Search Constraints
Search Results
-
Blog post
Calcutta to Bihar: an artist's journey
As part of the Visual Arts collections at the British Library, we hold an extensive collection of drawings, sketches and watercolours by amateur British and European artists who travelled through the Indian subcontinent. In 2015, we acquired a wonderful little sketchbook, measuring a mere 80 x 204 mm, by an...Roy, Malini
Hinduism, South Asia, art, visual arts, and Islam
-
Blog post
Adam Munni Ratna, a Buddhist monk in England in 1818
The Visual Arts section has recently acquired a portrait of Adam Sri Munni Ratna, a Singhalese Buddhist monk, who accompanied Sir Alexander Johnston (1775-1849) from Sri Lanka to England in 1817-18. Raised between Scotland, Madras and England, Johnston would be appointed as the President of the Council of Sri Lanka...Roy, Malini
religion, South Asia, art, visual arts, and Buddhism
-
Blog post
East India Company headquarters on Leadenhall Street
BBC One’s new period drama Taboo with actor Tom Hardy follows the story of James Keziah Delaney and his encounters with the East India Company. As the headquarters of the East India Company on Leadenhall Street was demolished in 1861 which is the present day site of Lloyds of London,...Roy, Malini
trade, South Asia, art, and visual arts
-
Blog post
Battle of Panipat 1761
Panipat, north of Delhi, is the location of three historic battles that shaped Mughal history. On the battlefield here in 1526, Babur defeated the Afghan Sultan of Delhi Ibrahim Lodi, which not only ended Lodi rule but gave the Mughals a stronger foothold on the subcontinent. The second battle took...Roy, Malini
Mughal India, South Asia, art, and visual arts
-
Blog post
William Beckford's albums on Hindu mythology
The English novelist and noted bibliophile William Beckford is highlighted in the British Library’s current exhibition ‘Terror and Wonder: the Gothic Imagination’. Exhibition curators (Greg Buzwell, Tanya Kirk and Tim Pye) feature Beckford’s Gothic novel Vathek as one of the earliest examples in this style. Beckford’s masterpiece expressed the ‘orientalist...Roy, Malini
Hinduism, religion, South Asia, exhibitions, and art
-
Blog post
‘White Mughal’ William Fullerton of Rosemount
Scottish surgeon William Fullerton (d.1805) from Rosemount enlisted with the East India Company and served in Bengal and Bihar from 1744-66. Developing close ties with locals, including the historian Ghulam Husain Khan, he remained in the region after retiring. Although his impressive linguistic abilities brought him attention, Fullerton’s prominence stems...Roy, Malini
Mughal India, language studies, South Asia, art, and visual arts
-
Blog post
The accident that befell Sir Donald Friell McLeod
Even if the attendant or station inspector had shouted ‘Mind the Gap’ (the phrase first used in 1969 at rail stations in the United Kingdom), it would not have prevented the horrific accident that befell Sir Donald Friell McLeod at the railway station at Gloucester Road in 1872. Arriving at...Roy, Malini
religion, South Asia, art, and visual arts
-
Blog post
Distinctive leg-of-mutton legs and fine jewels: a new display of Indian paintings in the Treasures of the British Library
Regular visitors to the Sir John Ritblat Gallery: Treasures of the British Library, may have encountered our recent display of Natural History drawings from India next to the entrance to the Magna Carta. From 8 March 2014, a new display of Indian paintings from the Visual Arts collection will be...Roy, Malini
Hinduism, South Asia, exhibitions, and art
-
Blog post
Mughal painting by Faizallah recently acquired by the British Library
In our recent exhibition and the accompanying publication Mughal India: Art, Culture and Empire, we featured paintings made in Delhi as well as at the Mughal province of Awadh during the 18th century. In March, we were able to add to our collection a splendid work by the artist Faizallah...Roy, Malini
Mughal India, South Asia, and art
-
Blog post
Marianne North's Visions of India
The British Library holds one of the richest archives of prints, drawings and photographs from South Asia. As Visual Arts Curator, exploring the vast collections and learning about the history of the works of art is just part of my daily activities. Although my previous blog posts have focused on...Roy, Malini
South East Asia, South Asia, and art
-
Blog post
Book of Affairs of Love
Karnama-i ‘Ishq (Book of affairs of love) by the Hindu poet Rai Anand Ram Mukhlis (d. 1751) is a romance in Persian on the afflictions of a young man’s heart and the challenges he faces for eternal love. The poetical narrative is derived from an existing Hindi literary work, the...Roy, Malini
Mughal India, South Asia, and art
-
Blog post
A farewell to the Mughals
