Lost Hitchcock Film Found in Garden Shed

From a garden shed ‘archive’ to preservation for future generation of film historians and eager audiences… Non literary, but interesting archive related news nonetheless: a lost early Hitchcock film has been discovered in New Zealand and screened for the first time in Hollywood.

The 1923 silent feature titled The White Shadow was found in a garden shed after being lost for some 80 years. The film represents the earliest known feature from the infamous British director of such film history classics as Vertigo, Psycho and early features Sabotage and The Lodger.

The print was found in a garden shed in Hastings, part of a collection assembled by film fanatic Jack Murtagh. Peter Jackson's Park Road studio worked on the degraded reels, making a new print to enable the film to be screened at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Samuel Goldwyn Theatre last week.

The Telegraph’s coverage of the find can be found here.

Dead Sea Scrolls Digitized

It's a bit of a tongue twister. but the Dead Sea Scrolls have been digitized and are now available online - http://dss.collections.imj.org.il/ as part of the Israel Museum.

The website records the initial discovery of the scrolls:

"The first seven Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered by chance in 1947 by Bedouin of the Ta'amra tribe, in a cave (later given the name "Cave 1") near Khirbet Qumran on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea. Three of the scrolls were immediately purchased by archaeologist Eliezer Lipa Sukenik on behalf of the Hebrew University; the others were bought by the Metropolitan of the Syrian Orthodox Church in Jerusalem, Mar Athanasius Samuel. In 1948 Samuel smuggled the four scrolls in his possession to the United States; it was only in 1954 that Sukenik's son, Yigael Yadin, also an archaeologist, was able to return them to Israel, and they were ultimately entrusted to the Shrine of the Book Foundation. They have been on display in the Shrine of the Book at The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, since 1965.
Over the next few years, from 1949 to 1956, additional fragments of some 950 different scrolls were discovered in ten nearby caves, both by Bedouins and by a joint archaeological expedition of the École Biblique et Archéologique Française and the Rockefeller Museum, under the direction of Professor Father Roland de Vaux. The richest yield, from Cave 4, just opposite the site of Qumran, consisted of some 15,000 fragments. The last cave, Cave 11, was discovered in 1956, and the scrolls found there were in a reasonable state of preservation. Since then, only a few small scraps of parchment have been found in the Judean Desert (though not in the close vicinity of Qumran)."

As the Official Google Blog explains, the digitization allows you to click on the Hebrew text and see an English translation (see below) and that:

"The scroll text is also discoverable via web search. If you search for phrases from the scrolls, a link to that text within the scroll viewers on the Dead Sea Scrolls collections site may surface in your search results. For example, search for [Dead Sea Scrolls "In the day of thy planting thou didst make it to grow"], and you may see a link to Chapter 17:Verse 11 within the Great Isaiah Scroll."

British Library ebook treasures

The British Library has digitized and made available for ipad various handwritten notebooks from their collection - William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Leonardo da Vinci, Jane Austen and Gerardus Mercator .
http://www.ebooktreasures.org/category/books-by-institution/british-library/

For a limited time Alice's Adventures Underground - Lewis Carroll's notebook is available free!



Sample of page from Blake's notebook

From the BL website: "This small notebook, which came into Blake’s possession in 1787 following his brother’s death, was used by Blake for over thirty years to record sketches and to work on drafts of his poems. The dense, closely-filled pages provide a fascinating insight into Blake’s compositional process, and allow us to follow, line by line, correction by correction, the genesis of some of his best-known work, including poems such as ‘London’ and ‘The Tyger' This eBookTreasures version contains the complete manuscript along with commentary on selected pages."

Sample Page from Lewis Carroll's notebook

From the BL website:

"Later known as Alice in Wonderland, this is the original manuscript given by Lewis Carroll to Alice Liddell for Christmas 1864. One summer’s day in 1862, he took Alice and her sisters on a boat trip on the Thames by Oxford, where he taught as a mathematician. Along the way he entertained them with a fabulous story of Alice’s adventures in a magical world entered through a rabbit hole. Ten year-old Alice begged him to write it down, and eventually he did, giving her this meticulous manuscript of the tale for Christmas.

