</i>, which contains at the end of the sixth volume an account of his life. The ESTC only notes the first volume, which is in the British Library. In 2003, Jacob Simon pointed out that there were copies of the remaining five volumes in the <a href="http://www.freemasonry.london.museum/" target="_blank">Library and Museum of Freemasonry</a>, and published Johnson's Autobiography in <i>Furniture History</i> 39, pp. 1-64) . But most of the printed autobiographies
in which we are interested were produced after 1800. Burnett’s bibliography
only covers items produced after 1790, and only three items in it were printed
before 1800<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Vol. 1, nos. 15, 472, 507).
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Griffin, going back to 1700, adds a
further six items, giving us nine recorded working-class autobiographies
between 1700 and 1800. By contrast, the Bibliography records over 80 working
class autobiographies produced between 1800 and 1849, which (as Griffin
observes) itself tells us a great deal about changes in working class literacy
and access to means of communication.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span lang="EN-US">The nine eighteenth-century autobiographies
are all carefully recorded in the ESTC and as a result duly appear in
Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Here are the ESTC entries in
chronological order, with links to the ECCO facsimile. Where only one edition
of the work appears in ECCO, I have given the entry for that edition. </span>
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the Internet Archive, I have also given a link. </span>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><b>Tryon, Thomas, 1634-1703.</b><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i>Some memoirs of the life of Mr. Tho. Tryon,
late of London, merchant: Written by himself: together with some rules, and
orders, proper to be observed by all such as would train up and govern, either
familes, or societies, in cleanness, temperance, and innocency.</i> (London :
Printed, by T. Sowle, in White-Hart-Court, in Gracious-Street, 1705.) <a href="http://bit.ly/19p7d0C" target="_blank">ECCO copy</a>.</span></div>
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<b>Chubb, Thomas, 1679-1747.</b> <i>The posthumous works of Mr. Thomas Chubb:
containing, I. Remarks on the Scriptures. II. Observations on the
Reverend Mr. Warburton's Divine Legation of Moses. III. The author's
farewel to his Readers; comprehending a Variety of Tracts, on the most
important Subjects of Religion. With an appendix, including a postscript
to his four last Dissertations, more particularly relative to that on
the History of Melchizedek. To the whole is prefixed, some account of
the author : written by himself. In two volumes. ... </i>(London : printed
for R. Baldwin, jun. at the Rose in Pater-Noster-Row; and sold by E.
Easton, in Silver-Street, Sarum, M.DCC.XLVIII. [1748]). <a href="http://bit.ly/1cUMq9a" target="_blank">ECCO copy</a>. <a href="http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015036815358;view=1up;seq=9" target="_blank">HATHI Trust copy</a>. <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Ab-QlbDyB3cC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank">Google Books copy</a>. </div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><b>Bewley, George, 1683 or 4-1749</b>. <i>A narrative of the Christian
experiences of George Bewley, late of the City of Corke, deceased.
Written by himself: And Published with the Approbation, and by Order of
the National Half-Year's Meeting, held in Dublin in the third Month,
1750.</i> (Dublin : printed by I. Jackson at the Globe in Meath-Street,
1750.) <a href="http://bit.ly/1aeCWVc" target="_blank">ECCO copy</a>.</span></div>
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<b>Bangs, Benjamin, 1652-1741.</b> <i>Memoirs of the life and convincement of
that worthy Friend, Benjamin Bangs, late of Stockport in Cheshire,
deceased; mostly taken from his own mouth, by Joseph Hobson.</i> (London :
printed and sold by Luke Hinde at the Bible in George-Yard,
Lombard-Street, [1757]). <a href="http://bit.ly/1aeKZ4d" target="_blank">ECCO copy</a>. </div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><b>Barker, Robert, b. 1729.</b> <i>The unfortunate shipwright: Or, Cruel captain.
Being a faithful narrative of the unparallel'd sufferings of Robert
Barker, late carpenter on board the thetis snow of Bristol, in a voyage
to the coast of Guinea and Antigua.</i> (London : Printed for, and sold by
the author, and may be had at Mr. Samuel Collins's, the sign of the
Card-maker's Arms on Garlick Hill, London, and no where else, 1758.) <a href="http://bit.ly/19A86Xz" target="_blank">ECCO copy</a>. [A <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=AjZcAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank">copy of the 1759 edition</a> is available via Google Books]. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><b>Barker, Robert, b. 1729.</b> Unfortunate shipwright. Part 2 (Published
according to act of Parliament.) <i>The second part of the unfortunate
shipwright; or, The blind man's travels through many parts of England,
in pursuit of his right</i>: ([Dublin] : London, printed: and Dublin
reprinted for Robert Barker, for his own benefit, in the year, 1766.) <a href="http://bit.ly/16W5jEu" target="_blank">ECCO copy</a>. </span><br />
<b>MacDonald, John, b. 1741?.</b> <i>Travels, in various parts of Europe, Asia,
and Africa, during a series of thirty years and upwards. By John
Macdonald, A Cadet of the Family of Keppoch in Inverness-Shire; who,
After the Ruin of his Family in 1745, was thrown when a Child on the
wide World; the Ways of which, with many curious, useful, and
interesting Particulars he had occasion to observe, and has taken care,
by Means of a regular Journal, to record, while he served, in various
departments, a great number of Noblemen and Gentlemen, English, Scotch,
Irish, Dutch, &c. &c.</i> (London : printed for the author, and sold
by J. Forbes, Covent-Garden, MDCCXC. [1790]). <a href="http://bit.ly/13HjVU4" target="_blank">ECCO copy</a>. <br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><i>Memoirs of a printer's devil; interspersed with pleasing recollections,
local descriptions, and anecdotes.</i> (Gainsborough : printed and sold by
J. M. Mozley and Co. for the author: and sold by Messrs. Rivington, St.
Paul's-Church-Yard, London, M.DCC.XCIII. [1793]) <a href="http://bit.ly/16w5k3z" target="_blank">ECCO copy</a>. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><b>McKaen, James, 1752 or 3-1797.</b> <i>Genuine copy. The life of James M'Kaen,
shoemaker in Glasgow, [w]ho was executed at the Cross of Glasgow, on
Wednesday the 25th Jan. 1797. For the murder and robbery of James
Buchanan, the Lanark carrier.</i> [ Second edition.] (Glasgow : Printed for
and sold by Brash and Reid, [1797]). <a href="http://bit.ly/15SkzO5" target="_blank">ECCO copy</a>. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><b>Anderson, Edward, 18th cent</b>. <i>The sailor; a poem. Description of his
going to sea, and through various scenes of life, ... with observations
on the town of Liverpool. By Edward Anderson, </i>... (Newcastle : printed
for and sold by the author. M. Angus and Son, Printers, Side, Newcastle,
[1800?]) <a href="http://bit.ly/13sTmHf" target="_blank">ECCO copy</a>. </span><br />
<br />
So for books published before 1800, that remarkable bibliographic achievement, the ESTC, and the resoures derived from it such as ECCO, ensure that we can easily trace obscure voices like that of Robert Barker or Benjamin Bangs. It is worth noting in passing that humbler folk like these are not so well served by other initiatives such as Google Books or the HATHI Trust. While most (but not all) of these works feature as catalogue entries in Google Books, only one is reproduced in facsimile in the Googl;e library so far (which is also the only one to be picked up by the HATHI Trust, showing how the selectivity of these initiatives can become self-reinforcing).<br />
<br />
From 1800, paradoxically, as working class autobiographies become more commonplace, they start to disappear from the web. This is partly because the bibliographical infrastructure is less comprehensive from 1800. As noted, to 1800 we have the ESTC which attempts to record every known publication from the English-speaking world. A Nineteenth-Century Short Title catalogue was produced in print and CD-ROM by Avero Publications between 1983 and 2003 and there is an online version which continures to be updated, but, even though this contains more than 1,275,000 items, it is based on the holdings of big league research libraries: the Bodleian Library, the British Library, Harvard University Library,
the Library of Congress, the Library of Trinity College, Dublin, the
National Library of Scotland and the University Libraries of Cambridge
and Newcastle.That means a book that survives in a single copy in Torquay Public Library will not be mentioned. If a book was published in the nineteenth century (and likewise for much of the twentieth century), it needed to have had the social, intellectual or moral prestige to make it worthy of inclusion in one of the super-elite libraries of the English-speaking world. And, if it didn't make its way into these august collections, then it probably won't make it onto the web either, because the blinkered assumption of projects like Google Books and the HATHI Trust is that the sum of human knowledge and understanding is only to be found in elite top notch institutions, and not in Torquay Public Library.<br />
<br />
Let us take as an illustration the autobiography found by Griffin in Torquay: <i>A Short Account of the Life of John Robinson</i>, printed by Robinson himself in Torquay in 1882. This does not appear in the Bibliography of Burnett et al., and Griffin speculates that the copy in Torquay Public Library is the only one surviving. Not surprisingly, it is not in the NSTC. A natural next port of call would be COPAC, which declares that 'In a single search you can discover the holdings of the UK’s national
libraries (including the British Library), many University libraries,
and specialist research libraries'. COPAC stands for 'CURL Online Public Access Catalogue'. CURL was the Consortium of University Libraries, a co-ordinating group for libraries as universities which regarded themselves as elite, now re-branded as Research Libraries UK. Broadly, the membership of RLUK is those elite universities which belong to what is called the Russell Group. There are one or two non-Russell Group universities in RLUK, but generally non-Russell Group universities such as Aberystwyth University, Bangor University, Hull University, Kent University and Sussex University, all of which have important and interesting research collections, are not deemed worthy of inclusion in the COPAC club. COPAC has recently been extending its coverage to other specialist collections, including some which are major resources for working class history such as the Bishopsgate Institute and the Humanist Library at Conway Hall, but no public library collections have so far passed the august portals of COPAC.<br />
<br />
A better alternative in searching for this type of material is WorldCat, run by the world's biggest and most important library consortium, OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) which has developed from an association of Ohio Libraries and Colleges who wanted to share cataloguing and other resources. Many of the bibliographic products produced by OCLC are indispensable to running a large modern library service and virtually every major library service in the UK is a member and contributes its catalogue records to WorldCat. This includes the university libraries omitted from COPAC, as well as public library services such as Torbay Library Services. WorldCat altogether combines the catalogues of more than 10,000 libraries worldwide. However the size of WorldCat can be a hindrance if you are looking for specific items. In this case, the fact that 'short account life robinson' (and other similar search strategies) wil result in hundreds of hits on WotldCat. The single sheet in Torquay is probably somewhere, but it is searching for a needle in a haystack.<br />
<br />
Annoyingly, WorldCat doesn't have an easy means of restricting searches to particular libraries. So the simplest thing to do is to go direct to the online catalogue for Torbay Library Services, where a search for 'robinson' as author and 'short' in the title produces the following very gnomic catalogue entry:<br />
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<span lang="EN-US"><b>RCN - ISBN/ISSN/BNB </b><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>D02006836X</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><b>Personal Name</b> <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Robinson, J.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><b>Main Title</b> <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>A
short account of the life of john robinson</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><b>Publication</b> <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>As author</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"># TORQUAY LOCAL HISTORY <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>D929/ROB PAM <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Not for loan <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Local
History/Studies</span></div>
<br />
Part of the difficulty in locating this item in WorldCat was because this original catalogue information is so limited - an indication of place or approximate date of publication would have assisted in locating the information on WorldCat. It is sometimes suggested that catalogue information and formats are becoming irrelevant because of the power of Google as a search tool, but of course the quality of Google searches depend on the underlying information. WorldCat records have been ingested into Google Books, presumably to help direct future digitisation work, but the restricted information in this catalogue entry effectively obscures it. A Google search for 'john robinson torquay' doesn't retrieve the catalogue entry in the first ten hits. A search for "short account of the life of john robinson" does the job, but the lack of information in the original catalogue entry makes the Google Book entry virtually meaningless:<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XS_PvNChD1U/UhDx8BBSPVI/AAAAAAAAAS0/cdnlGAfBbqo/s1600/googlegrab.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="268" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XS_PvNChD1U/UhDx8BBSPVI/AAAAAAAAAS0/cdnlGAfBbqo/s640/googlegrab.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<br />
It will probably be a very long time before we see a digitised version of Robinson's account of his life in Google Books. It is ironic that it is through Emma Griffin's own reference to Robinson's little autobiography that this item is beginning to develop a footprint in Google (to which this blog entry will, of course, add). In selecting items for digitisation in Google Books and other mass digitisation projects, priority is given to such 'great libraries' as the Bodleian Library, Harvard University Library and the British Library. The assumption appears to be that the contents of these libraries embraces the whole of human knowledge and understanding. For the British partners, it is assumed that legal deposit under the terms of copyright legislation means that the libraries have a copy of every book ever printed in the UK. But in the British Library (for example) legal deposit was not systematically enforced until the late 1840s and it is unlikely that librarians at the British Museum before that date would have taken much interest in acquiring what would have been seen as such ephemeral material as the autobiographies used by Griffin. Moreover, many items received under legal deposit considered of ephemeral interest were not fully catalogued by the British Library but placed under generic 'dump' headings. The ESTC found that there were something like 50,000-60,000 forgotten items from the eighteenth century in the British Library. These have now been largely identified and catalogued for items up to 1800, but no such similar exercise has occurred for the nineteenth century, and there can be no doubt that many further working class autobiographies languish under such dump catalogue entries.<br />
<br />
Although WorldCat and Google Books are wonderful resources, the problem is that they reinforce an assumption that by simply linking up the catalogues of major libraries gives us comprehensive coverage in a quick and painless process. As a result, we found ourselves silently and surreptitiously enmeshed in the world view and cultural assumptions which shaped those elite libraries. The problem is that, in working with resources like Google Books, we soon cease to have any sense of how these resources are silently constraining and altering our research. You can begin to get a sense of the perils of this process by looking more closely at the way which the digital representation of the working class autobiographies used by Emma Griffin is highly filtered, with a significant quantity of material disappearing from sight altogether.<br />
<br />
Those writers of working class origins who had a success story to report, who had become distinguished statesmen, successful businessmen, religious leaders and so on, were able to find commercial publishers who were interested in their story. Writers whose life demonstrated the virtues of temperance, prudence and self-help were of course particularly favoured. Books published by major commercial publishers would be picked up by the legal deposit libraries in Britain, and might even excite interest across the Atlantic. As a result, it is these volumes which we tend to find in such resources as Google Books, the Internet Archive and the HATHI Trust. Here are some examples:<br />
<br />
[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 125]. <b>[CAMPKIN, J.], </b><i>The Struggles of a Village Lad</i> (William Tweedie: London, 1859). <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=uEVWAAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=campkin+struggles+village+lad&hl=en&sa=X&ei=GDASUr6DBa2b0wX7iYCACw&ved=0CDMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=campkin%20struggles%20village%20lad&f=false" target="_blank">Google Books copy</a> (from The British Library).<br />
<br />
[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 241]. <b>FLOCKHART, Robert.</b> <i>The Street Preacher, being the Autobiography of Robert Flockhart, late corporal 81st Regiment</i> (Adam and Charles Black: Edinburgh, 1858). <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=u-gKAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=robert+flockhart+street&hl=en&sa=X&ei=mgERUrj3OsTX0QXz-YD4AQ&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=robert%20flockhart%20street&f=false" target="_blank">Google Books copy</a> (from Harvard); <a href="http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Search/Home?lookfor=robert%20flockhart&searchtype=all&ft=ft&setft=true" target="_blank">HATHI Trust copy</a> (also from Harvard).<br />
<br />
[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 331]. <b>HILLOCKS, James Inches</b>.<i> My Life and Labours in London, a step nearer the mark</i> (William Freeman: London, 1865). Cheap edn., <i>Mission Life in London</i> (London, 1865). <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ZXMBAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=hillocks+hard+battles&hl=en&sa=X&ei=0wMRUvH_KKqJ0AXimYGQAg&ved=0CDgQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank">Google Books copy</a> of cheap edition (from Oxford), also available at <a href="http://archive.org/details/missionlifeinlo00hillgoog" target="_blank">Internet Archive</a>.<br />
<br />
[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 632]<b> [SMITH, Charles Manby]</b>, <i>The Working Man's Way in the World, being the Autobiography of a Journeyman Printer</i> (William and Frederick G. Cash: London [1853]). <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=b_QKAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=charles+manby+smith+working+man%27s&hl=en&sa=X&ei=qyMSUoy1HYeS0AXnuoGgDA&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=charles%20manby%20smith%20working%20man%27s&f=false" target="_blank">Google Books copy (from Harvard)</a>, also in <a href="http://archive.org/details/workingmanswayi00smitgoog" target="_blank">Internet Archive</a> and <a href="http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008640143?type[]=all&lookfor[]=working%20mans%20way&ft=ft" target="_blank">HATHI Trust (with additional copy in New York Public Library</a>). <br />
<br />
[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 675] <b>ANON., </b><i>Struggles for Life; or, the Autobiography of a Dissenting Minister</i> (W. and F. G. Cash, London; John Menzies, Edinburgh: 1854 [1853]; new edn. The Book Society, Hamilton, Adams and Co., Jarrold and Sons: London, 1864).<a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=1I_v-92UWq0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=struggles+for+life+dissenting&hl=en&sa=X&ei=picSUo2kD8mH0AXh9IDgCw&ved=0CDMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=struggles%20for%20life%20dissenting&f=false" target="_blank"> Google Books copy</a>, from an American edition printed by Lindsay and Blakiston, Philadelphia, 1854, in Harvard Libraries, where a cataloguer has identified the author as William Leask. This copy also in <a href="http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044029901956;view=1up;seq=7" target="_blank">HATHI Trust</a> catalogue.<br />
<br />
These autobiographies for one reason or the other caught the attention of librarians and collectors and made their way to the respectable havens of Harvard and the British Museum, where they have been picked up by Google, HATHI and so on. In comparing the contents of the bibliography compiled with Burnett et al. with Google Books, the surprising thing is the large number of the nineteenth century autobiographies, most of which present no copyright issues, are represented only by catalogue entries with no digitisation. This is a reminder of how far Google Books remains a very incomplete (indeed, barely started) enterprise, even for pre-1900 material. In some cases, digitised versions of autobiographies (derived from a microfilm edition of some items in the British Library from Burnett's Bibliography) are available via the Gale subscription resource, Nineteenth Century Collections Online (these electronic versions are picked up by COPAC). However, what is the most surprising and startling aspect of examining the digital presence of these working class autobiographies is the large number which escaped the bibliographical net altogether. As a result, these everyday voices have effectively vanished from the web, except where a modern scholar happens to have discussed them and this discussion has been picked up by Google. Let us examine a few cases to illustrate the process.<br />
<br />
Edward Davis was born in Aston started working in a button factory at the age of six. He became a Quaker in 1858 and, having been apprenticed to a pearl button manufacturer and then built up a confectionery trade, eventually became a teacher. In 1898, the firm of White and Pike published a short pamphlet by Davis entitled <i>Some Passages from My Life, </i>Davis presumably paying for the publication. This is No. 204 in Vol. 1 of the Burnett bibliography, which states that there is a copy in Birmingham Reference Library. This is not on the online catalogue of Birmingham Libraries, presumably because it is only recorded on a card catalogue which has not been converted to an online form. Since the book is not recorded in the Birmingham catalogue, it is not in WorldCat. And as a result of this, there is no catalogue entry for Davis's little book in Google Books, the HATHI Trust, or The Open Library. Davis's book hasn't completely vanished from the web, however. A xerox of the copy in Birmingham was made at some point (presumably because of the entry in Burnett's bibliography) and deposited in Oxford University, so there is an entry for this photocopy on COPAC.<br />
Other autobiographies have been more completely obscured by the way in which digitisation has proceeded. John Finney worked in the Potteries from the age of 13 and in 1902 published <i>Sixty Years Recollection of an Etruscan</i> (J. G. Fenn, Stoke-on-Trent, 1902), which is No. 57 in Vol. 3 of the Bibliography. The Bibliography records that there is a copy in the Horace Barks Reference Library in Hanley. In many cases, holdings of local history libraries and reference libraries remain as card catalogues, and the online catalogue for Stoke libraries does not refer to Finney's book. So, once again, it is absent from our major catalogues - no entry for Finney's book in WorldCat or COPAC. As a result, Google Books denies all knowedge of such a book. A general Google web search on 'John Finney Etruscan' will tell us that this is an engaging work, but we can find out nothing else about it or where to get it.<br />
<br />
Another example: Benjamin North was born at Thame in Oxford in 1811, the 8th child of a labourer. He was a boy shepherd, bird-keeper, plough-boy, and groom, then trained as a paper-maker, but was made redundant by the introduction of new machinery. He eventually became a traveller for a chair-maker and set up a successful furniture business in High Wycombe. North's autobiography was published after his death by his son, and is No. 129 in Vol. 3 of the Bibliography: <i>Autobiography of Benjamin North, with a preface by W.H., to which is appended a brief notice of his last moments, by his eldest son</i> (Fred K. Samuels, Aylesbury, 1882). A copy is recorded in the Local Collection Reference Library in High Wycombe. The<a href="https://buckinghamshire.spydus.co.uk/cgi-bin/spydus.exe/FULL/OPAC/BIBENQ/9475836/10123743,1" target="_blank"> entry in the Buckinghamshire Libraries online catalogue</a> states that the copy in High Wycombe is a photocopy. Buckinghamshire Libraries are members of OCLC, so perhaps it is because the High Wycombe copy is stated to be a photocopy that the entry for North's memoirs does not appear in WorldCat. Whatever the explanation, this is another book that the web has caused to vanish: no entry in WorldCat, nothing in COPAC, no report on Google Books. The only trace of its existence in Google is where it is cited by historians such as Emma Griffin or Jane Humphries in her book on<i> <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=hslWsi3c0B4C&pg=PA398&lpg=PA398&dq=%22benjamin+north%22+autobiography+humphries&source=bl&ots=QXoPcnNQ5t&sig=REpJ37icpmqM9dGIqKXBqSGNays&hl=en&sa=X&ei=HWMTUqyrHKOb0QWGrYHgDA&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22benjamin%20north%22%20autobiography%20humphries&f=false" target="_blank">Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution</a></i>. <br />
We could continue to mount up examples of working class autobiographies listed in the Bibliography of Burnett, Vincent and Mayall which have vanished from our main online bibliographic resources such as WorldCat and Google Books and have in effect been suppressed by the web. Here is a random list made from first preliminary checks against the Bibliography:<br />
<br />
[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 26] <i>Autobiographies of Industrial School Children</i> (T. Nelson and Sons: London, 1865). Ten short narratives by boys and girls who attended industrial schools in Aberdeen. A copy is reported in Aberdeen Central Library.<br />
<br />
[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 41] <b>BARBER, Mrs M.</b> <i>Five Score and Ten. A True Narrative of the Long Life</i> <i>and Many Hardships of M. Barber, taken down from her own dictation, a short time before her death and who died at the advanced age of nearly one hundred and eleven years</i> (Penny and Makeig, Crewkerne, 1840). Copy reported in Bristol Central Library, the website for which explains clearly why this little book hasn't made its way onto the web: 'Much of the older reference stock from before 1985 will not be found on
the online catalogue. These records are still held on card catalogue
files in the Reference Library'.<br />
<br />
[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 47] <b>BARNETT, Will. </b><i>The Life Story of Will Barnett, better known as the ex-jockey. Written by himself </i>(Spurgeon Memorial Press: Congleton, [1911?]). Copy in Horace Barks Reference Library, Hanley.<br />
<br />
[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 71] <b>BLOW, John</b>. <i>The Autobiography of John Blow </i>(J. Parrott: Leeds, 1870). Copy in Leeds Public Library.<br />
<br />
[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 213] <b>DUKE, Robert Rippon</b>. <i>An Autobiography, 1817-1902</i> (Privately published: Buxton, 1902). Copy in Derbyshire County Library, Matlock. Duke, having been apprenticed to a caprenter at the age of 14, became an architect and was responsible for much of the development of Buxton, so there are published biographies and further information about him on the web, but the existence of this published autobiography is only mentioned in passing.<br />
<br />
[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 263] <b>GIBBS, John.</b> <i>The Life and Experience of, and some traces of the Lord's gracious dealings towards the author, John Gibbs, Minister of the Gospel, at the Chapel of Saint John Street, Lewes</i> (Printed for the author: Lewes, 1827). On this book. see now in addition the <a href="http://www.eastsussex.gov.uk/nr/rdonlyres/70d08952-b214-4250-9175-5521f808334b/0/esroannualreport0809.pdf" target="_blank">Annual Report of the East Sussex County Record Office 2008-9</a>, p. 13. <br />
<br />
[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 299] <b>HANBY, George. </b><i>Autobiography of a Colliery Weighman</i> (Brewin and Davis: Barnsley, 1874). Copy in Barnsley Public Library.<br />
<br />
[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 300] <b>HANSON, William. </b><i>The Life of William Hanson, written by himself (in his 80th year) and revised by a friend</i> (Privately published: Halifax, 1883). Another edition was published by J. Walsh in Halifax in 1884. Copies in Halifax Public Library.<i></i><br />
<br />
[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 478] <b>McNAUGHTON, John Donkin. </b><i>The Life and Happy Experience of John Donkin McNaughton. Written by Himself </i>(H. Masterman: Thirsk, [1810?]). Burnett et al don't give a location for this item - presumably it is recorded only on a card catalogue somewhere in North Yorkshire County Libraries.<br />
<br />
[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 542] [<b>OVERSBY, W. T.</b>] <i>A Life's Romance. By a Successful Insurance Man </i>(Liverpool Daily Post: Liverpool, 1938). Copy in Blackburn Central Library.<br />
[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 568] <b>RAGG, Thomas</b>. <i>God's Dealings with an Infidel: or, Grace Triumphant: being the Autobiography of Thomas Ragg, author of Creation's Testimony to its God' </i>(Piper, Stephenson and Spence: London, 1858). Copy reported in Local Studies Department, Central Reference Library, Birmingham.<br />
<br />
[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 598] <b>ROONEY, Ralph. </b><i>The Story of My Life</i> (Bury Times: Bury, 1947). 3 editions are reported in Burnett, all held by the Local Studies Collection in Preston, but none of them are apparently in WorldCat, Copac, Google Books, etc. <br />
<br />
[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 637] <b>SMITH, George. </b><i>An Autobiography of One of the People</i> (Privately published, 1923). Copy in Local Studies Library, Redruth.<br />
<br />
[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 641] <b>SMITH, William. </b><i>The Life of William Smith, late Minister of the Baptist Chapel, Bedworth </i>(E. C. Lewis: Coventry [1857?]). Copy in Nuneaton Library.<br />
<br />
[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 677] <b>SUTTON, William. </b>Multum in Parvo; or the Ups and Downs of a Village Gardener (Robertson and Gray: Kenilworth, 1903). Copy in Local Studies Library, Coventry.<br />
<br />
[Burnett et al., Vol. 1, No. 687] <b>TAYLOR, John. </b>Autobiography of John Taylor (J. Francis: Bath, 1893). Copy in Bristol Central Library.<br />
<br />