British Library's exhibition Mughal India: Art, Culture and Empire closed on 2 April 2013. The last few days of the exhibition saw a record number of visitors! Since opening in November 2012, we have been surprised by the overwhelming response from the press and social media. We never anticipated being...Roy, Malini
science, Mughal India, and art
-
Blog post
Open and Engaged 2019: Open Access Week at the British Library
There are opportunities and benefits for growth in open access and open scholarship when experience and knowledge is shared between Higher Education Institutes and cultural heritage organisations. On Tuesday 22nd October, The British Library celebrated Open Access Week with the event, Open and Engaged - Forging links between higher education...Miles, Susan
-
Research report
Persistent Identifiers at the National Gallery
The National Gallery has conducted exploratory work related to persistent identifiers (PIDs) over the last number of years. This work has led to the development of a beta PID system based on URIs that is now transitioning to a production system. This case study provides an overview of their implementation...Madden, Frances ; Padfield, Joseph
-
Research report
Persistent Identifiers at the British Library
This case study provides an overview of persistent identifiers (PIDs) at the British Library, including both those in use and those planned for the future. We hope that this case study will help other heritage organisations to see what the path to use PIDs looks like, and understand what decisions...Madden, Frances ; Kotarski, Rachael
-
Book
Quality Assurance Guide for the UK Web Archive: An introduction to reviewing the quality of archived websites through ACT
This guidebook contains strategies that can be used to support Quality Assurance (QA) undertaken with the UK Web Archive’s Annotation Curation Tool (ACT). The guide has several aims: to provide an introduction to web archiving generally and to the UK Web Archive in particular; to provide hints and tips on...Bingham, Nicola ; Byrne, Helena
-
Conference paper (published)
ICIDS2020 Panel: Building the Discipline of Interactive Digital Narratives
Building our discipline has been an ongoing discussion since the early days of ICIDS. From earlier international joint efforts to integrate research from multiple fields of study to today’s endeavours by researchers to provide scholarly works of reference, the discussion on how to continue building Interactive Digital Narratives as a...Bernstein, Mark ; Palosaari Eladhari, Mirjam ; Koenitz, Hartmut ; Louchart, Sandy ; Nack, Frank …
-
Research report
UK Web Archive Quarterly Report: July, August and September 2020
This is the Web Archiving Statistics 2nd Quarter Report for 2020/2021. It presents statistics about targets (titles) created, 'Save a UK website' nominations, UKWA scope and usage. It is our intention to distribute this report quarterly (July, October, January, and April) with a more comprehensive report at the end of...Webber, Jason
-
Research report
UK Web Archive Quarterly Report: April, May and June 2020
This is the first Web Archiving Statistics Quarterly Report for 2020/2021. It is our intention to distribute this report quarterly (July, October, January, and April) with a more comprehensive report at the end of the financial year.Webber, Jason
-
Dataset
The Express
The Express (1846-1869) was an evening newspaper companion to the Daily News (1846-1912), published by Bradbury & Evans, and advocating reformist principles.British Library
-
Dataset
The Press.
The Press (1853-1866) was a weekly conservative newspaper, to which Benjamin Disraeli regularly contributed.British Library
-
Dataset
The Star
The Star (1788-1831, dataset 1801-1831) was the first daily London evening newspaper. Its circulation was facilitated by the success of the mail-coach service.British Library
-
Dataset
National Register.
The National Register (1808-1823) was a Conservative Sunday newspaper, owned by John Browne Bell, which was hostile to parliamentary reform.British Library
-
Dataset
The British Press; or, Morning Literary Advertiser
The British Press (1803-1826) was a daily newspaper founded in January 1803 in opposition to The Morning Post, with a conservative orientation. It printed the latest news, from home and abroad, for a London readership, and provided early journalistic employment for Charles Dickens.British Library
-
Conference paper (unpublished)
For Whom Should Science Be Opened?
Leslie Chan invites us to consider the uncritical acceptance of openness, proposing that there is no universal concept of open as the concept does not address how knowledge is created, shared and circulated in different communities and different contexts. Leslie advocates for a need to decenter whiteness in both academic...Chan, Leslie
-
Conference paper (unpublished)
Open or Ajar? And How We Blow The B****Y Doors Off!
