One of the ways in which we've done this in the past or I've done this in the classroom
is to open up a book that
is quite accessible to students
One of those that I find is the Book of the Courtier by Castiglione
We have two versions of the text in the AOR
corpus one is actually the Italian language version, which is also annotated by
Harvey, that can be a bit more of a stretch for some students. However
the, uh, this particular
translation by Hoby is entirely in English.
And as we learn from marginalia very often the nature of the marginalia will
reflect the nature of the language of the original anchor text, and so a lot of the marginalia are also in English and
because of Gabriel Harvey's particularly clear hand
this becomes
a very manageable
sort of thing.
I have to keep moving the things around on my screen in order to get access.
But, one of the things that I've done in the past is to go all the way across
to
a summary of the attributes of a courtier
which appear uh toward the end of the book.
And I'm just trying to discover those.
I'm having--bear with me
It's
Yy3
Some of our pagination or foliation
is a little more challenging
than others.
And then we opened it to this page a brief rehearsal
of the chief conditions and qualities of a courtier. So here we have a wonderful example of a page
and indeed a sequence of pages that are heavily annotated in all sorts of different ways
um you have
uh
interliniation underlining. You have lots of commentary located next to passages
as well as general comments to the side.
As you continue you get through the summary of the chief qualities
you begin to see what qualities Harvey, uh thought were perhaps most important
As you can see not unlike a first or second year student, uh Castiglione
Sorry, um
Gabriel Harvey, there's a slip
um
Decides to highlight everything uh, because he wants to get an a at being a courtier, uh in his class
Um, here's the um the opening I think that we have on our uh, broadside
um
Which has uh among other things
sections that are bracketed, uh that he describes as uh,
No, man, so excellently qualified for active exercise or valorous action as indeed these qualities that he's bracketed
Um, there are others that have not been
Um, there are various and sundry of these different kinds of elements
We also see um here where my I don't know if you can see my the arrow from my my mouse
But you also see that there are different qualities of ink or writing instrument
Which reflect that this document or this page was annotated on multiple occasions
So it's interesting to get students to think about how a reader read a text over time
Particularly where there are cross-references
And you can go from one particular passage for example the art of blunderville
And go through the the text as it were
And here you for example, you can search through the people indexed item, Thomas
Blundeville, to find if there are other books in the corpus in which Blunderville appears
where that same quality of ink and writing instrument occurs, for example, an attempt to get students to at least think about
How somebody?
Um takes different stabs at the same text and then more importantly one of the sort of uber comment
Contexts for all of this how a reader not only read a book
But how a reader read their library and how they interacted, um with texts within their library
Um, so i'm just throwing that as kind of spaghetti on the wall as it were to get a conversation started about an introductory
Form of teaching. I wonder if one of my colleagues Matt, perhaps you have some thoughts about
teaching from AOR to
first or second year undergraduates, for example
Ah, uh i'm possibly not well, uh place to advise on that because I have no undergraduate students. I only teach graduate students
Um, I do however teach an introductory lesson
um
to print culture using AOR there are there are two different approaches one is
I generally start as many things do from the Livy because usually
Um, I put this up against a history of reading that's with Lisa Jardine with Tony Grafton's
Uh studied for action and then we move
outwards from there through actually being able to see
uh
the livy in
an interesting state because of course as you know, um
These photographs were taken before an act of conservation at Princeton Library. So we see these in as we see this book in a
in a state that's a record of
Not of how the book used to be even um, six or so years ago. Not as it is, uh today, beautifully
uh rebound and preserved
and then we can
Put this up against
Other online resources. I generally ask everyone to have a look
We pick bits I pick bits essentially like you of well commented bits
And ask the students to read
livy in translation before generally in the lobe translation because of course that's also available online or at least it is at my
university
And then we have breakout
Sessions deciding what they would add how they would annotate this thing according to their usual practice
How um what would best
What are the points that they would want to capture uh from this text for their own interest for their own?