This is only the result of a very preliminary excursus into the Bibliography, and again the very action of publishing this blog entry (just as means of parking my notes for the time being) will give these books a web presence, in some cases for the first time. However, these lacunae of the web do raise important questions about how we are building up our digital libraries and the way in which we conduct research using them. For the period before 1800, the ESTC attempts (and largely succeeds) in documenting all printing in the English-speaking world, no matter where it is kept. After 1800, Google Books and other enterprises have decided to forgo the preliminary creation of such a detailed bibliographical infrastructure. Instead, they have assumed that national libraries and other major research libraries contain all that is needed, and have worked from there. The way in which the use of this ad hoc method distorts the online representation of post-1800 printing requires much further examination. I suspect the result is that the printed output of the provinces (particularly the newly industrialised areas of Northern England and the Midlands) is seriously underrepresented in corpora like Google Books. The extent to which there is an inherent class bias in enterprises like Google Books is also worth investigating (probably there was a bias in the British Museum against all sorts of biographical material which was apparently only of ephemeral value). These issues in themselves have ramifications for the research methods that we adopt in approaching collections like Google Books. 'Distant reading' has a great deal to offer in looking at measuring shifts in the use of language and metaphor over long periods, but, if the sample on which the distant reading takes place is biased towards particular regions or social groups, this will significantly distort the results.<br />
<br />
I hope to develop a more detailed analysis of these issues, but I suppose a preliminary conclusion is a plea to remember public libraries in developing digitisation programmes. Digitising the British Library and Harvard Libraries will never be enough; we also need the <a href="http://www.thepotteries.org/federation/061_barks.htm" target="_blank">Horace Barks Reference Library</a>, the <a href="http://www.glasgowlife.org.uk/libraries/the-mitchell-library/Pages/About-Mitchell-Library.aspx" target="_blank">Mitchell Library</a> and the <a href="http://www.brixtonblog.com/spotlight-on-minet-library-2/12046" target="_blank">Minet Library</a>. Our digitisation strategies need to take this into account.<br />
<br />
<i>Further Reading</i><br />
<br />
J. Burnett (ed.)<i> Destiny Obscure: Autobiographies of Childhood, Education and Family from the 1820s to the 1920s</i> (London: Allen Lane, 1982) <br />
J. Burnett (ed.) <i>Useful Toil: Autobiographies of Working People from the 1820s to the 1920s</i> (London: Allen Lane, 1994)<br />
J. Burnett, D. Vincent and D. Mayall (eds.), <i>The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated Critical Bibliography </i>3 vols. (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984-9)<br />
E. Griffin, <span class="st"><i>Liberty's Dawn</i>: <i>A People's History of the Industrial Revolution </i>(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013) </span><br />
Jane Humphries, <i>Childhood and Childhood Labour in the British Industrial Revolution </i> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)<br />
D. Vincent, <i>Testaments of Radicalism: Memoirs of Working Class Politicians 1790-1885</i> (London: Europa, 1977)<br />
D. Vincent,<i> Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Working Class Autobiography</i> (London: Europa, 1981)<br />
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Andrew Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07861908988990764618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8856697805993319185.post-45430892033764527522013-08-09T06:26:00.003-07:002014-01-13T03:27:32.155-08:00"Start from Arts and Humanities"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NP_261Ii3Rs/UgTs0P1pmMI/AAAAAAAAASg/61REwNYkFKM/s1600/ubiquitous.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="222" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NP_261Ii3Rs/UgTs0P1pmMI/AAAAAAAAASg/61REwNYkFKM/s320/ubiquitous.gif" width="320" /></a></div>
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Mark Weiser was the Chief Technology Officer at the Rank Xerox Palo
Alto Research Center (PARC) from 1996-1999. PARC had of course during the
1960s and 1970s been the place where many of the features we associate
with personal computing were developed. Weiser had a vision of something
which went further - a world where we are surrounded by technollogical
devices which help shape our life silently and without complex
interactions. Weiser called this 'ubiquitous computing' and described
his vision in an article <a href="http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/SciAmDraft3.html" target="_blank">'The Computer for the 21st Century</a>' in the <i>Scientific American</i> in 1991. And of
course Weiser's vision is very much the world we see taking shape today -
of mobile phones which are powerful small computers, domestic devices
controlled by chips, self-navigating cars, an internet of things.<br />
<br />
Weiser's work is described in the enthralling book by Phil Dourish and Genevieve Bell, <i>Divining a Digital Future: Mess of Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing</i>. Weiser sadly died on cancer in 1999 but his website <a href="http://www.ubiq.com/">www.ubiq.com</a> provides a record of his ideas and personality - itself an interesting example of the need to preserve websites as historical documents.<br />
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Among the documents archived on Weiser's site are a series of slides (35mm. slides - these were the days before data projectors were commonplace) from a talk called '<a href="http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/UIST94_4up.ps" target="_blank">Building Invisible Interfaces</a>' given by him in 1994. The whole lecture is compelling, but perhaps particularly intriguing for those working in the digital humanities is Slide No. 10:<br />
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'start from arts and humanities' is a wonderful message. Weiser's message was, as described by Dourish and Bell, a heady one: 'Weiser hoped that future research in ubicomp would be thoroughly grounded in postmodern analysis and feminist critical theory'. (p. 16) Maybe Weiser's vision of computer science research which is framed by a powerful engagement with cultural theory anticipates what Digital Humanties is becoming. Andrew Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07861908988990764618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8856697805993319185.post-67994370085230359122013-07-22T08:45:00.000-07:002014-01-13T03:29:31.007-08:00Riffs on McCarty<style>
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<span lang="EN-US">A recent highlight for the Department of
Digital Humanities at King’s College London was the award of the <a href="http://www.kcl.ac.uk/newsevents/news/newsrecords/2013/07-July/Willard-McCarty-awarded-Roberto-Busa-Prize-2013.aspx" target="_blank">Roberto Busa prize</a>, the major international award for lifetime achievement in the digital
humanities, to Willard McCarty, one of the founding fathers of the Department.
Matthew Jockers in <a href="http://www.matthewjockers.net/2013/07/19/obi-wan-mccarty/" target="_blank">introducing Willard’s Busa lecture</a> memorably described him
as the ‘Obi-Wan Kenobi of digital humanities’, a denomination which Willard
relished. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Occasional lectures of this kind can often
be damp squibs, but Willard’s Busa lecture was truly memorable, because it
mapped out an intellectual manifesto for the future of the digital humanities
which is ambitious, exciting and inspiring. The title illustrates the ambition of the lecture: 'Getting There from Here: Remembering the Future of the Digital Humanities'. Willard’s lecture was
live-streamed, and I understand that the archive video will shortly be
available online. We are arranging for Willard to repeat his lecture at King’s
in the autumn, and it will be published. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Willard’s lecture was incredibly rich and
intellectually challenging, so it might be worth starting the process of
unpacking his message. Willard’s lecture will I am sure lead to as much
discussion and debate as his 2005 book on<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">
Humanities Computing</i>, and the lecture should be seen as the next move
forward from what Willard describes as the ‘intellectually claustrophobic
territory’ represented by his book. Among the key themes in Willard’s lecture
to which I would draw particular attention are:</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">- <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">‘Failure
is our most important product’.</i> In describing his work to see how far
tagging could capture aspects of Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’, Willard urges us to
move away from our preoccupation with creating user-friendly online resources
which will enable humanities scholars with low levels of computer literacy more
easily to search and interrogate their primary materials. Willard urges a more
experimental digital humanities which explores the limits and inadequacies of
computing. I couldn’t agree more. For too long, we have seen ourselves as
evangelists of technology, trying to convince humanities scholars that machines
can be helpful. The risk now is that, as digital technologies become
commonplace in the academy, we will assume that there is only one way of doing
things, a series of methods and standards which have to be shared and
disseminated. The result will be an evisceration of the possibilities of the
digital humanities. The only way to avoid this is to embrace that sense of
computing as an ‘ongoing, never ending experimental process’ described by
Willard, but that means radically changing the type of things we assume that
digital humanities should do – death to projects; more experiments, more
tinkering, more just trying out.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">- <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">‘Imaginative
exploration’</i>. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Willard picks up on
Busa’s 1976 question ‘Why can the computer do so little?’ to criticize our
assumption that computers simply enable us to reduce the drudgery of
scholarship by performing routine tasks more quickly. Thinking of the computer
as a ‘mere’ tool is a way of making it safe – it becomes from this perspective just
a humdrum piece of technology which gets rid of the tedious aspects of
research. Such thinking is a way of avoiding confronting the radical
epistemological and phenomenological implications of computing. If we think of
digital humanities as a series of ‘methods’ which can be ‘applied’, we are
complicit in such denial of the radical implications of the computer. Digital
humanities is not a series of methods which can be learnt or introduced but
rather a field of exploration. We need to focus on imaginatively exploring the
potential (and limitations) of computing rather than on creating ever more
efficient scholarly data crunching.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">- <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Learning
from artists</i>. Referring back to the <a href="http://cyberneticserendipity.net/" target="_blank">1968 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cybernetic Serendipity</i> exhibition</a> at the Institute of Contemporary
Arts, ‘at which artists and engineers experimented with ideas so far ahead of
their time they remain mostly ahead of ours’, Willard urges those engaged in
the digital humanities to create a stronger dialogue with technologically aware
artists. This is a theme I have found echoed in my own work on the AHRC’s
‘Digital Transformations’ theme where it has become evident that the time is
ripe for a stronger cross-over between the digital arts and the digital
humanities. The kind of work with arduinos, conductive inks or mBed
microcontrollers is precisely the field for that restless experimentation, the
constant tinkering, that Willard urges us to engage in.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">- <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">‘We
need the techno</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "American Typewriter"; mso-bidi-font-family: "American Typewriter";">‑</span><span lang="EN-US">sciences just as much, more than many of us realize, more than some
of us fear.’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></i><span lang="EN-US">Willard powerfully argues the need for the digital humanities to
connect more closely with the sciences. At one level, this is simply because
the discipline will wither and die if it loses its connection with its
epistemological roots. At another, shared issues and concerns mean that
scientists are people we can and should be talking to. One of the most
fascinating events I attended recently was a <a href="https://indico.cern.ch/conferenceOtherViews.py?view=standard&confId=246453" target="_blank">multi-disciplinary workshop on theproblems of Big Data</a> organized by the Large Hadron Collider community. The
cross-connections and parallels across different disciplines were fascinating.
We need more of that sort of dialogue – we won’t learn much new from talking to
historians or classicists but talking to scientists will lead us into
completely fresh pastures.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">- <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Where
is the criticism?</i> Willard, taking up questions posed by Alan Liu and Fred
Gibbs, emphasizes the importance of retaining a critical stance in exploring
these areas. Indeed, one of the things which we as humanities scholars bring to
the table in discussions with scientists and technologists are the remarkable
theoretical tools which are among the great intellectual achievements of the
past fifty years (and in turn have their roots in the scientific discoveries of
men like Einstein, Heisenberg and Freud). The most fruitful areas of future
development for the digital humanities will be at these intersections of science,
art and criticism – as critical code studies are beginning to illustrate. A key
element for this in Willard’s discussion is the importance of historicizing our
understanding of an engagement with computing. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">-<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">
Resonate with the humanities!</i> Just as digital humanities wilts if it
ignores its roots in computing science, likewise its roots in the humanities
cannot be forgotten. Willard expresses the aim perfectly when he says that the
results of our foraging across the sciences, technology, arts and culture should
‘resonate with the humanities’. The mix we produce from our hunter-gatherer
expeditions will not necessarily fall into such easily recognizable categories
as history, literature or archaeology, but what we find and express should have
resonances across all these disciplines. Here, I think we can draw inspiration
from disciplines such as bibliography or manuscript studies. To take an example
from my own work, my study of <a href="http://www.uky.edu/~kiernan/eBeo_archives/articles90s/ajp-pms.htm" target="_blank">the restoration of the burnt manuscripts of Sir Robert Cotton</a> has, I believe, implications across a range of historical,
literary and other studies, but I would find it difficult to categorise it as
history or literature – I hope it has wider resonances, as our DH experiments
should.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Willard described in his Busa lecture a new
type of digital humanities. This is a digital humanities which remembers its
roots and traditions – indeed to some extent Busa’s 1976 question ‘Why can a
computer do so little?’ provides the key epigram for the lecture. It is a
digital humanities which is intellectually restless and exists in marginal
lands: ‘I’ve imagined us as maritime explorers in an archipelago of
disciplines, peripatetic, prowling the margins; I’ve imagined us with the
novelist David Malouf, adventurous youth discovering life and death in a wild,
dangerous acre of bush’. This area is defined by a triangulation between
science, digital arts and making and cultural criticism. It is an area of
experiment – of tinkering and playing with cross-connections. It is a zone of
failure but also of restless intellectual energy. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">At the end of his lecture, Willard
commented how the digital photograph albums we increasingly produce in the name
of improved access distort and oversimplify our understanding of the act of
remembering. It is a tragedy how so much of what we do in the digital
humanities denies the possibility of reinventing and changing the textual and
other forms we have inherited. Our ‘digital scholarly editions’ are so
conservatively conceived that they would be recognized and understood by the
Grimm Brothers; we continue to use the calendar form, deeply bound up with
print technology, to reproduce abridgements of historical documents; our
collections of images are little more than photograph albums. Is the computer
really no more than a digital photocopier? Does our digital humanities work explore
whether it has greater potentiality? If we are to embrace Willard’s vision of a
more intellectually restless and experimental digital humanities, we need to
abandon many of the assumptions we have made about what we do in the digital
humanities. Building endless numbers of unimaginative, repetitive, stereotyped and
hidebound projects is not enough. As digital humanities develops, it is
difficult to escape the suspicion that for many the routine creation of digital
projects or the cutting and slicing of data provides a quiet peaceful haven,
where we can code quietly without the risk of demanding intellectual challenges
or complex theoretical considerations. Data is too often at the moment seen as
a substitute for thought. Willard’s fundamental message is that digital
humanities should be intellectually demanding and challenging, posing fundamental
philosophical and theoretical questions at every turn. Willard describes here
the intellectual constituency of the digital humanities, and it is the
exploration and investigation of this constituency which should be our concern.
We can discuss pointlessly and forever how big and what shape the text of the
digital humanities should be (and what the labels on the door mean), but in the
end it is only the conversations that take place within it which count.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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Andrew Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07861908988990764618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8856697805993319185.post-3435739212672461222013-05-05T09:18:00.000-07:002014-01-13T03:31:28.110-08:00Small Worlds and Big Tents<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The climax of David Lodge’s novel <i>Small World</i>, a burlesque on academic conferences in which scholars pursue each other around the world from conference to conference, occurs at that bizarre cultural manifestation, the Convention of the Modern Languages Association. The MLA Convention attracts thousands of American scholars every year who present hundreds of papers, but the main function of the event appears to be as a beauty parade for young scholars desperately seeking the shrinking number of academic posts available in North America. Intellectual exploration and excitement don’t figure very high in this revolting bloated piece of academic corporatism. I am conscious that MLA has over the years helped promote causes to which I am sympathetic, and has played an active part in breaking down conservative approaches to the study of literature. Nevertheless, I find it astonishing that the MLA Convention attracts so many different scholars but is nevertheless one of the most parochial and inward-looking academic gatherings on the planet, preoccupied with those tiresome internal debates that characterize American academic life. MLA is the smallest and most self-absorbed of worlds. The recent calls to Occupy MLA would be very attractive as a means of attacking this horrible institution, except that it would require one to go to MLA.<br />
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Much of the excitement about Digital Humanities as ‘the next big thing’ (in itself an absurd piece of hype, given that the type of research espoused by the Digital Humanities has been practiced for over fifty years) has been generated by internal debates within MLA. The progress of DH has been measured by its prominence on the MLA platforms (particularly through <a href="http://www.samplereality.com/?s=mla" target="_blank">Mark Sample's excellent work</a> - my illustration above is a wordcloud by Mark of tweets from the 2009 MLA). At the 2013 Convention, a roundtable on 'The Dark Side of Digital Humanities' suggested <i>inter alia</i> that DH has paved the way for such managerial initiatives in universities as the use of metrics or the rise of MOOCs (The roundtable was led by <a href="http://www.c21uwm.com/2013/01/09/the-dark-side-of-the-digital-humanities-part-1/" target="_blank">Wendy Hui Kyong Chun</a>, <a href="http://www.c21uwm.com/2013/01/09/dark-side-of-the-digital-humanities-part-2/" target="_blank">Richard Grusin</a>, <a href="http://www.c21uwm.com/2013/01/09/the-dark-side-of-the-digital-humanities-part-3/" target="_blank">Patrick Jagoda</a> and <a href="http://www.c21uwm.com/2013/01/09/the-dark-side-of-the-digital-humanities-part-4/" target="_blank">Rita Raley</a>). This roundtable has generated the predictable <a href="http://storify.com/robincamille/mla13-s307-the-dark-side-of-digital-humanities" target="_blank">large quantities of MLA hot air</a>, and the blog debate around ‘The Dark Side of Digital Humanities’ is burgeoning. A <a href="http://stephenramsay.us/2013/05/03/dh-one-and-two/" target="_blank">recent and helpful addition to the debate by Stephen Ramsay</a> proposes a distinction between what he calls DH Type 1, represented by such activities as the Perseus Digital Library, Rossetti Archive, TEI, etc., and DH Type 2, in which DH is used a shorthand for signifier ‘both for a very broad constellation of scholarly endeavors, and for a certain revolutionary disposition that had overtaken the academy’. The ‘big tent’ of DH Type 2, suggests Ramsay, reflects a looser definition of DH: ‘Media studies practitioners were digital humanists; people who had devoted several decades to digital pedagogy were digital humanists; cultural critics who were interested in Internet culture were digital humanists; and digital artists of a certain variety were digital humanists’. For Ramsay, much of the criticism of the dark side of the digital humanities is directed at DH Type 2 (although I can’t imagine those people he lists as representing DH Type 2 being any more enthusiastic about say MOOCs than DH Type 1). Ramsay seeks to reaffirm the identification of ‘true’ (one might almost say fundamentalist) DH with DH Type 1, and seems to suggest that the rhetoric suggesting that DH will reshape the academy should be given a rest. In an interesting <a href="http://www.michaeljkramer.net/issuesindigitalhistory/blog/?p=1221" target="_blank">response to Ramsay’s post</a>, Michael Kramer suggests that the emergence of ‘alt-ac’, promoting the idea that DH could be a way of offering alternative academic careers for unemployed Humanities PhDs could help explain the emergence of Ramsay’s DH Type 2.<br />
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The ‘alt-ac’ and tenure discussions are an illustration of the way in which local problems in the structure of higher education in the United States are somehow represented as an existential crisis for humanity. When attending any DH event in the United States, it appears to be a necessary and unavoidable ritual that at least 25% of the discussion time be devoted to hearing about the problems encountered by American scholars producing digital outputs in securing tenure. I’m extremely sympathetic to the difficulties faced by young scholars in America, and the casualization of American academic work through the growth of the adjunct system is undoubtedly scandalous, but I came from a country where university tenure was abolished in 1988 and it seems rather pointless to travel thousand of miles to hear complaints about something which, as far as Britain is concerned, is dead and buried. Again, I am deeply sympathetic to ‘alt-ac’ debates. In a country where most PhDs have for many years been unlikely to find employment as lecturers, the idea that careers like publishing, curatorship or research management provide equally valid means of professional academic engagement is necessarily a familiar one. I deliberately chose at first not to pursue a university career and went to the British Library. I have moved between librarianship and academic positions throughout my career. I have generally found librarianship to be a more creative, intellectually stimulating, fast-changing and satisfying activity than conventional academic work. So I am very much in favour of ‘alt-ac’, but the way in which this discussion has developed seems to me to have been derailed by its American advocates. The discussion has become focused on the failure of American universities to deliver the prizes of tenured faculty positions, the terms on which such prizes are awarded, and whether an alternate career path is an equally valid reward. I warm to the way in which ‘alt-ac’ discussions urge a rethinking of the academy, but I am aghast at the way in which it is assumed that changing the American tenure system in some way represents a new form of academic life. It isn’t – it is the United States belatedly and ineffectually trying to sort out messes in the structure of its higher education system which probably should have been reformed years ago.<br />
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Debates about American tenure devalue and distract from more fundamental issues about the way in which Digital Humanities might change the academy, which are only apparent if we try and develop a more genuinely international perspective. In Europe, libraries and archives have been strong drivers of DH developments and the career paths of many DH professional have criss-crossed a variety of professions, including information professions and academic career paths. Many DH practitioners (like myself) relish this professional eclecticism and, while we would strongly defend the intellectual claims of Digital Humanities against more conventional disciplines, would nevertheless be horrified to end up as academics in traditional departments – I decided firmly in 1979 that I did not want to be a History Professor, and I still do not want to be a History Professor. In Britain, the increasing professionalization of higher education and the resulting insistence on particular career paths is threatening this kind of eclecticism (in 2008, I could be returned as a librarian under the British research assessment exercise; this will not be possible in 2013). In addition, there is the issue of the digital humanities developer – the person who wants to spend a career creating DH resources, not necessarily pursuing their own scholarly vision or analysing the digital reshaping of scholarship. The developer is a key part of DH, but no one has effectively worked out how good career paths of this sort can be provided in a DH department. In fact, we run a terrible risk in many DH units of imposing precisely the sort of academic/ professional apartheid that DH should be explicitly reacting against.There is an urgent need to think through the ways in which we provide career structures in DH for the highly gifted technical developer who does not want a Ph D or an academic career but is fascinated by DH, makes the most fundamental contribution and wants to spend their life absorbed in DH. DH cannot and never will be undertaken solely by tenured academic faculty supported by post-docs waiting in the wings for the tenured folk to keel over. The ad hoc methods developed so far to support such career structures are not fit for purpose. We need urgently to think through a completely new career and skill structure for DH. <br />
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Alt-ac is, or should be, more than means of providing career advice to humanities doctoral students in a country where a sclerotic tenure system is seizing up. Alt-ac is about reconnecting the academy internationally with the vibrant intellectual and scholarly world of galleries, archives, libraries, museums and, increasingly in a digital sphere, private companies (I think a digital humanist could as legitimately have a career with Google or Facebook as with a university). It is also about creating new career structures in universities which accommodate different skills, interests and aspirations. DH is an example of a university activity where a range of skills beyond that of the conventional academic is required; further such areas will inevitably quickly follow (as robots become more ubiquitous, how will we absorb them into the academy?). The greatest threat to universities comes not from MOOCs but rather from the risk (likelihood) that universities will fail to create more flexible career and institutional structures which address wider social and economic changes. Libraries have completely reinvented themselves since I began work as a librarian in 1979, and universities will be called to do the same over the next 30 years. Whatever the resulting institutional structure in universities, the one thing that is certain is that it will not prove to be an American traditional system of tenured faculty.<br />
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DH began in Italy (if we see Roberto Busa as its founding father). Much of the most exciting and innovative work in DH has taken place in Europe through figures such as Manfred Thaller, Jan Christoph Meister, Lou Burnard, Espen Ore or Claudine Moulin. Initiatives such as <a href="http://openedition.org/">openedition.org</a>, substantially supported by French government research organisations, or the <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/OlafJanssenNL/the-big-dutch-20-year-730-million-page-digitisation-challenge" target="_blank">comprehensive digitisation projects undertaken in the Netherlands</a> show a maturity of infrastructure beyond much to be seen in the United States (where the <a href="http://dp.la/" target="_blank">Digital Public Library of America</a> seems to be relying on a piecemeal voluntary effort rather than the comprehensive and systematic state-funded interventions of various European governments). Yet, for all its internationalist, interdisciplinary and collaborationist pretensions, much of the available literature on DH is dominated by internal North American debates, driven by MLA. Matthew Gold’s recent <a href="http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/debates-in-the-digital-humanities" target="_blank">Debates in the Digital Humanities</a> consisted chiefly of very parochial North American discussions – as far as I can see, only two contributors (Patrik Svensson and Willard McCarty) held posts in universities outside North America. The contents of Gold’s book are dominated by the kind of agendas being generated from within MLA, and suggest that there is a danger that DH will become annexed to the vacuous and anal preoccupations of the MLA. <br />
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I think this is possibly the true dark side of the Digital Humanities – that there is a risk that DH becomes one of the means by which an Anglophone globalization of world culture is implemented. Domenico Fiormonte recently analysed the wider threats represented by the anglicisation of DH in his <a href="http://www.cceh.uni-koeln.de/files/Fiormonte_final.pdf" target="_blank">thought-provoking contribution</a> to the <a href="http://www.cceh.uni-koeln.de/events/CologneDialogue" target="_blank">Cologne Debates in the Digital Humanities</a> (altogether a more rounded and profound collection than that assembled by Gold). Reading Fiormonte’s discussion, one realizes that Ramsay’s distinction between DH Type 1 and DH Type 2 is largely irrelevant. DH Type 1, grounded in international organizations such as ALLC, might seem to have a wider international outlook than DH Type 2, but as Fiormonte emphasizes, DH Type 1 is as firmly Anglophone as DH Type 2. These tables from Fiormonte’s article are extremely eloquent:<br />
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In this context, I would suggest that the problem is not the distinction between DH Type 1 and DH Type 2, but rather the way in which the formal structures of DH have become so strongly Anglophone and in particular the way in which they have become hooked up with a view that seems to equate the academy with the small world of American subject associations such as MLA. This myopic approach appears to be shared by Ramsay when he seems to suggest that DH Type 1 had largely a literary approach, and suggests that digital history and digital archaeology (both key components of DH in Europe) had a more distant relationship from DH Type 1.