The Open Access movement has transformed access to publicly funded research outcomes. Since 2009 there has been a 216% increase in the number of Open Access journals registered with the Directory of Open Access Journals who have published over 5,276,127 articles between them. But what happens when open access content...Caplehorne, Josie ; Watson, Ben
-
Conference paper (unpublished)
Small and Medium Size Academic Publishers Matter!
Beyond the large publishing groups, with huge catalogs of international books and journals published in English and with extensive presence in academic institutions around the world, the small and medium size academic publishing houses exist. These publishers are concerned with building catalogs that cover global issues but also local ones....Giménez Toledo, Elea
-
Conference paper (unpublished)
Knowledge Justice in the Digital Archive: The Exclusions of ‘Open’ / The Inclusions of ‘Closed’
The digital revolution has arguably made more information – otherwise locked away in the exclusionary spaces of libraries, archives, personal collections, and memory – more accessible to more people, who can now both contribute to and draw from remarkable digitized repositories of free content, like Wikipedia. The open data, software,...Allmann, Kira
-
Conference paper (unpublished)
Bricks and Mortals: Approaches to Decolonizing Museums at UCL
Subhadra Das is Curator of the Galton Collection at UCL. She reflects on the problematic issues of the naming of spaces and buildings at UCL, focusing on Francis Galton and his links with the history of eugenics. Subhadra considered how to bring this story to a wider public and in...Das, Subhadra
-
Conference paper (unpublished)
Using Open Source Tools to Decolonize Map Archives: The Case of Palestine Open Maps
An essential part of the colonial process was mapping the colonies: to know their historical and spatial characteristics as a prelude to conquering them (Abu Sitta, 2004). The maps produced through those processes now sit in various archives, and often serve as a snapshot of the spatial layout of those...Al-Shihabi, Majd
-
Conference paper (unpublished)
Scaling Small: Enabling a More Diverse Ecosystem for Scholarly Book Publishing
This presentation provides an overview of the COPIM (Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs) project (https://www.copim.ac.uk/), which is dedicated to the creation of robust and resilient infrastructures, workflows, business models, governance structures, and reuse and preservation strategies for the publication of open access books. It will focus on how we...Adema, Janneke
-
Conference paper (unpublished)
Decolonising the Archive: Questions, Problems and Solutions?
Those working on or with colonial archives and collections face a number of challenges arising from the historical contexts of these materials: where they came from, how they were brought together (or separated), and who has been their custodian. In these circumstances, it is important that contemporary professionals do not...Bennett, Melissa
-
Conference paper (unpublished)
Leverage Academy-Owned Non-APC Open Access Publishing to Achieve Sustainable and Equitable Scholarly Communications
Latin America has kept a strong tradition in Open Access, as a natural way to disseminate knowledge in a cooperative manner, where neither author fees nor subscriptions have been involved. Academic institutions, in this region, are in charge of publishing journals in such a way that each institution’s investment mutually...Becerril-Garcia, Arianna
-
Conference paper (unpublished)
Social Justice Driven Open Access Bridging The Information Divide
“Open access is not only access and consumption but also and above all, production and dissemination...…[and] has the potential to contribute to and foster local research and development” Schöpfel (2017). The open access (OA) movement has been hailed in Africa as a significant contributor to its development as it opens...Raju, Reggie
-
Conference paper (unpublished)
Inequities in Scholarly Communications
In today's political climate, we are well aware, if we weren't before, that inequities exist at all levels of society. This is true also in scholarly communications, which despite its many changes in the last few decades, still adheres to traditional values and structures. This talk offers a broad overview...Roh, Charlotte
-
Research report
British Library Research Report 2018-19
Welcome to our third annual Research Report, covering the academic year October 2018 to September 2019. Research is central to the work of the British Library, permeating what we do as an organisation and shaping what we are able to offer to all our users, collaborators and audiences. Reflecting on...British Library
-
Research report
British Library Research Report 2017-18
The Library’s role as an Independent Research Organisation (IRO) is central to our research identity, supporting a thriving research culture and enabling us to lead and partner on high level research. The funding we receive feeds into all aspects of our vision, supporting learning, custodianship, business and international partnerships, and...British Library
