Lost Jack Kerouac Novels Unearthed from the Author's Personal Archive

Beat poet and author Jack Kerouac’s first novel, entitled The Sea is My Brother, has up till now never been seen in print. Thanks to his brother-in-law, however, it now finally makes it to publication thisweek some 40 years since Kerouac’s death after a discovery in the author’s personal archive.

Up till now sparse knowledge of the novel’s existence had been traced through brief references in Kerouac’s letters, but the size and scope of the volume proved unexpected. The book, written when Kerouac was 20, is based on his experiences as a merchant seaman and and features correspondence between the author and his close friend Sebastian Sampas.

The book’s editor, Dawn Ward, commented on the significance of the find, explaining that the publication of this lost work "is really quite important as it shows how Jack developed his writing process... [he] opens up and shows a side to him that we don't normally see in his books."

Click for further commentary from Ward in the BBC coverage of the publication.

Digital Humanities Resource Guide

This website curates a list of digital humanties initiatives with links to the projects. Generally interesting, but particularly so for the list titled "The Archive, Digital Preservation of Analog & Born-Digital Materials", which I have reproduced here:

Transcribe Bentham, based at University College London, has been crowdsourcing the transcription of thousands of manuscripts written by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). Anyone can sign up to participate, viewing the original documents, and transcribing and encoding them online in a wiki; instructions and a discussion forum are provided.

NEW! See also What's On the Menu?, which invites users to transcribe the New York Public Library's collection of 40,000 menus; a project of NYPL Labs.

The Rossetti Archive, sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, University of Virginia under the direction of Jerome McGann, provides access to Dante Gabriel Rossetti's complete works, including high-quality images, detailed descriptions and commentary. Related works (contemporary and antecedents) are also included, along with a bibliography.

The Walt Whitman Archive – "an electronic research and teaching tool that sets out to make Whitman's vast work easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers, drawing on the resources of libraries and collections from around the United States and around the world." Directed by Kenneth M. Price (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) and Ed Folsom (University of Iowa).

Preserving Virtual Worlds – exploring methods for preserving digital games, electronic literature, and environments such as Second Life. A collaboration between Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Stanford University, the Rochester Institute of Technology, and Linden Lab (creators of Second Life).

The work of institutions such as the Ransom Center at the University of Texas in preserving born-digital textual materials.

Omeka – a free, open source web-publishing platform for the display of library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections and exhibitions; developed by the team at Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University "with non-IT specialists in mind, allowing users to focus on content and interpretation rather than programming."

How May Digital Collections Serve Scholarly Needs?

Project Bamboo

"As part of the Collections Interoperability working group, we are investigating the question of scholars’ needs with digital collections: What kind of functionalities, features, and/or services do humanities scholars need in digital collections, in order for the collections to be useful in research?

The reason we ask is twofold: First, we’d like to know what types of digital collections should be prepared and incorporated into the Bamboo research platform. While there are a few all-encompassing general digital collections, such as the Hathi Trust Digital Library, there are many more digital collections with limited content or specialized focuses, and it is hard to determine how to select collections for incorporation into Bamboo.

Secondly, a larger question faces libraries and digital libraries about effective collection development strategies for digital collections: How can we build digital libraries that aren’t simply mass collections of materials or are based on libraries’ classifications, but that directly address scholars’ research needs?

To explore this question, we decided to launch a study that would create a needs assessment for scholars and digital collections. Over the summer, I worked with Indiana University librarian Angela Courtney to contact humanities librarians, digital humanities coordinators, and academic technologists at the twelve member institutions of the CIC academic consortium and participating Bamboo partner institutions. We ultimately convinced nine librarians and staffers to work with us on conducting a survey and interviews with their humanities faculty. The participating institutions are the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Indiana University, Northwestern University, University of Illinois at Chicago, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Michigan State University, University of Iowa, University of Chicago, University of Minnesota, Penn State University, and the University of Maryland.

After months of IRB wrangling, writing the test instruments, pre-testing, and consultations, we launched the study in late October. A survey has been distributed to randomly selected faculty members in all of the English and history departments at the aforementioned institutions, and will run through December. Interviews will be conducted in November and December with select faculty members from fine arts and performing arts departments on the campuses who are involved in digital scholarship. Follow-up interviews will also be conducted with survey respondents who indicated a willingness to be interviewed.

We anticipate that this study will enable us to gain new insights into the transformations occurring in humanities research with the advent of digitized materials. An update will be forthcoming as results are analyzed this winter, and we’re excited for what the data will tell us!"

By Harriett Green

Unpublished Siegfried Sassoon Poems Found

Dr Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Siegfried Sassoon‘s biographer, unearthed some unpublished poems at Cambridge University. Follow this link to BBC for a listen!


What she find most noticeable about the poems she discovered is that they aren't the angry war poems one might expect from Sassoon, but rather glorify war at points. 
Professor Sheffield argues against the dominant view that First World War poets presented of the war and Dr Moorcroft Wilson argues in counter to this.

Forthcoming Arnold Dreyblatt Lecture: From the Archives: Installation and Performace 1990-2011

To mark the launch of the new Visual Culture programme at the University of Exeter, the first of five visiting speaker events throughout 2011/12 will be held on Wednesday November 23rd, 2.00-4.00pm. This event will take place on the University’s Streatham Campus, in the Queens Building, LT4.

