Workshop invitation: Textual editing workshops for undergraduates and postgraduates

 

We are looking for enthusiastic undergraduates and postgraduates from any discipline to take part in workshops in textual editing culminating in the publication of a citable transcription.

 

Sign up for a workshop: see below for details.

 

We are pleased to announce the fourth year of Bodleian Student Editions workshops, a collaboration between the Bodleian’s Department of Special Collections and Centre for Digital Scholarship, and Cultures of Knowledge, a project based at the Faculty of History.

There will be 6 standalone workshops taking place in the year 2019-20, two per term. Workshops are held in the Weston Library’s Centre for Digital Scholarship. Dates for each term will be announced in that term, and are as follows:

Michaelmas Term 2019

  • 10:00–16:30 Wednesday 3rd week, 30 October
  • 10:00–16:30 Thursday 7th week, 28 November

Hilary Term 2020 To be announced in Hilary

  • 10:00-16:30 Wednesday 3rd Week, 5th February
  • tbc

Trinity Term 2020 To be announced in Trinity

  • tbc
  • tbc

Textual editing is the process by which a manuscript reaches its audience in print or digital form. The texts we read in printed books are dependent on the choices of editors across the years, some obscured more than others. The past few years have seen an insurgence in interest in curated media, and the advent of new means of distribution has inspired increasingly charged debates about what is chosen to be edited, by whom and for whom.

These workshops give students the opportunity to examine these questions of research practice in a space designed around the sources at the heart of them. The Bodleian Libraries’ vast collections give students direct access to important ideas free from years of mediation, and to authorial processes in their entirety, while new digital tools allow greater space to showcase the lives of ordinary people who may not feature in traditional narrative history.

Our focus is on letters of the early modern period: a unique, obsolescent medium, by which the ideas which shaped our civilisation were communicated and developed. Participants will study previously unpublished manuscripts from Bodleian collections, working with Bodleian curators and staff of Cultures of Knowledge (http://www.culturesofknowledge.org), to produce a digital transcription, which will be published on the flagship resource site of Cultures of Knowledge, Early Modern Letters Online (http://emlo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk), as ‘Bodleian Student Editions’.

The sessions are standalone, but participants in previous workshops have gone on to further transcription work with Bodleian collections and with research projects around the country, as well as producing the first scholarship on some of the manuscripts by incorporating material in their own research (from undergraduate to doctorate level). The first-hand experience with primary sources, and citable transcription, extremely useful for those wishing to apply for postgraduate study in areas where this is valued: one participant successfully proceeded from a BA in Biological Sciences to an MA in Early Modern Literature on the basis of having attended.

The sessions provide a hands-on introduction to the following:

  1. Special Collections handling
  2. Palaeography and transcription
  3. Metadata curation, analysis, and input into Early Modern Letters Online
  4. Research and publication ethics
  5. Digital tools for scholarship and further training available

You can read about research conducted in previous workshops here.

Participation in the workshops is open to undergraduate and graduate students currently enrolled at the University of Oxford in any subject and year, full-time or part-time. Eligibility includes visiting students who are registered as recognized students, and paying fees, but does not include informal visitors, postdoctoral researchers, or staff.

If you would like to participate, please contact Francesca Barr, Special Collections Administrator, francesca.barr@bodleian.ox.ac.uk, and include:

  1. your ox.ac.uk email address
  2. your department
  3. your level and year of study
  4. particular access requirements
  5. particular dietary requirements

Please note that owing to the workshops regularly being oversubscribed, we can only confirm places on this term’s workshops. You may register your interest in subsequent workshops, and will be notified of the dates for each term before they are advertised more widely.

The Bodleian Libraries welcome thoughts and queries from students of all levels on ways in which the use of archival material can facilitate your research. For an idea of the range of collections in the Weston, visit our current exhibitions in Blackwell Hall. Thinking 3D: Leonardo to the Present, in the Treasury gallery, tells the story of the development of three-dimensional communication over the last 500 years, showcasing techniques that revolutionised the dissemination of ideas in anatomy, architecture and astronomy and geometry and ultimately influenced how we perceive the world today. Talking Maps in the ST Lee Gallery is a celebration of maps and what they tell us about the places they depict and the people that make and use them. Drawing primarily on the Bodleian’s own unparalleled collection of more than 1.5 million maps – including the Gough Map (the first to show Great Britain in recognizable form), the Selden map (a late Ming map of the South China Sea, and fictional maps by CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien – it also features specially commissioned artworks and loans from artists and other institutions. Both exhibitions are free to attend and can be accessed through Blackwell Hall.

