Exploring the world of books at Oxford
By Matthew McConkey As anyone who has grappled with Single Sign-on can attest, humanities researchers and IT are often uneasy bedfellows. It was this perceived <div>ide that the 2024 history of the book students confronted last Wednesday: just what hides behind the intimidating pseudonyms ‘XML’ and ‘TEI?’ Luckily, we had an expert guide in Emma …
Following our foray into textual encoding last week, Dr Giles Bergel joined us from the Visual Geometry Group (https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/) to talk about book-historical uses of computer vision. Originally trained as a book historian, Dr Bergel gave us an overview of the theory behind it, how it has been used in humanities projects, and what computer …
By Henrike Lähnemann Preface to the Edition 2024 marks the 500th anniversary of Hans Sachs publishing in quick succession four prose dialogues which became bestsellers, particularly the first one where he has his alter ego, Hans the cobbler, debate a pompous priest – and win the day, of course. That the Taylorian was aware of …
By Philip Flacke The Reformation in sixteenth-century Germany was a matter of public debate to a scale that had never been seen before. It was carried by a generation, born between 1470 and 1500, whom Thomas Kaufmann has recently characterised as ‘printing natives’ in analogy to the digital natives of today.1 These women and men …
One of the Taylor Editions practicum placement students from the MSc in Digital Scholarship programme writes on creating different TikTok series inspired by the “Epic!: Homer and Nibelungenlied in Translation” and “Kafka’s Languages” exhibitions, as well as creating her own digital edition of a text inspired by the Kafka exhibition, displayed in the Voltaire Room at the Taylor Institution Library from 29 May–13 June.
One of the Taylor Editions practicum placement students from the MSc in Digital Scholarship programme writes on creating a digital edition of her own Slovak language learning notebook. Visit Kafka’s Languages in the Voltaire Room, Taylor Institution Library from 29 May–13 June to see the exhibition that inspired this project. For the 2022–23 academic year, …
David Hirsch studies Translation Studies at Heidelberg University and spent his mandatory placement in Oxford during Hilary Term 2024, working with Henrike Lähnemann I was very nervous arriving in Oxford, as I had never had an experience quite like this before. It was quite beneficial to me, then, to be instantly thrown in the deep …
By the end of Michaelmas term, I came across a volume at the Weston Library on which several villancico chapbooks were bound. The volume itself had no title, no index, no author. There was nothing that could point to its origin but a shelfmark – Arch. Sigma III 70 – belonging to an enigmatic collection. …
by Thomas Godfrey (MSt. Modern Languages 2021) As part of my MSt. in Modern Languages, I was fortunate enough to take Henrike Lähnemann’s method option, entitled Palaeography, History of the Book and Digital Humanities. This particular method option provides training in dealing with manuscripts and books, and the final assessment requires students to come up …
By Tianyi Liu (MSt in Modern Languages) On 8 November 2023, as a prelude to the launch of the e-ilustrace database of early printed Czech books (https://e-ilustrace.cz/en/), Dr Giles Bergel treated the History of the Book class to a fascinating session on image matching technology. Giles Bergel trained as book historian and now works in …