My worry is that this MLA annexation of DH appears to proceeding apace, and again distinguishing between the different strains of DH doesn’t seem to help – they all seem to carry the lethal MLA bacillus. Tim Hitchcock in a recent Twitter exchange commented that ‘DH is a bit up itself, a bit self-absorbed, a bit over concerned to claim its place, rather than make a difference’. This anxiety that DH should claim a place is driven strongly by the internal debates in North American bodies like MLA. Scholars engaged with technology, having been very badly treated by those who in the 1960s and 1970s saw no role for technology in the study of the arts, have reacted by trying too hard to demonstrate in venues such as MLA, the intellectual credibility of their work. That shouldn’t be necessary. The important thing is to demonstrate the validity of the approach by the quality of the scholarship produced – whether through the creation of a digital object, a book or an article, a visualization, a mash-up, a map, apiece of 3D printing, a blog entry or a tweet – the format and the method don’t matter as long as the scholarship is outstanding, gives us new understandings and, as Tim Hitchcock put it, makes a difference.<br />
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PS Thanks to @joshhonn for pointing out <a href="http://blog.whitneyannetrettien.com/2013/01/so-whats-up-with-mla.html" target="_blank">Whitney Trettien's post</a> after MLA 2013, which I think supplements some of my comments from another, and equally important angle.Andrew Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07861908988990764618noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8856697805993319185.post-51323935974849968852013-04-16T14:59:00.000-07:002014-01-13T03:33:28.117-08:00Requiescat<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-lFYAiS2ggvU/UW27u33zYfI/AAAAAAAAAPg/OA0ZBouwgdU/s1600/Margaret_Thatcher_davanti_al_primissimo_computer.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="273" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-lFYAiS2ggvU/UW27u33zYfI/AAAAAAAAAPg/OA0ZBouwgdU/s320/Margaret_Thatcher_davanti_al_primissimo_computer.jpg" width="320" /> </a></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Although I have now been travelling on London buses for more than fifty years, I still find that the upper deck of a London bus is one of the most entertaining and diverting places to be. Coming home on the bus this evening, the Strand was disrupted outside King's College by preparations for Lady Thatcher's funeral tomorrow. Seeing the notices for her funeral, I felt one phase of my life coming full circle. I was job hunting during the Winter of Discontent in 1979 and was appointed at the British Library just as Margaret Thatcher was coming to power, so the first period of my professional life coincided with her government. I remember an old-style civil servant at the British Library assuring me and others that governments come and go - some would privatise cleaning services, other would bring services back in-house, at the end of the day it wouldn't make much difference. I instinctively felt that such cosy bureaucratic complacency was misplaced, and I was right - Thatcher was very different to everything we had known before.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">At that time, I was completing my doctoral thesis on the history of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, as I was at that time, and the early days of Thatcher government provided an instructive and appropriate backdrop. On 11 April 1381, I gave my first public talk on the revolt of 1981 at the University of Kent in Canterbury. I afterwards used my memories of the day to introduce an article on the 1381 revolt:</span></div>
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<i>Returning to London by train, I was astonished to see, as we passed through Brixton,
cars and shops in flames and mobs running through the streets. It seemed
as if the ghosts of 1381 had come back to take their revenge on modern
society. But it was not; it was a riot provoked by heavy-handed police
behaviour following a stabbing outside a mini-cab office the previous night.
This was the prelude to a summer of riots which affected inner city areas
of London, Liverpool, Manchester and elsewhere, eventually leading to</i><i> disturbances even in peaceful country towns like Cirencester and Knaresborough. These riots marked the nadir of the early days of the Thatcher
government. </i><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Shortly afterwards, I saw a group of rioters throw a burning car into the air at Clapham Junction station, close to where I then lived. These events were instructive for a historian of rebellion: the way in which rumours of disturbances circulated beforeha<span style="font-size: small;">n</span>d, for example, illustra<span style="font-size: small;">t</span>ed the power of rumour in such events. I also discovered how it was possible to be in a house close to very violent events and be completely unaware of what was going on. Later, <span style="font-size: small;">the par<span style="font-size: small;">allels with 1381 became even stronger <span style="font-size: small;">when Thatcher's reintrodu<span style="font-size: small;">c</span>ed <span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">a</span> poll tax. <span style="font-size: small;">The resulting riots were again instructive for a historian of 1381. In Hackney, for example, rioters were very selective in their attacks, destroyin<span style="font-size: small;">g shops o<span style="font-size: small;">wned b<span style="font-size: small;">y</span></span> international conglomerates or singling out unpopular local figures - <span style="font-size: small;">strong parallels</span> to what happened in 1381. <span style="font-size: small;">A puz<span style="font-size: small;">zle in 1381 is how manorial courts sat <span style="font-size: small;">during t<span style="font-size: small;">h</span>e revolt while officials were being attacked and manorial records were being burnt. Yet in 1990 while Trafalgar Square saw the riots whi<span style="font-size: small;">ch even<span style="font-size: small;">t</span>ually precipitated Thatcher's</span> departure from office, </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span>I sat co<span style="font-size: small;">ntentedly in a pub half a mile away, with no knowledge of any disturbances.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">Two memories of Margaret Thatcher <span style="font-size: small;">on the eve of her funeral. I was on the top of a 170 bu<span style="font-size: small;">s, go<span style="font-size: small;">ing through Parliament S<span style="font-size: small;">quare, on my way to research the 1381 revolt at the Public Record Office in Chancery Lane. <span style="font-size: small;">A small car (was it a Brit<span style="font-size: small;">ish Le<span style="font-size: small;">yland car?) cut up the bus, causing it to swerve. Sitting at the front of the bus, I realised it was driven by Margaret Th<span style="font-size: small;">atcher, then a new Leader of the Op<span style="font-size: small;">position. The coiffure<span style="font-size: small;"> and</span> dress suit made the <span style="font-size: small;">d</span>river instantly recognisable<span style="font-size: small;">.</span> Her indomitable driving, heading for the gates of the Palace of W<span style="font-size: small;">e</span>stminster </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span>without much regard for anything else on the road, seemed to summarise her character perfectly.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">In 1991, I attended the opening of an exhibition of English Silver Treasur<span style="font-size: small;">es feom the Kremlin at Sotheby's in London. It was one of the earliest<span style="font-size: small;"> displays of<span style="font-size: small;"> art tr<span style="font-size: small;">e</span>asures from Russia f<span style="font-size: small;">ollowing the <span style="font-size: small;">events of 1989, and the Chairman o<span style="font-size: small;">f</span> Sotheby's <span style="font-size: small;">at that <span style="font-size: small;">t</span>ime was Lord Gowrie, a for<span style="font-size: small;">m</span>er minister in Thatcher's cabinet. Rumou<span style="font-size: small;">rs began to circulate in the reception that she herself would attend. And indeed after a while, she appeared, to the ecstatic delight of t<span style="font-size: small;">h</span>e Russian representatives at the reception. Gowrie showed her round. What <span style="font-size: small;">was truly astonishing was the way that she lo<span style="font-size: small;">oked like a pa<span style="font-size: small;">r<span style="font-size: small;">ody of herself: layered in thick make-<span style="font-size: small;">u</span>p, she looked and moved like a Thatcher <span style="font-size: small;">d</span>oll - the <span style="font-size: small;">exaggerated movements in slow motion were particularly stri<span style="font-size: small;">king.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">These are just two images that run thro<span style="font-size: small;">u</span>gh my mind on the ev<span style="font-size: small;">e</span> of Lady Thatcher's funeral. I lived <span style="font-size: small;">of co<span style="font-size: small;">ur</span>se at that <span style="font-size: small;">time </span>in Battersea, <span style="font-size: small;">and frequently walked <span style="font-size: small;">past the tiny Thatcher home in Floo<span style="font-size: small;">d Street</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span>. I remem<span style="font-size: small;">b</span>er my surprise when, after she <span style="font-size: small;">w</span>as elected L<span style="font-size: small;">eader of the Opposition, a policeman stoof outside the house. I sud<span style="font-size: small;">denly also remember working on my thesis when I heard a huge explos<span style="font-size: small;">ion the other side of t<span style="font-size: small;">he river - the siege of the Iranian Embassy had been ra<span style="font-size: small;">ised. </span></span></span></span></span>But what have these tri<span style="font-size: small;">vial memories to do with the main theme of this blog, the digital and the changes our new digital world are <span style="font-size: small;">bringing?</span></span> Thatcher, alth<span style="font-size: small;">ough she was <span style="font-size: small;">a </span>scientist and despite the fact that her government s<span style="font-size: small;">aw the PC begin<span style="font-size: small;">ning to be introduced into offices, is somehow not in my mind as<span style="font-size: small;">sociated wi<span style="font-size: small;">th technology - the sup<span style="font-size: small;">remely technological British government of the twentieth century will always <span style="font-size: small;">to me </span>(rightly or w<span style="font-size: small;">ron<span style="font-size: small;">gly) be Harold Wilson's 196<span style="font-size: small;">4-70</span> government<span style="font-size: small;">.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">T<span style="font-size: small;">he digital transformation here is not Thatcher herself, but the fact that I am inclined to wri<span style="font-size: small;">te down and share these memories. I'<span style="font-size: small;">m not a natural diary writer (too <span style="font-size: small;">m</span>uch self-discip<span style="font-size: small;">line required) and I woild never have bothered to <span style="font-size: small;">use</span> pen and ink on these memories. But somehow <span style="font-size: small;">its more tempting and convenie<span style="font-size: small;">nt to capture thse thoughts and memories on a London bus <span style="font-size: small;">in blog form. </span>I'm sure there are others who have done</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span> the same, in different ways and in different f<span style="font-size: small;">orms,</span> <span style="font-size: small;">followi<span style="font-size: small;">ng the death</span></span> of Margaret Thatcher. If we can <span style="font-size: small;">somehow locate and analyse <span style="font-size: small;">all these</span> various <span style="font-size: small;">r</span>ecollections of Margaret Thatcher, we will <span style="font-size: small;">be able to create a very diff<span style="font-size: small;">erent picture of the impact and characteristics of her premiership than would be possible for (say) Gla<span style="font-size: small;">dstone o<span style="font-size: small;">r</span> Disraeli, where we are restricted to what as written, drawn and printed. </span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">Blogs, <span style="font-size: small;">T</span>witter, <span style="font-size: small;">F</span>acebook<span style="font-size: small;"> enable us to share shards of memory and recollection which are ot<span style="font-size: small;">herwise too easily l<span style="font-size: small;">ost to the historical record.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span> <br />
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Andrew Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07861908988990764618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8856697805993319185.post-12091440802629170492013-04-14T15:53:00.000-07:002014-01-13T03:44:35.319-08:00Freemasons Down the Bailey<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0JlVTwOQikY/UWszH2FhTFI/AAAAAAAAAPQ/eumYckJOFAg/s1600/trial-at-the-old-bailey%5B1%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="217" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0JlVTwOQikY/UWszH2FhTFI/AAAAAAAAAPQ/eumYckJOFAg/s320/trial-at-the-old-bailey%5B1%5D.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I have watched and admired with fascination and admiration the growth and development of the <a href="http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/" target="_blank"><i>Proceedings of the Old Bailey</i></a> over the past ten years into one of the most important online historical resources. The <i>Old Bailey</i> <i>Proceedings</i> are a constant source of inspiration as to how scholarly historical resources should be developed and taken forward. <a href="http://crimeinthecommunity.wordpress.com/2013/04/12/blogging-the-old-bailey-online-10th-anniversary/" target="_blank">Bloggers are celebrating the tenth anniversary of the <i>Old Bailey Proceedings</i></a> by blogging their take on the Bailey, so as part of the celebrations, here are two articles which I published a couple of years ago in the masonic periodical, <i><a href="http://www.thesquaremagazine.com/" target="_blank">The Square</a></i>, on references to Freemasonry in the <i>Old Bailey Proceedings</i>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I</span> </div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Assiduous listeners to Radio 4 may
recently have heard a series introduced by the historian Amanda Vickery called <i>Voices
from the Old Bailey</i>. The radio programme gave a lively picture of everyday
life in the eighteenth century by using reports of criminal trials held at the
Old Bailey, the criminal court covering London and Middlesex. Every conceivable
type of crime passed through the doors of the Bailey. We meet brothel keepers
and male prostitutes; we see highwaymen and pickpockets at work; starving men
and women are hung for stealing a spoon or a handkerchief. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 134.7pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The fascination of these stories
of criminal life was recognised at the time, and reports of trials were popular
reading from the beginning of the seventeenth century onwards. From 1678, a
periodical was published entitled <i>The Proceedings of the King's Commission
of the Peace and Oyer and Terminer, and Gaol Delivery of Newgate, held for the
City of London and the County of Middlesex, at Justice-Hall, in the Old Bailey</i>.
The <i>Old Bailey Proceedings</i>, as they are known for short, became very
popular reading material among eighteenth-century Londoners. A French visitor
to London declared that the trial reports 'are in the opinion of many people
one of the most diverting things that a man can read in London'.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 134.7pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The reason why the <i>Old Bailey
Proceedings </i>are such a compelling read is not only their presentation of
the sheer variety and colour of eighteenth-century London life but also the
fact that the reports are based on shorthand notes of the trials, so that
victims, witnesses and defendants speak in the first person, and we can almost
fancy that we are hearing their own voices. In 1735, for example, a gang led by
the notorious highwayman Dick Turpin robbed a house in North London, and one of
the victims described his ordeal as follows:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 134.7pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: serif; font-size: 11.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Between
seven and eight at Night some body knocked; I unbolted the Door; the two
Prisoners, Wheeler, and three more came in with Pistols in their Hands, and
said, D - your Blood! How long have you lived here? We had two Candles in the
Room, and I saw their Faces plainly. They put a Cloth over my Eyes, but in five
or six Minutes they took it off, tyed my Hands before me, and carried me into
the Room where the Boy was, and sat me down by the Fire. My Master was ty'd and
hoodwink'd at the same time - They opened a Closet, took out a Bottle of Elder
Wine and made us drink twice. They took out some Linnen and Plate. I was
present when the Prisoners were taken, they had several Pistols, and made a
great Resistance.</span> </i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 134.7pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Despite the fact that they were so
popular in the eighteenth century, the <i>Old Bailey Proceedings</i> lapsed
into obscurity and became difficult to consult. In recent years, however, a
joint project by the Universities of Hertfordshire and Sheffield has made the <i>Old
Bailey Proceedings</i> freely available online. They can be consulted at <a href="http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/">www.oldbaileyonline.org</a> The online
resource is fully searchable and contains <span style="color: black;">197,745</span>
trials, the largest body of texts ever published about the everyday life of the
ordinary people of London.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 134.7pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Among the <i>Old Bailey
Proceedings</i> are some fascinating references to Freemasonry which give us a
vivid sense of the role of freemasonry in eighteenth-century London life. For
example, in 1796 'Swearus Sandestrom' a Scandinavian visitor to London had his
watch stolen. This is his description of the incident:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 134.7pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: serif; font-size: 11.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">I
am a foreigner, I have been in this country eleven months; yesterday, about
three minutes before one o'clock, I was robbed at the gate of the coffee-house,
where the Free Masons come out, before they go into Shoreditch church; I was
walking along the foot-path, there were a great many people, as thick as they
could be, the prisoner was there, and he snatched at my watch chain, and broke
it off close to the ring of the watch; I was going into the coffee-house, I
took him by the shoulder, and said, my man, you robbed me; he said, what have I
robbed you of, and he let it drop out of his hand.</span> </i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 134.7pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The trial took place on 22 June,
suggesting that Sandestrom had been watching a procession by Freemasons at
Shoreditch preceding a St John's Day church service. The masonic procession
evidently attracted quite a crowd. The man seized by Sandestrom, William
Goodwin, protested his innocence, and produced character witnesses saying that
his business had recently closed but that he was otherwise honest.
Nevertheless, Goodwin was sent for two years to the House of Correction and
fined one shilling.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 134.7pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The Goose and Gridiron is famous
as the place where Grand Lodge was established in 1717. The <i>Old Bailey
Proceedings </i>contain a number of reports of theft at the Goose and Gridiron,
reminding us what dangerous places eighteenth-century taverns could be. Worse
than theft could occur; one particularly grizzly trial from 1766 describes the
rape of a young servant girl aged under 10. One violation of the young girl
took place in the room used by a masonic lodge at the Goose and Gridiron:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 134.7pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>on the free
masons day (there is a club of free masons at the house) she said her uncle
sent her up, and the prisoner was cleaning the glasses; that he took her up and
flung her on the bed, and did the same again</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 134.7pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">This masonic lodge at the Goose
and Gridiron seems to have been an unhappy place. The following year, it was
the scene of a theft. Perhaps not surprisingly, it is impossible to identify
which lodge was meeting at the Goose and Gridiron at this time, and one wonders
if it was some kind of unofficial masonic activity. The victim of the theft was
James Walker, who was the keeper of both the Goose and Gridiron and the Rose
and Crown. Walker's testimony does not make it clear whether the theft occurred
in the Goose and Gridiron or the Rose and Crown, but the rape case confirms
that Walker lived at the Goose and Gridiron and that a lodge was meeting there,
so the crime probably took place there. Walker claimed that the perpetrator of
the crime was one William Gilliard. Here is the <i>Old Bailey Proceedings</i>
report of Walker's accusation:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 134.7pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: serif; font-size: 11.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">I
keep the Rose and Crown, and Goose and Gridiron in St. Paul's church-yard; I
have known the prisoner from last Tuesday was a fortnight, and no longer; he
had been at my house before, as I understood by some of my customers;</span> </i><i><span style="color: black; font-family: serif; font-size: 11.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">he
appeared decent and very genteel, and said he was private secretary to my Lord
Shelburne; I had given him credit from time to time; the first time he came in
a coach with a lodger of mine; yesterday fortnight he came, and called me up
stairs, and said he would pay me my bill, and wanted me to propose him to be
made a free mason, in the society at my house, which is held every first and
third Thursday in the month; (he used to tell what passed in the house of
Lords.) I went up stairs with him to the next room to the lodge-room, upon the
same floor; he asked me to give him two half guineas for a guinea; (it is a
general rule to deposit half a guinea when a mason<span style="background: #FFFFCC;">
</span>is made) I pulled out my purse, there might be 30 or 40 guineas in it; I
put it on the table; the master of the lodge immediately called; the prisoner
had given me his guinea; I in a hurry took up part of my money, but I left some
upon the table; I can safely say there were five guineas left; I went that
moment into the mason's room, I had not time to take it all up; (I had put it
down in order to look out two half guineas for his guinea) I was not absent I
believe a minute, nor two I am sure; and when I came back, the prisoner and
money was gone; I went down stairs immediately; he was got into the bar, in
order to take his great coat, as I apprehend since; (he went then by the name
of Thompson) I said, Mr. Thompson, did you take any money off the table; he
said, yes, I did take five guineas; I said, what did you take it off the table
for; he said, I took it only to secure it, as you was gone; the bell rang
again, and I ran up stairs; I don't suppose I was absent three minutes, and
when I came down again, he was gone with his great coat; that night I took some
friends with me and pursued him; I understood he used the night houses about
Covent-garden; I dare say I spent more than 10 l in looking for him; I had been
there every night; I had mentioned him to a gentleman that knew him, and I
found he was a person of very bad character; last Saturday night a person came
and said, run out, Walker, he is just gone by; I ran out, and found him in an
earthen-ware shop, cheapening some things; when he came out of the shop, I laid
hold of him, and said, Mr. Thompson, I want to speak with you; said he, I am in
a violent hurry now; I said, I must speak with you; I am in a violent hurry,
said he again; I said, I take you up as a thief, you stole my money in my
house; said he, what, for them few guineas; go with me into Queen-street,
Cheapside, and I'll give you security for your money; I said, no, you shall
never be discharged till you come to the Old-Bailey</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Cross-examined, Walker was asked
whether the prisoner was the only person in the room when he went into the
mason's room. Walker replied that 'There was nobody near him but the tyler,
that was obliged to stand at the door'. John Gill, a lodger at the Goose and
Gridiron, confirmed that Walker had claimed to be Lord Shelburne's secretary
and said that he would speak to Lord Shelburne about getting a position for
him. The prisoner then spoke in his own defence:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 134.7pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>I went to
Mr. Walker's house on Thursday the 5th istant; he took me up stairs; I told
him there in the room, I had not money then to be made a mason, what I had was
but 3 s. 6 d. The reply to me was, he would lend me any money that I wanted,
and pulled out a sum of money from his pocket, and offered me five guineas into
my hand; said he, I will make you a present of this money, if you will not
mention the case that was when you lay with me at five o'clock in the morning;
after this, I told him I would not accept of that sum of money upon any such
terms, but if he would lend me the sum of five guineas, I would be much obliged
to him, and pay him very honestly; upon this, he consented and lent it me; I
took a guinea out of them, and desired two half guineas; he took it and gave me
two half guineas, and then took one of the half guineas and went into the
lodge-room to propose me as a mason; after he had been into the club-room, he
came out to me, and told me he had proposed me; he went down stairs with me;
there I staid some time in the bar, and then told him I could not stay any
longer; I wished him a good night, and went away.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Gilliard's suggestion that he had
some kind of liaison with Walker was apparently a desperate attempt to save his
skin. Enquiries revealed that Lord Shelburne knew nothing about him. William
Pain, summoned as a character witness on behalf of Gilliard, declared that he
was actually a pastry cook called Swain, whose character 'is a very bad one; it
is that of a thief'. In fact, Swain al. Gilliard al. Thompson had already been
sentenced to death for a robbery in Surrey five years previously, but had been
pardoned by the influence of his friends. He was found guilty and sentenced to
transportation to the American colonies.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 134.7pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">In 1774, the Bow Street Runners,
under the direction of Henry Fielding's brother, the blind magistrate Sir John
Fielding, seized a group of men who were making counterfeit coins in the
basement of a house in Old Fish Street. Among the gang was a man called Thomas
Pickering, who claimed that he was the master of a masonic lodge and was at the
time of his arrest on his way to visit Charles Bearblock, who was Grand
Secretary of the Ancients Grand Lodge from 1779 to 1782.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Pickering claimed that he had simply stopped
to see what the commotion was about and had been wrongly seized by the Bow
Street Runners:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 134.7pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>I had some
business with Mr. Bearblock; he had been a Grand Master of the Free-masons; I
was master of the Lodge this year; a man had applied to me to be made a
free-mason; I was not so well acquainted with the solemnities as Mr. Bearblock,
therefore I applied to see him; I saw a man come out of the area of this house;
I saw Heley take him, upon that I got over the rails into the area to satisfy
my curiosity; I was sent to the Compter; being taken, I could not go on to Mr.
