Presentation to Early Modern Digital Agendas at Folger Shakespeare Library 2015

2. Proceedings in the court of King’s Bench against Joanna, wife of John Ferrer
of Rochester, accused of participating in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381:
burning John of Gaunt’s palace at the Savoy and plundering it:
London, The National Archives, KB 27/482 rex m. 39d

3. aalt.law.uh.edu

4. Recorda file from the Court of King’s Bench, containing copies of charges and
evidence for trials in that court, 1382-3

5. File indictments against rebels in Kent: note how the many interlineations and
corrections reflect the process of interrogation and compilation: London, The
National Archives, KB 9/43 mm. 15-19

7. Sir Robert Cotton (1571-1631)

8. Experimental image of fragment of an Old English life of St Mary of Egypt,
London, British Library, Cotton MS. Otho B x, f. 54v, taken with a Roche
Kontron digital camera under ultra-violet light in 1993.

9. An unstable text: London, British Library, Cotton MS
Vitellius A.xv, Beowulf [even the foliation is disputed: you
can choose between 179r or 182 r]

10. Imaging of the Beowulf manuscript using fibre optic backlighting to reveal letters and
words concealed by nineteenth-century conservation work, from Electronic Beowulf
3.0, edited by Kevin S. Kiernan

11. Two sets of transcripts made for
the Danish antiquary Thorkelin,
now in the Royal Library
Copenhagen, compared with the
original manuscript

12. Electronic Beowulf edition with access to translation and metrics tool

14. A conjectural restoration of lost text that doesn’t fit the available space
A conjectural restoration of lost text that does fit the available space

15. British Library, London, Cotton MS. Vitellius F.v: chronicle of the
London provisioner Henry Machyn, 1550-1563

17. Only surviving engrossment of 1215 Magna Carta with a seal of King John
attached: damaged by fire in 1731 and then by conservation work in 1836

18. Hyperspectral imaging of the burnt Magna Carta, Cotton Ch. xiii.31a:
Principal Component Analysis of images under different light wavelengths
used to reconstruct damaged text

19. Visual and statistical analysis of scribal hands: digipal.eu
Like Visualising English Print intended to develop more transparent and
systematic scholarly discourse in humanities

20. Mitchell Whitelaw’s Generous Interfaces: illustrations from the Queenslander filtered
by colour and date
How far could a generous interface like this be used to realise the historian Vivian
Galbraith’s dream of an archivists’ history: ‘To name a century is to call up a mental
picture of the relevant records, the progress of history appearing as a slow pageant of
slowly changing records’

21. • ‘Digital transformations’ refers to (and misinterprets) the ‘disruptive’
models of Christensen
• The world is going through a kind of digital transformation as
everything — customers and equipment alike — becomes connected.
The connected world creates a digital imperative for companies. They
must succeed in creating transformation through technology, or they’ll
face destruction at the hands of their competitors that do.
MIT Sloan Management Review: Capgemini

22. Traditional music companies are expected to lose more
than 35 percent of value between 2003 and 2012, with
total revenues for the period expected to drop from US$12
billion to $8 billion. But at the same time, other parts of the
music ecosystem – more closely attuned to the customer –
experienced significant growth. This includes consumer
electronics companies that make digital music players,
concert promoters and producers of other live events.

30. Sidney Pollard on the Industrial
Revolution in Sheffield and Birmingham
“a visitor to the metalworking areas of
Birmingham or Sheffield in the mid
nineteenth-century would have found little to
distinguish them superficially from the same
industries a hundred years earlier. The men
worked as independent sub-contractors in
their own or rented workshops using their own
or hired equipment … These industries ..
were still waiting for their Industrial
Revolution”

32. up" by organized labor was a persistent problem to industrialpioneers (Crafts
1995).
Table 3 reportsthe results of a growth accounting exercise to quantify the
contributionof steam power to British economic growth. This shows that the
contributionmadetolaborproductivitygrowthwas trivialbefore 1830 andpeaked
Table 3. Steam'scontributionto Britishlaborproductivitygrowth1760-1910 (%peryear).
1760-1800 1800-1830 1830-1850 1850-1870 1870-1910
Capitaldeepening 0.004 0.02 0.16 0.20 0.15
Steamengines 0.004 0.02 0.02 0.06 0.09
Railways 0.14 0.12 0.01
Steamships 0.02 0.05
TFP 0.005 0.001 0.04 0.21 0.16
Steamengines 0.005 0.001 0.02 0.06 0.05
Railways 0.02 0.14 0.06
Steamships 0.01 0.05
Total O01 O02 O20 041 0.31
Source:Crafts(2004b).

