http://www.methnet.ac.uk en Methnet Expert seminars MP3 files Arianna Ciula Methods Network Expert Seminars are a chance for experts in various fields to share their knowledge and participate in debates on the advanced use of ICT methods for research in the arts and humanities. These events and the resulting publications are central to the objectives of the Methods Network. Each Seminar is led by a Methods Network Associate Director or a specialist in the field. Each Expert Seminar examines specific methods in particular areas of each discipline, identifies current and future needs and issues which may be addressed in follow-up Workshops, Conferences and Seminars, or other activities supported by the Methods Network. Each Seminar either deals directly with individual academic disciplines, or explores issues potentially of relevance to a range of subjects. So far the Expert Seminars have covered the following disciplinary areas: Linguistics (Word frequency and keyword extraction), Music (Modern methods for musicology), Literature (Text editing in a digital environment), History and Archaeology (Virtual history and archaeology), Visual Arts (From pigments to pixels), Practice-based Arts (' Blue skies and signing rings'; digital technologies and jewellery of the future) The AHRC Methods Network methnet@kcl.ac.uk John Kirk (Queen's University Belfast, Northern Ireland) Expert Seminar on Linguistics (Word Frequency and Keyword Extraction), Lancaster University, 8 September 2005. Hosted by Tony McEnery, Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University. This paper will not be concerned with statistical treatments of word frequency beyond percentage distributions and relativized frequencies per thousands or millions of words. Its primary concern will be with frequency as a property of data, adopting a critical look at statements such as 'each text comprises 2,000 words'. It will be concerned with words as tokens, types and lemmatised types; the range of functions and meanings of words; and words and lexemes. It will consider words of low frequency as well as of high frequency. In its critical section, it will ask whether word frequencies are self-explanatory or need explanation, and whether approximation is as useful as precision. It refers to a range of well-known corpora of English as well as the three corpora which I have compiled: Corpus of Dramatic Texts in Scots, the Northern Ireland Transcribed Corpus of Speech (NITCS), and the Irish component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-Ireland). This paper will not be concerned with statistical treatments of word frequency beyond percentage distributions and relativized frequencies per thousands or millions of words. Its primary concern will be with frequency as a property of data, adopting a critical look at statements such as 'each text comprises 2,000 words'. It will be concerned with words as tokens, types and lemmatised types; the range of functions and meanings of words; and words and lexemes. It will consider words of low frequency as well as of high frequency. In its critical section, it will ask whether word frequencies are self-explanatory or need explanation, and whether approximation is as useful as precision. It refers to a range of well-known corpora of English as well as the three corpora which I have compiled: Corpus of Dramatic Texts in Scots, the Northern Ireland Transcribed Corpus of Speech (NITCS), and the Irish component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-Ireland). http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk/redist/audio/eseminars/es01/es1_01.mp3 Wed, 16 Aug 2006 15:49:52 GMT 28:168 Clear word frequency, corpora, numbers , contextualization, replicability , orthographic, phonological, morphological, lexical, grammatical, onomastic , lexicographical. statistical, numeral, discourse David Hoover (New York University, USA) Expert Seminar on Linguistics (Word Frequency and Keyword Extraction), Lancaster University, 8 September 2005. Hosted by Tony McEnery, Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University. The availability of large corpora and of electronic texts has renewed interest in the venerable topic of word frequency. Innovations in analytic techniques and in the ways word frequencies are selected for analysis have also been instrumental. Authorship attribution and statistical stylistics have, until recently, typically been based upon fewer than the 100 most frequent words of a corpus. These words – almost exclusively function words – are attractive because they are so frequent that they account for most of the running words of a text, and because such words have been assumed to be especially resistant to intentional manipulation by an author, so that their frequencies should reveal authorial habits that remain relatively constant across a variety of texts. http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk/redist/audio/eseminars/es01/es1_02.mp3 Wed, 16 Aug 2006 15:49:02 GMT 29:09 Clear word frequency, authorship, statistical stylistics, style, corpora, Victorian novels, contemporary American poetry Mark Davies (Brigham Young University, USA) Expert Seminar on Linguistics (Word Frequency and Keyword Extraction), Lancaster University, 8 September 2005. Hosted by Tony McEnery, Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University. The use of relational databases that are composed of the frequency of n-gram in a given corpus allows users to quickly and easily examine word