Bearblock's at all </i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 134.7pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">It was an exaggeration to claim
that Bearblock had been Grand Master, but he was Past Master of Lodge No. 4
under the Ancients. Despite Pickering's invocation of this masonic connection,
he and all the other counterfeiters were found guilty. It may be that
Bearblock, who was at that time apparently a wine importer, was indeed prone to
keeping dubious company. He was mysteriously discharged after just three years
as Grand Secretary of the Ancients. It would be intrguing to know whether the
Charles Bearblock who was tried with others at the Old Bailey in 1798 for
stealing a shipment of coffee from a ship moored on the Thames was the former
Grand Secretary of the Ancients. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 134.7pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">One of the most compelling aspects
of <i>The Old Bailey Proceedings</i> is the way in which they reveal the lives
of obscure and forgotten Londoners. Tracing the life of somebody like Bearblock
through these sources is a fascinating exercise in reconstruction, and this is
the inspiration for a new project by the team which created the online version
of the <i>Old Bailey Proceedings</i>. <i>London Lives </i>will allow a number
of other datasets containing information about ordinary Londoners to be
investigated and cross-searched, so that biographies of many everyday people
can be reconstructed. The first stages of the London Lives project are
available at <a href="http://www.londonlives.org/">www.londonlives.org</a>.
Again, this project is already bringing to light fascinating information about
eighteenth-century London Freemasonry. For example, it is already possible to
search on this site working papers of Middlesex justices which include
inquests. In 1763, a man called John Bunter was stabbed to death near Cannon
Street. The immediate reason for the argument which led to Bunter's death was
apparently his intention of becoming a Freemason.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 134.7pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">By the late eighteenth century,
public interest in crime reports was waning, and sales of the <i>Old Bailey
Proceedings</i> declined. From 1787, the City of London had to subsidise the
publication costs of the proceedings. The proceedings began to become less
popular literature and more of a formal record. They continued to be pubished
until the establishment of the Central Criminal Court in 1913. The <i>Old
Bailey Proceedings Online</i> website has recently added these
nineteenth-century records to its database. While these reports lack the
immediacy of the eighteenth-century trials, nevertheless they are also packed
with fascinating information for the historian of Freemasonry. I hope to
discuss some of these nineteenth-century cases from the Old Bailey in the next
issue of <i>The Square</i>. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 134.7pt;">
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">II</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
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</style><span style="font-family: inherit;">'A person who is tired of crime', declared Horace Rumpole,
'is tired of life'. Rumpole of course regarded his 'proper stamping ground' as
the Old Bailey. Those of you who have seen the recent BBC drama series <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Garrow’s Law</i> or heard the Radio 4
programmes <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Voices from the Bailey</i>
will know that Rumpole's axiom was just as true in the eighteenth century as
today. The printed collections of Old Bailey Proceedings, which describe
criminal trials held at the courts held at the Old Bailey in London, provide
vivid depictions of many aspects of everyday life in eighteenth-century London.
The Old Bailey Proceedings have been made available online by a joint project
based at the Universities of Sheffield and Hertfordshire, and you can search
these trials for yourself at </span></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/">www.oldbaileyonline.org</a>. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The eighteenth-century trials include a number of intriguing
references to Freemasonry, such as a theft during a Masonic meeting at the
Goose and Gridiron, which I described in an earlier issue of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Square</i>. The <i>Old Bailey Proceedings</i>
do not simply cover the eighteenth century, but continued until 1913. However,
the nature of the reports of nineteenth-century trials in the proceedings
is<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>slightly different to those I have
already discussed. To understand the reasons for this, it is necessary to look
briefly at the publication history of the proceedings.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The enormous public interest in the lives of ordinary
criminals (perhaps enhanced by the explicit sexual testimony in some of the
trials) meant that from the 1730s the printed proceedings were among the
best-selling publications of the day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By
the 1770s, however, readership for the proceedings was declining, as newspapers
began to carry more detailed reports of trials. Commercial publishers lost
interest in the <i>Old Bailey Proceedings</i> and it was necessary for the City of
London to provide a subsidy to ensure their continued publication.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The City started to view the printed proceedings
increasingly as an official record and in 1778 demanded that they should provide
a ‘true, fair and perfect narrative’ of all the trials. In response to this,
the publishers of the proceedings reduced the amount of salacious content and
reported individual trials in much greater detail. The <i>Old Bailey Proceedings
</i>became in effect an official publication of the City of London, providing an
accurate public record designed largely for use by lawyers. In 1834, the
jurisdiction of the court was extended and it was renamed the Central Criminal
Court. Despite occasional attempts by the City of London to save money by
discontinuing the proceedings, they continued to be published until 1913 when
the Criminal Justice Act introduced a statutory requirement for the taking of
shorthand notes of trials, paid for by the Treasury. The <i>Old Bailey Proceedings</i>
consequently became redundant, and their publication ceased in 1913.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The reports of nineteenth-century criminal trials at the Old
Bailey have now been made available online by the Old Bailey Online project at
the Universities of Hertfordshire and Sheffield. An immediate impression is
that these nineteenth-century trials contain much more information about
Freemasonry than the eighteenth-century trials. This may be explained in a
number of ways. As already noted, the publishers of the eighteenth-century
proceedings tended to concentrate on the more sensational cases and omitted
many mundane crimes, which may have included some cases with a Masonic element.
The nineteenth-century reports also provide a much more detailed record of the
examination of prisoners and witnesses which mean that they contain more
passing references to Freemasonry. Nevertheless, the impression which emerges
from the Old Bailey proceedings is that Freemasonry was a much more prominent
and significant part of London life during the reign of Queen Victoria than it
had been in the eighteenth century. This is important, since research into the
history of Freemasonry has tended to focus on the eighteenth century, and
Freemasonry has been largely considered historically as an expression of the
Enlightenment. Yet it was during the nineteenth century that Freemasonry
finally became an integral part of British society. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The <i>Old Bailey Proceedings</i> illustrate how we need to pay
more attention to nineteenth-century Freemasonry if we are to understand the
importance of Freemasonry in culture and society. The way in which Freemasonry
was all pervasive in nineteenth-century London can be seen from a number of
theft cases in which Masonic objects were stolen. For example, Henry Sales was
indicted in 1840 for shoplifting from a pawnshop. The most valuable of the
objects stolen by him were three Masonic ornaments worth altogether about a
guinea. One imagines a run-down pawnshop in which many of the most prominent
and most noticeable objects on display were Masonic. In a case from 1835,
Elizabeth Baker, who with her husband Avery kept the Crown and Horseshoe public
house in Holborn, was going to bed and found her bedroom door open. She could
see that her chest of drawers had been opened and that her clothes were
scattered all over the room. She ran down the stairs and cleverly locked a door
so that the thief could not escape if he was still upstairs. When the thief
came downstairs he tried the door and finding it locked, leapt over some
banisters. Elizabeth shouted ‘Stop Thief!’ and tried to grab the miscreant, but
he got away from her clutches.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">In the scuffle, the thief lost his hat, and when it was
picked up it was found that it contained Avery Baker’s Masonic apron which was
valued at fifteen shillings (about £70 in modern values). Among other goods
which the thief had tried to take were some shirts, a gown, a shawl and some
handkerchiefs, but the Masonic apron was far and away the most valuable item.
In the tap room of the Crown and Horseshoe, where Avery was pouring
gin-and-water and customers were drinking, they heard Elizabeth’s cry of alarm,
and saw the thief trying to escape. One of the Bakers’ servants, Abigail Barry,
seized the thief, and with the assistance of one of the customers restrained him
while the watchman was summoned. The prisoner was a man called Henry Edmonds.
On closer examination of the hat, it was found that as well as the Masonic
apron it contained some skeleton keys. Edmonds, who had been seen drinking in
the bar before the attempted theft, claimed that the hat was not his, and that
he had been innocently drinking with his brother-in-law. He had simply gone
upstairs to find the landlord to get another drink. Despite receiving a good
character, Edmonds’s claim was not believed, and he was sentenced to death.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The opulence of Victorian and Edwardian Freemasonry is
vividly expressed in the case of Albert Rothery. In January 1907, Samuel Gurney
Massey was tried at the Old Bailey for fraud in managing the affairs of the
‘Economic Bank’, which had gone bankrupt. Albert Rothery, an accountant who had
acted for the liquidators of the bank, was among the witnesses who appeared
against Massey. However, nine months later, Rothery himself was to be tried at
the Old Bailey for a crude fraud on suppliers of Masonic regalia and jewels. He
had obtained Masonic and other jewellery worth hundreds of pounds on credit
from various suppliers which he had then pawned, notwithstanding the fact that
he was an undischarged bankrupt. It is worth tabulating Rothery’s depredations
since they give a good picture of the healthy state of the Masonic regalia
business in Edwardian London and the value of the jewels commonly sported by
the Freemasons of that time:</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">From Sir John Bennett Limited, one ring, worth £119;<br />
From Thomas Hutchinson, seven Masonic jewels, worth £37 1s<br />
From Sidney Alexander Weeden, two Masonic jewels, worth £12 1s 6d<br />
From William Henry Toye, two rings and five Masonic jewels, worth £26 1s<br />
From Frank Reginald Kenning, three Masonic jewels, worth £16 5s<br />
From James Masters, one ring, worth £85<br />
From William Stiffen, five Masonic jewels, worth £25 10s</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Thus, Rothery had managed to acquire rings and Masonic
jewels worth a grand total of £320 17s 6d – more than £25,000 by modern values.
Rothery had spun a complex web in perpetrating his fraud, with some twenty
pawnbrokers involved. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The name of one of Rothery’s victims, William Toye
(1844-1910), who developed the specialist braid and ribbon manufacturing
business established by his father into one of the largest manufacturers of
Masonic and friendly society regalia, is still well known among British
Freemasons. It was not the first time that Toye had suffered a deception in a
case which ended up in the Bailey. In 1896, the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Investor</i> newspaper carried a prospectus for the firm of T. E.
Brinsmead and Sons, piano manufacturers in Kentish Town. Among the subscribers
to the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Investor</i> was Toye, who
described himself as a Masonic jeweller living in the Clerkenwell Road. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">John</i> Brinsmead was one of the best piano
makers of the period; but the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Thomas</i>
Brinsmead who had set up T. E. Brinsmead and Sons was simply trying to cash in
on the Brinsmead name, and had no experience in the manufacture of pianos. Toye
was among those duped, and purchased ten pounds worth of shares in T. E.
Brinsmead and Sons. Shortly afterwards, he realised his mistake and he wrote
asking for his money back, stating that ‘Your prospectus certainly was very
misleading in my opinion, as<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>it did not
distinctly state that the firm of T. E. Brinsmead and Sons had or had not any
connection with John Brinsmead and Sons, but it read as though they had’. Toye
never received his money back, and the firm of T. E. Brinsmead went bankrupt.
For their deception, Thomas Brinsmead and his associates were sentenced, thanks
to the testimony of Toye and others, to sentences ranging from three months
hard labour to five years penal servitude.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Freemasonry was associated in Victorian London with the
well-off and respectable. There was money in it, so not surprisingly it
frequently figured in cases involving forgery, deception and extortion. James
Edgell was a solicitor living in a comfortable house in Teddington who served
as a magistrate in Middlesex and was Clerk to the Kingston Guardians. On 29
December 1867, he was attending one of his committees when he received a letter
signed T. J. Adams which ‘stated that the writer was aware of certain indecent
practices which Edgell had been carrying on, that he could produce 4 witnesses,
but had no desire to cause a pubic scandal, or make a pretence of blackmailing,
and if £10 in unregistered notes was sent him, the prosecutor would never hear
more of the matter’. Edgell sent ten pounds by post and told his wife what had
happened. Inevitably, he received another demand for money a few days later.
Edgell refused to send any more money, and he received a further letter
insisting that the money should be paid and adding that if Edgell sent the
money, the blackmailer ‘would keep his secret as a brother Mason’. Eventually,
Edgell contacted the police, and an interview was arranged to trap the
blackmailer, resulting in the arrest of Oliver Fletcher. Shortly afterwards an
accomplice named John Cox was also arrested. Fletcher alleged that the
blackmailer was really his half-brother, named Reuben Brooks. He claimed that
Brooks owed him four pounds and had said to him ‘I know a Mason, and if you
will go and collect some money from him you can deduct that £4, and give me the
rest’. Brooks had told him that ‘it was a Masonic affair’. Cross-examined, Fletcher
insisted on this justification that ‘it was a Masonic matter’ as a
justification for his behaviour. Eventually, after lengthy cross-examination,
Fletcher changed his plea to guilty, and received seven years penal servitude.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Another case of extortion directed against a Freemason
occurred in 1847. Henry Robert Lewis lived in Upper Montague Street and among
his servants were William Litchfield and his wife. Litchfield’s wife died and
William Litchfield afterwards left Lewis’s service. Lewis had promised at the
time Litchfield’s wife was dying that he would help look after their son, and
Lewis gave Litchfield various sums of money after he had left his service to
help him in caring for the child. He also gave Litchfield a large sum of money
to help him establish a business. Notwithstanding Lewis’s apparent generosity
to his former employee, Litchfield seems to have felt that he still deserved
more money. On 22 July 1847, Litchfield wrote to Lewis as follows:</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Sir, if you do not act as a gentleman towards me in this
affair of yours, and come to terms with your solicitor, by leaving with him
certain monies to supply my wants in the future while you are out of town, I
swear by heaven and hell that the whole of your damnable affair and beastly
conduct shall be held up before the eyes of the Masonic order, and the clubs
that you are a member of, whose secretaries I will write unto.</span></i></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Lewis’s reaction to this threatening letter was to arrange
for Litchfield to be indicted and arrested. Litchfield was sentenced to be transported
for life.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Of the various cases of fraud and deception at the Old
Bailey during the nineteenth century with a Masonic connection, the most
interesting to the historian of Freemasonry is the prosecution in January 1870
of John Rust for embezzlement in January 1870, because it sheds a remarkable
light on the chaotic and financially unstable world of Masonic publication at
that time. Rust was employed in the office of William Smith, a civil engineer,
in Salisbury Street in London. Among many other activities at this office was
the production of two periodicals, namely the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Artizan</i> and the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Freemasons’
Magazine</i>. The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Artizan</i> was one of
the main periodicals concerned with civil engineering and had been established
in 1844. Smith apparently took over its publication in 1868, at the same time
that he also became the publisher of the <i>Freemasons’ Magazine</i>, which had
been begun in 1848 by Henry Warren. The production of these two periodicals was
just one of the many concerns of Smith’s office which apparently consisted of a
room in a building occupied by a number of other nebulous and dubious
companies. In cross-examination at the Old Bailey, Smith admitted that a great
many companies such as ‘The Public Works and Credit Company of Italy’, of which
he was engineer, and the ‘Agricultural and General Machinery Company Limited’
had their nameplates on his office doors.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">John Rust had been employed in Smith’s office for about four
years and was described by Smith as the publishing clerk of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Artizan</i> and the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Freemasons’ Magazine</i>. As far as Smith was concerned, Rust was a
junior employee whose duty was ‘to receive money when tendered at the office,
receive all letters and hand them over to me and, if I was absent, to my wife'.
In August 1869, however, Smith was arrested for debt and imprisoned for three
weeks. Smith had been first bankrupted in 1850, which he swore was not his
fault, but in connection with partnership proceedings. At the time of Rust’s
trial, he was a bankrupt to the tune of some £10,000. While Smith was in the
debtor’s prison, Rust received a cheque for £6 15s for an advertisement in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Artizan</i>. After Smith was released from
prison, he discharged Rust, presumably because he could no longer afford the
wages. When Smith afterwards wrote to the firm which had placed the
advertisement requesting payment for the advertisement, the firm replied saying
that a cheque had already been sent which had been cashed. Smith found the
cheque had been endorsed by Rust. The ledgers of Smith’s companies seem to have
been rather hit and miss – in 1850, he had boasted that he had run a firm
without any books at all – but he claimed that Rust had deliberately failed to
enter the cheque in the ledgers. Rust was arrested at his house in Euston. Rust
admitted that he had endorsed the cheque, but insisted that he had used the
money for the business.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Smith fared badly under cross-examination. He was asked if
he had ever got a lad of fifteen to sign fictitious bills of exchange which
were used to raise money; at first, he denied doing so, but when confronted
with the boy in question, said that the boy wasn't fifteen, but actually
sixteen or seventeen. Smith attempted to bluster, but it was clear that he had
engaged in dubious transactions using office juniors as front men. Rust had signed
an affidavit for the bankruptcy court concerning Smith’s sharp practice in the
publication of the ‘National Masonic Calendar, Pocket Book, and Diary for
1870’, advertised to be edited and published by Smith. Smith claimed that
subscriptions to the Masonic calendar would be paid by the advertising agent,
but the advertisement stated that post office orders and cheques should be
payable to Henry Herbert Montague, which it transpired were the Christian names
of Smith’s nine-year-old son.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Rust claimed that he had used the money from the
advertisement to pay wages. Smith insisted that Rust had no authority to pay
wages unless money was handed to him for that purpose – according to Smith, the
only payments Rust was authorised to make were for petty cash and stamps for
the postage of newspapers. Smith admitted however that Rust was described in
the <i>Freemasons’ Magazine</i> as its publisher to whom Post Office orders
should be sent. There was an entry in the books which apparently referred to
the disputed cheque, but Smith denied they could be the same. Asked directly
whether he had ever been charged with fraud, Smith replied ‘Never, nor against
my character. I have always stood very high in the estimation of my friends – I
have been utterly ruined by the failure of joint stock companies to pay my fair
and reasonable charges’. Nevertheless, the cross-examination made it clear that
Smith had a long past of colourful financial dealings.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">William Rogers was summoned as a witness for the defence. He
described himself as a gentleman who had been for sometime employed as Smith’s
amanuensis ‘when he was out of the way’. He produced various cheques relating
to his employment which showed the chaotic organisation of the office’s
finances and illustrated the way in which the staff had had to use their own
money to help keep the office running. Rust frequently opened letters in the
office, and signed Post Office orders on Smith’s behalf, although it was not
clear whether he also regularly endorsed cheques. Rogers declared that Rust always
paid for the postage of the periodicals:</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Artizan</i>
journal comes out on the 27<sup>th</sup> or 28<sup>th</sup> of the month; it is
supposed to be published on the 1<sup>st</sup>. The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Freemasons’ Magazine</i> is issued every Friday. There would be a large
number that day to go to all parts of England, and some would go abroad; they
were sent out before the beginning of the month, and sometimes not then, in
consequence of an absence of money. Rust always paid my salary for the last
twelve or eighteen months. He was the publisher of the periodicals, he managed
them. He was a person of authority in the office. I considered myself under
him. There was no concealment about the cheque.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Asked whether it was ‘a common thing, or was it a very rare
thing indeed, that the office should be hard up for money, and the clerks
obliged to supply it’, Rogers replied that he had ‘heard the prisoner say so
many times and that he did not even know how he was to get the stamps to post
the magazines’. It seemed clear that Rust had endorsed the cheque, but it also
seemed that he had been routinely allowed to do this by Smith and that such
expedients were the only way in which the office could keep running. The jury
found Rust guilty, but made the pointed rider that it strongly recommended the
judge to show mercy ‘under the very peculiar circumstances of Mr Smith’s
office’. Smith’s operation was clearly a very extraordinary one. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Among the claims made by Smith against Rust was that he had
been pasing information (presumably about subscribers) to a rival masonic publication.
This is presumably a reference to <i>The Freemason</i> which was launched in
1869 by the supplier of Masonic jewels and regalia, George Kenning. Kenning ran
the new periodical in a much more business-like fashion and not surprisingly <i>The
Freemasons' Magazine</i> soon ceased trading. Rather than relying on an
inexperienced young man like John Rust, Kenning used as managers for <i>The
Freemason </i>men like<i> </i>Arthur Melbourne, who had had previous experience
in running newspapers. But even Kenning could sometimes be caught unawares. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">In 1896, Edward Morgan was tried at the Old Bailey for fraud
in promoting shares in a company called<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>the 'United Founders' Association'. Morgan was an undischarged bankrupt,
and simply used the money he received via the United Founders' Association' to
try and clear some of his debts. The 'United Founders Association' ran
newspaper advertisements to attract investors. One such advert read 'Idle
Money.—The United Founders'Association invite the attention of investors to
unique and safe system of investment, yielding from 10 to 25 percent. No
gambling. Absolute security'.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Among the publications which ran advertisements for the
'United Founders' Association' was <i>The Freemason</i>. The item in The
Freemason stated that the Association had a capital of £20,000 and was paying
very satisfactory dividends.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To make
matters worse, there was no indication that this was an advertisement – it
looked like an editorial recommendation by <i>The Freemason</i>. Kenning was
summoned as a witness to the Old Bailey to explain matters. Kenning declared
that the article 'was not written by me or by any member of my staff—I am told
it is an advertisement'. Under cross-examination, he repeated that 'I had
nothing to do with the puffing advertisement being put in this way and I do not
know how it was done'. He blamed his manager, who had supplied two hundred free
copies of the issue of <i>The Freemason</i> containing the advertisement to the
'United Founders' Association'. Apparently the advertisement had been secured
for <i>The Freemason</i> by a man named Evans who had received ten shillings
commission. Kenning felt the responsibility was entirely his manager's: 'my
manager was paying 10s. commission to insert a puffing paper what was not
marked "Advertisement"—that was very improper'.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Kenning's manager, Arthur Melbourne, was then summoned. He
explained that Evans was used to secure advertisements for <i>The Freemason,</i>
and had received ten shillings commission for arranging this advertisement.