 

Detailed depictions with IIIF, Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons

Extract from “High Street Oxford.” Ashmolean Museum WA2016.48

The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) is a standard, developed by a consortium including the Bodleian Libraries, that allows images and associated metadata to be shared across the web. It’s used by many sites including Digital Bodleian and Wikimedia’s image server, Wikimedia Commons.

As of November this year, Wikidata can point to the IIIF manifests associated with a digitised object (example near the foot of this page). However, the opportunity of Wikidata and IIIF is not just about discoverability of the IIIF data itself. Included in IIIF is the ability to address a specific rectangular region of an image with a URL. Wikidata can use this to express statements about part of an image

Anyone familiar with Turner’s “High Street, Oxford” will recognise several landmarks included in the scene. In this sense, there is a lot of structure in the image that is obvious to humans but not naturally captured in the painting’s digital representation (image + catalogue record). My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to express in open data not just that the painting depicts the Church of St. Mary the Virgin but that a specific part of the image depicts the church. Continue reading

Research Uncovered—The artist sleeps and the audience performs

Book tickets!


What: The artist sleeps and the audience performs

Who: Menaka PP Bora, David de Min, and Sebastiano Ludovico

When: 13:00—14:00, Monday 27 November 2017

Where: Weston Library Lecture Theatre (map)

Access: open to all

Admission: free

Registration is required

Blending technology and performance art for new experiences in viewing Bodleian collections

This performance talk highlights a new way for people to experience and interpret visual arts collections through performance and the latest technology in mobile apps, Velapp, the ‘world’s most natural video editor’. The talk uses Velapp to explore the challenges and opportunities posed by new technology on artistic responses to heritage collections.

During the talk the audience is invited to play with a sample Velapp mobile phone app, learning to shoot film and simultaneously edit while enjoying the performance of items from the Bodleian’s collections. This technological intervention enables members of the audience to produce mobile films while they watch the performance, editing as they continue to film. The experience becomes more entertaining and immersive.

Dr. Menaka PP Bora is a multi- award winning performing artist, choreographer, ethnomusicologist, actor, and broadcaster. Besides touring her sell-out solo shows in the ‘world dance’ scene and regularly appearing as Guest Speaker on BBC Radio, she is Bodleian’s Affiliated Artist and winner of the highly prestigious Leverhulme Early Career Fellowships 2016.

 

David de Min is a Tech Enterpreneur and Founder and CEO of Velapp. David is currently working on one of the most game-changing projects for the UK technology industry which will be very high profile, hugely impact the tech sector/economy, firmly place the UK on the map as a game changer in the tech world and drive phenomenal positive social change across Europe.

 

Sebastiano Ludovico is a talented young Artist and Tech Investor belonging to the Sicilian royal family in Italy. Based in London, Sebastiano exhibited his paintings at solo exhibitions from the age of 5 years. His works of art are particularly appreciated by Hollywood stars and international pop music artists and all funds raised from sales of his work are donated directly to children’s foundations and other charities, in particular the Samuel L. Jackson Foundation with whom he has collaborated with for the last 4 years.

This performance talk is hosted by the Centre for Digital Scholarship as part of the Research Uncovered series of public talks.

IIIFrankenstein

Last week Digital.Bodleian reached 700,000 images with the help of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein notebooks. These have been accessible online at the wonderful Shelley-Godwin Archive for some time now, complete with transcriptions, TEI markup and detailed explanatory notes, alongside other manuscripts from Mary Shelley, Percy-Bysshe Shelley, and William Godwin. Porting them to Digital.Bodleian is not intended to replace this brilliant resource, but it helps with the Bodleian’s mission to improve the discoverability of our online resources. It also lets users do a few extra neat things with the images.

