Early Modern Notes

The Digging into Data challenge is an international grant competition (UK, US, Canada), which announced its first eight winners yesterday.

What is the “challenge” we speak of? The idea behind the Digging into Data Challenge is to answer the question “what do you do with a million books?” Or a million pages of newspaper? Or a million photographs of artwork? That is, how does the notion of scale affect humanities and social science research? Now that scholars have access to huge repositories of digitized data — far more than they could read in a lifetime — what does that mean for research?

The most exciting bit for historians of crime and fans of the Old Bailey Proceedings Online, and of Zotero and TAPoR, is that the Old Bailey Online is one of the eight:

Using Zotero and TAPoR on the Old Bailey Proceedings: Data Mining with Criminal Intent

Awardees: Dan Cohen, George Mason University, NEH; Tim Hitchcock, University of Hertfordshire, JISC; Geoffrey Rockwell, University of Alberta, SSHRC.

Additional Key Participants: The National Archives (United Kingdom), McMaster University, the Open University, Amherst College, University of Sheffield, Trent University, and the University of Western Ontario.

Description: This project will create an intellectual exemplar for the role of data mining in an important historical discipline – the history of crime – and illustrate how the tools of digital humanities can be used to wrest new knowledge from one of the largest humanities data sets currently available: the Old Bailey Online.

Seems it’s official: we have funding for our new project, Connected Histories.

Connected Histories will create a federated search facility for a wide range of distributed electronic resources relating to early modern and nineteenth-century British History. …

Using metadata and other available background information, the project will create a search facility that can adapt to each resource to allow searching across a range of chosen sources for names, places and dates as well as keywords and dates. Background information about search results and a facility to save and export search results for further analysis will also be provided. An online collaborative workspace will allow users to document connections between resources.

It’s going to be interesting.

Here is the latest early modern Carnivalesque, for the pick of the last couple of months’ early modern blogging. Thanks to those who sent in nominations; apologies to those who like witty themes and smart commentaries.

Cenotaphs
Airs, Waters, Places comments on John Weever’s book on Ancient Funerall Monuments (1631) and “the way he writes about the correlation between the location of the dead in the afterlife and the physical realisation of their memory in monument form in the world”.

Early Modern Gardens – Kenilworth Castle
The Gentleman Administrator draws attention to the social and political significance of early modern gardens by looking at the reconstructed Elizabethan pleasure garden at Kenilworth Castle, originally built by the Earl of Leicester for the visit of Queen Elizabeth in July 1575.

Vade Mecum
Bookn3rd has found some lovely digitised examples of these small manuscript handbooks of the medieval and early modern periods, which could contain a variety of medical and calendrical information.

Essayes of a prentise
Wynken de Worde highlights work from a student project on King James’s The Essayes of a prentise, in the divine art of poesie. The book is a collection of poems and translations in Scots dialect, and includes some luxuriously lovely poem layouts.

Casting Painting as One of the Liberal Arts
Notes on Early Modern Art looks at Johannes Vermeer’s ‘Allegory of Painting’ (c. 1667) which “seems to have expressed the artist’s desire to raise his own social status and that of painting as more than just manual labor”.

On the uses of newspapers, in and out of the classroom
Dave Mazella at Early Modern Online Bibliography considers the possibilities of using online collections of early modern newspapers in teaching students.

Collaborative Readings #3: Sayre N. Greenfield’s “ECCO-locating the Eighteenth Century”
Also at EMOB, Anna Battigelli discusses Greenfield’s essay on using ECCO as a research tool, “revealing both its possibilities and its current limitations” for text-mining early modern texts to trace specific cultural threads.

Some things memorably considerable in the conditions, Life and Death of the ever blessed and now eternally happy Mris Anne Bovves
Westminster Wisdom discusses this pamphlet (and its bad poetry), and concludes that its writer “is less interested in Anne than in Anne as an example of a religious life”.

Cromwell: the blog post of the book of the film
Investigations of a Dog is reading bad historical literature so you don’t have to; this time, it’s the novelization of the notoriously dodgy film Cromwell. Don’t miss the cover. It’s, er, striking.