Morgan had separately ordered two hndred extra copies of the issue containing
the advertisement. Since <i>The Freemason </i>sold for sixpence a copy, Morgan
had been invoiced for £2 10s; this bill had not been paid. Melbourne was then
cross-questioned as to why the fact that this was an advertisement was not
indicated. He replied as follows:</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoBodyText">
<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">We did not put "Advt." at the end, because it
was stipulated that it should not be put—I agreed to that—this was an
exceptional one—nobody criticises the advertisements—our usual charge is five
shillings per inch for advertisements pure and simple—there is not a charge for
advertisements like this; it depends upon the number of copies—I saw what the
copy would make, and suggested the price—I saw it before it was set up in
type—the copy was written by Evans, the gentleman who brought orders, and to
whom I gave the commission—he has not brought advertisements frequently
before—we did not put it in leaded type—this is the first we have put in
without "Advt."—I was assured that it was a bone fide business, and I put it in, believing it was all right—the
final proof is revised by the editor, but there was not time—I took something
out—I am not sub-editor, I am manager—it was not an honest thing to put it in.</span></i></div>
<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span></i><br />
<div class="MsoBodyText">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The publication of newspapers such as <i>The Freemason </i>was
one of the best illustrations of the way in which Freemasonry had become part
of the fabric of life in Victorian London. This integration of Freemasonry into
everyday life was most visibly expressed in the appearance of masonic halls
alongside the non-conformists chapels, temperance halls and other meeting
places that appeared as the suburbs of the Victorian city inexorably swallowed
up the surrounding countryside. One of the most singular of the cases relating
to Freemasonry reported in the Old Bailey Proceedings concerned the use of one
of these new masonic halls. The masonic hall at Mount Pleasant in Plumstead was
opened in 1888. A number of the lodges which met there had connections with the
nearby Woolwich Arsenal, and the Royal Arsenal football team had its annual
dinner there in 1891 when it was still an amateur club. In 1911, Sydney
Burnett, an employee at the Arsenal, began to hold weekly whist drives at the
Freemasons' Hall. Most of those who attended were Arsenal men and their
wives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The drives proved very popular;
on one occasion, there were 144 players at 36 tables.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoBodyText">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The question of whether whist played in public places for
prizes contravened the gaming laws was a vexed one. A recent court decision had
determined that 'progressive whist', where pairs were split up when they won a
game, was not primarily a game of skill and therefore contravened the law.
Burnett was warned by the local police that he drive at the Freemasons' Hall
were illegal. He protested that the drives did not involve progressive whist.
He offered to allow the police to witness the play. Two policemen visited two
of the whist drives. They observed that the events were very respectably
conducted: 'No alcohol was sold. The prizes were useful ones'. They confirmed
that the drives were partner drives, and admitted that in partner drives the
element of chance was less than that of skill. Nevertheless, Burnett was
arrested, charged with 'unlawfully using the Freemasons' Hall, Mount Pleasant,
Plumstead, for the purpose of unlawful gaming' and duly appeared in the Old
Bailey.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoBodyText">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The sense of outrage is still audible in Burnett's
testimony as recorded in the Old Bailey Proceedings:</span></div>
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</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">SYDNEY BURNETT (prisoner, on oath). I am employed in the
Woolwich Arsenal. I have played whist some 20 years. It is absolutely a game of
skill. I used to organise whist drives on behalf of an association. They
presented me with a gold watch in recognition of my services. In October, 1911,
I commenced whist drives at Freemason's Hall. Ninety per cent. of the players
are Arsenal men and their wives. Most of them are expert players. The drives
originally were ordinary progressive. Since the case of Morris v. Godfrey I
introduced partner drives. I consider them legal. I consider it a game where
skill predominates over chance. It increases the skill of the game not to have
the trump card shown. In addition to the ordinary prizes there is an aggregate
prize. Those that do not win a prize hand in their cards at the end of the
evening and they choose their partners for a whole month. At the end of the
month the scores are totalled up and the lady and gentleman with the highest
score take prizes. The games are conducted in silence and proper time is given
for playing each hand. The games are over at 11 o'clock at the latest. The
profit for the 14 months of the whist drives and refreshment bar was £58. </span></i></div>
<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span></i><br />
<div class="MsoBodyText">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Some of those who attended appeared to attest to Burnett's
good character. James Underwood was an examiner of forgings in the Royal
Arsenal, had known Burnett since he was a child and considered him of unimpeachable
character. Underwood himself had played whist for twenty three years, and was
firmly of the opinion that it is a game of skill. Florence Morgan was married
to a worker at the Arsenal. She had played whist for about ten years and had
regularly attended Burnett's whist drives. She added: 'The players are what I
should call the upper set of the artisan class. They are mostly very good
players. I consider whist a game of skill. I have run aggregate prizes two
months running'. Edith Pyne added simply, 'I know the people who go to these
whist drives. I think they tend to improve the social life'.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoBodyText">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Burnett was found not guilty, and the whist drives
continued at the Freemasons' Hall in Plumstead. Rumpole was right: all human
life truly appeared at the Old Bailey, and the different ways in which
Freemasonry became bound up with London life in reigns of Queen Victoria and
Edward VII are colourfully illustrated for us in the Old Bailey Proceedings.
Explore them online for yourself.</span></div>
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Andrew Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07861908988990764618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8856697805993319185.post-65529066626095432722013-04-08T13:49:00.002-07:002014-01-13T03:47:06.682-08:00Thinking about Fluorescent Bunnies <div style="text-align: center;">
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In a <a href="http://digitalriffs.blogspot.com/2013/04/shared-horizons-data-biomedicine-and.html">previous blog pos</a>t anticipating the exciting symposium <a href="http://mith.umd.edu/sharedhorizons/">Shared Horizons: Data, Biomedicine and Digital Humanities</a>, I looked backward to the discovery of DNA and suggested that Maurice Wilkins’s description of the nature of collaborative work held lessons for the digital humanities. But the aim of the symposium at Maryland is to look forward to new collaborations and to explore the potential that new types of data and analysis of data holds for humanities scholars. I have already suggested that a function of the digital humanities should be to form a bridgehead for collaboration between humanities scholars and scientists – in much the way that conservation science in libraries and archives has been one of the chief means by which humanities scholars become acquainted with scientific tools of relevance to their research. But in forging such connections, what kind of links between bioinformatics and digital humanities should we be looking for?<br />
<br />
At one level, there are clear cross-overs of knowledge domain. A great deal of epidemiology depends on the use of historical sources, and historians can contribute completely new perspectives to the study of plagues and epidemics because of their understanding of these sources. I think inevitably of the work of my good friend Samuel K. Cohn at the University of Glasgow in his books <i>The Black Death Transformed</i> (2002) and <i>Cultures of Plague</i> (2009) which have challenged conventional wisdom about the nature of the plague in medieval and early modern Europe. Among the sources used by Cohn are health statistics from Italian cities, and in approaches to historical data of this kind there is the potential for a great deal of synergy between bioinformatics and a number of humanities disciplines. New forms of visualization and analysis offer wonderful tools for many different types of study, but also pose potential hazards, since there is a risk that, once historical evidence and texts are rendered into machine-readable form, we forget their context and become uncritical in our use of data.<br />
<br />
Data offers rich new potential, but one of the surprising things we have found in our early development of the theme of ‘<a href="http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/Funding-Opportunities/Research-funding/Themes/Digital-Transformations/Pages/Digital-Transformations.aspx">Digital Transformations', one of the strategic themes identified by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in Britain</a>, is that there are other shared horizons and transformations which go beyond data. The importance of making is becoming daily more evident and imposing. It is clear that the technologies of 3D printing are likely to present another major wave of digital transformation. Amazon has secured a dominant commercial position by transforming the logistics of ordering; with 3D printing, the logistics of manufacture and delivery will be changed in an even more profound fashion, which will make Amazon seem as quaint as Victorian mail order catalogues. The potential of 3D printing is already beginning to transform the medical world. Hospitals in the UK are saving thousands of pounds by <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-15535438">printing replacement hips and other bones</a>. The possibility of 3D printing replacement organs such as <a href="http://www.medgadget.com/2013/02/cornell-bioengineers-3d-print-living-replacement-ears.html">ears </a>or even <a href="http://now.uiowa.edu/2013/02/ui-researchers-developing-3d-printer-bio-ink-create-human-organs">internal organs</a> using synthetic cells and bio-inks has already been successfully demonstrated, and will presumably shortly become routine.<br />
<br />
In developing the ‘Digital Transformations’ theme, it is becoming increasingly clear that those engaged with the digital arts, because they are exploring new forms of making and experimenting with rapid systems development, will be key people in coming to terms with these new developments. I think for example of the work of <a href="http://www.shu.ac.uk/research/c3ri/projects/data-objects">Professor Ian Gwilt </a>at Sheffield Hallam University on 3D printing representations of data visualisations, which give us new ways of engaging with data as a tactile object. I have also found very exciting the work of <a href="http://www.robtoulson.rt60.co.uk/">Dr Rob Toulson</a> at Anglia Ruskin University on new approaches to audio engineering. For many years, there has been an aspiration to achieve a great synergy between the work of practicing artists and humanities scholars, and my sense is that finally there is the potential for a very rich and fruitful collaboration. Those working with the digital arts will, in my view, provide a means by which humanities scholars can help assimilate and deploy the new approaches which the maker revolution will produce.<br />
<br />
In thinking about biomedicine, art probably seems a long way away. Yet medical research can become cultural heritage and art. When I was at the British Library, a <a href="http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/features/beautifulminds/fleming.html">model of Alexander Fleming’s penicillin culture and the careful drawing made by him</a> formed one the most distinctive and attractive objects in the display of modern historical papers. Fleming himself was aware of the potential of biomedicine to create art. He was an amateur painter, but also <a href="http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Painting-With-Penicillin-Alexander-Flemings-Germ-Art.html">used microbes themselves to create art</a>. A recent article in the Smithsonian Magazine describes how ‘Fleming painted ballerinas, houses, soldiers, mothers feeding children, stick figures fighting and other scenes using bacteria. He produced these paintings by growing microbes with different natural pigments in the places where he wanted different colors. He would fill a petri dish with agar, a gelatin-like substance, and then use a wire lab tool called a loop to inoculate sections of the plate with different species’. The resulting artworks are little more than curiosities, but Fleming anticipated the development of bioart, which has developed recently into a distinctive field of artistic practice.<br />
<br />
One of the most exciting experiences of my first few months as an AHRC fellow was, through the good offices of <a href="http://www.boundaryobject.org/">Bronac Ferran</a>, to meet the distinguished artist <a href="http://www.ekac.org/">Eduardo Kac</a>. Eduardo has been very active in developing and discussing ideas of <a href="http://www.ekac.org/transgenicindex.html">bioart</a>. Among Eduardo’s most celebrated artworks is <a href="http://www.ekac.org/gfpbunny.html"><i>GFP Bunny </i></a>which involved ‘the creation of a green fluorescent rabbit, the public dialogue generated by the project, and the social integration of the rabbit. GFP stands for green fluorescent protein’. Eduardo describes this a transgenic art, and describes transgenic art as follows: ‘a new art form based on the use of genetic engineering to transfer natural or synthetic genes to an organism, to create unique living beings. This must be done with great care, with acknowledgment of the complex issues thus raised and, above all, with a commitment to respect, nurture, and love the life thus created’. Eduardo has also produced a fascinating edited volume on bioart, details of which are available here.<br />
<br />
Among the artworks which form part of <i>GFP Bunny </i>are a series of artworks called Lagoglyph which reference the rabbit in a series of different media, such as a <a href="http://www.ekac.org/lagoogleglyph.html">Google Earth image of a painting of a rabbit head</a>. Last year, Eduardo exhibited a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCYn7oQlLiA">Lagoglyph Sound System</a> which used conductive ink in order to enable the viewer to elicit sounds by touching parts of the painting. Conductive inks (the products used by Eduardo were produced by <a href="http://www.bareconductive.com/">Bare Conductive Inks</a>) seem to me to illustrate perfectly the transformative potential of making. Once ink can conduct electricity, the analogue becomes digital: manuscripts can become circuit boards and paintings computers. This shifts many of the relations around which the idea of digital humanities has been constructed. Electrically conductive inks of this type are made from enzymes or even whole living organisms, as is described in <a href="http://www.google.com/patents/US20120315552">this patent</a>, so these new materials are themselves a result of biomedicine.<br />
<br />
Data has much to unite biomedicine but maybe and digital humanities, but maybe making, bioinks and bioart will prove to be another important shared horizon.Andrew Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07861908988990764618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8856697805993319185.post-48148075416875828622013-04-05T08:07:00.001-07:002014-01-22T04:29:17.793-08:00Shared Horizons: Data, Biomedicine and the Digital Humanities<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-PwG7yNF6Dk4/UV7nXgakpiI/AAAAAAAAAPA/-YYgm6G32sc/s1600/dna45454.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-PwG7yNF6Dk4/UV7nXgakpiI/AAAAAAAAAPA/-YYgm6G32sc/s1600/dna45454.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">I’m very much looking forward to the
symposium being organized at the Maryland Institute for Technology and the
Humanities next week, <a href="http://mith.umd.edu/sharedhorizons/" target="_blank"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shared Horizons:Data, Biomedicine and the Digital Humanities</i></a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The involvement of such important sponsors as
the NEH, the US Department of Health and Research Councils UK make this a
particularly exciting and enticing event. Ever since I participated in a
pioneering symposium on <a href="http://www.uky.edu/~kiernan/DL/symp.html" target="_blank">Reconnecting the Science and Humanities through Digital Libraries</a> organized by my friend Kevin Kiernan at the University of
Kentucky in 199<i>5</i>, it has been clear to me that one major role of the digital
humanities is to be at the forefront of building links between the arts,
humanities and sciences so as to create new methods and insights across a range
of disciplines. The digital humanities is potentially a bridgehead between the
sciences and the arts and humanities, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shared
Horizons</i> is one of the most exciting and ambitious attempts yet to realize
this vision.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">I’m attending the event on behalf of
Research Councils UK, but in preparing myself for the symposium, my thoughts
inevitably ran towards the history of my own Institution, King’s College London.
King’s College includes the celebrated medical schools at Guy’s Hospital (where
Keats studied medicine), at St Thomas’s Hospital (founded in 1173 in honour of
the recently martyred Becket) and King’s College Hospital itself (where Lister
introduced antiseptic surgery), as well as the world famous Institute of
Psychiatry. There could hardly be a better place in the world to think about
links between the humanities and biological sciences than King’s College
London. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">If you walk past the Strand campus of
King’s College, you will see among the pictures of famous people associated
with the College, pictures of Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, who were
both involved in the pioneering studies of DNA at King’s College from 1945 to
1960. A lot of the preliminary work which led to the building of the first
model of DNA by James Watson and Francis Crick took place at King’s, which was
recognized by the fact that the Nobel Prize awarded in 1962 for the analysis of
the structure of DNA was given to the troika of Watson, Crick and Wilkins. Yet
of course the role of King’s College London in the discovery of DNA has been
overshadowed by controversy, particularly over suggestions that the role of
Rosalind Franklin in the discovery has not been sufficiently acknowledged and
that Maurice Wilkins gave Crick and Watson access to her research without her
permission. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">A natural first starting point for me in
preparing for the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shared Horizons</i>
event was to read Maurice Wilkins’s autobiography, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Third Man of the Double Helix </i>(Oxford, 2003) – a title which
Wilkins firmly insisted in his preface had been imposed on him by his
publisher. Wilkins’s autobiography is less well known than Watson’s account of
the discovery of DNA,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Double Helix</i>,
but it is also a compelling read. Watson described Wilkins as a tragic figure,
because he had worked on DNA for so long but failed to realize the secret of
its structure, and this sense of a man who was utterly committed to science but
was also in many ways deeply unhappy and frustrated, longing for a family life
but unable for many years to form relaxed and friendly relationships with women,
is what makes the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Third Man of the Double
Helix</i> such a remarkable book. Wilkins was involved in many of the greatest
scientific events of the twentieth century – the development of radar, the
building of the atom bomb, DNA – but this was undercut by immense loneliness,
so bad that Wilkins more than once contemplated suicide. He seemed only to find
contentment in his personal life in 1958 when he married Patricia Chidgey.
Wilkins is very frank about his difficulties with women and, while Watson felt
that Rosalind Franklin made difficulties for Wilkins, Franklin herself must
have found the desperately frustrated Wilkins an almost impossible colleague.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Wilkins’s autobiography should be one of
the first books read by anyone who wants to work in the digital humanities,
because it is one of the most thoughtful and honest discussions of the
possibilities and problems of interdisciplinarity. During the London Blitz, a German
bomber aiming for Waterloo Bridge missed, and dropped a number of bombs on the
quadrangle between King’s College London and Somerset House. After the war, it
was realized that the <a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_7ycFHfdh3bk/TJiuuanWDiI/AAAAAAAAAFY/2QIk4FdTWRc/s1600/Strand+rebuilding104.jpg" target="_blank">bomb craters</a> offered an opportunity for expansion in a
college always short of space, and it was decided to build new scientific
laboratories in the space that had been created by the bombs. King’s College
London has recruited John Randall from St Andrew’s University as Professor of
Physics, who brought Wilkins with him. Randall had begun as a scientist working
for GEC, and had shown true entrepreneurial vision in securing equipment and
expertise to build on the work undertaken during the war to improve radar.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Randall recognized the potential for the
synergies between the separate scientific disciplines of physics and biology.
He realized that the availability of strong Departments of physics, chemistry,
biology and medicine made King’s College London an ideal place to start a new
interdisciplinary programme of biophysics research. Randall secured the funding
and support to build in the old bomb craters a new set of laboratories
specifically designed to foster a new interdisciplinary study of biophysics. For
digital humanists, the way in which the discovery of DNA had its roots in the
creation of this avowedly interdisciplinary institute should be an inspiration,
and I think it appropriate that the first Department of Digital Humanities in
the world should be created in the college which had the vision to allow the
creation of the Randall Institute.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Yet Wilkins illustrates many of the
tensions and difficulties of boldly creating such new types of research. The
College bureaucrats found such innovation unsettling and threatening; according
to Wilkins, ‘College bureaucrats were disturbed by Randall’s long-distance
telephone bills, and stuffy academics were offended by his unusual plan to mix
physics and biology (traditionally very separate) and by what they saw as his
pushy style’ (p. 98). Randall showed a genius for obtaining grant money, and
his institute developed very rapidly. Yet this created further tensions. While
Randall himself allowed researchers a free hand in developing their
investigations, he became frustrated at the way in which he became seen as
someone whose main function was to pull in grants and build infrastructure. He
wanted to be engaged in front-line science, but his researchers became
resentful if he tried to get involved. The involvement of different disciplines
created tensions, as is apparent in the way in which Rosalind Franklin was
recruited partly because of her expertise in x-ray diffraction which would
support the work that Wilkins had been doing, but Franklin (apparently having
been given an assurance by Randall that she would be working independently) was
unwilling simply to support Wilkins’s work. While Wilkins makes it clear that
the discovery of the structure of DNA could only have been achieved by the
interdisciplinary approach pioneered at King’s, he also provides a vivid series
of cautionary tales about the problems and tensions of collaboration, which all
digital humanities scholars would be well advised to contemplate at length.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Wilkins perfectly embodies many of the
tensions and dilemmas of team working. He emphasizes strongly how in his view
the day of the lone scientist making world-shattering discoveries and
deductions (like James Clarke Maxwell, another great figure in the history of
King’s) were gone. Wilkins’s narrative sows how Crick and Watson did not simply
‘discover’ DNA; their work was one piece in a jigsaw of research by many
scientists stretching back many years. In Wilkins’s view, the days when a
scientist could aspire to conquer single-handed a great scientific problem,
like a mountaineer conquering Everest, were past. But, nevertheless, it is
evident from every page of Wilkins’s autobiography that he was oppressed by a
sense that, if things had only worked out differently, he could easily have
discovered the double helix structure himself. For this, Wilkins blames flaws
in the interdisciplinary structure of Randall’s lab at King’s. Colleagues
didn’t share information enough, and kept developments to themselves (an ironic
criticism, since Wilkins himself seems to have been painfully shy and found
talking to colleagues like Franklin difficult). Wilkins contrasts this with
Watson and Crick who, he said, were utterly open with each other, fearless in
their mutual self-criticism, even to the point of risking their friendship. In
many ways, Wilkins’s book is a plea for the open sharing of data in research.
It could, of course, be claimed that such pleading for openness was the result
of a guilty conscience in showing Crick and Watson the famous image of DNA made
by Rosalind Franklin without her knowledge. Nevertheless, Wilkins’s plea for
openness seems particularly pertinent as we prepare to consider possible links
between the digital humanities and bioinformatics in the Shared Horizons event
at MITH, so I can’t resist wrapping up this meditation on the role of
interdisciplinarity, collaboration and openness in the discovery of the
structure of DNA by quoting the final paragraph of Maurice Wilkins’s book:</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">‘Open minds are crucial in the future. The
concept of openness connects with breadth of mind (like Priestley, of oxygen
fame, who in his Chapel read from all the Holy Books). When I use the word
‘open’ I must emphasise that I do not mean open in the static sense, as when
one waits passively to receive messages from the outside. To establish dialogue
there must be interaction going in and out. It is a creative process, and one
needs to be actively exploring one’s own mind, and the mind of the other
participant. Energy, creativity, intuition and careful thought may all be
needed. The same attention may be required to the concept of open dialogue
itself: looking to the future, we need much further enquiry into the idea of
open dialogue. The process may be tedious, exhausting and exasperating, and
demand much imagination (and good luck!), but without such processes there may
be no future for humanity. Perhaps with open dialogue, we may hope for a more
creative and joyful community’. (pp. 265-6)</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">I can’t think of a better epigram for our <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shared Horizons</i> symposium.</span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN-US">I couldn't resist adding some more forward-looking reflections to this post. 'Thinking About Fluorescent Bunnies' can be read <a href="http://dayofdh2013.matrix.msu.edu/prescott/2013/04/08/4-30pm-thinking-about-flourescent-bunnies/" target="_blank">here</a>. </span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN-US"><i>Postscript, 18 April 2013</i></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN-US">The Department of Digital Humanities is currently based in a dingy outpost of King's at 26-29 Drury Lane (opposite the theatre showing <i>Warhorse). </i></span><span lang="EN-US">By a strange coincidence, it was in these offices at
Drury Lane that Maurice Wilkins spent the end of his career at King's.