33. William Holt Yates Titcomb, The Wealth of England, the
Bessemer Process of Making Steel (1895)
Sheffield Industrial Museums Trust

34. • Model of Newcomen Steam Engine
at the University of Glasgow repaired
by James Watt in 1765
• A plaything to start with, but
‘everything became science in his
hands’
• Not immediately disruptive
• Partnership with Boulton and move to
Birmingham was key

35. Steve Jobs: the tweaker of genius?

37. • Elizabeth Eisenstein: printing as the ‘unacknowledged revolution’
• Acting as an agent of change by fixing texts
• Proposed that standardized texts which had been fluid during periods
of oral and manuscript circulation
• By making settled versions of texts more readily available, their
contradictions and mistakes became more evident, so that readers
became more sceptical of authority
• Tom Pettit: oral culture was interrupted by Gutenberg's invention of the
printing press and the roughly 500 years of print dominance; a
dominance now being challenged in many ways by digital culture and
the orality it embraces
• Fluidity / fixity of text in different media has wider implications for our
understanding of technological and social change

38. • Objections to Eisenstein thesis by David McKitterick, Adrian Johns etc.
• Technological determinism which can be easily disproved: printing
press readily controlled in Russia, Ottoman Empire etc.
• Contemporary reactions to print do not correspond with those
suggested by Eisenstein: Donne and Marvell believed that manuscripts
might be more durable; the Duke of Newcastle considers the pen to be
more dangerous than the printing press, because less easily controlled
• McKitterick: treatise by Walter of Hilton copied in 1499 despite the fact
that owner possessed the book as printed by Wynkyn de Worde five
years previously
• McKitterick describes the slow process by which the distinction
between manuscripts and printed books in library shelving emerged
over a period of two hundred years

39. • The fundamental objection to Eisenstein’s thesis raised by Johns and
McKitterick is that it is difficult to find that print resulted in greater fixity of text
than the manuscript pecia system
• McKitterick: From the 42-line Bible onwards, thousands of books [printed in
the fifteenth century] exist with different type settings for reasons that are not
always clear but that always emanate from some adjustment found necessary
in the printing house or the binder’s bench … Of three dozen copies surviving
of Fust and Schoeffer’s Durandus (1459), no two copies are exactly alike.
• Shakespeare’s First Folio
• The errors in successive editions of the Canterbury Tales ‘reduced the text to a
state of chaos’ (Derek Pearsall)
• Jeremy Smith has recently discussed how early printed versions of lives of
Robert Bruce and William Wallace were reshaped by political and religious
considerations in successive editions, with Scotticisms ironed out

40. Fredson Bowers demonstrating the Hinman Collator (based on an
astronomical instrument called a blink comparator; digital blink
comparators have been used for analysis of Sloan sky survey).

41. • Ten copies survive of Bacon’s 1625 Essays.
Wright found that no two were the same.
• ‘The cause of these differences is not difficult to
conjecture. Corrections were made while the
sheets were being printed off, and the corrected
and uncorrected sheets were afterwards bound
up indiscriminately. In this way the number of
different copies might be multiplied to any
extent’.

42. STC (2nd ed.), 1148: reissue of STC 1147:
reproduced in EEBO from a copy in Cambridge
University Library. This is the copy used for the
TCP text, thereby fixing the text in this version.
STC 1147 added to EEBO from
copy in Henry Huntingdon
Library. Not in TCP. The original
microfilm on which EEBO was
based is misnumbered.

43. First edition of Vol. 3 of Tristram Shandy. 4,000 copies were printed, each
containing two marbled pages. No two marbled pages were alike, and
each two tipped in by hand.

45. Illustration from ECCO presentation of second volume of Hans Sloane’s
Voyage to Jamaica (1725). Illustration originally showed Indian cultivation of
cochineal.

47. 26
Single-composer prints (RISM A/I)
versus anthologies (RISM B/I),
1500-1700
0
200
400
600
800
1000
1200
1400
1600
1800
2000
1490s 1500s 1510s 1520s 1530s 1540s 1550s 1560s 1570s 1580s 1590s 1600s 1610s 1620s 1630s 1640s 1650s 1660s 1670s 1680s 1690s
AI BI

48. 30
Music printed in major centres,
1500-1649
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
140
160
1493
1503
1507
1511
1516
1520
1526
1530
1534
1538
1542
1546
1550
1554
1558
1562
1566
1570
1574
1578
1582
1586
1590
1594
1598
1602
1606
1610
1614
1618
1622
1626
1630
1634
1638
1642
1646
Venice
Rome
Paris
Nuremberg
London
Antwerp

49. 42
RISM A/I data
Palestrina: genres and places

51. Concluding questions
• What does this sense of continuity and continued affordance in such ‘revolutions’ as the
printing and industrial tell us about our approach to the ‘digital revolution’?
• We began by just seeking to make catalogues easier to update and to replace microfilm.
Should we be thinking of an endless development: ‘perpetual beta’?
• How does this affect the way we think of the tools we have developed - as subject to
constant interrogation and refinement?
• The relationship of text to its physical environment is a constant issue for the humanities
scholar. How is this explored in a computing environment which splits up information?
• Do we need to think of textual manipulation which operates both horizontally (across
many copies of the text) as well as vertically (across many texts)?
• Importance of data (and data cleaning) as the contribution of the humanities scholar?
• How will specialisms emerge within digital forms of scholarship? Are divisions based on
period, form and media the best ones?