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Scholarly dissemination, Technical Development

Visual marginalia!

Posted on: May 19, 2015 Jaap Geraerts Leave a comment

On Friday morning, May 1, Matt and I traveled from London to Cambridge to attend the Early Modern Visual Marginalia workshop, organized by Alexander Marr and Kate Isard. This workshop focused on a specific type of marginalia, namely drawings or other forms of visual annotations that early modern readers drew in (or sometimes literally cut and pasted into!) the marginal spaces of their books. Whereas the study of marginalia is extremely fashionable at the moment, most of these studies focus on the more conventional textual marginalia (i.e., written notes), while the visual interventions in early modern books still are understudied. This could very well have been the result of disciplinary boundaries, as the first speaker, Julian Luxford, remarked, as medievalists have been paying close attention to the visual marginalia that appear in medieval manuscripts. Even though visual marginalia are rarer than their textual counterparts, their appearance in early modern printed books warrants careful study.

The morning session of the workshop consisted of several papers all of which dealt with particular aspects of visual marginalia and the sources in which they appear. It soon became apparent how complex these visual marginalia are, as they often involve a combination of text and image, and what a large variety of visual interventions were used by readers, ranging from emblems and architectural drawings to full-fledged mathematical diagrams. Often, like their textual counterparts, visual marginalia refer to objects outside the book in which they were written down or drawn. Whereas Harvey, for example, frequently refers to other books, visual marginalia could refer to a host of material objects that existed outside of the book, including (no longer existing) buildings.

Anonymous drawing in Cartari’s 'Le imagini de i dei delli antichi'
Anonymous drawing in Cartari’s ‘Le imagini de i dei delli antichi’

After lunch, we continued with a special session in the Cambridge University Library, where Ed Potten, Head of Rare Books, made available a number of early modern books that included visual marginalia (a number of which were selected by the organizers and several participants of the workshop). All these examples of visual marginalia, especially those in an annotated copy of Johannes de Sacrobosco’s Tractatus de Sphaera, made us realize how complex this form of annotation is and how tricky this is going to be to capture in XML. Currently our schema is poised to deal with the relatively easy drawings made by Gabriel Harvey, who hardly made use of this form of annotation (see the image below for a rare example). We need to think hard about how to incorporate the more complex visual marginalia in our schema as well, especially as we are going to work on John Dee in the next phase of the project.

Thomas Hoby (transl.), 'The Courtier...' (London, 1561).
Thomas Hoby (transl.), ‘The Courtier…’ (London, 1561).

All in all, this was a very fruitful day, with some thoughtful papers in the morning and the opportunity to browse wonderfully annotated books in the afternoon. Hitherto visual marginalia are a rather neglected form of annotation that deserves much more attention, and hopefully more workshops like these can and will be organized in the future. In the meantime, we will continue to work on refining our XML schema in order to be able to capture more complicated drawings, so stay put for more updates on this topic! Last but not least: massive thanks to the organizers of this wonderful day!

About Jaap Geraerts

Scholarly dissemination

Wir sind alle Berliner: AOR @ RSA2015

Posted on: March 31, 2015 Jaap Geraerts Leave a comment

Last week was the 2015 edition of the Renaissance Society of America (RSA) conference, held at the Humboldt University of Berlin (26–28 March). It’s one of these American mega conferences, the size of which can be quite overwhelming, and CELL unanimously decided that easing into it was best done by eating some traditional German food in combination with an appropriately sized glass of beer.

RSA blog 1

The AOR team was well represented at the conference: Earle Havens and the Charles Singleton Center for the Study of Pre-Modern Europe had organized countless panels, including a couple of really exciting ones on late medieval and early modern marginalia. CELL, for the first time being an associate organization of the RSA, had organized two panels, both of which were scheduled for Saturday morning (unfortunately clashing with some of Earle’s panels, something that is unavoidable at conferences of this size). The CELL panels consisted of strong papers on a large number of topics, including Quakers and publishing, language learning and early modern travel, and legal records and life writing, to name but a few.

