The Importance of Page Design

Really enjoyed today’s workshop on scholarly annotation organised by the Institute of English Studies. Because of other commitments I was only able to attend the first half, but it was a great opportunity to hear about and ponder the challenges faced by editors of scholarly editions of texts.

The first paper was by Dr Valerie Rumbold (University of Birmingham), and discussed her work to render The Dunciad in Four Books (1743) teachable to modern undergraduates. She gave a brief history of how she came to edit the Longman Annotated Text of it, after having claimed at the start of her career that the capabilities of the web to provide hypertext editions would render print editions obsolete. Thank goodness for the rest of us that (a) she was wrong in this youthful assertion and (b) she was willing to reconsider her opinion and embark on the task of producing the Longman edition.

Dr Rumbold spoke clearly and concisely on the decision-making processes she faced as an editor, working out what requires annotation in order to contextualise and elucidate the text for the primary audience of undergrads while remaining useful for Pope scholars. As is the case with any full paper given by an expert presenter, there was lots of food for thought – too much to do justice to all of it in a brief blog article.

One point that was beautifully illustrated by Dr Rumbold was the importance of page design in communicating the text to the reader. Users of the earlier Twickenham edition by James Sutherland had reported that it was challenging to identify the modern editor’s annotations (as opposed to Pope’s own). In the Longman text, a swelled rule was used to indicate the end of Pope’s work (above) and Rumbold’s (below the rule). A modern font was also used to set the modern commentary. A page of the original 1743 Dunciad is shown on p. viii of the Longman text, which is available in the “look inside” preview on Amazon, “showing the complexity of the original layout and typography”. Dr Rumbold mentioned in passing that Pope used every bit of print technology available to him. She also discussed the irony with which she and other Pope editors have to feel comfortable –   knowing that they are involved in the kind of book-making activity Pope satirised in some of his work.

Now I want to go back to The Dunciad and really contemplate the page design of the different editions. Future Historical Bibliography students should look out for a class activity based on this … with full credit to today’s workshop for pointing out this excellent case study. Browsing around tonight, I’ve noticed Katherine Mannheimer’s study Print, Visuality, and Gender in Eighteenth Century Satire (Routledge, 2011). Fingers poised over the “buy with 1-click” button on a well-known online bookstore …

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Image:

Alexander Pope (Creative Commons, limited non-commercial use)

by George White, sold by Samuel Sympson, after Sir Godfrey Kneller, Bt
mezzotint, 1732 (1722)
13 7/8 in. x 9 3/4 in. (352 mm x 247 mm) paper size
Given by Sir Herbert Henry Raphael, 1st Bt, 1916
Reference Collection
NPG D19286

Ambassadors of the Book

Really proud to have a chapter in Ambassadors of the Book: Competences and Training for Heritage Librarians (De Gruyter, 2012).  Edited by Raphaële Mouren, it is based on conference papers from the IFLA Rare Books and Manuscripts Section Midterm in February.

Here’s my abstract:

Experiential Learning in Historical Bibliography

Summary: This paper explores the impact of practical experience on the learning of Historical Bibliography among students on UCL’s MA in Library & Information Studies (MA LIS) and MA in Archives and Records Management. It finds that practical activities not only equip students for the practical elements of rare books librarianship but also aid in the higher order learning required to understand the History of the Book and the book as object.

Background: Having been taught for a number of years by guest lecturers, the module in Historical Bibliography was brought back in-house in 2009-10, with the stipulation that a higher proportion of teaching time be spent in practical activities. In 2009-10 collation and cataloguing practice were reintroduced and the practical assessed work which constitutes 30% of the overall mark was changed from a ‘pop quiz’ to the production of a quasi-facsimile. This ensured a constructive alignment between the cataloguing undertaken in classwork and the assessment – quasi-facsimile being not as detailed as a full cataloguing record, but detailed enough to test observation and accuracy skills, and also indicating students’ ability to understand the quasi-facsimile format used most frequently in enumerative bibliographies and other reference books for rare books cataloguing. Student satisfaction criteria were met, and comments were received from employers in the rare books sector that graduates from the 2009-10 programme met their expectations.

Purpose of research: Having put a successful teaching programme in place, in 2010-11 the focus of the module coordinator has been on understanding the learning undertaken by students as part of the further enhancement of the module for 2011-12: as Dewey and later educationalists have argued, there can be a considerable gap between an educator’s teaching aims and the students’ learning experience. Further, from 2011-12 the module will be open to students on UCL’s new MA in Digital Humanities (MA DH). Whereas current and former students aim to work in libraries and archives, students on the MA DH have a wider range of career aspirations. A consideration of the relevance of the practicals for overall student learning seemed timely.