Bodleian MS. Abinger c.57, fol. 23r.

Everything added to Digital.Bodleian receives a IIIF Manifest. This means the image sets and accompanying metadata are expressed in a rich, flexible format conforming to a shared API standard. IIIF tools exist for manipulating and comparing, as well as viewing, digital images. This comes in handy for the Frankenstein notebooks (properly called MS. Abinger c.56, MS. Abinger c.57 and MS. Abinger c.58). At present they are fragmented, and the ordering of the pages in the Draft notebooks (MS. Abinger c. 56 and c.57) is different to the linear order of the novel. Using IIIF tools, we can easily work with the notebooks side-by-side, and remix the ordering of pages to fit the novel’s sequence.

The Mirador viewer, created by Stanford University with the help of the Andrew. W. Mellon Foundation, lets us quickly and easily view multiple IIIF-compliant image sets alongside each other. We’ve created an instance with the Frankenstein notebooks ready-loaded side by side.

Bodleian MS. Abinger c.56, c.57 and c.58 viewed in Mirador.

The Bodleian’s Digital Manuscripts Toolkit, also funded with help from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, includes a Manifest Editor. This lets us remix and combine IIIF-compliant image sets into new sequences. Following the lead of the Shelley-Godwin Archive, we’ve created a manifest which reorders the Frankenstein Draft pages into the linear sequence of the novel. This can be viewed in a Mirador instance here – though note that the extant Draft is incomplete! The manifest itself lives here, and can be used with any other IIIF-compliant API.

IIIF Manifests are in a standardised JSON format.

If you’d like to use Mirador to view Digital.Bodleian images, you can use the link in the sidebar (the stylised ‘M’) when viewing any image or item. IIIF, Universal Viewer and Mirador Icons on Digital.Bodleian

To add further images alongside an item in Mirador, select ‘Change Layout’ from the top menu and choose how many items you’d like to view together, and the layout you’d like to view then in. You can then simply click-and-drag the IIIF icon from any other Digital.Bodleian image set into the Mirador browser tab. You can also open IIIF-compliant image sets from other institutions – you just need the URI of the IIIF Manifest.

For instructions on using the Digital Manuscript Toolkit’s Manifest Editor (and other tools), please see the DMT website.

Publicising a historic event in Wikipedia

The front page of English Wikipedia gets around five million hits per day. Highlighted sections of the page, such as “Did you know” and “In the news” trumpet the site’s purpose: sharing knowledge for its own sake. One of these sections, “On this day…” features five different facts each day, with links to relevant articles. These facts in turn are chosen from a large collection of roughly 100 historic events for each date. Many other language versions of Wikipedia have a similar “This day in history” section, though with different sets of facts.

As with everything else on Wikipedia, this collection of historic facts is offered freely for anyone to use for any purpose. “On this day in history” facts are ideal for sharing on social media, for example by Wikipedia’s official presence on Twitter.

Napoléon Bonaparte, listed in Wikipedia’s May 26 article for his coronation as King of Italy on 26 May 1805. Image from the Curzon Collection of political prints, CC-BY the Bodleian Libraries.

To avoid repetition from year to year, it helps to be able to draw on a large pool of historic events, so each day can showcase a variety of types of event, of locations and of eras. There is a relative shortage of events before 1800, so additions are welcome.

Being featured on the front page generates a lot of interest in the article.

  • The Alhambra Decree article typically gets about 300 views per day. When linked from the front page as a recent “On this day” item, it had nearly 10,000.
  • The Treaty of Fontainebleau (1814) article gets 70 to 80 views on a typical day, but had 5,400 when linked from the home page on its anniversary.
  • The article about Suvarnadurg, an Indian fort, usually gets around 30 views a day, but had 8,500 when the fort’s 1755 capture by the East India Company was listed on April 2.

By considering one example, we can look at how a historic event is made visible in Wikipedia.

March 31: 1492 – The Catholic Monarchs of Spain issued the Alhambra Decree, ordering all Jews to convert to Christianity or be expelled from the country.

