Clik here to view.
Week 20: “Aren’t you writing a book?”
“Aren’t you writing a book or something?” I keep getting asked this recently. Perhaps because my various non-book related activities – speaking at the Kent Open Access Forum, talking to distance...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Week 22: Talking to each other through discoverable scholarship
So there I am watching Africa, the BBCs latest Attenborough fronted masterpiece of nature programming (or, to put a cynical spin on it, yet enough crude attempt by the Beeb to kill-off an old man: in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Week 25: The Royal Brat
This Thursday I am heading to Hanover for the Herrenhäusen Symposium “Loyal Subversion – Caricatures from the Personal Union between England and Hanover 1714-1837″. Speakers include Timothy Clayton,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
49456 books
Held on a large mass storage device in the corner of my office are (among other things) 49456 books, broken down into pdfs, ocr fragments, jp2 files, and reams of metadata. Most – if not all – of this...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Book-shaped thought, publishing and me
Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now that the Facts aren’t the Facts, Experts are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room is the Room by David Weinberger is a little book packed with...
View ArticleClik here to view.
10 years of Old Bailey Online
Old Bailey Online turns 10 years old on 15 April 2013. It is curious to consider that its lifetime echoes my own career as a historian. Old Bailey Online was the first digital research resource I used...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Ackermann ledgers at Coutts
Rudolph Ackermann will be a familiar name to all those acquainted with the history of the late-Georgian satirical print. This Leipzig born entrepreneur published the much revered Doctor Syntax series,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The collection of Derek Schartau
Historians of the book know how important it is that collections are maintained as opposed to broken up. Last year I was delighted to the see the collection of Derek Schartau arrive at the British...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Some collections on my radar
The John Johnson Collected of Printed Ephemera relaunched this week with a splendid new front end and some improvements to the discovery interface. Alongside the now obligatory collection of image of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
On hoarding
Last month I went into an archive to look at some historic ledgers. Working through ledgers is a bit dull, but we need historians who see persistence and patience in the face of dullness as a virtue:...
View ArticleClik here to view.
[live blog] #DHOxSS Kate Lindsay, Re-imaging the First World War. How can...
[live blog, so excuse the errors, omissions and personal perspective] Talk from @KTdigital, Manager for Engagement | Education Enhancement, Academic IT Services, University of Oxford. Standard...
View ArticleClik here to view.
[live blog] #DHOxSS, Christine Madsen and Matthew McGrattan, Digital Library...
[live notes, so excuse the errors, omissions and personal perspective] Christine Madsen, Part 1: Deconstructing Digital Libraries; or: why you should work with your library! (Bodleian Digital Library...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Shared research resources
Over the last month I’ve stepped up my attempts to stop hoarding the data I collect and generate and just get it out there, warts and all. As a consequence I’ve made two major changes to my workflow....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Distance Reading the History of History writing
Over the next few months I’ll be working on a dataset of metadata for journal articles categorised under the category ‘History’ from the last 50 years (or so). Having conducted some tests over the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Jewishness and the Covent Garden OP War
Published in the latest edition of 19th Century Theatre and Film is an article entitled ‘Jewishness and the Covent Garden OP War: Satiric Perceptions of John Philip Kemble‘. I wrote this, and I just...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Comic art beyond the print shop
We now know that the late-Georgian satirical print shop, at least in the form we have often conceived it, did not exist. This print shop sold satirical prints, ‘caricatures’, and appealed to a broad...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Killing the text
We know texts are partial, incomplete and unsatisfying representations of historical phenomena, of past experience. We know this both because it is the logical conclusion arrived at during the course...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Lessons from science part the third: why we do what we do
One last thought on science, method and the humanities; a footnote if you will to the last two posts (Lessons from science: ‘Digital Humanities, History of Science and Technology, and juking the stats‘...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Making Fun of George Augustus Frederick, and other publishing matters
Last February I attended and spoke at a conference organised and funded by the VolkswagenStiftung. The conference was hosted at the splendid Herrenhausen Palace in Hanover and it examined caricature...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading comic art
It is easy to forgot sometimes that reading visual evidence is tricky. For the newcomer, the many possible interpretations available can on one hand seen overwhelming, on the other constrained by more...
View Article