This eBookTreasures version has transcription throughout as well as superb narration by Miriam Margoyles."

Reel British History: new archive facilities at the BFI

The British Film Institute have recently completed a new Master Film Store at a cost of £12m, built to house more than 45,000 cans of British film and preserve a national cinematic legacy. The facility in Warwickshire employs state of the art technology to ensure the longevity of its fragile treasures. Old film stock is notoriously difficult to store safely, likely to disintegrate entirely under the wrong conditions or combust due the highly flammable nature of the nitrate stock of much early film. The expansive new facilities of the Master Film Store offer a safer environment for these fragile materials.

The new facility presents an alternative to archival digitization projects, which, whilst helping to retain the content of older materials on the point of deterioration, is both an expensive and time consuming process, limiting the selection of films to be restored. As an alternative to the long-practiced approach of format conversion, the new facility presents a more cost-effective method, allowing the original material to be accessed safely.

The preservation project seeks to protect national film heritage in the manner of other decorative arts, raising awareness of Britain’s role in the development of global film culture and forming part of a £25m strategy for Screen Heritage UK (SHUK). The strategy represents the largest award ever given to an archival project. SHUK will allow people to search online catalogues of national and regional archives and access a number of films online. The project will launch early next month; further details of the SHUK strategy can be found here.

An interesting little film of BFI Head of Collections and Information, Ruth Kelly, showing BBC News around the old starage facility can also be found here. Kelly shows the old and new facilities, and offers examples of deteriorated film and the problems faced in storage and control.

The ‘Edible’ Archive

The Scottish Council on Archives (SCA) have launched a new archive project for 2011 seeking to compile a wide ranging history of Scottish recipes. As part of the National Archives Awareness Campaign, the SCA has been inviting both archives and the general public to contribute recipes to the project drawn from a variety of sources, including family history, personal recipe books, letters and archival documents. The project includes plans to host a feast in Edinburgh bringing many of the collected recipes to life in cooked dishes.

A full article on the archive and some of its bizarre (and frankly extremely off-putting sounding) entries can be found here News.scotsman.com. The archivists spearheading the project make the point that it’s not so much the recipes they’ve searched for as the stories these recipes tell—one such illuminating example is a rice pudding recipe written in code in a letter from a Scottish soldier in India in 1808. The recipe is used as a practice exercise for his encryption skills. Not exactly poetry, but interesting nonetheless! Plus, who doesn’t like rice pudding.

The SCA website can be found here, with an awareness campaign for the Edible collection.

I’ll end with a ‘delicious’ sounding example from the collection for the baking of Locust Bread, taken from the archive of Mount Stuart in Bute, which was brought back to the island by the 4th Marquess of Bute following a trip to Tangiers…get baking.

KHUBZ EL JARADE
Locust Bread

The best way to catch locusts is to repair to the nearest wall, the higher the better. Here, if the season be propitious, numbers of these insects will be found flying with such force against the wall that many will fall senseless to the ground.

Of those that fall, pick up the females - they are somewhat larger and rather lighter in colour. Pull off the head as the head is pulled off a shrimp. Then squeeze the body and there will exude the eggs, like dark and diminutive caviare, to the amount of nearly a teaspoonful from each animal. When half a kilo of this spawn has been obtained in a small basin, mix with half a kilo of flour and bake into small loaves.

Be careful not to let an opportunity pass to make this dish, as these little beasts make their visitation to the North of Morocco, at least, every nine years only. The last swarm occurred in Tangier in AD 1947.