The typical form is a single sentence, in past tense, linking multiple different Wikipedia articles, with a bold link to the one most closely connected to the fact. Not every historical event qualifies:

  • The event must have happened on a single day, so not a crisis or war, but a precipitating or concluding event such as the signing of a treaty.
  • Births and deaths have their own process for appearing on the front page, so do not qualify for this collection of facts.
  • It must be an event with notable repercussions: one notable figure marrying another, or writing a letter to another, is not always significant in itself, but can be significant by initiating other events.
  • There must be no controversy about the day on which it happened. Reputable sources should agree.
  • The fact must be backed up by at least one reliable source, which must be cited in the article. As with all Wikipedia references, paywalled sources are fine but open-access sources have an advantage because they can be checked by Wikipedians outside subscribing institutions. With software developments over the last couple of years, adding citations has become extremely easy: the Cite tool expands DOIs into full citations and normally succeeds in transforming web links into full citations.

If you have a cited fact that meets the above criteria, it can have multiple mentions in Wikipedia:

  • The fact must be stated in the “home” article, in this case Alhambra Decree.
  • It can also go in the articles about the calendar date and the year. There are English Wikipedia articles about the year 1492 and about the date March 31. Unlike most Wikipedia articles, these are essentially lists of facts under different headings.
  • It can also appear in the biographies of the people, organisations or nations involved (in this case, Isabella of Castille). Some topics have timeline articles which are essentially lists of dates, such as Timeline of Spanish history.

The articles about individual dates, such as March 30, also have lists of births and deaths. In the long term, these will probably be driven by Wikidata, which is ideal for this kind of data. These lists have the same relative paucity of dates before 1800, and the same requirement that dates should be sourced and uncontroversial.

Facts for a particular day are chosen well in advance by an administrator, working behind the scenes in an area called the Selected anniversaries project. It is accepted, even encouraged, for other users to proactively edit in their own suggestions if they know wiki-code. The listing is decided two to four days in advance, so include your suggestion further in advance than that.

The guidelines give preference to events with a significant anniversary (meaning a multiple of 25, e.g. a 325th anniversary), events that differ from the others on the list (in era or geography), and articles that have not been on the front page before. “On this day” articles do not have to be comprehensive, but should be good examples of Wikipedia articles with citations in all sections. Each day’s “staging area” has a list of events that were submitted but did not qualify. Usually the article is rejected for having insufficient citations, so by improving the articles with links to scholarly sources, we can help those links reach the front page.

So there is an opportunity here for heritage organisations and historians to extend awareness of the turning points of history, and the use of biographical papers or databases. We just need to succinctly describe the key events and share citations about them.

—Martin Poulter, Wikimedian in Residence

This post licensed under a CC-BY-SA 4.0 license

Digital Manuscripts at the Bodleian: free event

MS. Kennicott 1

MS. Kennicott 1

On Monday 28 November we will be celebrating two major projects, the Polonsky Foundation Digitization Project and the Digital Manuscripts Toolkit, with an event at the Weston Library. Tickets are free, but please book in advance to reserve a place. The event runs from 11am to 5pm, with a break for lunch, and speakers will include:

  • Nigel Wilson on digitized Greek manuscripts at the Bodleian
  • César Merchán-Hamann on digitized Hebrew manuscripts
  • Paola Manoni from the Vatican Library on their part in the Polonsky Project
  • Judith Siefring on the Digital Manuscripts Toolkit
  • Emma Stanford on IIIF and Digital.Bodleian
  • Rafael Schwemmer on the Bodleian’s IIIF manifest editor
  • and presentations by Oxford scholars on their work with the Digital Manuscripts Toolkit.

Anyone interested in manuscripts, digitization, or learning about new tools for dealing with digitized objects is encouraged to attend.

Book free tickets

The digitized Hertford Atlas

Hertford Atlas 1/2, fol. 19v

Last autumn, BDLSS collaborated with Hertford College to digitize its copies of Abraham Ortelius’s 1573 Theatrum orbis terrarum and Georg Braun’s 1574 Civitates orbis terrarum, two landmark works in the history of cartography, known collectively as the Hertford Atlas. The digitization was undertaken as a celebration of the return of the atlas to Humboldt University in Berlin, whence it came at the end of the Second World War. The digitized atlas is now in Digital.Bodleian, with a IIIF manifest and image endpoints to enable creative and scholarly engagement with this resource.