Walker’s Office of Entries
Mercurius Politicus looks at a less well-known aspect of the life of the 17th-century pamphleteer and preacher Henry Walker, his entrepreneurial ‘Office of Entries’ “which seems to have functioned as a mixture of financial agent, employment agency, and bulletin board”.

John Lilburne – Abolitionist
Edward Vallance explores the appearance of Lilburne in the precedents brought by lawyers in Somerset’s Case of 1772. “In the eighteenth century, it seems to have been Lilburne’s punishment by Star Chamber in 1638, rather than his activities as a Leveller pamphleteer that were deemed worthy of attention.”

Nature’s Bias: Sex Testing
Early Modern Renaissance draws parallels between early modern and modern difficulties in establishing sexual identity.

Hystericon
The Quack Doctor discusses the ‘Hyſtericon’, an obscure 18th-century remedy, one amongst many, for the ‘Fits of the Mother’.

A London marriage gone sour, 1652
From Early Modern Whale, a news report of the suicide of a cuckolded husband.

Early Modern Underground has a series of posts on John Webster’s tragicomedy, A Cure for a Cuckold: part 1; part 2; part 3; part 4.

What on Earth?
Meanwhile, Ink and Incapability wants to know, “what on earth is going on with Shadwell’s The Libertine?” and concludes “this is totally the weirdest play I’ve ever read”.

‘I see dead people’s books’ at LibraryThing
Early Modern Intelligencer notes that LibraryThing now includes a number of famous dead people’s libraries, with early modern examples including Marie Antoinette, Thomas Jefferson and Mozart.

And finally, the Eastern Association is a treat that should not be missed.

The next Carnivalesque will be an ancient/medieval edition hosted by Bavardess sometime in the latter half of October, exact date to be confirmed. The next early modern Carnivalesque will be in November and needs a host – email sharon {at} earlymodernweb.org(.)uk if you’re willing and able!

Yesterday I tweeted a question, as one does, to see what would come of it: what to do next with the #historycarnival?

It brought an immediate offer from Katrina Gulliver to host an edition (for which I’m grateful), so in the short term it worked. (Clearly, I should have thought of it earlier.) It’s also generated an interesting suggestion and one response asking what I meant. That I can’t do in 140 characters, so I’m going to have a go here.

The History Carnival has been having periodic crises for pretty much as long as it has existed. If you’ve read here for any length of time you’ve read me moaning and asking, what’s the point?, at some stage (quite apart from arm-twisting/begging emails behind the scenes), and you’ve often responded brilliantly. But this time I wonder if it goes deeper.

There was a good deal of comment a couple of months ago about how the blogosphere has changed in recent years, including an argument that bloggers don’t link to each other anywhere near as much as they used to. I’m not sure if that’s true, but what’s indisputable is that history blogging has expanded far beyond the small excited groups of bloggers I knew four or five years ago, and inevitably become much more fragmented in the process. Many of those c.2005 history bloggers aren’t even active any more, or only intermittently so (*cough*).

A number of previously active history-related carnivals have withered of late (Asian History and Military History in particular spring to mind). Who is reading the History Carnival? I certainly don’t see many links to it any more – and if it’s not being linked then it’s not going to find new readers, just the gradually diminishing band of old bloggers who were reading it three years ago.

And if it’s not being read then I don’t see the point of bloggers spending time putting editions together, and I’m not going to be motivated to spend time chasing hosts and maintaining it either. Which is why I didn’t try particularly hard to find a host for September, to be honest.

But maybe Twitter can help out here and revitalise the Carnival (and other history carnivals too). Suddenly there’s a single place where growing numbers of historians are communicating with each other: Katrina Gulliver has started to compile a list, and coined a new tag to help us find each other: #twitterstorians.

You can tweet nominations for next weekend’s History Carnival to @katrinagulliver including the tag #historycarnival (as well as the usual channels – announcements coming). You can also use the #historycarnival tag to tweet suggestions in response to my original question – or if you want to be old-school, you can of course comment below.

Where do you think the History Carnival could or should be going in the future? Or is it time to shut up shop?