Digital Humanities spotlight: 7 important digitization projects

The 7 projects can be read about here, the one that stood out particularly was the following:

"Long before there was Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, there was the Republic of Letters — a vast and intricate network of intellectuals, linking the finest “philosophes” of the Enlightenment across national borders and language barriers. This self-defined community of writers, scholars, philosophers and other thinkers included greats like Voltaire, Leibniz, Rousseau, Linnaeus, Franklin, Newton, Diderot and many others we’ve come to see as linchpins of cultural history. Mapping the Republic of Letters, which we first looked at last year, is a fascinating project by a team of students and professors at Stanford, visualizing the famous intellectual correspondence of the Enlightenment, how they traveled, and how the network evolved over time, bridging humanitarian scholarship and computer science."

Find it here - https://republicofletters.stanford.edu/

Missing papers from National Archives

Recent reports have brought to light the troubling loss of important documents and papers from the National Archive. The Archive lists some 1,600 folders of documents reported missing since 2005, including items such as letters from Sir Winston Churchill to General Franco, minutes of Harold Wilson's meetings with the Queen, and documents from the courts of Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and Charles I. Some files have not been seen since the early 1990s and fewer than half have been recovered.

Despite negative commentary from scholars and historians on the handling of these materials (outlined in greater detail in this Telegraph online article), an archives spokesman said missing files amounted to 0.01 per cent of the collection. There is also an ongoing programme in place to search for lost items.

Many missing items relate to key moments in British history. Here’s hoping it’s an unfortunate but temporary misplacement...

A response to - "Online is fine, but history is best hands on"

By Carrie Smith and Lisa Stead

We appreciate that we are a little late coming to the party on this one, but we have just come across this article in the Guardian - Online is fine, but history is best hands on (via the excellent http://archivesinfo.blogspot.com/). The article discusses the importance of seeing the original document over an online version. Although it makes some sensible points, points which have been made frequently on this blog, for example that during research in an archive:

 “Perhaps another document will come up in the same batch, perhaps some marginalia or even the leaf of another text inserted as a bookmark”.

 The author calls this the “serendipity” of research and certainly there is an element of unexpected discovery when undertaking archive work, however, the argument for seeing the original can be put in more concrete terms than the “mystery” being lost in online versions. What can be lost are slight differences in shades of ink colour, watermarks, water stains even etc – the genetic makeup of the document can be lessened. That said, the problem with Hunts argument, aside from its slightly melodramatic reverence of the ‘original’, is its unpleasant derision of the non-scholar, he writes:

“Why sit in an archive leafing through impenetrable prose when you can slurp frappucino while scrolling down Edmund Burke documents?”

The unpleasantness of this statement, even on the level of a physical shudder at the noisy, uncouth “slurp” of the person on the street, is offensive. It is the underlying message about access, however, that is worse. Although Hunt refers to the British Library, which is a public library, Hunt is unhappy with the public access search engines provide, he writes:

“the arrival of search engines has transformed our ability to sift and surf the past. What once would have required days trawling through an index, hunting down a footnote or finding a misfiled library book can now be done in an instant”

One commentator picks up on this and responds:

“Thus making this information accessible to people who aren't full-time academics and/or living in London. God forbid, eh?”

There also seems to be an element in the Hunt-esque argument of a sense of unfairness in the ease of access for the new generation of scholars, researchers and (again, god forbid) non-affiliated ‘ordinary’ interested people. As if, because the archive was formerly often something difficult to access, something that required travel grants, networking, extensive planning and a big investment of valuable time for the individual, it should equally represent a right of passage for the next generation. With this element of difficulty removed, the argument seems to suggest that ease of access somehow automatically will equate to lazy scholarship, idly flicking through sacred manuscripts on Iphone apps. The view that location and context for access fundamentally impacts upon ‘proper’ academic contemplation seems a difficult one to support, however, especially since there seems to be no consideration of any negative consequences that the hushed environment of the archive in which the academic seemingly sits in reverence, ‘leafing through impenetrable prose’ (all worthy scholarship should deal with this sort of prose, obviously) might have upon interpretation. Is it not possible that aura inspires a reverence that’s perhaps not always deserved, or that the sheer difficulty of access and the time/money/effort that goes into many archive research trips encourages the researcher to make links, connections and observations that aren’t always justified by the material, simply to make the effort worthwhile? 

