Search Constraints
Search Results
-
Journal article
The Pacific King and the Militant Prince? Representation and Collaboration in the Letters Patent of James I, creating his son, Henry, Prince of Wales
The relationship of King James VI and I with his elder son and heir, Prince Henry Frederick, has received much scholarly attention in recent years. James has often been portrayed as a resentful father whose peaceful policies were at odds with his son’s martial interests and militant Protestantism. With reference...Murray, Catriona
-
Journal article
The Provenance of the Abreujamens de las estorias (London, British Library, Egerton MS. 1500) and the Identification of Scribal Hands (c. 1323)
This essay provides an overview of research undertaken on the provenance of a medieval Occitan (Old Provençal) translation of an unedited diagrammatic chronicle of Paolino of Venice (Marciana, Zanetti 399). It confirms the existing suspicion that the manuscript was produced in Avignon, and provides a possible dating of 1321-1323; it...Ibarz, Alexander
-
Journal article
Who was Mozart's Laura? Abendempfindung and the Editors
Mozart's song Abendempfindung (K523) was written in 1787. This article challenges the editorial decision of the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe (1963) to rename it Abendempfindung an Laura.Paisey, David
-
Journal article
Early Northern Iroquoian Language Books in the British Library
This article surveys seventy-six antiquarian materials in or about Northern Iroquoian, a group of indigenous North American languages from the eastern side of the United States and Canada. The languages covered are: Laurentian, Huron/Wyandot, Susquehannock, Tuscarora, Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida and Mohawk. The aim is to survey what can be...Edwards, Adrian S.
-
Journal article
Good Morals for a Couple at the Burgundian Court: Contents and Context of Harley 1310, Le Livre des bonnes meurs of Jacques Legrand
London, British Library, Harley MS. 1310 has received no scholarly attention for decades, perhaps even centuries. The aim of this article is to frame more precisely the early owners whose arms are painted in the lower margin of the frontispiece folio and to contextualize the manuscript and especially its illumination....Wijsman, Hanno
-
Journal article
Mad Dogs and Scotsmen: A Plain Tale from the Military Collections of the India Office Records Section of the British Library
The Military Collections of the India Office Records of the British Library document the experiences of four Gordon Highlanders sent to the Institut Pasteur in Paris for treatment for rabies in the summer of 1896.Mulvihill, Margaret
-
Journal article
Manuscripts Supplied to Robert Harley by John Bagford: Further Information from BL, Harl. MS. 5998
The London bookseller, John Bagford (? 1650/1-1716), transferred – probably by sale – many parts of his collections, printed and manuscript, to Sir Robert Harley (1661-1724), with the assistance of Harley’s librarian, Humfrey Wanley (1672-1726), and Harley’s son, Edward Harley (1689-1741). BL, Harl. MS. 5998, once thought to be an...Tite, Colin G. C.
-
Journal article
Advising France through the Example of England: Visual Narrative in the Livre de la prinse et mort du roy Richart (Harl. MS. 1319)
Some time between November 1401 and March 1402 Jean Creton wrote an eyewitness account of King Richard II’s deposition in 1399. Around 1405 Duke John of Berry, the uncle of the French King Charles VI, was given the only richly illuminated copy of the text to survive. This article examines...Hedeman, Anne D.
-
Journal article
Sir Thomas Jewell Bennett (1852-1925)
An account of the personal papers of Sir Thomas Jewell Bennett (1852-1925), editor/principal proprietor of the Times of India and Conservative MP for Sevenoaks. They form an interesting source for politics and other issues in British India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.O'Brien, John
-
Journal article
The Library Catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane: Their Authors, Organization, and Functions
This article undertakes a detailed examination of the library catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane, whose collections formed the basis of the British Museum and thus of the British Library. These are now held in the British Library: Sloane MS 3972B, Sloane MS 3972C, Sloane MS 3972D and an interleaved copy...Blakeway, Amy
-
Journal article
Kissing Images, Unfurling Rolls, Measuring Wounds, Sewing Badges and Carrying Talismans: Considering Some Harley Manuscripts through the Physical Rituals they Reveal
This article considers how early users of prayer books handled and interacted with their manuscripts. Deploying evidence from signs of wear within the manuscripts themselves, the author argues that medieval believers used manuscripts ritually in such a way that they blurred the distinction between images and their referents. Votaries treated...Rudy, Kathryn M.