frequency. http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk/redist/audio/eseminars/es01/es1_03.mp3 Sun, 27 Aug 2006 18:35:23 GMT 26:801 Clear mega-corpora, relational database, n-gram, integration, frequency, slot-based queries, collocates Christian Kay (University of Glasgow, Scotland) Expert Seminar on Linguistics (Word Frequency and Keyword Extraction), Lancaster University, 8 September 2005. Hosted by Tony McEnery, Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University. The Historical Thesaurus of English (HTE) is a semantic index to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) supplemented by Old English materials published separately in A Thesaurus of Old English (TOE). Word senses are organised in a hierarchy of categories and sub-categories, with up to fourteen levels of delicacy. The material is held in a database and first steps towards Internet publication are being taken by an AHRC ICT Strategy Project creating searches for use in a range of humanities disciplines. The main problem which besets searching historical texts is that of variable spelling – the further one goes back in time, the worse it gets. Similar problems affect texts in non-standard varieties, as experience of the Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech (SCOTS) demonstrates. Dictionary headwords lemmatize common variants but by no means comprehensively; an alternative may be a rule-based system which predicts possible spellings. Corpora have further problems in ambiguity caused by homonymy and polysemy. The paper will suggest ways of addressing these problems. http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk/redist/audio/eseminars/es01/es1_04.mp3 Sun, 27 Aug 2006 18:35:26 GMT 25:968 Clear word frequency, semantic, ambiguity, variable spelling, corpora, homonymy, polysemy, text analysis, non-standard language Mike Scott (University of Liverpool, UK ) Expert Seminar on Linguistics (Word Frequency and Keyword Extraction), Lancaster University, 8 September 2005. Hosted by Tony McEnery, Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University. What are the tolerable limits of similarity between a reference corpus and a node text for the generation of a useful set of keywords? There is of course considerable subjectivity in the notion of usefulness, which will vary according to research goals which cannot in general be predicted with certainty. Nevertheless, the aim here is to explore the ways in which the similarity between reference corpus and node text varies on certain important dimensions, such as size in tokens, similarity of text-type, similarity of historical period, similarity of subject-matter. This paper starts from the formula proposed by Berber Sardinha (2004: 101-3) which suggests that the larger the reference corpus, the more keywords will be detected, and his formula for predicting the number of keywords produced with a given text and reference corpus. It also considers his recommendation that a reference corpus should be about five times the size of the node text. Using a series of reference corpora, the paper explores keywords results in relation to specific texts. The aim is to identify not, as one might imagine, the characteristics of the good reference corpus, but the limits defining a poor one, since in many cases, e.g. the analysis of a dead language or a restricted corpus, the chance of accessing a good reference corpus is slim. The study represents work in progress and much further work needs to be done to confirm and develop its preliminary findings. http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk/redist/audio/eseminars/es01/es1_05.mp3 Sun, 27 Aug 2006 18:35:32 GMT 20:119 Clear keywords, reference corpus, node text, aboutness Tony McEnery (University of Lancaster, UK) Expert Seminar on Linguistics (Word Frequency and Keyword Extraction), Lancaster University, 8 September 2005. Hosted by Tony McEnery, Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University. In this paper I will use an analytical framework based around the use of keywords to investigate the moral panic encoded in the writings of Mary Whitehouse in the 1960s and 70s in Britain. In doing so, I will be using keywords as a way of focusing on the aboutness of the moral panic, and a study of patterns of colligation and collocation to explore convergence in these texts. Subsequently, I will consider the issue of bad language and consider how bad language was represented by Whitehouse’s organisation VALA (Viewers and Listeners’ Association). The paper will consider throughout how the moral panic in the corpus of Whitehouse’s writings compares to that in the writings of the Societies for the Reformation of Manners, religious organisations in the seventeenth century which opposed bad language (among other behaviours). The point of departure for all aspects of this investigation is the question of moral panics and the use of keywords to explore them. http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk/redist/audio/eseminars/es01/es1_06.mp3 Sun, 27 Aug 2006 18:35:31 GMT 24:048 Clear keywords, key keywords, aboutness, colligation, collocation, convergence, moral panic. Mary Whitehouse, censorship, media, bad language Paul Baker (University of Lancaster, UK) Expert Seminar on Linguistics (Word Frequency and Keyword Extraction), Lancaster University, 8 September 2005. Hosted by Tony McEnery, Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University. A small corpus of 130,000 words consisting of debates on fox hunting which took place in the British