The event will feature a talk by the artist Arnold Dreyblatt, entitled ‘From the Archives: Installation and Performance 1990-2011’.

Arnold Dreyblatt (b. New York City, 1953) is an American media artist and composer. He has been based in Berlin, Germany since 1984. In 2007, Dreyblatt was elected to lifetime membership in the German Academy of Art (Akademie der Künste, Berlin). He is Professor for Media Art at the Muthesius Academy of Art and Design in Kiel, Germany.
Dreyblatt's visual work creates complex textual and spatial visualizations for memory. His works, which reflect on such themes as recollection and the archive, include permanent works, digital room projections, dynamic textual objects and muti-layered lenticular text panels. His work been exhibited and staged in galleries, museums and public spaces such as the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum for Contemporary Art, Berlin; The Jewish Museum in New York; the Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna and the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Permanent public art works are on display at the HL Holocaust Center in Oslo and the Jewish Museum in Berlin. He has received numerous commissions and awards including the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts and the Förderpreis der Akademie der Künste.

Dreyblatt will be speaking about his work from 1990 – 2011. He will take the audience through his processes and include still and moving image documentation.


The talk is free, but booking is essential, and can be made here: http://www.arnolddreyblattlecture.eventbrite.com/

What would Dazed and Confused have done differently? - They'd archive

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/nov/05/dazed-confused-gang-still-cool

Reading the above article I noticed this paragraph:

"If they could have done anything differently, I ask, what would they change? "We'd archive," says Hack, immediately. "There were these Jake and Dinos Chapman sculptures that they made for one of our events. They all got trashed, of course. No one knew to give a shit. And when Radiohead debuted OK Computer for us nobody thought to record it – there were no smartphones then, nobody took cameras into clubs. Everything felt very … temporary.""

The Black Hours - Online Exhibition of a rare black manuscript

An extraordinary online exhibition of a Book of Hours named The Black Hours, was given this name becase the manuscripts are written and illuminated on vellum that is stained or painted black. The anonymous painter of the Black Hours is an artist whose style depended mainly upon that of Willem Vrelant, one of the dominant illuminators working in Bruges from the late 1450s until his death in 1481. The website describes it as follows:

"The text is written in silver and gold, with gilt initials and line endings composed of chartreuse panels enlivened with yellow filigree. Gold foliage on a monochromatic blue background makes up the borders. The miniatures are executed in a restricted palette of blue, old rose, and light flesh tones, with dashes of green, gray, and white. The solid black background is utilized to great advantage, especially by means of gold highlighting."
Unfortunately the very thing which makes the manuscript so unusual is difficult to preserve:

"The black of its vellum—the very thing that makes the codex so striking—is also the cause of some serious flaking. The carbon used in the black renders the surface of the vellum smooth and shiny—a handsome but less than ideal supporting surface for some of the pigments. The Morgan's Black Hours is awaiting conservation treatment. In the meantime, we are pleased to offer a virtual facsimile."

Manucript - http://www.themorgan.org/collections/works/BlackHours/manuscript.asp

Archiving a 100 year history of fan magazines

This October is the 100th anniversary of the film fan magazine!

The publication of the very first issue of ‘The Pictures’ marked the birth of a rich 100 year history of film magazines, and Exeter's Bill Douglas Centre archive holds a copy of this first edition, amidst a wealth of other fan papers spanning the history of cinema.

To commemorate, a short piece offering a brief history of the British fan magazine and my research with these objects in the archive is now up on the University of Exeter homepage news and events section, and also in the Western Morning News.

#libcampuk: special collections

Just a quick post to direct you to an interesting discussion on the role of special collections and how to promote/expand them. Topics covered: issues surrounding outreach, the merits of physical or online exhibitions, hidden special collections etc.


The blog post is a summary of the issues discusses at 'Library Camp UK'.


Here is - the blog post


http://www.librarycamp.co.uk/

"early drafts were locked away for a reason"?

An article in the Telegraph titled "It's exciting to find  manuscripts abandoned by writers or musicians but early drafts were locked away for a reason" posits that newly discovered works "are best consigned to the cutting-room floor of history" as their authors intended. The argument stakes this claim firstly on the fact that many of these pieces were deemed substandard by their creators and secondly that the wishes of many artists are ignored in the publication of works which they desired to be destroyed. 


This kind of argument draws on the idea of the perfect, completed text as was intended by the author-god of that textual world. This calls into question the place of archival materials in scholarship at all, if  Peter Stanford is unsure about making unpublished 'completed texts' available, then it would follow that the use of manuscript drafts (especially of a work with a final published version) is entirely put of the question. Giving the shade of the author final control over what they intended to be published must also exclude volumes of letters and journals being published. And so on. 


As an example of poor literary executors Stanford uses Max Brod, who is responsible for the crime of not destroying Kafka's manuscripts. This is perhaps a poor choice of example as Stanford does acknowledge that Brod's actions mean that we have texts that are "now regarded as classics of 20th-century literature". He finds, however, that preserving a literary heritage is secondary to the "thrill" of rooting through papers and the money to which this can lead.  


The legal tangles aside, Stanford's article betrays interesting sentimental attachment to the idea of the perfect, published text intended by its author. The stability of this idea is is being constantly challenged by the use of draft material in scholarship. Whilst there certainly is money to be made in lost works and archives, these works are important to scholarship despite, or even because of, their unfinished nature.