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.

The ‘war against knowledge’? Protesting the academic archive paywall

Anyone following academic news of late may have heard about the current prosecution launched against Aaron Swartz for his downloading of nearly 5 million scholarly articles archived online with JSTOR. Swartz has been charged with computer intrusion, fraud and data theft for his actions—charges which have been branded excessive by many academics and copyright critics.

On Wednesday the plot thickened, with over 18,000 documents being pulled from the scientific journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society made available through Bittorrent on The Pirate Bay by Gregory Maxwell. Maxwell's actions made freely accessible documents that usually are charged at a rate of between $8 and $19 dollars for access. Maxwell claims his actions were in protest of Swartz’s charges, accompanying his upload with a manifesto stating his intent to “remove even on dollar of ill-gained income from a poisonous industry which act to supress scientific and historic understanding” regardless of the “personal cost” he might suffer.

While the ‘stealing is stealing’ argument is one side of the issue in relation to how exactly material was obtained, Swartz and Maxwell’s actions obviously spark interesting debate about free access to archived scholarly material. Swartz prominently supports the free flow of information and access online and in libraries in the open culture movement. As Dan Goodwin points out in an article for The Register, critics of the somewhat epic charges brought against Swartz argue that “many of the documents in JSTOR's collection are probably kept behind its paywall against the authors' will and that there are no valid copyright claims restricting their distribution”.

Should access to archived scholarship be free in the digital domain? How far does the "authors’ will" extend? Is prosectuing for downloading to this extent the same as being charged for checking out too many books at the library?

For more on Swartz and the charges as covered by the Demand Progress Blog, click here.