House of Commons in 2002 and 2003 was collected and then subjected to a keywords analysis. The corpus was split into two sub-corpora depending on whether speakers argued for or against fox hunting to be banned. The sub-corpora were compared together, resulting in separate keyword lists for each. Proper nouns and words relating to the debate's context (parliament) were removed from the lists prior to analysis. This paper examines a number of keywords in detail, using concordance analyses, in order to identify different discourses (ways of looking at the world) that speakers access in order to persuade others of their point of view. I also explore additional ways of using keyness to find salient language differences in texts, for example, by looking at key clusters and key semantic categories as well as comparing the whole corpus to a reference corpus of general British English. http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk/redist/audio/eseminars/es01/es1_07.mp3 Sun, 27 Aug 2006 18:35:22 GMT 22:782 Clear fox-hunting, House of Commons, keywords, keyness, corpus, corpora, concordance, discourses, semantic, debate, saliency, frequency, aboutness Dawn Archer (University of Central Lancashire, UK) Expert Seminar on Linguistics (Word Frequency and Keyword Extraction), Lancaster University, 8 September 2005. Hosted by Tony McEnery, Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University. Researchers increasingly use corpus linguistic methodologies such as keyword analysis to study Shakespeare (see, for example, Culpeper 2002) or are studying Shakespeare from the perspective of cognitive metaphor theory (see, for example, Freeman 1995). This paper demonstrates how the UCREL Semantic Annotation Scheme, a software program for automatic, dictionary-based content analysis, may be used to add a further dimension to both approaches, by systematically taking account of the semantic relationships between keywords via an investigation of key domains, and providing empirical support for some of the love-related conceptual metaphors put forward by cognitive metaphor theorists. Specifically, we use the UCREL Semantic Annotation Scheme to explore the concept of love in three Shakespearean love-tragedies (Othello, Anthony and Cleopatra and Romeo and Juliet) and three Shakespearean love-comedies (A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Two Gentlemen of Verona and As You Like It). Our approach is to initially determine how love is presented in the two datasets and then highlight any resemblances between our findings and the conceptual metaphors identified by cognitive metaphor theorists. We also discuss how the semantic field of love co-occurs with different domains in the two datasets, and assess the implications this has on our understanding of love as a concept. This research builds on Jonathan Culpeper’s work on keywords in Shakespeare, using Wordsmith Tools (Culpeper 2002); Paul Rayson’s comparisons of keyword and key domain analysis (Rayson 2003); and Dawn Archer and Paul Rayson’s work on the identification of key domains in refugee literature, using USAS (Archer and Rayson forthcoming). http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk/redist/audio/eseminars/es01/es1_08.mp3 Sun, 27 Aug 2006 18:35:31 GMT 24:048 Clear love, Shakespeare, love-tragedies, love-comedies, conceptual metaphors, keywords, key domains, corpus, semantic annotation, collocates, quantitative, qualitative, aboutness, content analysis Ian Gregory (Queens University Belfast, Northern Ireland) Expert Seminar on History and Archaeology (Virtual History and Archaeology), Humanities Research Institute, Sheffield University, 19-21 April 2006. Hosted by Mark Greengrass, Sheffield University. The study of long-term change in population has long been hindered by the complexity of the available data which is published for areas where boundaries change, making long-term comparisons impossible. GIS allows us significantly to address this problem by uniting the attribute data (which tells us what was happening) with spatial data (that tells us where it was happening). As we have data for many points in time we also know when it was happening. Even within this comprehensive database, exploring change through all three of these components remains difficult. This paper explores approaches to this problem by studying changing patterns of infant mortality in England and Wales from the mid-nineteenth century. It shows how methodological innovations can gain new insight from data that has been extensively studied for over a century. http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk/redist/audio/eseminars/es04/es4_01.mp3 Tues, 07 Nov 2006 18:35:31 GMT 26:567 Clear GIS, history, population, infant mortality Paul Cripps (University of Southampton, UK) Expert Seminar on History and Archaeology (Virtual History and Archaeology), Humanities Research Institute, Sheffield University, 19-21 April 2006. Hosted by Mark Greengrass, Sheffield University. GIS has undoubtedly made a significant impact on the archaeological discipline; its use in cultural resource management, development control, and research contexts in the public and private sectors in the last decade has greatly improved quality of and access to data whilst at the same time providing new opportunities for researchers and other end-users, including the general public. In the field of prehistoric landscape studies, considerable work has been successfully undertaken, demonstrating the benefits of such techniques as visibility