To mark the anniversary of Abraham Ortelius’s death in 1598, we published a series of tweets on Tuesday encouraging Twitter users to engage with the digitized atlas. You can read them all on Storify.

Digitized image service update

Access to many of the Bodleian’s digitized images has been compromised due to a recent hardware failure. The images on Digital.Bodleian are still fully accessible, but the images on one of the Bodleian’s older viewing interfaces, viewer.bodleian, are temporarily unavailable, as are some other image archives. Resources that have been partially or totally affected include:

  • Polonsky Foundation Digitization Project
  • Serica digitization project
  • Shelley Godwin Archive

A plan is in place to rebuild the affected resources in the next weeks and months. For more information, please see this post on the Polonsky Project website.

Introducing the IIIF First Folio

The First Folio in the Universal Viewer

To commemorate the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death and to celebrate the opening of the Bodleian Libraries’ “Shakespeare’s Dead” exhibit, we have added our copy of the First Folio to Digital.Bodleian and created a IIIF manifest that allows the full structure of the book to be displayed in Digirati’s Universal Viewer.

The Bodleian’s First Folio has an unusual history: it was acquired by the Bodleian when it was printed in 1623, then sold off a few decades later, then rediscovered and repurchased for the Bodleian through a crowdfunding campaign in the early 1900s. Thanks to the generosity of our supporters, another public campaign in 2012 raised funds for the Bodleian to stabilize and digitize the First Folio and, later, to create full-text TEI transcriptions of each play. The images and transcriptions can be viewed and downloaded from the First Folio project website. Now, by adding the First Folio to Digital.Bodleian and creating images and metadata that are compatible with the standards of the International Image Interoperability Framework, we are opening up this resource for further use by institutions and researchers across the world.

Creating the IIIF First Folio was a multi-step process. Adding the images and metadata to Digital.Bodleian allowed us to generate a bare-bones IIIF manifest, which included page-level metadata but did not reflect the structure of the plays. To allow users to navigate through the book’s contents, we then hand-edited the manifest to add nested ranges of images corresponding to each play and scene. The finished manifest is almost 30,000 lines long.

Digital.Bodleian’s embedded image viewer doesn’t support image ranges, so instead, we’re directing users to the Universal Viewer, a IIIF viewer produced by Digirati, the Wellcome Library, the British Library and the IIIF community. The Universal Viewer—which can be accessed directly from the First Folio in Digital.Bodleian by clicking on the purple “UV” button—features an “Index” panel that displays the multiple levels of structural hierarchy described in the First Folio’s IIIF manifest. The Universal Viewer is also embeddable, so if you like, you can add the First Folio to your own website. You can also link to particular parts of each page, as the URL of each Universal Viewer session is live-updated with the coordinates of the part of the image you are currently viewing. (For example, here is Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech.)First Folio in its box

Finally, this re-publication of the First Folio includes several previously-unpublished images of the book’s binding. The Bodleian’s copy is rare in that it has not been rebound since its initial printing almost 400 years ago, so these images are especially valuable, conveying a sense of the weight, size and condition of the original object.

 

– Emma Stanford

 

12th-century Arabic manuscript added to Digital.Bodleian

MS. Huntington 212, fol. 40r

MS. Huntington 212, fol. 40r

Since the launch of Digital.Bodleian last July, the number of images on the site has almost tripled. This is mostly thanks to the ongoing Polonsky Foundation Digitization Project, but we have also been undertaking smaller digitization projects for colleges and departments within the University of Oxford. These projects include Hertford College’s Ortelius Atlas, digitized in October, and Exeter College’s Prideaux manuscript.

Our most recent addition is the Bodleian’s MS. Huntington 212, a 12th-century copy of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Ṣūfī’s Book of Fixed Stars. This important Arabic manuscript, a treatise on the constellations, is now available to view online via Digital.Bodleian, with catalogue information available via Fihrist. More information about the manuscript can be found in a post by Alasdair Watson over at the blog for Archives and Manuscripts.