-
Research report
British Library Research Report 2016-17
The British Library has always been a place where research happens. Academics, students and independent researchers alike use our Reading Rooms to undertake detailed study on topics from every disciplinary area, reflecting the national and international collections we care for. More recently, our users have been able to access an...British Library
-
Journal article
Re-viewing William Blake’s Paradise Regained (c. 1816–1820)
This article presents a revisionist reading of William Blake’s (1757–1827) twelve watercolor designs for John Milton’s “Paradise Regained” (c. 1816–1820). The designs have previously been dismissed in critical commentary as of little interest to Blake scholarship, or regarded as a narrative merely about Christ’s human nature. This article argues that they...Billingsley, Naomi
Baptism of Christ, cosmology, Temptations of Christ, William Blake, Satan, Paradise Regained, and John Milton
-
Journal article
An ‘Apostle of Futurity’: William Blake as Herald of a Universal Religious Worldview
This article examines a strand of William Blake criticism from the second quarter of the twentieth century that styled his work as an embodiment of a universal religious worldview. In particular, it focuses on the writings of Max Plowman and John Middleton Murry from the mid 1920s to the early...Billingsley, Naomi
vision, pacifism, William Blake, Max Plowman, John Middleton Murry, and religion
-
Journal article
Taking library collections Off The Map
The ‘Off the Map’ competition is an unusual collaboration between the British Library and GameCity; a videogame culture festival, which takes place annually in the UK city of Nottingham. The competition challenges higher education students based in the UK to create videogames, explorable virtual environments and interactive fiction inspired by...Wisdom, Stella
-
Other
Research reflections: a transmedia residency at the British Library
As a Digital Curator in the British Library’s Digital Scholarship department it is my role to encourage and support innovative, creative use and reinterpretation of the Library’s vast collections. Furthermore, my specific areas of personal research interest are how virtual and augmented reality technology, videogames and interactive fiction can be...Wisdom, Stella
-
Conference paper (published)
DeezyMatch: A Flexible Deep Learning Approach to Fuzzy String Matching
We present DeezyMatch, a free, open-source software library written in Python for fuzzy string matching and candidate ranking. Its pair classifier supports various deep neural network architectures for training new classifiers and for fine-tuning a pretrained model, which paves the way for transfer learning in fuzzy string matching. This approach...Hosseini, Kasra ; Nanni, Federico ; Coll Ardanuy, Mariona
Natural Language Processing, string matching, toponym matching, machine learning, and digital humanities
-
Blog post
When is a persistent identifier not persistent? Or an identifier?
Ever wondered what that bar code on the back of every book is? It’s an ISBN: an International Standard Book Number. Every modern book published has an ISBN, which uniquely identifies that book, and anyone publishing a book can get an ISBN for it whether an individual or a huge...Cope, Jez
-
Conference paper (published)
Archiving Interactive Narratives at the British Library
This paper describes the creation of the Interactive Narratives collection in the UK Web Archive, as part of the UK Legal Deposit Libraries Emerging Formats Project. The aim of the project is to identify, collect and preserve complex digital publications that are in scope for collection under UK Non-Print Legal...Clark, Lynda ; Rossi, Giulia Carla ; Wisdom, Stella
Emerging Formats, digital storytelling, new media collection management, Interactive Narratives collection, digital preservation, and web archiving
-
Dataset
Living Machines atypical animacy dataset
Atypical animacy detection dataset, based on nineteenth-century sentences in English extracted from an open dataset of nineteenth-century books digitized by the British Library (available via https://doi.org/10.21250/db14, British Library Labs, 2014). This dataset contains 598 sentences containing mentions of machines. Each sentence has been annotated according to the animacy and humanness... -
Blog post
The Botish Library: developing a poetry printing machine with Python
In June 2020 the Office for Students announced a campaign to fill 2,500 new places on artificial intelligence and data science conversion courses in universities across the UK. While I’m not planning to retrain in cyber, I was lucky enough to be in the cohort for the trial run of...Rossi, Giulia Carla
-
Blog post
Writing Tools for Interactive Fiction