Research experiences and then build outwards from there
It's usually quite a good session, I find. Or as a way into
Thinking about these things more widely as I say it's an introductory session for
M.A. students in the very first few weeks of a postgraduate, UK course
We have a number of items in the um corpus
that are
um
Have have particularly complex physical histories
So I can return I go to the home button and I can return to the sequence
Any number of them represent different kinds of problems some of those problems
Were problems that we faced?
um
In order to create a complex viewer that can handle lots of different problems
Um, this is the Voarchadumia
which
Aaron, you asked about the physical qualities of books
Um, this is an interesting book, uh in that it's actually has a colored border with multiple colors of ink. It's a color printed
uh process
Um and uh, it has notes, um all across it including very specific notes. Um,
from John Dee who is another one of our readers who we haven't talked about a great deal as yet, uh, including um his uh,
his
monad, uh figure here, which is a form of uh symbolic logic his
Engagement with the various figures in the text and the texts that are represented in it
That sort of combine to create meaning within the physical space
of the page
But as you proceed through the text
You find other pieces of information including the British Library. Um
Information and so for that i'm toggling here between the two
You also have in the the printed text
complex
sorts of materials
So in this text we have a different kind of material work
Um, I wish I could find the cardano, but for some reason it's just not popping out at me
Does anyone have any suggestions about why we can't it looks like pearl eyes
Um, i've got it up if you'd like to have a look at it. There we go
Yeah, if you zoom into this one
If we zoom into this image
There you go, you'll see um, a very interesting textual engagement
in which
a correction is being made to the
Horoscope of an individual within history. Neil, I'm the less familiar with the marginal on the right
Perhaps you have something you could say about that
Yes. Um, so I mean Dee is in this note here commenting as he's kind of
Corrected all this so Cardano's book had lots of sample horoscopes to tell you
how these these things were to be tabulated and directed they also
The book was also full of horoscopes of famous individuals
um
this isn't one of those but um
The idea was that the text would explain
How it came about and here in the margin
D has corrected
Basically the hour that this is supposed to have taken place because the year and the movements of the planets are at different
Locations so you can see the symbols that he's drawn in
For the different planets the different times
and then
even in here
This little j and d
Um, he's added another
Comment basically to himself. Um
Guessing why this might be the case, why this error might have occurred.
So,
you basically have
Dee in this case talking to a book
Talking to the author of a book through the material text
Which is a really great example
Um, both of how people interact with books, but just of how complex these interactions could be
I mean
We can decode this annotation
But very few of us. I think except for maybe tony, um could tell us what it actually means
If you just encountered it in a room. Maybe one more thing that would help people getting started though
This
Exercise here the libraries without walls on the pedagogy page
um has a number of the pages that we were talking about that have sort of
reader library interactions or specific interactions with texts
so this would be a good selection of materials just to click on and
start a discussion about
What reading and annotating is for for undergraduates as well as the ones the examples discussed above?
That's great. Thanks a lot
No problem
Yes, so I read the question about also finding variation spelling variations in nouns for instance and the example that was given
was
between war
the customary spelling of war, w-a-r,
or the Elizabethan spelling, which is sometimes
w-a-r-r-e. Um, and I think if you're interested in spending variations, there are uh,
different ways to to go about it if you know if you're interested in specific words that you
already know specific spanning variations
Um, you can for instance as i'm doing here now
um just
Use the simple search
and say search for
"war" and "warre" as you can see here
Which will
This take a bit because it's a bit slow
um
and
Here you see already search results. It picks up the search picks up of different spellings of
of the word war
The disadvantage is though if you do this in a in a simple basic search
um
It looks, as I explained on Monday, it doesn't only look in the the
Text of the marginal notes, but it looks in all the text associated with
Every single reader intervention, so if you want to narrow it down a bit
What I would suggest is for instance use
Look for the word only within the text of a marginal notes
limit it to war
And you can add the term
Do exactly the same
but usually
other
spring
variants
And then as you can immediately see you get lots of less
Results because the search is narrowed down
So that's one particular way in which I would go about
Trying to find spelling variants of of a particular word
if you want to
Broaden your search and just look for which words
Words might exist in the corpus with different ways of spelling it
You could approach it from an entirely different angle
which might be interesting as well, so if you go to
the um
Download data page
You can see here AOR date
And we have made
available various data releases
During the project with the last and final date releases data lease
5.0
um and in these date releases you can find
Quite a lot of CSV files. These are all
Exports from the data as we capture them in the any transcriptions in the XML files
and
including
Which you can see here
an overview of all the words which
Captured in the marginalia that were written in English language as you can see it's a incredibly long list and you need to do
Some work you can order it for instance alphabetically
Column A, column B signifies how often a particular word
Was mentioned in marginal note, but if you ordered alphabets another way of
Finding spelling variants of one particular word. The only thing you then need to do is trying to
uh in within the AOR viewer trying to find out
In which book and in which particular marginal note that a particular word was mentioned?