analysis. At the same time, there has been an improvement both in availability and quality of source data combined with an increase in available computer processing power to work with such increasingly large and complex datasets. Having said this, the use of GIS in archaeological scenarios is often limited by its two-dimensional Cartesian, predominantly static view of the world. This paper will examine some of the ongoing developments in the broader field of spatial technologies in archaeology aimed at tackling some of these issues as relating to landscape studies. This will include applications of novel forms of GIS-based visibility analysis including dynamic and probabilistic viewsheds, use of laser-scan data for landscape analysis, the use of three-dimensional applications such as 3D Studio for analytical purposes in the field of visibility analysis and the potential for back-end database structures and middleware which facilitate temporal reasoning about spatial objects in all of our cultural heritage systems. http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk/redist/audio/eseminars/es04/es4_04.mp3 Tues, 07 Nov 2006 18:35:31 GMT 20:315 Clear GIS, archaeology, 3D, database, middleware Andrew Prescott (University of Sheffield, UK) Expert Seminar on History and Archaeology (Virtual History and Archaeology), Humanities Research Institute, Sheffield University, 19-21 April 2006. Hosted by Mark Greengrass, Sheffield University. As recently as 1979, the eminent medieval historian G. O. Sayles declared that administrative records provide the only means by which historians can escape the ‘uniformed tittle tattle’ of literary sources such as chronicles and newspapers. However, historians using administrative records have in recent years become increasingly aware that these records are also complex textual productions, frequently as artificial in their discourse and deceptive as literary texts, and by no means more objective because of their ‘official’ provenance. As V. H. Galbraith has forcefully pointed out, ‘official’ records are as much literary productions as conventional ‘literary’ sources. The exploration of the textual layers of administrative documents is a complex matter, since knowledge of scribal practice and procedure in the production of such documents is at present limited. One tool which can be very valuable in developing a critical approach to administrative records is the digital image. This will be demonstrated with reference to records of the suppression of the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. In order to progress such studies, an essential requirement is an editorial environment which allows editorial text and commentary to be integrated more closely with digital images. The Edition Production and Presentation Technology, developed by Professor Kevin Kiernan of the University of Kentucky, provides such an environment. The application of this technology to administrative records will be demonstrated. Such an approach is not only relevant to medieval materials; its importance in analysis of modern texts will also be considered. http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk/redist/audio/eseminars/es04/es4_05.mp3 Tues, 07 Nov 2006 18:35:31 GMT 34:548 Clear history, digital imaging, administrative records, peasant's revolt Mark Greengrass, Fabio Ciravegna (University of Sheffield, UK) Expert Seminar on History and Archaeology (Virtual History and Archaeology), Humanities Research Institute, Sheffield University, 19-21 April 2006. Hosted by Mark Greengrass, Sheffield University. This paper examines the application of Semantic Web technologies to the mining of historical data in distributed data-sets. The potential of such applications is clear. The problems, however, arise from working in a domain where ontology construction is constrained by the malleability of many of its conceptual frameworks. Using the experience gained so far from the Armadillo Project, which applies these technologies to distributed data-sets related to eighteenth-century London, this paper examines the extent to which these problems are likely to be overcome, so that the research dividend from data-mining can be realized. http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk/redist/audio/eseminars/es04/es4_08.mp3 Tues, 08 Nov 2006 18:35:31 GMT 28:281 Clear data mining, semantic web, ontology, eighteenth century, london Tim Hitchcock (University of Hertfordshire, UK) Expert Seminar on History and Archaeology (Virtual History and Archaeology), Humanities Research Institute, Sheffield University, 19-21 April 2006. Hosted by Mark Greengrass, Sheffield University. Most historians are the love-sick victims of manuscript. They sit, wrapt and lonely, communing with dusty papers and noisy parchment. If they are good, they use three or four archives and promiscuously sample the ideas and personalities of a range of institutions, but most are more monogamous than this and focus their every emotion on the clerk who constructed their archive. As a result, most history is driven by archival structures. We give greater weight to the role of governments and armies, parishes and hospitals, precisely because they form coherent archives. At the same time, we denigrate loose communities and informal connections, because they do not speak with a single voice. However, as it becomes ever more possible to search across archives, to hear other voices quietly whispering in the background, to mechanically combine the whispers of a thousand individuals