Interactive fiction (IF), or interactive narrative/narration, is defined as “software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment.” The British Library has been collecting examples of UK interactive fiction as part of the Emerging Formats Project, which is a collaborative effort from all...Rossi, Giulia Carla
-
Blog post
Digital Literature and Emerging Media: 10 Years of the New Media Writing Prize
On 18 July, The British Library hosted a Digital Conversations event to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the New Media Writing Prize. Digital Conversations is a series of events that explores the way in which technology is changing how we experience our life and how we communicate. New media writing...Rossi, Giulia Carla
-
Research report
PIDs as IRO Infrastructure - Early Findings
The Persistent Identifiers as IRO Infrastructure project was launched in January 2020, funded under the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Towards a National Collection programme. Our aim is to explore persistent identifiers as a foundational infrastructure for the programme, using their power to provide a long-lasting click-able link to...Kotarski, Rachael ; Kirby, Jack ; Madden, Frances ; Mitchell, Lorna ; Padfield, Joseph …
-
Book
A Hand-list of the Manuscripts in Burmese Collection in the British Library
This list contains about 1000 manuscripts from Myanmar (Burma) in the British Library originating from the British Museum collections, and contains not only manuscripts in Burmese but also Shan, Mon, and Arakanese. All items are identified and described based upon a physical examination of the manuscripts, and a collation of...British Library
Pali manuscripts, palm leaf manuscripts, Myanmar, and folding books
-
Presentation
On the verge of success – or failure? Repositories and the wider knowledge infrastructure, plus a bit about Hyku
Samvera Connect (Online) 2020 keynote presentation.Reimer, Torsten
open source, Samvera, open access, Hyku, and repositories
-
Book
Publications proscribed by the Government of India: a catalogue of the collections in the India Office Library and Records and the Department of Oriental Manuscripts and Printed Books, British Library Reference Division
The books, pamphlets, periodicals, newspapers, handbills and posters proscribed by the British government in India are an invaluable printed archive for the study of the Indian freedom struggle during its last four crucial decades from the 1910s to the 1940s. As such they also constitute perhaps one of the largest...Shaw, Graham ; Lloyd, Mary
-
Journal article
‘No Mercenary Views’? Constable’s English Landscape
Constable’s English Landscape 1830–2, a set of twenty-two mezzotints by David Lucas after paintings by the artist, has generally been viewed from art historical and biographical perspectives that connect its irregular production, aesthetic character and commercial failure to the artist’s creative and personal life or the development of Romanticism. This...Myrone, Felicity
-
Journal article
Consul Joseph Smith’s Gold-Tooled Leather Bookbindings
To some researchers Consul Joseph Smith's (1682-1770) favoured binding style would comprise plain white/cream parchment covers and coloured spine pieces. There are many examples in the library of George III. This tells only part of the whole story, however, as more elaborate styles exist. As a bibliophile Smith would at...Marks, P. J. M.
-
Dataset
Persistent Identifiers as IRO Infrastructure: Survey Data
The survey ran from 28 May to 14 September 2020 and was open to everyone working in Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums internationally but the survey had a clear UK focus. Some responses have been removed or recoded to protect the identity of respondents. It is intended to re-run the...Kotarski, Rachael ; Madden, Frances
-
Research report
UK Web Archive Annual Report 2019
This report collates the quarterly web archiving statistical reports from the preceding year (1st April 2019 to 31st March 2020). It mostly covers headline statistics but also highlights other notable areas of interest, such as collection development and projects that have either been completed or are still ongoing. The report...UK Web Archive
-
Book chapter
Music and Print
This chapter surveys some of the major trends in music printing and publishing from the fifteenth century to the present day. From Ottaviano Petrucci's introduction of triple‐impression printing for polyphonic music in the sixteenth century to the global marketing of music in modern times, the history of music in print...Ridgewell, Rupert
-
-
Conference paper (unpublished)
Spreadsheets as User Interfaces
Spreadsheets are ubiquitous, familiar, often overlooked, and embody vast financial and human investment, not least in their user interface. This paper shows how spreadsheets can be used as an integral part of interactive processes, for activities from simple data entry, to more complex grouping and linking of datasets, both as...Dix, Alan ; Cowgill, Rachel ; Bashford, Christina ; McVeigh, Simon ; Ridgewell, Rupert
-
-
Conference paper (unpublished)
Authority and Judgement in the Digital Archive