Although some of the reactions to this article were political, regarding Tristram Hunt’s position in the labour party, many were simply unsettled by Hunts preference to limit access to important documents to those who have the travel grants/geographical or scholarly access. Although seeing the original document is an important enterprise, the widening access new technologies allow and also the protection for fragile documents is of equal importance.  

Does digital writing leave fingerprints?

THIS New York Times article discusses whether emails can linguistically analysed in the same manner manuscripts are to test for fakes. Do we have linguistic ticks that reveal our authorship or is this obscured by spell check and the device on which we are writing? As more and more archives contain 'Born Digital' material these questions become increasingly important. Especially if you're Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. A multi-billion dollar lawsuit is being fought along these linguistic lines to determine the provenance of a set of emails saved as a word document, thus stripping them of the usual identifying data. So the question being asked is, does digital writing leave fingerprints?




Decoding Your E-mail Personality by Ben Zimmer

"IMAGINE, if you will, a young Mark Zuckerberg circa 2003, tapping out e-mail messages from his Harvard dorm room. It’s a safe bet he never would have guessed that eight years later a multibillion-dollar lawsuit might hinge on whether he capitalized the word “Internet,” or whether he spelled “cannot” as one word or two.

But that is exactly the kind of stylistic minutiae being analyzed in a lawsuit filed by Paul Ceglia, owner of a wood-pellet fuel company in upstate New York. Mr. Ceglia says that a work-for-hire contract he arranged with Mr. Zuckerberg, then an 18-year-old Harvard freshman, entitles him to half of the Facebook fortune. He has backed up his claim with e-mails purported to be from Mr. Zuckerberg, but Facebook’s lawyers argue that the e-mail exchanges are fabrications.

When legal teams need to prove or disprove the authorship of key texts, they call in the forensic linguists. Scholars in the field have tackled the disputed origins of some prestigious works, from Shakespearean sonnets to the Federalist Papers. But how reliably can linguistic experts establish that Person A wrote Document X when Document X is an e-mail — or worse, a terse note sent by instant message or Twitter? After all, e-mails and their ilk give us a much more limited purchase on an author’s idiosyncrasies than an extended work of literature. ..."


Read the rest of the article - http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/opinion/sunday/24gray.html?_r=2

Push to digitize archive reveals hidden Yeats play

An interesting find at Boston College as a result of new digitization initiatives...

Thanks to Librarian Tom Wall’s efforts to bring the institution's archives into the digital era, an unpublished treasure has been discovered—Yeats’ very first play, “Love and Death”. Written in 1884 when Yeats was 18, the little known piece was uncovered amidst boxes of journals and correspondence purchased by the institution from the poet’s son in the early nineties.

Wall’s creation of a committee to search the archives for high impact materials to be digitized resulted in this rare find, and has led to its new access online for a global audience.

The uncovering of the play obviously boasts a major positive for new digital initiatives, both in encouraging archivists and librarians to re-evaluate what institutions contain and in enabling exciting (re)discoveries to be made accessible to researchers and readers the world over.

Yet the digitization process is not without careful attention to attempting to maintain some sense of the aura of the manuscript itself; in bringing the play to digital access, the Boston College website includes high-res photographic images of the handwritten pages to accompany the transcribed text. Burn’s Library conservator Barbara Adams Hebard says of the digitization project, “We definitely wanted to present the whole object as if you could hold it in your hands”.

Wall aims to bring 5% of Boston College’s archive collections online in the future, stating that while “Digital is not a replacement . . . it will be interesting to see what our Web hits look like in a year.”

The play can be accessed the BC website.

Click here a detailed article from The Boston Globe with response from Boston Yeats specialist Marjorie Hawes.