Exploring the world of books at Oxford
Jane Eagan and Matthew Shaw Librarians and conservators see a lot of books. As such, they are often only passing acquaintances at best with many of them, and large numbers in their collection or care are positively strangers. It’s also unusual to know much at all about what researchers do with the books that they …
What does it mean to read and write? For the Tudor educationalist Richard Mulcaster, the answer can be summarised in a single word: everything. Reading and writing are far more than simple practical skills, and form for Mulcaster the vital building blocks of a good education. Acquiring them, though, embroils us in a kind of …
‘The Pleasuant Playne and Pythye Pathewaye : a digital edition’ is available to read now on the Taylor Editions website Self-help texts are hardly a novel concept in our modern world. A self-help text from the 16th century, however, is quite the exciting read! My first cursory glance at the riveting rhetoric within A Pleasaunt …
‘Goostly psalmes and spirituall songes: a digital edition’ is available to read now on the Taylor Editions website. I was quite at a loss when, towards the end of our first week on the History of the Book and Digital Humanities project, we were directed by our graduate mentors – Mary Newman and Sebastian Dows-Miller …
Things are a little disconcerting when you open an early printed book for the first time: everything initially seems familiar, yet upon further inspection you realise that some things are not quite right. Alongside the characters that we glide over without much thought feature strange additions and conspicuous absences, many of which are incomprehensible if …
For the five weeks of our UNIQ+ internship, the text that I have been working to encode is ‘An A.B.C. for Chyldren’, a sixteen-page pamphlet which (ambitiously) aims to teach people to read and write both English and Latin in just six weeks. Although the author of the document is anonymous, we do know that this …
As Week 5 begins and our projects begin to wrap up, it is with great excitement that we prepare to present our work on Friday, the 13th of August. After all our efforts, validation errors (ahem), and thrilling code-athons, the time is fast arriving to finish this year’s UNIQ+ programme. This mini conference will bring …
“What on earth is that?!” I thought to myself when we were presented with our latest Code-a-thon challenge on Monday morning. As you may well be able to see from the header image, the test before us was a difficult one: columns, colours, glosses, handwriting and marginalia (that even had its own marginalia!). How could …
Week III marked something of a beginning. To characterize the third of a six-week long internship as a ‘beginning’ moment seems, of course, somewhat absurd. But it was indeed a pivotal instance: it was the moment we encountered the complete sammelband for the first time, the point at which we decided upon our own independent …
UNIQ+ is a series of research internships designed to give excellent experience to students from under-represented backgrounds to enrich future applications for postgraduate study or graduate employment. For the History of The Book, we are particularly looking at enhancing digital research skills and exploring books as cultural objects. These skills will then be used for …