The transformative promise of the digital humanities is not without problems. This paper looks at digital archive curation using a database of 19th-century London concerts as a case study. We examine some of the barriers faced in its development, related to expertise, volume and complexity, the gap between cost and...Dix, Alan ; Cowgill, Rachel ; Bashford, Christina ; McVeigh, Simon ; Ridgewell, Rupert
-
Journal article
Biographical Myth and the Publication of Mozart's Piano Quartets
The story that Mozart was commissioned to write three piano quartets for publication in Franz Anton Hoffmeister's subscription series has proved to be remarkably resilient in the Mozart literature. According to the account that first appeared in Georg Nikolaus von Nissen's biography (1828), Hoffmeister gave Mozart an advance payment for...Ridgewell, Rupert
-
Journal article
The Concert Programmes Project: History, progress and future directions
The Concert Programmes Project (CPP) was formally established in 2003, following discussions concerning the need for an inventory of programmes initiated by a IAML symposium in Cambridge in 1981.The preliminary work of the Project was to create a collection-level approach towards improving programme access with the final goal of creating...Ridgewell, Rupert
-
-
Journal article
Mozart's Publishing Plans With Artaria in 1787: New Archival Evidence
A previously unknown document witnessing a transaction between Mozart and his principal Viennese publisher, Artaria, appears in an inventory ledger compiled by the firm in 1787. The documentary, financial, and bibliographical contexts suggest that Mozart was paid in advance for six piano trios and twelve songs, but failed to complete...Ridgewell, Rupert
-
Book chapter
Artaria
Austrian firm of music publishers. It was founded in Mainz in 1765 and by 1768 was operating in Vienna, where it became the first important music publishing firm in the city.Weinmann, Alexander
-
Book chapter
UK Non-Print Legal Deposit: From Regulations to Review
Legal deposit is the statutory requirement for any publisher to deposit a copy of their publications with designated libraries. It plays a critical role in ensuring preservation of the nation’s cultural heritage by allowing systematic collection of the published output. It is the record of human memory, creativity and discovery...Arnold-Stratford, Linda ; Ovenden, Richard
-
Dataset
DUKweb (Diachronic UK web)
We present DUKweb, a set of large-scale resources useful for the diachronic analysis of contemporary English. The dataset is derived from JISC UK Web Domain Dataset (1996-2013), which collects resources from the Internet Archive that were hosted on domains ending in ‘.uk’. The dataset includes co-occurrences matrices for each year...Basile, Pierpaolo ; Tsakalidis, Adam
-
Journal article
Reviewing football history through the UK Web Archive
The UK Web Archive aims to archive, preserve and give access to the UK webspace. This aim is achieved through an annual domain crawl, in addition to frequent crawls of selected websites and specially curated collections. These collections reflect important aspects of British culture and events that shape society. Sport...Byrne, Helena
-
Journal article
‘An ‘authentic’ performance?: The cultural politics of ‘folk’ in Bengal and Bangladesh’ (part 2)
Folk performance genres have long been adapted to shorter formats for festivals, films, television and the new media. Contemporary practices of Kobigaan (a verse-duelling/song theatre genre) reveal how it functions differently for different communities relying on their cultural/collective memory of the genre. This section of the article first engages with...Basu, Priyanka
cultural memory, souvenir, festivals, sound chronotope, and Bengali cinema
-
Journal article
Turkic Typologies: Ideology and Indigenous Linguistic Knowledge in the Work of Bekir Çobanzade
The current work is an exploration of the life and linguistic scholarship of the Crimean Tatar linguist Bekir Çobanzade. In it, I pay particular attention to the impact of the author's socio-political environment, especially the rise of Stalinism, on his works relating to the history and classification of the Turkic...Erdman, Michael
-
Research report
Enabling use of DOIs for data citation in longitudinal studies: A report on the DataCite UK Workshop for CLOSER
The UK’s longitudinal studies (including cohort and household panel studies) have been making their data available to researchers beyond their immediate staff for decades. Over this time, they have developed various models of data sharing and citation that have increased the value of the data collected. DataCite was created in...British Library
-
Journal article
James McNeill Whistler to Richard D’Oyly Carte: A Letter Comes to Light at the British Library
Recently catalogued papers of the Doyly Carte family held at the British Library have brought to light a ‘lost’ letter from the American artist James McNeill Whistler to theatrical impresario and hotelier Richard D’Oyly Carte. The letter refers to Whistler’s decoration scheme for Carte’s home at No. 4 Adelphi Terrace...Beckett, Chris