but those are
Uh, yeah ways I would go about trying to find find spelling variants
And what about declined forms of of Latin nouns would it be similar
It would be similar. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's also, I mean, I'm now showing the file for the English language
we also have a file only for
words that
Um that we encountered in in marginal notes that were written in Latin
Um, so that works exactly the same you will get a similar list, but then then Latin words and verbs and what not
Super, thanks a lot.
If I could add one more thing here.
When we're searching, when we're doing simple searches for Latin words, because this is a
problem that many people or many different
um
programs have had with searching for Latin variants, Latin decline forms,
we've been able to essentially piggyback on the works of others, so
the software underneath that performs the search there is a
library
that
Programs it in such a way that it knows how to deal with decline forms and so should bring back
Uh as many different forms as humanly possible
so if you search in one instance of a Latin word
It will know well enough or at least it knows the basics of the Latin language
Well enough to try to bring back as many forms of that as possible to widen your search. So it is not foolproof
but there are
Computational things going on under the hood that allow that to happen
Yes, uh, it's a it's a wonderful question that we received during our
Presentation earlier i'm just i'm putting up a powerpoint slide just now
um
uh, one of the books in our collections at Johns Hopkins
That actually offers a wonderful example of how to expand the AOR corpus
Um, this is Richard Eden's annotated copy text of the first history of the new world discovery by Peter Martyr
Richard Eden translated this work. The history of Columbus's discovery of the new world and so forth
This is his copy text with all of his marginalia
Um, it's an extraordinary book which represents
Um his interpretations of the various. Um,
uh voyages and of Columbus
There are marginal annotations including drawings of islands and other things
This is something that would be
very interesting to add
In part because it also offers up
various visual marginalia
as well as
Interlinear translation notes and that sort of thing. Um
There are other texts that we have in our collection. Um, for example, we have the most heavily annotated known copy of uh,
Montaigne's essays in the florio edition published in 1613 a work that William Shakespeare for example quoted from
um, it's uh
Heavily annotated by Lord William Howard a Catholic antiquary living in the north of England and his um antiquary
Nicholas Roscarrock and others and it offers a wonderful. Um
array of marginalia
In English very often to an English text
The problem with all of this of course is infrastructure. That is to say we would have to digitize the entire book
And then have it completely transcribed encoded into xml as all the books in the AOR corpus have been
And um subsequent to that
um
We would need to make that searchable and we would also like to expand the corpus
over time by integrating pedagogical components
Where different?
instructors
offer the opportunity
to interpret
a chapter of
Archaeology of Reading for example
Through a classroom experience and to annotate the text with that those experiences
Those are ideas that we have
For moving forward with the Archaeology of Reading but it's one thing to have sort of an idea of books to add to the corpus
But it's another to do all of that work
Literally it took a team of half a dozen
graduate students at the center for editing laws and letters
Post-doctoral fellows who were tasked like neil before his um before you've done
Sort of between his time at Johns Hopkins and at the University of Florida and many others to do the work of transcribing
checking
And then working with technologists to integrate that material
Into the corpus. It's a it's a work intensive, but also a quite a rewarding. Um
uh kind of activity and that would involve introducing different kinds of readers, um beyond
John Dee and Gabriel Harvey, um people we know because that's very useful in being able to
Do research but also to teach to know who's annotating and and what sort of context from which they're annotating
But um, that's kind of a short or maybe a medium-sized answer to a very large question. I think
one thing we might mention
More about that expansion to the site
is
the relationship
Between um coming up with a site with a research question
And then gathering, uh materials for that particular research question and keeping it open to other things
But they're not
Maintaining it and not letting it become a sort of
Standard platform. I don't think any of us stepped into this project hoping to build
Something that might just be an ongoing thing where people can just upload
Stuff or it just becomes a repository of things. We're looking to use this to answer very particular questions
So I think one of those things we're thinking about when we're thinking about expansion in the same way in
In the way that Earle was talking about earlier
We're also thinking what effect will hap this have on our research on these intellectual questions that we're curious in answering
About the use of books about the connecting collections of books together to form
Libraries, um, I think that's something that we've got to go through
Quite carefully and think through quite carefully
as we go on
Even thinking about expanding the resource as it is
Yeah Matt I think that's a really good point and I also
Just would underscore kind of what Earle was saying about
the the time um, and the thoroughness that
Is required to even just get a book into the AOR corpus
The XML schema that we used wasn't full TEI--Textual Encoding Initiative, for those familiar with that--but it was close so
Underlines became a big time consuming thing some ways. It's just easier to hold up a physical book next to AOR and say
Compare them
or images
to get started rather than
The urge to put everything in to the database or the project
I think Matt might have some thoughts about the latter part of that question
Again, I think this is allied to how we expand, to how we get forward.