into a stentorian shout that can be heard over the august tones of the clerk, the way we do history will change. This paper will suggest that our models of social order and change give unnecessary privilege to the institutions that by happenstance or good luck or good order, created the archives in the first place. It will suggest that the reconfiguration of the archives through digitization will radically re-invent history as a genre and as a social practise. As a generation of historians, we are faced with the challenge of removing the inky hand of the manuscript clerk from up our backsides, in order to engage in a broader, more promiscuous, and ultimately more humane, conversation with the past. http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk/redist/audio/eseminars/es04/es4_09.mp3 Tues, 08 Nov 2006 18:35:31 GMT 28:212 Clear manuscript, archive, digital searching Caroline Bowden (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK) Expert Seminar on History and Archaeology (Virtual History and Archaeology), Humanities Research Institute, Sheffield University, 19-21 April 2006. Hosted by Mark Greengrass, Sheffield University. This software, developed mainly for use by social scientists, has been little used by historians to date; however closer examination of its potential would suggest that, with some adaptation, it has much to offer. This paper will focus on key stages of the project, which has been running for the past two and a half years, to consider the experience of using CAQDAS and its implications for historians. The Health of the Cecils (c.1550–c.1660) project based at Royal Holloway, funded by the Wellcome Trust for three years (Sep 2003–Sep 2006) is studying the experience of health care in one of the great aristocratic households of early modern England. The study extends to the wider family and the household as well as their wider political and social contacts. The family has been chosen for a number of reasons: extensive collections of archives survive, particularly for the first two generations in the study; members of the family suffered significantly from several medical conditions including gout, scoliosis, and agues on which they sought and were offered advice on many occasions. They were in a position to spend very large amounts of money on health care, often employing the same physicians and apothecaries as the Royal Family. The equivalent of £315,956.17 was spent on treatment at Bath for Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury in the period just before he died in 1612. At the same time the Cecils received advice and offers of remedies from family and friends. For example, Mary Countess of Shrewsbury sent Robert Cecil her quintessence of honey and laudanum and the Bishop of London sent William Cecil advice on how to treat his painful back. Their political status meant that physicians from other countries, including Germany, wrote offering medical services in return for Cecil support in helping them to establish a career in England. The Cecil households consisted of very large groups of servants, stewards, wards and for the third generation living at Hatfield, children. Account books for the seventeenth century include evidence of health care costs as part of the overall budget. As well as illnesses, other health experiences relating specifically to age or gender such as childbirth, ageing and death appear in the letters. The manuscripts offer a significant opportunity to study the experience of health care over an extended period of time when attitudes to medicine and medical knowledge were changing substantially. The main manuscript collections studied are the Lansdowne Papers held at the British Library, the Salisbury Papers still owned by Lord Salisbury at Hatfield House, where they have been since the collection was first formed, and State Papers. Evidence of health care has been found in a wide variety of documents including bills, accounts, medicinal and culinary receipts, medical reports and letters. In this paper, I examine the problems and potential research conclusions to be gained from applying CAQDAS to this kind of historical material. http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk/redist/audio/eseminars/es04/es4_10.mp3 Tues, 08 Nov 2006 18:35:31 GMT 34:128 Clear CAQDAS, healthcare, Cecil family, Catherine Hardman (University of York, UK) Expert Seminar on History and Archaeology (Virtual History and Archaeology), Humanities Research Institute, Sheffield University, 19-21 April 2006. Hosted by Mark Greengrass, Sheffield University. It has long been recognized that the information flow between fieldworkers, local government archaeologists, national heritage agencies and the rest of the community could be improved. The Online Access to the Index of Archaeological Investigations (OASIS) project aims to use IT to ease the flow of information from those undertaking fieldwork to the wider archaeological community. The OASIS system captures the data, holds it in a database, and then allows different heritage professionals to access it. This paper will describe that process, the ways in which the project has progressed since its launch in 2004 and the way in which XML schemas have been developed in order to facilitate the easy transfer of data from the OASIS database to a variety of different databases across the curatorial community. http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk/redist/audio/eseminars/es04/es4_13.mp3 Tues, 08 Nov 2006 18:35:31 GMT 17:445 Clear Oasis