-
Journal article
Edward Spencer Dodgson, the Basque language, and the British Museum Library
Edward Spencer Dodgson (1857-1922) studied Classics at Oxford University, but there is no evidence that he sat his Finals. A visit to the Basque Country in 1886 began a life-long, passionate devotion to the Basque language and bibliography. He published new editions of important early texts and a series of...West, Geoffrey
-
Blog post
Esperanto and Endangered Languages
Esperanto can be described as the language of hope, peace, and solidarity as Professor Renato Corsetti, General Secretary of the Academy of Esperanto has discussed in his previous posts for the European Studies blog. Hope remains the governing principle, as the name of the language attests (espero in Esperanto). Driven...Déri, Andrea
-
Blog post
Diarists and diaries
‘But one shower of rain all this month.’ - entered John Evelyn in his diary on 29th April 1681. What would you write about April 2020 in your diary? John Evelyn (1620–1706) is one of the best-known English diarists. He is known as a diarist but he was also a...Déri, Andrea
science, modern history, curiosity, writing, and environmental science
-
Blog post
Clouds: How Luke Howard linked Weather Lore and Natural Philosophy
William Wordsworth’s (1770-1850) ‘lonely as a cloud’ poem was conceived in April 1802 on a spring day walk in the Lake District. A few months later, in December 1802, a pharmacist and amateur meteorologist, Luke Howard (1772-1864) delivered a paper in London, on the dynamics of cloud formations. The two...Déri, Andrea
-
Blog post
Oil, storms and knowing part 2: Pliny, Franklin and the IPCC Special Report on Oceans
This post is the second of a pair to mark the period of the 25th Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and is contributed by Andrea Deri, Cataloguer. In addition to seafarers, fishers in the Mediterranean Sea applied oil as Pliny the Elder and Plutarch...Déri, Andrea
science, maps, Americas, modern history, curiosity, travel, and environmental science
-
Blog post
Oil, storms and knowing part 1: Seafarers Calm Waves with Oil
This post is to mark the period of the 25th Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and is contributed by Andrea Deri, Cataloguer. A storm at sea is one of the most feared experiences, as it often presages shipwreck. Mariners would do anything to survive...Déri, Andrea
South East Asia, science, maps, Medieval history, East Asia, South Asia, Middle East, curiosity, travel, and environmental science
-
Blog post
A Bioluminescent Christmas
Christmas is associated with sparkling lights that lift the eyes up to the stars in motionless awe. On Christmas 1875, a curious traveller wrote about a less-known yet equally magical light that drew his eyes below the horizon, a light that flared up with the breaking waves: sea sparkle. The...Déri, Andrea
science, Hungary, history, and South Asia
-
Blog post
Languages of Reckoning: The Gagauz Number System
The more languages you speak, the more perspectives you have on the world. Bulgarian, Czech and Hungarian proverbs capture this observation: ‘Човекът е толкова пъти човек, колкото езика знае’ (Bulgarian: a person is as many times a person as many languages knows), ‘Kolik jazyků znáš, tolikrát jsi člověkem’ (Czech: as...Déri, Andrea
-
Book chapter
Maps, Knowledge and Resilience: Application of ArcGIS in Building Small Islands’ Resilience to Climate Change
Small, low-lying islands are one of the most vulnerable social-ecological systems to climate change. Inundation caused by storm surges and sea level rise makes habitability a serious concern for islanders. This chapter explores how co-production of knowledge through a collaborative local and scientific inquiry could contribute to small islands’ resilience... -
Blog post
Hume’s Stray Feathers
Allan Octavian Hume (1829-1912), British administrator and one of the founders of the Indian National Congress, recorded an extraordinary story of resilience, the ability of people to cope with disruptions. Hume was a respected ornithologist. In January 1875 he boarded an old gunboat fitted for the Indian Marine Survey to...Déri, Andrea
-
Magazine article
Passing Traditional Knowledge to Youth - A New Mythology
In globalizing India, the traditional knowledge-practice-belief complex passed through generations is challenged by the younger generation. CEC member Andrea Deri and Rushikesh Chavan ask, "Can Western scientific knowledge provide a new belief system and motivate decisions?"Déri, Andrea ; Chavan, Rushikesh
-
Magazine article
Knowledge for Resilience
What happens to traditional fishermen’s multi-generational knowledge when the young people do not follow the tradition? CEC member Andrea Déri presents a case study on how young people revitalised and re-contextualised intergenerational learning for biodiversity conservation in the Lakshadweep archipelago, India.Déri, Andrea