Methodology: Paper-based survey of 31 (100%) course participants at the end of the module in December 2010, online survey in April 2011 which 16 students (51.61%) and interviews with 7 students (22.58%) in Summer 2011 . Findings: Although, predictably, students reported across the board that practicals aided their understanding of and proficiency in practical rare books curatorial and documentation practices, they also reported an increased understanding of theoretical concepts and displayed the higher order learning Bloom described in his taxonomy of learning.

Conclusions: Practical activities such as book handling, bibliographic description and collation, as well as being key competencies in their own right, aid the learning of History of the Book.

Digital Bibliography

 

The latest issue of Library Review presents, as editor Judith Broady-Preston writes, “a range of papers from the best of the current crop of postgraduates, based on their theses and dissertations, showcasing the work of new entrants to the profession and providing readable access to cutting edge research.”

Alongside papers from City University, Loughborough, Ottawa and others, we have a calling card for the kind of research alumni of the Historical Bibliography module (INSTG012) are producing. As Elizabeth McCarthy, Sarah Wheale and I put it in our article, such work “exists at the nexus of three disciplines: librarianship, bibliography and digital humanities (utilising computing in the pursuit of humanities research” (p. 562) and, I would argue, is at the forefront of the nascent field of Digital Bibliography – the utilisation of Digital Humanities techniques within the older discipline of Bibliography. In my chapter in the recently published Digital Humanities in Practice, I discuss the use of technology by bibliographers and rare books librarians, and the two case studies in the chapter – by H.R. Woudhuysen and Marieke Van Delft – are available online.

The current paper, ‘Early Modern Oxford Bindings in Twenty-first Century Markup‘ is based on Elizabeth McCarthy’s MA LIS dissertation research, and, we hope, represents an appropriate balance between the technical skills required to enhance 17th century binders’ records with TEI and the bibliographic and subject knowledge necessary to appreciate the value of the pilot study Liz conducted within the wider context of bindings research and library collection management in the early modern period. Our presentation of the significance to the Bodleian of the manuscript Binders Book that is the object at the centre of the work was enhanced by Rare Books Curator Sarah Wheale’s contribution. As a lecturer, I hope that our assertion is true, that the project provides “an example of the kind of work that can be undertaken by library employees as part of their graduate studies, which allows for innovation and the incorporation of new research methodologies within traditional library projects.” (p. 562).  Certainly, in the case of the Binders Book in TEI,

The researcher [Liz] was able to step outside the constraints of an existing library management system and encoding standard (MARC) and think about the scholarly concerns of analytical and descriptive bibliography: how could the entries in the BB best be represented? She was able to consider specialist users with an interest in Oxford bindings, and to build a resource with their needs in mind … (p. 573).

Melissa Terras has written elsewhere about the choices academics make when they decide to co-author a paper with a student or former student, and the inherent ethical considerations – principally the contribution that the academic makes to the work. This article not only is a terrific achievement on Liz’s part, but also the first of a little clutch of publications – some solo-authored and a couple written with Hist Bib alumni during or after their time studying at UCL – that sets out my wares as a Digital Bibliographer and a supervisor of Digital Bibliographers. As such, I’m delighted that Liz’s MA LIS research is first out of the publication box; that it’s representing UCL in Library Review‘s issue ‘Showcasing Postgraduate Research’; and that it’s come out right in the middle of our recruitment season for the MA LIS and MA DH. Students and prospective students with an interest in cataloguing need not worry, though, cataloguing research and supervision is, and will always be, equally core to my practice.

I’ll link through to Liz’s own blog on the article when it goes live, and, for those of you without online access to Library Review, copies of the authors’ final text will be available as soon as is possible (and legal) on the Oxford and UCL institutional repositories.

References

Broady-Preston, J. (2012). Showcasing postgraduate research. Library Review. 61 (8/9). Full-text available at http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?issn=0024-2535&volume=61&issue=8&articleid=17065501&show=html

McCarthy, E., Welsh, A., & Wheale, S. (2012). Early modern Oxford bindings in twenty-first century markup. Library Review, 61 (8/9), 561-576 .DOI: 10.1108/00242531211292079

Terras, M. (2011). Computer games and author lists. Melissa Terras’s Blog, 25 November 2011. Available at http://melissaterras.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/computer-games-and-author-lists.html

Van Delft, M. (2012). Case study: Watermarks in paper: four related online projects. In C. Warwick, M. Terras, & J. Nyhan (Eds.), Digital Humanities in practice. London: Facet. Full-text available at http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/dh-in-practice/chapter-7/

Welsh, A. (2012). Historical Bibliography in the digital world. In C. Warwick, M. Terras, & J. Nyhan (Eds.), Digital Humanities in practice (pp. 139-165). London: Facet. Retrieved from http://www.facetpublishing.co.uk/title.php?id=7661

Woudhuysen, H.R. (2012). Case study: The Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts, 1450-1700. In C. Warwick, M. Terras, & J. Nyhan (Eds.), Digital Humanities in practice. London: Facet. Full-text available at http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/dh-in-practice/chapter-7/