I will remember while we were planning the Dee
extension of this project--we started with Gabriel Harvey's books and then moved on to Dee--many happy days
sitting in a a library
with Earle and with Jaap pouring over
um, the the catalogue of these books and wondering what we could get hold of um,
And what we should have
and what was necessary to uh to get
um
I think we wanted to show a certain representative
um collection of these intellectual interests
um
To show a certain amount of heavily annotated books likely annotated books. So it was actually quite targeted when we were putting that together
along with
Um then working out
Which repository libraries?
uh
Would be happy to work with us, uh on this
um, and then and and then
uh amending our plans
Uh to do that. So I think if we expanded the Dee thing there are
Negotiations, uh that have to happen intellectually
Are we?
Overextending our representation of this event these interests. Uh, and also
pragmatically
um
Does this is this repository in a position where it could give us?
access to these photographs
Or access to these books so that we could photograph them as we did for the Royal College. Uh,
of
War College here in London
Where we took their books in and photographed them for them? They're not having their own facilities to do so
um
Can we work through these pragmatic?
Practical questions, uh as well before we put them
online
um as for the the suggestion of helping out with paleography
Um, I I know and Jaap can remember as well I'm certain
Uh days where we were just emailing things back and forth to work them out. I'm sure that there might well be mistakes and hours
Um, and I will always be open to someone emailing and go
Are you sure about this?
I'm but on crowdsourcing as a way forward
Um, i'm not sure
how we would
Work that out. Although I do have you know
we we have talked to people on other projects who've done that built that into their workflow in some way such as obviously
the initiative at the Folger Shakespeare Library, but also at UCL and our
project to transcribe
Bentham, uh where we're going through all of Jeremy Bentham the 19th century philosopher's papers slowly
Transcribing all of them as well
Uh, and it does raise particular issues, I think
Of how successful those things can be as an open-ended project
I would also just add that there is an editorial
Kind of level to this where it's very difficult
to impose a kind of editorial control
Particularly over polyglot materials that I mean some of these books literally contain marginalia in French
Italian, Latin, English and sometimes Greek
And bringing different kinds of levels of expertise or facility
can be a challenge if you're trying to also create a
Edition of virtual edition as it were of some of these works
Uh, not only transcribing them, but obviously also encoding them
um and that requires access to um,
to software and to a
github repository
and the double and triple checking of people's transcriptions, which is actually an a part of the editorial process of AOR
What we're um, what i've mentioned with respect to the idea of the montan of of doing a single book
with
a massive amount of annotation
is that it once that work is done could a tertiary level of annotation be introduced to the
um
to the pedagogical context of taking the transcriptions taking the search function within an individual book and then sort of
activating that and interpreting for example, one of the essays within a graduate seminar or a master class over a week or two and then
Finding a way to integrate the insights and interpretations of lots of different people with different backgrounds
Into it yet another feature of the viewer, um that may introduce a level of engagement
That could be not only productive in the classroom, but also productive of scholarship
Thank you so much. Um
I think that we are
Hitting time. We're a few minutes over
But unless there are any other questions then um i'd like to thank our panelists so very much for being with us
virtually
um
and
Thank all of our attendees for joining us and asking good questions and for sending them in advance, that was extremely helpful
Thanks a lot. So
Yes
Thank you again. And um, I think we're all ready to sign off. Bye. Bye
Thank you. Bye. Thank you. Goodbye