Following his Nobel Prize in 1962, the biophysics work had begun to
outgrow the subterranean Wheatstone Laboratory, and a lease was taken on
a old seed warehouse in Drury Lane. In 1964, the beautifully appointed
new home of the Biophysics Unit at 26-29 Drury Lane was opened by the
Queen Mother (picture below). The unit was later renamed the Randall</span> Institute in honour of its founder. Wilkins's autobiography includes some evocative photographs of social events at Drury Lane in the 1960s. It is a strange coincidence that a Digital Humanities Department, where issues of interdisciplinarity are a central concern, should be currently housed in a building specifically converted for a pioneering unit of interdisciplinary science. It is a connection we should be proud of. Much more about King's and DNA, including further information about Drury Lane, can be found in this excellent online exhibiton by the King's Archive Service: <a href="http://kingscollections.org/exhibitions/archives/dna" target="_blank">DNA the King's Story</a>.<br />
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Andrew Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07861908988990764618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8856697805993319185.post-82004098971460352702013-01-13T09:37:00.001-08:002014-01-13T04:03:16.663-08:00The Deceptions of Data<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-A553NwtVjmE/UPLwwsfbBkI/AAAAAAAAAOU/T7WsH02imGo/s1600/Historical-shipping-route-001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="153" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-A553NwtVjmE/UPLwwsfbBkI/AAAAAAAAAOU/T7WsH02imGo/s320/Historical-shipping-route-001.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
At Friday's conference organised by the estimable Orietta da Rold at the University of Leicester to mark the launch of the interesting <a href="http://www.manuscriptsonline.org/" target="_blank">Manuscripts Online </a>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, even down to the meticulous reproduction of the manuscript's binding. It is so beautifully done that it at first seems that somebody has stolen the original volume from the British Library. However, when you examine the facsimile more closely, you realise that, despite all the care lavished on ensuring that it reproduces the original manuscript as closely as possible, the facsimile has a major flaw. There are two very scrappy flyleaves in the manuscript, dirty and stained with old glue from an earlier binding. They initially appear completely insignificant, and the makers of the facsimile decided they could be left out. However, these scrappy flyleaves include some signatures which provide important information about early ownership of the manuscript.<br />
<br />
This carefully constructed facsimile is deceptive. Editorial decisions were made in its construction which mean that it represents a subjective view of the manuscript. In the late nineteenth century, the great manuscript scholar Edward Maunde Thompson, in introducing a photographic facsimile of a manuscript, declared that photographs offered a depiction of the manuscript unaffected by human intervention. Sadly, this is never the case. Every reproduction of a manuscript involves a mass of human decisions about (for example) what lighting method is used, how flyleaves, blank leaves, etc., are included, how the binding is represented, and so on, which means that each reproduction of the manuscript represents an interpretation, frequently drawing on a mixture of curatorial, photographic and academic expertise. This applies just as much (perhaps even more) with digital imaging as with conventional photographic imaging.<br />
<br />
During the Manuscripts Online event on Friday, we heard a great deal about data, to the point where data seemed to assume a life of its own, an energetic effervescent life force that needed to be freed so that medieval and other forms of scholarship could be transformed into new 'cool' forms by its remarkable qualities. It seemed that, for the participants in the conference, we are no longer curators or scholars but makers and consumers of data. In this perspective, data is presented as in some way offering a more objective, less problematic view of historic cultures and societies than the archives or manuscripts from which it is drawn.<br />
<br />
There are many well-known projects and demonstrations which illustrate the way in which data is being manipulated to transform our views of historic and cultural trends and developments. Mapping has become ubiquitous, as if cultural geographers had never taught us about the way in which maps are difficult and challenging cultural constructs. It is intended that Medieval Manuscripts Online will include a mapping component, and mapping has become almost a standard requirement of such products nowadays. A good example of a characteristic approach is the visualisation by Ben Schmidt of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcHZ9fSdktM" target="_blank">seasonal movements of shipping</a> during the late eighteenth century. This uses information from the log books of ships assembled for the <a href="http://www.ucm.es/info/cliwoc/" target="_blank">climatological database</a>. It all looks very entrancing and convincing, and we are reassured that the visualisation is based on 'hundreds of log books' so we assume it gives a good sense of major trade connections from 1750-1850. James Cheshire has also used the same data to produce <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/apr/13/shipping-routes-history-map#zoomed-picture" target="_blank">a map of British trade routes</a> from 1750 to 1800. <br />
<br />
However, for a scholar interested in Britain, one thing immediately catches the eye. There are virtually no traces from the east coast of Britain, and very little trade between England and Scandinavia - how could great ports like Hull not be on trade routes? Moreover, no trade is shown as emanating from Liverpool or Glasgow - two of Britain's greatest slaving ports in the eighteenth century. How can this not be shown? The answer is that the climatological database was based on log books from Royal Naval ships and ships of the East India Company. The Royal Navy mainly operated from the south of England and in any case didn't engage directly in trade, while the East India Company of course did not trade much with northern Europe. This is visualisation shows <i>some </i>trade routes in the eighteenth century, but by no means <i>all</i>. Indeed, it is possible that some of these are not trade routes at all, since it is possible that the Royal Navy did not necessarily follow just trade routes. In removing the data sets from their original context, this visualisation runs the risk of creating a seriously distorted impression. For the original purpose of analysing eighteenth-century temperatures, the database was well constructed - it didn't particularly matter whether the vessels were naval or not, the weather was still the same. Using naval data to represent trade is another matter, however.<br />
<br />
One of the problem confronting data enthusiasts in the humanities is that we feel a need to convince our more old-fashioned colleagues about what can be done. But our role as advocates as data shouldn't mean that we lose our critical sense as scholars. In their presentations to the Manuscripts Online conference, Michael Pidd and Kathy Rogers from the Humanitie Research Institute at Sheffield stressed the need for detailed and careful examination of datasets in making them available, but there is a risk that we look more carefully at the technical components of the datasets than the historical context of the information that they represent. This is a danger of which Ben Schmidt was aware in making the shipping visualisation - he observes that one of the many uses of the visualisation is that it shows the status and coverage of the climatological database. It may be that this proves to be one of the main uses of data visualisation, namely giving us an innovative way of analysing the structure of historical and other texts, as Tim Hitchcock and Bill Turkel have shown in the way in which they use visualisations to explore the structure of the Old Bailey Proceedings as a historical source.<br />
<br />
It comes back to the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/arts/17digital.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">notorious comment made in a New York Times article</a> on the Digital Humanities a couple of years ago, that data provides a way by which humanities scholars can escape from the '-isms' of cultural theory. There appears to be a sense that data can somehow be cut free from its historical moorings to enjoy an autonomous existence. I think that's very dangerous. Data doesn't mean we become less critical; it demands that our critical faculties are sharper than ever, as the distortions and deceptions of data can be so deeply embedded that they are difficult to ferret out. As data becomes more promiscuous and greater cross-connections are made, our critical faculties need to be sharper than ever. <br />
Andrew Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07861908988990764618noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8856697805993319185.post-166882671493877512013-01-11T03:10:00.000-08:002014-01-13T04:06:58.660-08:00The Function, Structure and Future of Catalogues<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qj1TkW8umOw/UtO384XlxkI/AAAAAAAAAbQ/vk2iGeC53Rc/s1600/cards.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qj1TkW8umOw/UtO384XlxkI/AAAAAAAAAbQ/vk2iGeC53Rc/s1600/cards.jpg" /></a></div>
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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.<br />
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<span lang="EN-US">THE
FUNCTION, STRUCTURE AND FUTURE OF CATALOGUES</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">The story of the British Library is full of
remarkable personalities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One of the
most striking of these was Donald Urquhart, who established in 1961 the
National Lending Library for Science and Technology at Boston Spa in Yorkshire,
which afterwards became the northern outpost of the British Library. Urquhart was
described by his successor Maurice Line as ‘one of the greatest innovators,
practitioners, thinkers and personalities the library profession has ever had’.
Urquhart was a scientist whose wartime experience made him aware of the
inability of staid literary libraries such as the British Museum to satisfy the
increasing need of scientific researchers for prompt, easy and cheap access to
the burgeoning range of publications reporting the latest technical and
scientific research.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At Boston Spa,
Urquhart designed and built a remarkable mail order facility for information
which would ensure that scientists could receive the articles they needed in
their laboratory within twenty four hours. In creating this facility, Urquhart
questioned, and frequently rejected, many of the accepted principles of
librarianship. His best known innovation was to jettison the idea of a
catalogue. When he asked a librarian what the purpose of a catalogue was, he
was unimpressed by the reply he received: ‘for completeness’. Urquhart argued
that, if books were arranged on the shelf by author and title order, a
catalogue was unnecessary. If the book was there, the lending request could be
met straight away off the shelf; if the book was not there, then it would be
necessary in any case to contact other institutions to see if they have a copy.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Urquhart’s questioning of the principle of
a library catalogue may seem to be gaining a new relevance as we see Google and
other search engines becoming the primary means by which researchers seek out
information. Recent studies, for example, show that students, in seeking
electronic resources, do not turn to the catalogues of e-resources laboriously
compiled by libraries, but simply Google the resource. Library catalogues have
been criticized as dowdy and lacking in interaction by comparison with (for
example) Amazon.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The highly structured
and meticulously prepared information in a catalogue looks redundant by
comparison with the speed and simplicity of Google. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The catalogue is starting to look in many ways
to be exactly what Urquhart suggested – a comfort blanket for librarians and
curators. It seems that some librarians themselves are also coming to such a
view. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Deanna Markum of the Library of
Congress commented in 2006 that: ‘the detailed attention that we have been
paying to descriptive cataloging may no longer be justified ... retooled
catalogers could give more time to authority control, subject analysis, [and]
resource identification and evaluation’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Likewise, Karen Calhoun, in a report commissioned by the Library of
Congress expressed a concern that ‘The existing local catalog's market position
has eroded to the point where there is real concern for its ability to weather
the competition for information seekers' attention’.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Yet the humble catalogue also underpins
many aspects of the new digital services by which it seems threatened. Two of
the major library digitization projects of recent years, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Early English Books Online</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Eighteenth
Century Collections Online</i>, stem directly from the largest modern
cataloguing project of recent times, the English Short Title Catalogue, and the
primacy of EEBO and ECCO as digitisation projects reflects the visionary
insistence of those who established the English Short Title Catalogue in the
1970s that it should be in machine readable form. While Amazon may have given a
lead in promoting a more interactive approach to identifying and using books,
the comprehensiveness of Amazon database is due to the fact that it
incorporates the historic catalogues of major libraries such as the Library of
Congress and the British Library. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anyone
who feels that Google can do the job performed by library catalogues should
attempt to locate specific volumes of periodicals in Google Book. It is an
extraordinarily time consuming task, and sometimes downright impossible, which
explains why digital libraries such as Hathi and Open Library offer
conventional online catalogue access to digital libraries.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Library, archive and museum catalogues
offer some of the largest and most highly structured datasets which humanities
researchers are likely to encounter. These bibliographical datasets are
increasingly being made available as open data. The British Museum’s collection
database is now available in this form and the British Library has also made
the British National Bibliography available as linked open data. The highly structured
data in library catalogues has great potential to support innovative
visualisations showing aspects of bibliographic and intellectual history, as
can be seen from this project at St Andrews, the Bohemian Bookshelf. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While these possibilities have lead to an
increased interest in the potential of using catalogue data in new ways, this
renaissance of interest in the catalogue comes at a time when the catalogue
itself is fundamentally changing because the services it has traditionally
supported are also being transformed. As Lorcan Dempsey has commented, ‘the
catalog is being reconfigured in ways which may result in its disappearance as
an individually identifiable component of library service. It is being subsumed
within larger library discovery environments and catalog data is flowing into
other systems and services’.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">The catalogue is one of the oldest and most
important means by which humans have sought to control information. The library
of clay tablets collected by King Ashurbanipal of Assyria in the 7<sup>th</sup>
century BC had an author and title catalogue and probably a class catalogue as
well. We will all be familiar with the corpus of British Medieval Library
catalogues which has been in the process of publication by the British Academy
under the general editorship of Richard Sharpe and which lists thousands of
texts in circulation in medieval Britain. The production of library catalogues
was one of the first fields in which automation was used to expedite the
management of information. One of the earliest applications of automated
duplicating devices was in the production of the British Museum’s library
catalogue. The card index may nowadays seen like a very humdrum instrument of
information technology, but it was revolutionary in the way in which the use of
standardized cards allowed the sharing of information. The Library of Congress
in the early part of the twentieth century operated a bibliographic service
which offered pre-printed catalogue cards for books to local libraries. The
automation of these card indexes was one of the first computing technologies to
impact on humanities research.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">The scholarly literature on cataloguing is
considerable, and the changes in the position of the catalogue mean that
discussion as to its purpose, value and future remains vigorous. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This extensive scholarly and professional
debate has helped encourage the establishment and continued development of new
cataloguing standards. Not surprisingly, the discussion of cataloging is most
sophisticated for such conventional,library materials as the printed book and
the periodical publication. As early as the seventeenth century, Thomas Bodley
debated with his librarian Richard James how the books he purchased should be
described. The Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum, Anthony Panizzi,
established the first modern set of rules for cataloguing books in 1841. The
ninety one rules promulgated by the British Museum reflected the collective
wisdom of Panizzi and his assistants, their debates about points of cataloguing
practice often extending far into the night. The British Museum’s example
encouraged American librarians to produce their own rules, culminating in
Charles Ammi Cutter’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rules for a
Dictionary Catalog</i> of 1876.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
formation of professional Library Associations in Britain and America
encouraged further collaboration, resulting in the compilation of an
Anglo-American Code in 1908 and finally the issue of the second edition of the
Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR2) in 1967, which were further revised in
1978. The experience of the Library of Congress in producing catalogue cards
for use by other libraries encouraged early experiments with distributing
library catalogue records in machine readable forms. The Library of Congress
developed a service to produce and distribute on tape Machine Readable
Catalogue entries as early as 1966. This international co-operation of course
extends beyond the English speaking world. The International Federation of
Library Associations has been very important here, for example, in enunciating
the International Principles for Bibliographic Description in 1961. This
framework has provided a strong basis for addressing new challenges. The new
version of the Principles for Bibliographic Description, which you can see
here, attempts to reconceptualise the role of bibliographic description in new
information environments, and reflect the sort of thinking which has
underpinned the development of the new Resource Discovery and Access (RDA) which
has been implemented by the Library of Congress and is in the process of being
adopted by the British Library. Since one of the advantages of RDA is that it
is meant to provide a more flexible framework than AACR2 for dealing with
archives, manuscripts and other non-book materials, RDA is likely to loom more
considerably in the field of manuscript scholars than AACR2 has done.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">While the use of ICT in printed book
cataloguing has a long history, for archives the development has been much more
recent, but very dramatic. Archive processing differs fundamentally from
printed book processing because of its concern to preserve and represent the
hierarchies and administrative inter-relationships of individual documents. An
archival callmark such as this example (National Archives, KB 145/3/5/1) tells
me everything I need to know about the document. At the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fonds</i> or collection level, it forms part of the records of the law
court known as the King’s Bench. At the series level, the number 145 tells me I
is part of the series of King’s Bench Recorda files. The sub-series number, 3,
indicates that this from the reign of Richard II. The item number, 5, indicates
that this file is from the 5<sup>th</sup> regnal year of Richard II and the
file number 1 shows that it is the first of two parts surviving for that year.
The concern of archival descriptions is chiefly to preserve and document these
hierarchies, as the record entry for this file in the National Archives
catalogue illustrates. The kind of codicological and palaeographical
information such as the number of membranes or the number of scribes which
might be discussed in a literary or liturgical manuscript of the same period is
not analysed or recorded here. As you can see, the physical information
provided for description of a twelfth-century archival document such as this
pipe roll is minimal. The international standard which governs archival processing
and description is ISAD(G): the General International Standard Archival
Description. By contrast to MARC and printed books, the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fonds</i> structures of ISAD(G) cannot easily be represented in a
relational database. The hyperlinks of the World Wide Web closely map archival
structures, so that very quickly after the web appeared, an XML schema known as
EAD (Encoded Archival Description) was produced which enabled archive
descriptions to be readily made available for web access. The vast catalogues
of the National Archives in London, which had remained until the 1990s in
typewritten form and were only made available remotely through the energetic
photocopying programme of the List and Index <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Society, were rapidly made available online.
This was rapidly followed by the Access to Archives programme which converted
and put on the web catalogue records from many local and specialist
repositories.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">There isn’t time here today to go into the
interesting development of online cataloguing and inventory methods in museums,
but the need for museum documentation to embrace such a wide range of materials
led to the emergence of a more semantically-based standard of the CIDOC
Conceptual Reference Model, which is I suspect likely to have a very major
impact on the way in which we document and analyse cultural heritage materials
over the next few years. But what is striking here is the way in which the sort
of material in which we are interested – the type of medieval literary, liturgical,
legal and other library manuscripts which are the glory of collections such as
the British Library, the Bodleian Library and the libraries of the Oxford and
Cambridge colleges – has been ignored by developments in cataloguing. The needs
of these manuscripts – or indeed of early modern and modern manuscripts which
do not fall easily into the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fonds</i>
structures of ISAD(G) - have barely figured in discussions of the nature and
future of the catalogue in new information environments. This is surprising,
since the cataloguing of manuscript libraries was one of the earliest forms of
library cataloguing. Among the earliest published library catalogues in England
were Thomas Smith’s 1696 catalogue of the Cotton Library and David Casley’s
1734 catalogue of the old Royal collection of manuscripts, while Humfrey Wanley
set a formidable standard for specialized catalogues with his catalogue of
Anglo-Saxon manuscripts published by Hickes in 1705. Edward Bernard’s 1697
Catalogue of manuscript books in England and Ireland was one of the first
attempts at a union catalogue. These seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
pioneers established a tradition which has without doubt been one of the
glories of English medieval scholarship. The catalogues of manuscript
collections compiled by scholars such as M. R. James, Neil Ker, Malcolm Parkes,
Tilly de la Mare, and Andrew Watson are remarkable achievements and this
tradition continues today, and some of its most distinguished practitioners are
with us today. Moreover, the various in-house catalogues of manuscript
collections compiled by institutions such as the British Library, the Bodleian
Library and the John Rylands Library in Manchester incorporate some of the
finest work of such manuscript scholars as Edward Maunde Thompson, Sir George
Warner, Francis Wormald, Julian Brown, Falconer Madan, Richard Hunt and (in
Manchester) Frank Taylor. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">The catalogues of British manuscript
collections represent a formidable scholarly achievement, but, unlike printed
books or archives, this remarkable body of work has failed to generate any reflective
or theoretical literature. Manuscript cataloguers have been too deeply steeped
in the uncial to consider how the catalogues they produce fit into the wider
range of library and archive catalogue provision or to consider how their
catalogues can be better suited to their function and purpose.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The contrast has been drawn between France,
where Leopold Delisle’s influence was responsible for the early development of
a very integrated and consistent approach to manuscript cataloguing. It has
been<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>suggested that the failure of
English manuscript libraries and scholars to develop a similar approach was due
to a more pragmatic tradition in England – that English scholars were more
concerned <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>with studying the manuscripts
than with the way in which the catalogues were structured. I fear this is a
rather self-serving piece of justification. I suspect that the failure to
develop any theory of manuscript cataloguing in Britain has more to do with the
way in which the study of manuscripts has been some intimately connecting with
connoisseurship and collecting. Falconer Madan’s discussion of the cataloguing
of manuscripts in his 1899 volume <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Books
in Manuscript</i> – amazingly, still one of the best introductions to the
subject when I started work in the Department of Manuscripts at the British
Library in 1979, but now of course supplanted by more up-to-date treatments by
scholars such as Michelle Brown and Christopher de Hamel – makes this concern
with the creation of informed connoisseurs clear when he explains that his
discussion of cataloguing is aimed at the ‘private collector [who] has
purchased a manuscript at a sale, that it has just reached him, and that he is
inexperienced in the treatment of such volumes’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">This tradition rooted in collecting and
connoisseurship goes back deep into the history of manuscript scholarship in
Britain – one thinks of Wanley’s work on the Harley collection. I suggest that
it had a profound effect on the intellectual programme of scholars such as
James or Ker. Richard Pfaff has suggested that the aim of M. R. James in
compiling his catalogues was to create in his mind a kind of imaginary library
which would assist him in dating and placing texts, and a similar sense is also
evident in the approach of Neil Ker. This means that for these scholars, the
catalogue was a method which gave them a structure for the systematic
exploration of manuscript libraries and also became a means of recording and
delivering a scholarly judgment on the dating and localization of a particular
manuscript. But frequently the relationship of these scholarly catalogues to
the libraries they described was not necessarily clear – as is apparent from
the problems created by James using his own systems for the numbering of
manuscripts. While the documentary scholars at the Public Record Office
codified their professional practice to create a new archive profession, with
training offered at new schools in centres like University College London and
Liverpool, there was no comparable move to create a similar professional basis
for manuscript librarianship. Indeed, in creating the archives profession in
Britain, Sir Hilary Jenkinson explicitly excluded Departments of Manuscripts
like that at the British Museum, arguing that they used museum procedures which
caused damage to the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fonds</i>. Rather
than seeking to create a parallel professional structure to that being
established by the archivists, manuscript scholars such as Edward Maunde
Thompson, Francis Wormald and Julian Brown concentrated instead on formalizing
and developing the academic study of paleography and codicology. While scholars
from the Department of Manuscripts such as Thompson and Frederick Kenyon served
as Directors of the British Museum and played a major part in museum
administration, they had little impact on the development of the new archives
profession – something which perhaps confirmed Jenkinson’s argument that the
approach of manuscript libraries was too often based on the selective
connoisseurship of the museum.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">The result of this is that, while the
emergence of cataloguing standards for books and archives, was underpinned in
Britain by a substantial scholarly literature discussing the function and
structure of archives, there is no comparable literature on the theory and
practice of manuscript cataloguing. Our essential handbooks, such as the works
of Michelle Brown and Christopher de Hamel that I have already mentioned,
discuss palaeography, codicology and terminology. They do not discuss the
cataloguing requirements of manuscripts. The British literature on this subject
is embarrassingly meagre. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The best
historical overview is A. J. Piper’s article on ‘Cataloguing British
Collections of Medieval Western Manuscripts’ in Lynda Dennison’s collection of
the legacy of M. R. James. An important but largely forgotten contribution is
an article by the remarkable palaeographer Dorothy Coveney, who produced a
groundbreaking catalogue of the manuscripts at University College London in
1935. Coveney’s article on ‘The Cataloguing of Literary Manuscripts’ – literary
manuscripts here being adopted as a technical term to distinguish library
manuscripts from archives – published in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Journal of Documentation</i> in 1950 argued for much fuller and more systematic
palaeographical treatment of manuscripts, making trenchant criticisms of the
mannered descriptions of hands in James’s catalogues. Of course, there are
descriptions of the methods adopted in the prefaces of catalogues by scholars
such as James and Ker and in some library catalogues, such as that of the Bodleian
Library which sought to introduce some of Delisle’s principles, but otherwise
that is all we have.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While the Public
Record Office in London was at the heart of generating a new literature on the
processing and documentation of archives, the Department of Manuscripts at the
British Library produced nothing beyond two short handbooks itemizing the
various manuscript catalogues, a Guide to Manuscript Indexing by J. P. Hudson,
which is a impenetrable description of the typographical house rules used in the
indexes of the Catalogue of Additions to the Manuscripts, and a short guide to
the methods used initially to automate the catalogues of manuscripts.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">As we have seen, the emergence of such
standards as AACR2, MARC and now RDA with printed books or ISAD(G) and EAD for
archives <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>were closely related to both
theoretical discussions and the development of international associations such
as IFLA and the International Congress on Archives. There has been no such
process with manuscripts, so that the picture internationally remains
fragmented. In America, there was an earlier recognition of the distinct needs
of manuscripts and an enthusiasm for a closer connection with mainstream
library developments and the promotion of a more integrated approach to
manuscripts, such as the proposal of the controversial librarian of Princeton,
Ernest Richardson, for the creation of a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Union
World Catalog of Manuscript Books</i>. This willingness to accept that
manuscripts were part of libraries perhaps accounts for the way in which
American practice has been more willing to accept that manuscript books can be
catalogued in much the same way as printed books. Gregory Pass’s </span><span class="st"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Descriptive
Cataloging of Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, and Early Modern</span></i></span><span class="st"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Manuscripts</span></i><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria; font-style: normal; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> is a supplement to AACR2 which provides guidelines for cataloguing
manuscripts according to ACCR2 principles. This approach is widely favoured in
the United States, but its drawback is that it cannot cope with the collection
hierarchies which are required as soon as one encounters archival materials,
and this is one reason why manuscript librarians have been reluctant to go down
the simple route of cataloging their manuscripts in AACR. However, while EAD
and ISAD(G) preserve information about the collection hierarchies, they are
very poor at representing the kind of bibliographical and codicological
information. The </span></i><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Liber
Horn</span></i><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria; font-style: normal; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">, for example, is held by the London Metropolitan
Archives which naturally uses ISAD(G) and EAD. This is the description for the
Liber Horn in the London Metropolitan Archives, and you can see the problems:
whether it is helpful to describe the </span></i><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Liber
Horn</span></i><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria; font-style: normal; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"> as a file I am not sure, and the kind of
structural information we would normally expect in a description of a medieval
manuscript is simply not there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>ISAD(G)
is geared to large quantities of corporate records, produced by institutions; a
volume of uncertain official status produced by a chamberlain of the city is
not easily accommodated by a standard designed to cope with the city’s
financial records.</span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">There is, then, simply no accepted standard
for manuscript cataloguing. This would not matter very much if it wasn’t for
automation. The creation of large aggregated catalogues such as OCLC’s WorldCat
or the type of federated searching which is possible through services such as
CatCymru, which searches the catalogue of every public library in Wales, are
only made possible by the standardization grounded in the use of guidelines
such as AACR2. Without such standardization, it is impossible to develop such
services for manuscripts in the same way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>A brave attempt to initiate such a standard was the MASTER project,
which sought to develop a TEI document type definition for use in manuscript
cataloguing. An immense amount of work has gone into developing MASTER and it
has been used in modified forms in cataloguing collections in Oxford, London,
Copenhagen and elsewhere. TEI P5 now includes provision for manuscript
description, but use of TEI P5 has tended to be restricted to academic
researchers rather than curators, and it has suffered from lack of take up by
major libraries. However, the Bodleian Library, which used EAD to prepare a
summary catalogue of its manuscript holdings, will be using TEI P5 to provide
more detailed descriptions of its medieval manuscripts. Nevertheless, the risks
and problems of fragmentation remain, which can be seen by looking at the
rather sorry tale of the British Library’s manuscript catalogue.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">The British Library’s historic printed
manuscript catalogues, such as the long run of Catalogues of Additions to the
Manuscripts, were converted to machine readable form in the 1990s and made
available online via an Access database, which reproduced the split between
description and index in the printed catalogues and offered separate searches
for description and index, as well as easy access to information by manuscript
number. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The catalogues of some of the
oldest collections in the Library were by this time very out of date and a
separate project was initiated to identify by means of a shelf survey all the
illuminated and pre-1200 manuscripts and then recatalogue them. This resulted
in a separate digital catalogue of illuminated manuscripts, where the
manuscript descriptions were also made available via an Access database. The
manuscript catalogues were separate from the Library’s main catalogue systems,
and it was clearly desirable that they should be incorporated in some way. In
1982, the India Office Records were transferred to the British Library. The
India Office Records are very much archives and in many ways it would have been
preferable to transfer them to the National Archives. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For any library manager, it would clearly make
sense to try and provide integrated access to the manuscripts collection and a
major archive like the India Office Records. This is where the problem with
cataloguing standards kicks in. For the India Office material, ISAD(G) and EAD
is the available and recommended standard. For medieval manuscripts, there is
no recommended standard, so in creating an integrated British Library archive
and manuscript catalogue an ill-advised attempt has ben made to shoehorn the
western manuscript catalogue records into ISAD(G) and EAD in<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a form that I fear that many manuscript
scholars will simply find cumbersome at best and baffling at worst. But it is
difficult to suggest an alternative approach if there isn’t a clear-cut
manuscript standard available.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">It’s perhaps worth lingering a moment to
take a closer look at why the new British Library ‘Search our Catalogue
Archives and Manuscripts’ is so problematic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Here’s what happens if you search on Thomas Hoccleve. The first
indication that there is a problem is actually in the left-hand side, where
entities from the manuscript descriptions, such as the language of the
manuscript or names of previous owners are displayed. You will notice that
there is some uncertainty as to whether these records are at fonds, item or
file level; my suggestion is that they should all be at item level, but the
difficulty of thinking about ‘file’ in the case of these manuscripts shows the
inappropriateness of the approach. However, more to the point is the display of
information about the manuscript. Here is the description of Harley MS 116 in
the Catalogue of illuminated Manuscripts, and in my view it is exemplary in the
clarity of its distinction between the different aspects of the manuscript. EAD
doesn’t allow for any of this, so this is what we get if we go to ‘Details’ for
this manuscript in the new catalogue. The first point to notice is that this is
a very different description from the one in the Catalogue of Illuminated
Manuscripts. Unfortunately, no information is given as to why this new more
detailed description was compiled and by who. It is a very fine description but
I think you can see how awkwardly it fits into the ISAD(G) template. Moreover,
some elements of the information will be difficult to search – there is no
reason why we couldn’t easily generate listings of manuscripts pricked in
different ways, given the level of detail here, but the inappropriate use of
the EAD schema makes that much more difficult.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">An even bigger problem is apparent if we
look at the description of Sloane MS 1825. In this case, a description of the
manuscript compiled in the 1840s has simply been scanned in without further
amendment. Physical information is given briefly in Latin, and the date is in
the description but hasn’t been registered as the date of creation. Again,
there is no indication of the status or origin of the description. All this
provides is simply a keyword searchable version of a very old description –
useful, since this wasn’t previously accessible, but otherwise not much value.