project, archaeology, national heritage, fieldwork, XML Richard Beacham (King’s College London, UK) Expert Seminar on History and Archaeology (Virtual History and Archaeology), Humanities Research Institute, Sheffield University, 19-21 April 2006. Hosted by Mark Greengrass, Sheffield University. Scholars employing 3D visualization both as a tool and an outcome of their research need to determine how to document the process and the presentation of results in such a manner that other scholars can fully understand and rigorously evaluate them, thereby enabling such methods to acquire greater recognition and standing in the scholarly community, and driving up standards of such work throughout the academic and cultural heritage sectors. A major challenge for those working in this area is that we are producing visual "texts" that we and our colleagues in the scholarly community do not yet fully understand how to "read". As part of its work under the AHRC ICT methodologies initiative, the Kings Visualization Lab recently hosted, together with the EU Network of Excellence, EPOCH, a symposium which aimed significantly to assist in providing the basis for future standards and methodologies in the field, both for enhancing the quality of the actual modelling process, and for establishing minimum levels of documentation necessary for users critically to assess visualization-based research processes. A major objective is to identify and disseminate the choices and decisions that occur during the complex process of modelling, which may include the reasons for choices made, as well as indications of possible alternative hypotheses. KVL have coined the term "paradata" to designate this process. The symposium produced a draft document, the "London Charter", which identifies a number of key guidelines and principles, relating to such areas as subject communities; aims and methods; the use of sources; transparency requirements; documentation; standards; sustainability; and accessibility. This presentation will discuss this initiative and briefly illustrate the type of issues it addresses. http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk/redist/audio/eseminars/es04/es4_15.mp3 Tues, 08 Nov 2006 18:35:31 GMT 45:051 Clear 3D visualization, documentation, King's Visualization Lab, EPOCH, paradata, London Charter, standards Anna Bentkowska-Kafel (Courtauld Institute of Art, London, UK) Expert Seminar on History and Archaeology (Virtual History and Archaeology), Humanities Research Institute, Sheffield University, 19-21 April 2006. Hosted by Mark Greengrass, Sheffield University. The CRSBI (www.crsbi.ac.uk) is an evolving electronic archive of stone sculpture from the period c.1050–c.1200. Over 5,000 sites featuring Romanesque sculpture have been identified, 70 per cent of which have been recorded so far by the project's volunteer fieldworkers. 700+ reports have been published online on the project's website. The reports vary in scope and range from a single object report illustrated with a handful of images to a book-length entry for Ely Cathedral. The project involves an Access database as a project management tool and a repository of data, mostly image metadata, XML-encoding of site reports, digital photography, digitization of prints and negatives, image editing and processing for archiving and online publication, and Perl scripts for data linking. In this paper, I intend to compare the methods and solutions adopted by this project with others of this kind, and to discuss how a complex digital resource like this is likely (when completed) to enhance the study of Romanesque sculpture. http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk/redist/audio/eseminars/es04/es4_16.mp3 Tues, 08 Nov 2006 18:35:31 GMT 32:274 Clear CRSBI, Romanesque Sculpture, Microsoft Access, database, XML, digital photography, Perl Meg Twycross (University of Lancaster, UK) Expert Seminar on History and Archaeology (Virtual History and Archaeology), Humanities Research Institute, Sheffield University, 19-21 April 2006. Hosted by Mark Greengrass, Sheffield University. Manuscripts have a multiplicity of ways of becoming illegible, ranging from the accidental—wear and tear, mice, immersion, incineration—to the intentional, malicious or would-be benign. There is an equally wide range of (non-invasive) ways of recovering their readings, often developed for forensic science. Some techniques have been around professionally for some time, but in the last few years ‘virtual restoration’ may be carried out by anyone with a decent PC, a willingness to experiment with Adobe Photoshop, and the means of acquiring high-resolution scans, preferably taken under a range of light conditions. My case study describes some techniques I have deployed on images of a manuscript in York City Archives which has suffered more than its fair share of the depredations of time, accident, and archivists’ repair. It is also a heavily-layered palimpsest, a patchwork of erasures and alterations by the medieval clerical staff of the City Council. One task is to recover what lies under the erasures, and to identify the hands which made the alterations. This form of non-destructive manuscript archaeology treats each level of text as significant, as a stage in the historical process which it records. http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk/redist/audio/eseminars/es04/es4_17.mp3 Tues, 08 Nov 2006 18:35:31 GMT 32:266 Clear manuscript, restoration, Adobe Photoshop, high-resolution scanning, palimpsest, manuscript archaeology