The majority of the activities regarding AOR were scheduled on Friday, the second day of the conference. It all started—that is, after we finally managed to get the IT working—with a panel outlining the project and providing information about its goals, its methodology, and its technical infrastructure. Matt Symonds gave a great overview of AOR in his paper, situating it among other Digital Humanities (DH) projects and explaining why, both for scholars and IT specialists, this is such an exciting project. Jaap Geraerts followed with an explanation of the XML schema and the (editorial) decisions that underpin it, whereas Lisa Jardine conveyed what she, as an end user of AOR, wants to get out of it and how AOR moves away from Harvey and enables one to discern reading strategies and practices. The session was very well attended and we’re pleased to say that it got some exciting responses on Twitter:

RSA blog 2

RSA blog 3

Directly after this panel it was time for the Roundtable, which consisted of our Principal Investigator (PI), Earle Havens, and the two co-PI’s, Lisa Jardine and Tony Grafton, and was chaired by Bill Sherman. Lisa and Tony explained the context of their groundbreaking article “Studied for Action” and reflected on the historiographical developments that took place after its publication, while Earle related AOR to this article and to the current state of this field of research, further stressing that we have moved towards the study of reading practices rather than examining marginalia in order to learn more about the life of the annotator. Matt then showed the audience a first glimpse of the AOR website and the prototype viewer, after which the floor was opened for questions.

It’s safe to say that RSA 2015 has been a great success for AOR. We think that we’ve generated a lot of interest in and awareness of our project, and it was great to exchange ideas with other scholars who are working on similar topics. Moreover, it was a pleasure to see so many colleagues and friends, and we’re already looking forward to RSA 2016. See you in Boston!

P.S. P.S. Liesbeth Corens has done an amazing job collecting and organizing all the tweets of the RSA on Storify. For the tweets about CELL/AOR panels and the “Studied for Action” roundtable, see: RSA15 tweets

About Jaap Geraerts

History of Reading

Getting started!

Posted on: March 13, 2015 Jaap Geraerts Leave a comment

This is the first of many blogs to be written by members of the Archaeology of Reading (AOR) project. The blogs will deal with various aspects of the project, such as the scholarly and technical questions we face on a daily basis, and aims to offer a look behind the curtains. So stay tuned for regular updates!

 

One of the first questions that needed answering at the start of the project was how to capture all the annotations made by Harvey, a prolific annotator. Indeed, Harvey, can be considered some sort of a prodigy when it comes to annotating, as he not only wrote comments in the margins of the pages but also made use of an elaborate system consisting of symbols and non-verbal marks.

Blog 1 picture 1

In order to get an idea and an overview of Harvey’s “annotation system,” in February 2014 some members of the team, including Earle Havens, Matt Symonds, and Jaap Geraerts, traveled to the Princeton University Library, which owns a number of Harvey’s books that have been digitized and incorporated into this project. In snowy Princeton, where we received a warm welcome from the rare books librarian and our project collaborator, Stephen Ferguson, we spent a happy week examining Harvey annotations and inventorying the interventions he had made in the texts.

 

A little bit in advance of the official start of the project, we started thinking about the best way to capture Harvey’s annotations in XML, a machine-readable mark-up language that allows us to engage with the transcriptions we are making of all the annotations in each of Harvey’s books. The development of the XML schema, as it is called, was very much an incremental process and led to frantic drafting on the blackboard in the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters (CELL) office in London.

Whiteboard 2

This project is a collaborative effort on the part of rare book librarians and curators, historians of early modern Europe, and IT-specialists, and after a couple of discussions with the team members from Johns Hopkins University (JHU), the schema was deemed to be ready, and we could actually start with the transcriptions! Harvey, however, continues to amaze us, and from time to time new marks are ‘discovered’, making it necessary to update the XML schema. For example, James Everest, our former research assistant at CELL, who’s now busy finishing his PhD, encountered a mark that looks like this:

Blog 1 picture 3

Our trusted Dictonario di Abbreviature Latine ed Italiane taught us that this mark means “est” or “id est,” hence it was christened “est_mark” and included in the schema. Harvey thus continues to challenge the schema, and we will keep you posted about new discoveries!

 

About Jaap Geraerts

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