It is very difficult within the new British Library to access descriptions by
manuscript number. The manuscript number here is a reference code. This is what
you get if you search for the reference code Nero D IV, the reference for the
Lindisfarne Gospels. In this record, more care has been taken to try and make
the discussion of the physical structure of the manuscript and the bibliography
fit into an archival framework, but the way in which the component texts of the
manuscript are treated (as if they were papers in a box set) is very
disconcerting. Moreover, the listing promises details that we don’t get – its
surprising for example that the colophon is listed as a separate textual
component, but no details are given anywhere of what the colophon says.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">There are many other problems with the new
British Library manuscripts catalogue. The facility to add your own subject
tags is potentially useful, and a similar facility has been included in the new
Discover the National Archives catalogue, but the relevance of reviews for the
Lindisfarne Gospels seems doubtful (would we put something like ‘a manuscript
that offers a great deal but when you see it close fails to deliver?’). But the
important point is that the problem is not the way in which the British Library
catalogue has been implemented here, but rather the difficulty caused by the
lack of any agreed standard for manuscript cataloguing, which is in itself a
symptom of a deeper lack of intellectual consensus as to the most appropriate
methods for processing and documenting manuscript collections which are not
formal archives. The temptation of course is to leap in and propose what such a
standard might look like. The need to develop a more standardized approach is
apparent from the outcome of a conference of manuscript librarians from Oxford,
New York, the British Library, Harvard, Yale and elsewhere held at the Bodleian
Library in 2007, where it was suggested that a good first step might be to look
at better handling of name authority. But I’m doubtful whether such tinkering
around the edges is adequate. Archival standards are not simply cataloguing
conventions but a statement of a whole philosophy as to how archival documents
should be processed, stored and made available. Cataloguing standards such as
RDA likewise reflect a holistic view of how categories of information are
managed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Likewise, we need to think
about what manuscript libraries are and how they should be managed. In thinking
about the future of manuscript catalogues, we need to rethink the nature and
function of the manuscript catalogue, from first principles.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">I think that the linking of data, and thus
the tentative first proof of concept that we have been given in Manuscripts
Online, has a role here, but we need to start at the beginning and think about
what the manuscript collections in the British Library or the Bodleian Library
are. The first, and most important point, is one that Otto Mazel stresses in
his little handbook, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Keeper of
Manuscripts</i>, which is perhaps the nearest thing to a philosophy of manuscript
librarianship that we have. While medievalists may naturally assume that the
most important things in manuscript collections are the volumes in which they
are interested, manuscript holdings are extremely diverse. The Additional
Manuscripts in the British Library embrace not only the Luttrell Psalter or
Sherborne Missal but also the Codex Sinaiticus, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s
Notebooks, Charles Babbage’s correspondence, the archives of many British Prime
Ministers, the notebooks of scientists and engineers like Fleming and Whittle
and even a choreographic diagram by Nijinsky. Any processing and cataloguing
method to deal with collections like these needs to be embrace all these varied
types of material – this is one reason why the use of the TEI guidelines for
manuscript description fail to address the problems of manuscript cataloguing. It
isn’t satisfactory to contemplate classifying the manuscripts, since individual
collections will themselves often be very diverse: Sir Robert Cotton’s library
included not only illuminated manuscripts but also a large portion of the
personal papers of Thomas Cromwell. Likewise, the manuscripts of the more modern
collector Eric Millar included both medieval material and the diaries of the
Edwardian writer F. Anstey. If we tried to split this material up into subject
types, we would potentially destroy a lot of evidence about the activities of
these collectors.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">The way in which most manuscript libraries
address this problem of diversity is to use acquisition and accessioning as the
means of organizing the collections. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is one of the reasons why the manuscript
number is the key that draws together all our thinking about manuscripts. The
manuscript number provides our equivalent of title, author and much other
bibliographic information for modern printed books, and needs to be at the
heart of our thinking about manuscript cataloguing. It is this physicality of
manuscripts and other rare materials that creates a distinction with the kind
of discovery resources represented by, say, Explore the British Library. It
could be argued that coping with such physicality is more critical to the
future of the library catalogue than the discovery of wider ranges of resource.
Karen Calhoun, in her report to the Library of Congress, argued that since
libraries are unlikely to be able to compete with commercial search services,
they should perhaps focus on giving greater attention to providing information
about rare and unique materials in their collections. However, if libraries are
to give greater priority to the catalogues as a means of accessing manuscripts
and other special collections, they will need to accept that this requires a
different philosophy to that which is evident in the Explore type approach. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Lorcan Dempsey declared that: ’The catalog
emerged at a time when information resources were scarce and attention was
abundant. Scarce because there were relatively few sources for particular
documents or research materials: they were distributed in print, collected in
libraries and were locally available. If you wanted to consult books or journal
or research reports or maps or government documents you went to the library’. Dempsey
points out that nowadays the situation is reversed: ‘information resources are
abundant and attention is scarce. The network user has many information
resources available to him or her on the network. Research and learning
materials may be available through many services, and there is no need for
physical proximity’. However, of course, the dynamics described by Dempsey do
not apply to manuscripts. In the case of manuscripts, our problem is not so
much that we have become less focused and are looking at the manuscript in a
more distant fashion, but instead, we are looking at manuscripts under closer
and closer microscopes, as we seek to extract every nugget of information that
we can from them. The interest of manuscript scholars in the potential of new
information technologies is completely the reverse of what Dempsey describes –
we want to view the manuscript under finer and finer views and to garner as
much information about it as we can.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Again, this means that the focus is on the
physical volume, on the individual manuscript, rather than a multiplicity of
resources. Linked data is definitely one of the topics of the day in humanities
scholarship and elsewhere, but I think there is a tendency to think that if we
link a random group of resources together, somehow the magic of linked data
will give us instantly new perspectives and new understandings for a particular
place or period. I fear that this rather naïve hope is evident in Manuscripts
Online resource in its first version, particularly in the selection of
resources that have been linked. Sadly, scholarship is much harder than this.
Linking of data can be a very useful scholarly technique, but we need to be
clear about why we are linking data, what sort of data we are linking, and our
aim in doing so. In the case of manuscript catalogues, linking of data has the
potential to deal with many of the processing issues which govern the structure
of manuscript catalogues, if we approach the linking in the right way.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Dorothy Coveney, one of the few
commentators to discuss the philosophy of manuscript cataloguing, said that the
primary purpose of a manuscript catalogue is to ensure that the manuscript is
securely stored and can be easily located. This security aspect of a catalogue
is easily forgotten but in the case of medieval volumes worth millions of
pounds remains of fundamental importance. The potential problem of a catalogue
which ignores this requirement is illustrated by Samuel Ayscough’s catalogue of
the Sloane Manuscripts. Ayscough’s catalogue was organized by author and it
meant that the numeration of the manuscripts became rather confused, because Ayscough’s
catalogue was not an accurate guide to what should be on the shelf. As a
result, the Sloane manuscript containing William Harvey’s lectures on the
circulation of the blood was accidentally discarded. When the Harvey volume was
found, it was put in the place of a fifteenth-century astrological manuscript,
which has now in turn disappeared. The confusion created by Ayscough was only
sorted out when a shelflist recording all the numbers of the manuscripts on the
shelf was compiled.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">In most manuscript libraries, these shelf
lists, containing the definitive listing of the manuscript numbers, provides
the fundamental statement of what the library holds, and is the spinal column
which links everything together. This is an example of the handlist for the some
of the Cotton manuscripts in the British Library. This is really the
fundamental catalogue for these manuscripts, since it is the only definitive
statement of the holdings of this section of the library. Obviously, it would
not be much use simply to provide readers with a list of numbers, so initially
a listing is prepared which provides an initial view of the manuscript. But the
important point is that this is only an initial view – what Edward Maunde
Thompson says about a manuscript in the Catalogue of Additions is simply the starting
point to a scholarly discussion which will then last centuries. To my mind,
ideally a catalogue provides us with access to a complete view of that
scholarly discussion in a structured way. Our vision of a catalogue has historically
been of a single volume that will provide us with an authoritative statement on
a particular manuscript. We expect a Ker or a Kathleen Scott or a Andrew Watson
to provide us with an ex cathedra view of what we need to know about a manuscript.
This is a view very much driven by the assumption that a catalogue will be a
single printed volume. Yet information about manuscripts is scattered through
dozens upon dozens of different sources, some in digital form, very many not.
Ideally what we want is synoptic access to all those different sources of
information. I heard a gripping account recently by Arnold Hunt of the British
Library of how linked access to catalogue information can be used to show that
a dinosaur tooth in the Natural History Museum came from Sir Hans Sloane’s
collection. Not all the information we need to follow this linked chain of
evidence is in digital form.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">My vision of the future manuscript
catalogue then is very much one which is of linked information which enables us
to accrue more and more detail about a manuscript. This doesn’t mean of course
that we are limited to one single direction in exploring the links, but I see
the physical manuscript as remaining our inevitable and necessary starting
point. There is an enormous task in assembling the information which would
enable us to create such a catalogue, particularly since many of the key
sources are not yet available in digital form. Take this example, Additional MS
18196, folio 1, a l</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">eaf of a Hymnal , containing part of
the hymns to Agnes and Anthony, acquired by the British Museum when Sir
Frederic Madden was Keeper of Manuscripts. Among the basic contemporary
resources you would need to link from this manuscript number in order to get a
good overview of the manuscript are the British Library’s shelflist database,
the Catalogue of Additions, Madden’s acquisition reports, Madden’s three series
of dairies which contain a great deal of information on manuscripts acquired by
him, Madden’s binding records, the huge archives of various annotated sale
catalogues held by the British Library, and the indexes of Sir Thomas
Phillipps’ manuscripts and catalogues – and that’s all just for starters.
Subsequent scholarship on the manuscript is recorded in a huge range of
different resources, starting with the Manuscripts Classed Catalogue in the
British Library and going right up to works by Paul Binski and Jonathan
Alexander. One of the biggest problems faced by manuscript librarians is
keeping track of the scholarly bibliography of their subjects. One of the most
comprehensive schemes historically was the British Library which systematically
collected and indexed offprints of articles relating to manuscripts in the
library’s collections, but this pamphlet collection stopped being systematically
maintained in the 1960s. We now of course have an excellent opportunity to
revive it on a larger scale in the context of something like Manuscripts
Online. A search of JSTOR quickly reveals nearly 100 references to the
manuscript. The British Library’s own blog reports that this manuscript is
indeed currently on loan to the Getty Museum, where one of the curators
describes it as the most spectacular Florentine manuscript commission of the
first half of the fourteenth century. Just for this single leaf, there is an
enormous amount of information to link together.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">My vision then of a future
manuscript catalogue would be of something that links together a wide range of
resources in this way, anchored by the record of the physical manuscript
itself. This is why in particularly welcome the vision of Manuscripts Online,
which represents a small and tentative step – almost a Fisher Price version –
of what I hope the manuscript catalogue might ultimately become.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span>
<br />
<br />Andrew Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07861908988990764618noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8856697805993319185.post-28298071521487626562012-09-18T14:44:00.004-07:002014-01-13T04:08:34.505-08:004Humanities<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-QCDjmbw8PgY/UtO6SjygvMI/AAAAAAAAAbc/Zh9V0arcHEU/s1600/4H_small.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-QCDjmbw8PgY/UtO6SjygvMI/AAAAAAAAAbc/Zh9V0arcHEU/s1600/4H_small.jpg" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
I was delighted to be among the speakers at an excellent day organised by Melissa Terras at UCL on 18 September 2012, calling 'Showing the Arts and Humanities Matter'. The redoubtable Ernesto Priego was assiduous in live tweeting the day and has storified it here:<br />
<br />
<a href="http://humanistica.ualberta.ca/2012/09/4humanitiesatucl/" target="_blank">http://humanistica.ualberta.ca/2012/09/4humanitiesatucl/</a><br />
<br />
Copies of the slides from my presentation are available at: <br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.slideshare.net/burgess1822/how-the-humanities-can-help-transform-science" target="_blank">http://www.slideshare.net/burgess1822/how-the-humanities-can-help-transform-science</a><br />
<br />Andrew Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07861908988990764618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8856697805993319185.post-2008773787215346762012-09-06T06:24:00.002-07:002014-01-13T04:10:19.379-08:00Made In Sheffield: Industrial Perspectives on the Digital Humanities<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Rl_48ZyYGrg/UtO8DvBJM2I/AAAAAAAAAbo/B4OI2zr1FOg/s1600/Sheffield-Forgemasters-001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="192" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Rl_48ZyYGrg/UtO8DvBJM2I/AAAAAAAAAbo/B4OI2zr1FOg/s320/Sheffield-Forgemasters-001.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
This is the text of my keynote for the Digital Humanities Congress at the University of Sheffield, 6 September 2012.<br />
<br />
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US">Made
in Sheffield: Industrial Perspectives on the Digital Humanities</span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">It is a great honour to be asked to
inaugurate this first Digital Humanities Congress at the University of
Sheffield. My connections with digital humanities at Sheffield go back to 1995
when the remarkable portfolio of projects in the Humanities Research Institute
at Sheffield caught the attention of the British Library, and I was asked as
one of the library’s curators to foster links with the pioneering work at
Sheffield. Since that time, it has been both a pleasure and an education to
watch how Sheffield has produced a stream of imaginative and forward-looking
work in the digital humanities. I’m going to suggest that the ‘little mesters’
of the Humanities Research Institute form part of a tradition of innovation in
Sheffield which reaches deep into the history of the town, but I’ll start a
long way from Sheffield, with the recent uprisings in the Middle East and North
Africa known as the Arab Spring. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">An aspect of the Arab Spring which has caused
particular comment in the West has been the use by protestors of social media.
One protestor tweeted ‘We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to
coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world!’ A prominent Egyptian blogger, Wael
Ghonim, named his book on the Egyptian uprising <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Revolution 2.0</i>, and declared that ‘Our revolution is like Wikipedia
… Everyone is contributing content, [but] you don’t know the names of the
people contributing the content’. Western media quickly labelled the risings in
Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere the ‘Twitter Revolutions’. It was even claimed
that an Egyptian couple named their baby ‘Facebook’. For some commentators,
these events proved that new communication technologies were a force for
democracy. Phillip Howard and Muzammil Hussain of the University of Washington
have argued that whereas in the past protest movements in this region had been
suppressed,</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">The Internet,
mobile phones, and social media made the difference this time. Using these
technologies, people interested in democracy could build extensive networks,
create social capital, and organize political action with a speed and on a
scale not seen before. Thanks to these technologies, virtual networks
materialized in the streets. Digital media became the tool that allowed social
movements to reach once-unachievable goals…</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">However, it seems that such a cyber-utopian
reading of these events is misplaced. It has been pointed that there does not
appear to be a correlation between internet penetration and the extent of Arab protests.
Thus, there were widespread protests in the Yemen, where rate of internet
penetration is low, but few protests in the Gulf States where there was greater
access to the internet. An analysis of clicks on links in tweets relating to
the protests indicates that much of the internet traffic generated by the
risings came from outside the countries affected, suggesting that the chief
role of social media was not to coordinate protests but rather to alert the
outside world to what was happening. When the internet was switched off in
Egypt, the protests actually grew in size, suggesting that social media was not
essential to the co-ordination of protests. New media did not simply supplant
traditional sources of news. Indeed, it seems that much of the impact of new
media was a result of its use as a source of information by traditional news
outlets. For example, it has been suggested that much of the mainstream media’s
coverage of events in Tunisia was derived from Tunisian Facebook pages which had
been repackaged for a blog maintained for Tunisian exiles and then passed onto
journalists via Twitter (Cottle p. 652). There appears to have been a
realignment in which old and new media remediated each other in a complex
interplay.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Anne Alexander and Miriyam Aouragh in an
important recent study have used interviews with Egyptian activists to
contextualize the role of new media in the Egyptian uprising. They describe how
activists including representatives of youth movements, workers’ groups and the
Muslim Brotherhood, met for weeks beforehand to plan the protests. Alexander
and Aouragh emphasise that ‘the Egyptian activists we interviewed rightly
reject simplistic claims that technology somehow caused the 2011 uprisings, and
they say it undermines the agency of the millions of people who participated in
the movement that brought down Hosni Mubarak’. But Alexander and Aouragh remind
us that there is also a risk of falling into the opposite trap by assuming
that, if social media did not cause the Arab Spring, then they were of no
significance. A million and half tweets from Egypt at the time of the rising suggest
this is wrong, and Alexander and Aouragh insist that we need to move away from
false polarisations and place the internet activism of the Arab Spring in the
context of wider developments in media and the public sphere. The Arab Spring saw
a profound realignment of the relationship between new and old media, in which
new media emerged as an important additional space for dissent and protest. In
past revolutions, it has often been difficult to recapture the voices of the
insurgents; social media now gives us unparalleled opportunities to explore
these textualities of revolt. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">However, what I am interested in here is
the cyber-myth, the idea that Facebook and Twitter allowed the Arab protests to
succeed when previously they had easily been suppressed. This is a myth that
has gained a firm hold in the popular imagination, and it reflects a deeply
held belief that the digital revolution will not simply alter our working life
and give us new forms of leisure but will also lead to major political and
social upheaval, on a par with such great historical movements of the past as
the Reformation. This widespread belief in inexorable technological progress
has been well expressed by Michael Brodie, the Chief Scientist of Network
Technologies for Verizon, the American telecommunications company, who suggests
that we are about to see a digital revolution which will make the Reformation
or the Industrial Revolution seem low-key. Brodie declared that:</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US">the Gutenberg
Bible led to religious reformation while the Web appears to be leading towards
social and economic reformation. But the Digital Industrial revolution, because
of the issues and phenomena surrounding the Web and its interactions with
society, is occurring at lightning speed with profound impacts on society, the
economy, politics, and more.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">There is a common assumption in the West that
changes in digital technologies will inexorably generate major transformations
in social, political and economic structures. The American business guru
Clayton Christiansen introduced in 1995 the idea that business success was
associated with the development and adoption of ‘disruptive technologies’.
Christiansen subsequently adopted the wider term ‘disruptive innovations’ to
reflect the idea that business models could also be disruptive. In coining the
term Web 2.0, Tim O’Reilly picked up on the disruptive zeitgeist and disruption
has consistently been seen as a feature of Web 2.0. The strapline for one of
the first Web 2.0 conferences in 2008 was ‘Design, Develop, Disrupt’.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">New technologies of communication have been
seen as particularly disruptive and likely to produce major social and
political upheaval. Among the most influential media theorists have been the
Toronto school of Harold Innes, Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong, who suggested
that major epochs in human history were marked by the appearance of new
communication media. They proposed that the shift from an oral to a literate
society was one such shift. The appearance of printing in the West is seen as
another major transformation precipitating great upheaval. In this analysis, the
impact of the printing press is a pointer towards the type of social and
cultural disruptions which will be produced by the emergence of electronic and
digital forms of communication. The idea that the printing press was a major
agent of social, religious and political change has become widely accepted as a
result of the work of Elizabeth Eisenstein. In a monumental study, Eisenstein suggested
that the role of printing had not been given sufficient weight in accounts of
the Renaissance, Reformation or Scientific Revolution and that printing was
‘the unacknowledged revolution’. Eisenstein argued that there were two major
means by which printing acted as an agent of change. First, she suggested that
print standardized texts which had been fluid during periods of oral and
manuscript circulation. This enabled knowledge to become more settled and
easily transmitted. Second, Eisenstein argued that, by making large numbers of texts
available, their contradictions and mistakes became more evident, so that readers
became more critical and sceptical of authority. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">The circulation of digital information alters
once again these two key characteristics of information. Texts have perhaps ceased
to become fixed, so that it could be suggested we have reverted to the fluidity
of oral and manuscript culture. In a recent presentation at MIT, the folklorist
Tom Pettit proposed the Gutenberg thesis, ‘the idea that oral culture was in a
way interrupted by Gutenberg's invention of the printing press and the roughly
500 years of print dominance; a dominance now being challenged in many ways by
digital culture and the orality it embraces’. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If Eisenstein was right, then it seems
reasonable to expect that we will shortly see new historical movements
comparable to the Renaissance and Reformation, disruptions and transformations
on a cataclysmic scale. Yet a growing number of historical bibliographers are
expressing doubts about Eisenstein’s thesis. There were states which were to
resist the printing press. The church and state ensured that the printing press
was kept out of Russia and when a press was set up in Moscow in 1564 it was
soon destroyed by a mob. The Ottoman Empire was likewise able to keep printing
at bay, with the first Turkish press only being established in the eighteenth
century. Moreover, the printing press did not kill off the manuscript. David
McKitterick has described how a manuscript of a treatise by Walter Hilton was
copied at Sheen in 1499, despite the fact that the owner of the manuscript had
a copy of the printed version of the same treatise produced by Wynkyn de Worde
five years previously. Although the production of printed gazettes flourished
in seventeenth-century England, manuscript newsletters were equally important
in the dissemination of news. Indeed, many regarded manuscript news as more
reliable than the printed version and the Duke of Newcastle warned Charles II
that the pen was actually far more dangerous than the press, since opponents
might be bolder in a letter than in print. John Donne and Andrew Marvell were
suspicious of print and believed that manuscripts might prove to be more
durable.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">The survival of a mixed media economy after
Gutenberg is perhaps not surprising, but a more substantial objection to
Eisenstein’s work is that there is substantial evidence that printing did not
standardise texts. Printing was a craft activity and just like manuscript
copying there were many points in the processing of printing in which
accidents, errors and mistakes could be introduced. As David McKitterick has
pointed out:</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">From the 42-line
Bible onwards, thousands of books [printed in the fifteenth century] exist with
different type settings for reasons that are not always clear but that always
emanate from some adjustment found necessary in the printing house or the
binder’s bench …<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of three dozen copies
surviving of Fust and Schoeffer’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Durandus</i>
(1459), no two copies are exactly alike.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Examples of printed books which differ as
much as manuscripts can be multiplied endlessly. Famously, no two copies of
Shakespeare’s First Folio are exactly the same. William Aldus Wright compared
ten copies of the 1625 edition of Bacon’s Essays, and found that none were the
same. Wright observed that:</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US">The cause of
these differences is not difficult to conjecture. Corrections were made while
the sheets were being printed off, and the corrected and uncorrected sheets
were afterwards bound up indiscriminately. In this way the number of different
copies might be multiplied to any extent.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">In other words, it is likely that no two
copies of this edition of Bacon’s work are the same. The implications of this
for online presentation of early printed books are fundamental and have not I
believe been sufficiently discussed. Early English Books Online presents us
with images of just one copy of the 1625 edition of Bacon’s work from Cambridge
University Library, so we have no way online of investigating the other variant
copies. Far from making the text of Bacon’s work more fluid, the online
presentation destroys our awareness of the fluidity and variation of the
printed text.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">The picture which emerges from historical
bibliographers such as David McKitterick, Adrian Johns and Sabrina Baron is
that Gutenberg’s introduction of the press marked one stage in the long process
of the evolution of printing. As Raymond Williams pointed out, the rise in
literacy and access to information was a long revolution in which the
appearance of the steam-driven printing press in the nineteenth century was
just as important as the work of Gutenberg. Moreover, this process was not
technologically driven. Political struggles over issues such as censorship and
taxes were just as important as technological innovation in opening up access
to printed information. As David McKitterick has pointed out: ‘the printing
revolution itself, a phrase which has been taken to heart by some historians,
was no revolution in the sense that it wrought instant change. The revolution was
part technological, and part bibliographical and social. It was prolonged, and
like many revolutions its process was irregular, and its effects were variable,
even erratic.’ </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">The picture painted by McKitterick and
other historical bibliographers of the impact of printing recalls the
description of the Arab Spring by Anne Alexander and Miriyam Aouragh. The
process was a complex and extended one, involving the realignment and repurposing
of media rather than a simple disruptive transformation. In the light of these
types of analysis, it becomes very difficult to accept the technologically-led
disruptive model of media history proposed by the Toronto school of Innes,
McLuhan and Ong. Moreover, the Toronto school privileges technologies of
communication, which make it sound as if technologies like the printing press
dropped from the sky. The history of media reflects a much broader
technological base. Printing presses only became capable of mass production
when they began to be powered by steam engines in the early nineteenth century.
