Speaking in Absence: Letters in the Digital Age (Conference, Tuesday 21 June 2016 / 9th week – Weston Library and Wolfson College, Oxford)

A conference hosted by Helen Brown (Hertford College / Oxford University Press), Michaela Crawley (Wolfson College / Oxford Centre for Life-Writing) and Olivia Thompson (Balliol College / Bodleian Libraries):

Registration for our conference is live, and closes at midnight on Monday 20 June (registration for dinner closes Thursday at midnight).

The conference is a one-day, interdisciplinary, student-led conversation on how we engage with handwritten letters in the digital age. We aim to explore the potential for collaboration between academics, librarians, technicians, editors, and publishers for the creation of mutual frameworks within which to use the digital as a means to supplement the analogue. We have chosen correspondence as a vehicle for this exploration because in the age of social media, its nature raises immediate and intriguing questions about the progression from material object to digital resource.

 Daytime activities at the Weston Library will include:

• an opening lecture on editing letters by Christopher Ricks (Boston University),
• panel discussion with the leaders of pioneering digital editing projects (Robert McNamee, Electronic Enlightenment; Alison Pearn, Darwin Correspondence Project; Howard Hotson, Cultures of Knowledge)
• demonstration of the process of digitizing letters by Miranda Lewis (Digital Editor, Early Modern Letters Online),
• visual tour of correspondence in the Bodleian collections led by Special Collections curators,
• panel on publishing with representatives from Oxford University Press and Blackwell’s.

From the Weston Library, delegates will then proceed to Wolfson College for a further panel discussion with writers and directors of projects based on the letters of Gertrude Bell, Dorothy Hodgkin and Ada Lovelace, and Letters 1916, a crowdsourced local history project in Ireland; and drinks reception with research posters by postgraduate students.

The conference is organised by students as part of the TORCH-OCLW annual postgraduate conference competition, and is additionally sponsored by the Bodleian Libraries and Balliol Interdisciplinary Institute.

The conference fee (£45 / limited number of subsidised undergraduate places at £20) includes refreshments throughout the day (breakfast, lunch, two coffee breaks, drinks reception). The conference dinner (£30) must be booked separately. For the full programme and instructions on registration options, please click here: http://www.e-pistolary.net/speaking-in-absence/programme

If you have any questions please contact olivia.thompson@bodleian.ox.ac.uk