To feed the new steam-powered presses, it was necessary to devise new methods
of making paper. Even then, the new machine-made books would not have been
widely distributed without canals and railways. All these technologies were
necessary to make printed books everyday objects.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">In recent discussion of disruptive
innovations, the focus is frequently on the history of the media, and
comparatively little attention is paid to one of the most disruptive moments in
Western history, the profound economic changes which began in the late
eighteenth century and are known as the Industrial and Agricultural
Revolutions. This period is conventionally taken as marking the rise of
modernity, and in a wide range of scholarly literature across many disciplines
is seen as a major watershed in human history. In contemplating the digital
revolution, it may seem as if there is little to learn from looking back to the
Industrial Revolution. The clean, hi-tech electronic world of the digital seems
utterly opposed to the smoky, muscle-driven factories of early
industrialization. The digital is frequently represented as a means of escape
from the industrial. Yet our digital world is largely a creation of many of the
key technologies of that industrial world. The development of the telegraph was
closely linked to the growth of railways, and the concept of the digital was
the creation of engineers seeking to improve the performance of telegraph
wires. One of the great icons of the Industrial Revolution, Brunel’s steamship
the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Great Eastern</i>, was used to lay
the first transatlantic cable, thereby effectively laying the foundations of
the internet. Some of the fundamental concepts behind the computer programme as
a sequence of logical instructions were developed in the 1820s from punch card
mechanisms used to control mechanical looms. Moreover, it was the machines created
by the Industrial Revolution which provided the technological infrastructure to
create computers – to create the turbines, valves, transistors, silicon,
cathode ray tubes which makes the computer one of the most sophisticated
products of Western industrialisation.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">The industrialization of the late
eighteenth century was a process which first gained momentum in various regions
of Great Britain, such as South Yorkshire. There can be no better place than
Sheffield, one of the great centres of the industrial revolution, to consider
the industrial dimensions of the digital and contemplate the Industrial
Revolution as a disruptive moment. Does the Industrial Revolution, and the
associated developments of the Agricultural Revolution, have anything to teach
us in considering potential digital transformations? This was clearly a period
when technological innovation was important. It felt like a period of
transformation. Tourists travelled from Europe to admire such wonders as the
Ironbridge at Coalbrookdale and artists such as Joseph Wright and Phillip
Loutherbourg celebrated these new technologies. In works of literature such as
Thomas Love Peacock’s Headlong Hall, the rights and wrongs of the manufacturing
system were earnestly debated, with one character praising the profound
researches, scientific inventions and complicated mechanisms which had given
employment and multiplied comfort, while another denounced the innovations:
‘Wherever this boasted machinery is established, the children of the poor are
death-doomed from their cradles. Look for one moment into a cotton mill, amidst
the smell of oil, the smoke of lamps, the rattling of wheels, the dizzy and
complicated motions of diabolical mechanisms’. Wide-ranging cultural and social
transformations have been attributed to these technological changes, such as regular
working hours and standardized timekeeping. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Sheffield has an industrial tradition as a
centre of cutlery manufacture which goes back to the middle ages. It was partly
the specialized skills available in Sheffield which prompted Benjamin Huntsman
to establish himself in Sheffield to undertake his experiments in the production
of crucible steel which laid the basis of Sheffield’s steel industry. Sheffield’s
light trades remained important even after Thomas Bessemer’s inventions allowed
the production of steel in bulk from the middle of the nineteenth century. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As, thanks to Bessemer, huge steel plants appeared
in the city, making rails, steel plates and armaments, the transformative
effect of the new technologies was evident in the physical fabric of the city
itself. As early as 1768, a visitor commented that ‘Sheffield is very large and
populous, but exceedingly dirty and ill paved. What makes it more disagreeable
is the excessive smoke from the great multitude of forges which the town is
crowded with’. By 1842, the social reformer Edwin Chadwick declared that
‘Sheffield is one of the dirtiest and smokiest towns I ever saw. One cannot be
long in the town without experiencing the necessary inhalation of soot…There
are however numbers of persons in Sheffield who think the smoke healthy’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The importance of industry in the history of
Sheffield in the Victorian town hall, which is surmounted by a statue of Vulcan
and incorporates statues of figures representing electricity and steam who hold
scrolls with the names of such great technological pioneers as </span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Watt, Stephenson, Faraday and Davy.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In this Victorian view, the Industrial
Revolution was the achievement of technological genius and enterprise. If this
was indeed the case, then perhaps the digital world does have something to
learn from its industrial great-grandparents. This view still holds sway, as is
suggested by a recent comment of the Sheffield MP Nick Clegg that it was the
likes of Brunel not the bankers who made Britain great. However, since the
Great Western Railway cost 6,500,000 million pounds (over 300 million pounds in
modern value, and twice the original estimate), presumably the bankers were of
assistance in facilitating this technological revolution at some point. For
politicians, it is convenient to hope that genius and inventiveness can quickly
bring prosperity and wealth. But the history of industrialization suggests that
this process of change can be amorphous, patchy in impact and above all subject
to long timescales. Just like the printing revolution of Gutenberg, the
industrial revolution dissolves under closer examination and become very
difficult to pin down. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The term industrial revolution was not
used as a shorthand for the changes which began in Britain until the late
nineteenth century. It expressed the idea that Britain had gone through changes
at this time which comparable in scale and importance to the political
revolutions in France and Germany. Clearly something of profound importance had
happened in Britain towards the end of the eighteenth century, but economic
historians have struggled to get a clear view of the nature and structure of
the process. The period from 1760 to 1830 was characterized by a wealth of
disruptive innovation, yet most recent research suggests that economic growth during
this period was not particularly marked. It appears that productivity growth
and technological progress were confined to a few small sectors such as cotton,
wool, iron and machinery in remote regions such as south Yorkshire, whereas
much of the rest of manufacturing remained stagnant until after 1830. For some
historians, the important features of early industrialization were not so much
economic developments or technological changes as the social and cultural
changes introduced by the growth of factory working and changes in farming.
Just like the printing revolution or the Arab Spring, the Industrial Revolution
proves to closer examination to be a much more complex and amorphous process
than is suggested by the use of the word revolution.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This is vividly illustrated by the
story of industrial development in Sheffield, which has been described by such
distinguished historians from Sheffield University as Sidney Pollard and David
Hey. Like other major industrial cities such as Birmingham and Glasgow,
industrialization did not take place in Sheffield by accident. The availability
of water power had made Sheffield a centre of craft production of cutlery since
the middle ages. It was partly the availability of skill and expertise in metal
working which encouraged the scientific instrument maker Benjamin Huntsman to
move from Doncaster to Sheffield to undertake his experiments in creating
crucible steel. However, despite Huntsman’s innovation in steelmaking, the
initial industrial growth in Sheffield was in its historic light trades such as
the making of tools, cutlery and silver plate. The techniques in Sheffield’s
light trades changed very slowly. Before 1850, the only major change was the
use of steam instead of water to drive the wheels used by grinders. The light
trades remained dominated by the ‘small mesters’ who hired rooms in works with
steam-powered wheels. It was only in the 1850s that factory production and
mechanization began to be introduced in the light trades. Similarly, steel
production and heavy industry only began to dominate Sheffield from 1850, chiefly
as a result of the establishment by Henry Bessemer in 1859 of a steelworks
using his new method of bulk steel production. The creation of heavy industry
in Sheffield was a product of the third quarter of the nineteenth century.
Between 1851 and 1891, employment increased over 300% in the heavy trades,
compared with 50% in the light trades. In 1851, less than a quarter of the
workers in the city were employed in heavy industry; by 1891, two thirds of the
city’s workers worked in heavy industry.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">We assume that new digital technologies
will very rapidly bring major cultural and social transformations in their
wake, but the lessons of industrialization suggest that the process may be
longer and more complex than we generally imagine. Huntsman first produced
crucible steel in the 1740s and steam power arrived in the city in 1786, yet it
took nearly a hundred years for Sheffield to become a steel city. The history
of industrialization suggests that the process of digital transformation may be
both more extended and more complex than is often assumed. The model of disruptive
innovation is not a helpful way of imaging the process of industrialization. It
was actually the ability of industrialization not to disrupt but instead to support
sustained change which was important. In Joel Mokyr’s words, ‘The Industrial
Revolution was “revolutionary” because the technological progress it witnessed
and the subsequent transformation of the economy were not ephemeral events and
moved society to a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">permanent</i> different
economic trajectory’. (p. 3) If industrialization is seen in this way, as a
sustained trajectory of economic change, it is a process which still continues,
and the digital world can simply be seen as an extension of a process which
began in the eighteenth century. Indeed, this continuity can be seen as
stretching further back. As we have noted, Sheffield’s growth reflected skills
developed since the Middle Ages, and such long-standing commercial traditions
fed into the early development of industrialisation.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The Industrial Revolution suggests that
the model of disruption and transformation we use in thinking about the digital
world may be over-simplistic. Are there other ways in which thinking about
industrialization can help us in understanding the digital world? I would like
to suggest that there are. In thinking about the digital humanities, we tend to
focus our attention on tools and methods, but it is striking that in cities
like Sheffield and Birmingham at the time of industrialization, tools and
working methods often did not greatly change, but environment did. Sidney
Pollard has pointed out how ‘a visitor to the metalworking areas of Birmingham
or Sheffield in the mid nineteenth-century would have found little to
distinguish them superficially from the same industries a hundred years
earlier. The men worked as independent sub-contractors in their own or rented
workshops using their own or hired equipment … These industries .. were still
waiting for their Industrial Revolution’. Yet, as Pollard emphasized, the
environment in which these workmen operated had been completely transformed.
Their wheels were now powered by steam and there were other gadgets which
speeded up minor operations such as stamping and cutting. The workshop might be
lit by gas and have a water supply. Railways made distribution easier and
cheaper and gave access to a larger labour market. Cheap printing would assist
in advertising products. While the ‘small mester’ may have been working in an old-fashioned
way, his environment had been completed transformed. Likewise, it may be that
the most important changes in the digital humanities will be in the environment
in which researchers into the humanities operate, and we should perhaps be
giving more attention to this.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The fascination of the digital lies in
its immense variety: 3D printing, multispectral imaging, mobile technologies,
RFID: these all have their part to play in humanities scholarship as well as more
familiar methods as linked data, geo-spatial visualisations, text encoding and
many others. This need for a pluralistic outlook in dealing with the digital is
one that is reinforced by the history of industrialization. While developments
such as steam, telegraph and steelmaking were important, they only formed a
part of an enormous spectrum of technological developments. It is striking how the
interests of such celebrated figures of the Industrial Revolution as James Watt
were very wide. Watt was as preoccupied with the making of musical instruments
or the copying of sculpture as he was in the application of steam power.
Likewise, among Thomas Bessemer’s inventions were an early type-composing
machine, new methods of making pencils, machines for making plate glass and an
(unsuccessful) ship to avoid seasickness, as well as his new method of steel
manufacture. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The examples of men like
Watt and Bessemer remind us of the importance of an eclectic approach to the
digital humanities, of embracing an approach that affirms that there is no
single answer, no single piece of kit or method which will unlock the digital
humanities. </span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Digital transformations will involve a variety of
approaches, embracing both </span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">risky short-term
experimentation <i>and</i> support for sustainability, embracing both mash-ups
made in bedrooms <i>and</i> experiments with synchrotrons</span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, as
well as </span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">digital art works <i>and </i>huge
quantitative visualisations. The digital humanities will not only be a critical
and theoretical debate <span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">but will also </span>code.
It encompasses both data and materiality.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">While we tend to associate the
Industrial Revolution with such major inventions as the steam engine, a key
driver of industrialization was the small improvement or adjustment – tinkering
with and progressively improving technology. The first steam engine was built
by Thomas Newcomen at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Watt’s invention
of the separate steam condenser was a microinvention which made steam power
economically viable. Watt’s low pressure steam engine was not suitable for locomotives,
and it was further refinements by many others which eventually made a high
pressure steam engine practicable. It is tempting to assume that economic
transformation is associated with the paradigm shifting macroinvention, but
this is not necessarily the case. Two of the great macroinventions of the
eighteenth century, the hot air balloon and the smallpox vaccine, had limited
economic impact, whereas Henry Cort’s invention of puddling and rolling was
technically modest, but by allowing the production of wrought iron had enormous
economic impact. We are regularly urged by research councils and others to
deliver the macro-invention, to demonstrate the paradigm shift. Yet the history
of industrialization suggests that the small improvement, the micro-invention,
can be more important. Moreover, it is perhaps precisely this kind of
micro-improvement that the digital humanities is particularly well placed to
deliver.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Some of the technical developments of the
Industrial Revolution were linked to new scientific theories. Watt’s separate
condenser was influenced by the theory of latent heat proposed by Watt’s mentor
at the University of Glasgow, Joseph Black. However, for the most part, as Joel
Mokyr has observed, ‘The inventions that set the British changes in motion were
largely the result of mechanical intuition and dexterity, the product of
technically brilliant but basically empirical tinkerers, or ‘technical
designers’’ (p. 75). The late eighteenth century was a period of scientific and
technological ferment, but this took place outside any formal academic
structure. This is illustrated again by James Watt in Glasgow. James Watt is
one of the outstanding names associated with the University of Glasgow, but he
was never a member of the University’s academic staff. He was employed to
repair scientific instruments. It was in the process of repairing a model of a
steam engine owned by the University that Watt hit on the idea of a separate
condenser. Although Watt wasn’t a lecturer but a mere craftsman, his workshop
became the intellectual hub of the University. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His friend John Robison, who afterwards became
Professor of Chemistry at Glasgow, recalled how: ‘All the young lads of our
little place that were any way remarkable for scientific predilection were
acquaintances of Mr Watt; and his parlour was a rendezvous for all of his
description. Whenever any puzzle came in the way of any of us, we went to Mr
Watt. He needed only to be prompted; everything became to him the beginning of
a new and serious study; and we knew that he would not quit it till he had
either discovered its insignificance, or had made something of it’. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Watt was not exceptional. In Sheffield,
Benjamin Huntsman was also a scientific instrument maker. Sheffield plating was
accidentally discovered in 1743 by a Sheffield cutler Thomas Boulsover while
repairing a customer’s knife. Henry Bessemer received only elementary
schooling, preferring to gain practical experience in his father’s type
foundry. When Bessemer was invited to describe his steel process to the British
Association, he protested that he had ‘never written or read a paper to a
learned society’. Stainless steel was developed in Sheffield in 1913 not in the
University but in the research laboratory of the steel firms Firth and Brown by
Harry Brearley, a self-taught metallurgist who had never received any formal
education. One of the great challenges which digital technologies present us is
the need also to develop spaces which allow theory, making and tinkering to collide
– a digital equivalent of Watt’s workshop at Glasgow. Ideally, this would be
precisely what a digital humanities centre should be like, but sadly we have
rarely achieved this. The pressure of university funding structures means that
most digital humanities centres are soft-funded and are on a treadmill of
project funding which restricts the ability to act as centres for innovative
thinking. Moreover, in Britain at least, universities are increasingly making a
stronger distinction between academic and professional staff. This is without
doubt a retrograde development, but the political and administrative drivers
behind it are formidable. In this context, it is difficult to see how digital
humanities centres can become more like Watt’s workshop or Harry Brearley’s
laboratory at Firth and Brown, yet I think we must try.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Such new spaces of making and
collaboration of course need not necessarily be physical spaces, but they must
embrace different skills, outlooks and conversations. We need to create spaces
which would embrace the digital equivalent of a James Watt or a Harry Brearley.
The creation of such spaces was a fundamental feature of early
industrialization. Economic historians are increasingly emphasizing the role of
social capital as fundamental to understanding early British industrialization.
Historians have frequently been puzzled as to why the first industrialization
occurred in Britain. There were other more technologically advanced countries
such as France. It seems that an important part of the reason for Britain’s
early lead was that it had social structures which facilitated the spread of
ideas and the making of contacts and partnerships. The multitude of clubs and
societies in eighteenth-century Britain helped spread expertise and encourage
new enterprises. A celebrated example is the Lunar Society, based in the West
Midlands, which include many of the mos famous names of the period such as
Matthew Boulton, James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood and Erasmus Darwin. Such
friendships were vital to the new enterprises. Watt had struggled to develop
his team engine in Glasgow, but Boulton in Birmingham had access to the
necessary precision craftsmanship which allowed the successful manufacture of
steam engines. Moreover, while the specializations of the Lunar Society were
distinct, their fascinations overlapped tremendously--so they were able to
support each other's ideas and endeavors well outside their own field proper in
a kind of early inter-disciplinarity. The Lunar Society was not exceptional.
Britain contained hundreds of philosophical clubs, masonic lodges and
statistical societies which were essential in encouraging that hands-on,
tinkering culture which encouraged early industrialization. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">We may feel that in learned societies
like ALLC or ADHO we have the equivalent of a Lunar Society in digital
humanities. But the model of something like ALLC is that of a
nineteenth-century learned society, and the Lunar Society was more flexible and
informal than that. Bodies like the ALLC or ADHO are designed to affirm the
respectability and seriousness of their members, to show that they are worthy
professional people. But the informal, drunken societies of the eighteenth
century show the value of using much looser and informal arrangements to
generate social capital. We need to think about how we can recreate that kind
of eighteenth century social excitement in the digital sphere. What is
particularly important about these eighteenth century clubs is that they
operated a particularly big tent. There was not set view in the eighteenth
century as to whether the engineer or the money man should take the lead. It
has been suggested that the key skill was ‘to identify a need or opportunity,
then cooperate with others who possessed a different skill to take advantage of
it’. This<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>description of the skills
necessary for success in the eighteenth century is, I would suggest, equally
applicable to the digital world. However, in the eighteenth century this also involved
an appetite for risk. Watt was constantly terrified by what he saw as Boulton’s
imprudence. Two of the greatest engineers and entrepreneurs of the Industrial
Revolution, Richard<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Trevithick and
Richard Roberts, died penniless. I wonder whether, in the dot.com age, we have
the same appetite for risk.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">But what is particularly striking about
industrialization is the passion for making. John Robison described how for
James Watt, ‘</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">everything
became to him the beginning of a new and serious study; and we knew that he
would not quit it till he had either discovered its insignificance, or had made
something of it. No matter in what line – languages, antiquity, natural
history, - nay, poetry, criticism, and works of taste; as to anything in the
line of engineering, whether civil or military, he was at home, and a ready
instructor’. According to Robison when Watt was asked to repair the University
of Glasgow’s model steam engine, it was ‘at first a fine plaything to Mr Watt…But
like everything which came into his hands, it soon became an object of most
serious study’. The mixture of play, tinkering, science and hands-on
experimentation is the most powerful legacy of the Industrial Revolution and it
is in that art of making, that materiality, that perhaps the most potent legacy
of industrialization lies. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">For
Watt and the others, this making was an aspect of data. One of Watt’s earliest
inventions was a perspective machine to assist artists. One great contribution
of the Soho Manufactory was the production of the first precise slide rules,
essential to calculate boiler pressures. Watt envisaged the production of a
mechanical calculating machine, but felt that the engineering techniques of the
time could not produce sufficiently precise parts – a problem that Babbage was
later to encounter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Towards the end of
his life, Watt became preoccupied with developing a sculpture copying machine
and his workshop was littered with busts and casts associated with this
project. The creation of this machine required both accurate data and methods
to make the sculpture – as a mixture of issues of data and making, it was very
characteristic of the Industrial Revolution. When the contents of Watt’s
workshop were recently moved into a new display at the Science Museum, a mould
of an unknown bust was found there. It was realized that the mould could be
imaged and the resulting 3d model could be used to print out the bust. The work
was done by a team from Geomatic Engineering at UCL, and when the bust was
printed, it was found to be a previously unknown bust of James Watt (For more on this, see: <a href="http://www.blogger.com/:%20http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/9892" target="_blank">www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/9892</a></span>)</div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This
exercise seems to me to bring the story full circle, and the way in which new
methods of fabrication are giving use new approaches to data seems to me to
bring the story full circle. Industrialisation and making will, it seems to me,
become more pertinent than ever as digital fabrication becomes increasingly
important. I’d like to conclude my lecture by quickly sharing with you some
video clips that seem to me to make this point very well. The first is a news
report on an exhibition last year at the V&A called, appropriately enough,
Industrial Revolution 2.0:</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Industrial
Revolution <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>2.0: </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUo6EqAix-o" target="_blank"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUo6EqAix-o</span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">From
this it is a short step to using fabrication machines to replicate objects in
museums, and this clip shows the Makerbot, an affordable 3d fabricator, used to
replicate objects in the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. I hardly need to point
out the parallekls with James Watts’s sculpture copying machine: </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Through
a Scanner, Getty: </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blKcIsEEoag" target="_blank"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blKcIsEEoag</span></span></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
Makerbot was recently used for a hackathon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in
New York in which artists used fabrications of objects in the Museum’s
collection to create new works of art. Here’s a short glimpse of the evenr in
Bew York in June:</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Met
Makerbot: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1dqXVe2GVo" target="_blank"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1dqXVe2GVo</span></span></a></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">It
is striking how in these clips there are frequent references to revolutions and
disruptions. What I think we have seen is that in fact these new methods echo
deeper continuities. The Arab Spring, the arrival of printing and the
Industrial Revolution all show us how change is not necessarily revolutionary
or disruptive. The processes we think of as revolutionary can be lengthy, patchy
in character, amorphous, difficult to measure and unpredictable, and there is
no reason to think that the digital will be any different. It’s the
continuities and the parallels that are often as striking as the disruptions.
Let me end with one last quick clip which shows the Fab Lab in Manchester which
to my mind inescapably recalls James Watts’s workshop in Glasgow, and points us
towards one digital space of the future which is deeply rooted in the past:</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Fab
Lab Manchester: </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1S8_K2ctNWs"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1S8_K2ctNWs</span></span></a></div>
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Andrew Prescotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07861908988990764618noreply@blogger.com0