-
Journal article
Beyond the Template: Aesthetics and Meaning in the Images of the Roman d'Alexandre en prose in Harley MS. 4979
The Roman d’Alexandre en prose is the translation into Old French of a Latin text known as the Historia de preliis. The processes of language conversion and transcription during the Middle Ages allowed patrons and manuscript-making ateliers to adapt and bring classical works up to date with medieval tastes and...Pérez-Simon, Maud
-
Book
Animals: Art, Science and Sound
Artworks, manuscripts, printed works and wildlife sound recordings come together in this major compendium of the greatest and strangest representations of animals on record. Published to accompany a 2023 British Library exhibition. Eighty detailed case studies highlight celebrated works, including John James Audubon’s The Birds of America, Matthew Paris’s Liber...Roy, Malini ; Sharp Jones, Cam ; Tipp, Cheryl
animals, sound, exhibitions, art, and science
-
Research report
UK Railway Archive (AR-UK)
Archive The Railway UK (AR-UK) is a comprehensive digital platform designed to enhance the online archives of the UK rail network. This initiative, developed in collaboration with Living with Machines, is primarily focused on research, historical preservation, and providing public access to railway history. As a centralized resource, it caters...Sheppard, Joanne
digital humanities, Victorian, rail, data visualisation, and Living with Machines
-
Research report
The Devils After the Fall
This is a report by Nicola Baldwin of a Digital Residency at Living With Machines, on the dataset: Crowdsourced accidents data from Newspapers, working in line with the LWM aims for Radical Collaboration, New Perspectives, Analysing at Scale. The following document is a personal account of work done, thoughts arising...Baldwin, Nicola
Living with Machines, accidents, Victorian, film, crowdsourcing, newspaper, and digital humanities
-
Research report
Visualising press politics in the United Kingdom
This project's main goal, as outlined in the initial proposal, was to develop an interactive, open-source web app that visualizes data from the Press Directories dataset alongside historical general election results. In this report, I will delve into the challenges encountered, the interesting findings uncovered, and the potential avenues for...Bonato, Nicolò
historcial newspapers, digital humanities, Victorian, politics, data visualisation, and Living with Machines
-
Research report
An Etiquette For Minor Time Travel
A report documenting the Living with Machines Digital Residency project called "An Etiquette for Minor Time Travel" by Robert Sherman. Via an open call and running from to July 2023, six Digital Residencies were funded by the Living with Machines project to support researchers and practitioners devising creative approaches to...Sherman, Robert
art, Living with Machines, Victorian, rail, data visualisation, digital humanities, and poetry
-
Research report
Publishing updated version of ‘R for Newspaper Data’
My Living with Machines Digital Residency, which I carried out between May and July 2023, allowed me to update and publish an online book on accessing and analysing newspaper data. The goal of the book is to make available an end-to-end set of instructions and tutorials which would allow researchers,...Ryan, Yann Ciarán
digital humanities, Victorian, historical newspapers, and Living with Machines
-
Disentangling Digital Preservation Risk: An Interdisciplinary Exploration and Solution
Memory institutions such as the British Library face the important challenge of preserving their digital collections for future generations. Disciplinary efforts to address this challenge are extensive but demonstrate significant inconsistency and uncertainty about how the field understands risk, as well as what it considers to be a valid response....Pennock, Maureen
libraries, risk, risk science, archives, digital preservation, reference model, and design science
-
Journal article
Working at scale: what do computational methods mean for research using cases, models and collections?
Open access, peer-reviewed article published in Science Museum Group Journal, as part of a double-length special issue for the AHRC TaNC discovery project, 'Congruence Engine'. The article gives a critical overview of how 'scale' operates as a keyword within computational humanities as well as reviewing a number of cognate fields,...Wilson, Daniel C S
machine learning, AI for GLAM, STS, scale, computational humanities, history, and congruence engine
-
Journal article
J. G. Ballard's 'Elaborately Signalled Landscape': The Drafting of Concrete Island
The archive of J. G. Ballard at the British Library contains two very different draft texts for 'Concrete Island': an undated typescript substantially revised by hand, and a 'first draft screenplay' dated 20 September 1972. The screenplay is, in the author’s words on the title page, 'from the novel of...Beckett, Chris
-
Journal article
Harley MS. 2979 and the Books of Hours Produced in Avignon by the Workshop of Jean de Toulouse
This contribution is centred on Harley MS. 2979, a Book of Hours illuminated in the last decade of the fourteenth century in Avignon, the capital of the antipopes during the Schism. Although now rather worn, it seems to have been one of the finest and most expensive of the Books...Manzari, Francesca
-
Journal article
A Transcription and Translation of Sloane MS. 2131, Robert Ashley’s (1561-1641) Vita: with Additional Biographical Details
British Library Sloane MS. 2131, Vita, is an autobiography written in Latin by Robert Ashley (1565-1641), bibliophile, lawyer, and translator. Ashley bequeathed his collection of approximately 5000 books to establish a library at Middle Temple, one of the four Inns of Court. This is the first full transcription and translation...Kelser, Astrid ; Nelson, Jennifer K. ; Satterley, Renae
-
Journal article
The Spiral-Locked Letters of Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots
This article presents evidence about the use of the ‘spiral lock’, a highly secure letterlocking mechanism used by Elizabeth I, Mary, Queen of Scots, and other letter-writers in early modern Europe, to secure their correspondence shut. After explaining the concept of letterlocking, a centuries-old communication security technique, we demonstrate how...Dambrogio, Jana ; Smith, Daniel Starza ; Pellecchia, Jennifer ; Wiggins, Alison ; Clarke, Andrea …
-
Journal article
The Alice N. Hays Notebook: A Tour of Early Twentieth-Century Library Methods in the UK and Europe
In the summer of 1909, Stanford librarian Alice Newman Hays embarked on a journey to visit libraries across England and Europe, compiling a record of cataloguing practices to share with her colleagues back in California. Among the stops on Alice's journey were prestigious institutions like the Bodleian Library and British...Jordan, Jessica Camille
-
Journal article
The Formation, development and curation of the Tapling Collection at the British Museum Library in the Nineteenth Century
In 1891 Thomas Keay Tapling bequeathed his near complete, worldwide collection of stamps and postal stationery to the British Museum Library. To celebrate the 130th anniversary of this event which created the British Library's Philatelic Collections, this article provides an overview of the Tapling Collection's formation, development and early curation...Morel, Richard Scott
-
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.
-
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
The Papers of Edward Scott, Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum 1888-1904
Edward Scott (1840-1918) was a member of the Department of Manuscripts, British Museum for just over forty years, 1863-1904. From 1888 until his retirement he was Keeper of Manuscripts and yet he is not as well remembered as his predecessors or successors. In 2014 the British Library acquired a small...Wright, C.J.
-
Journal article
From popular to rare: Acquisition and preservation policies at the British Museum Library in Panizzi’s time
Large quantities of Italian early modern books were dispersed on a vast scale mainly from the 1760s onwards as a consequence of the decline of the local aristocracy, the French Revolution and the suppressions of religious libraries. Increasing interest in the Italian Renaissance and its historical importance strongly influenced the...Carnelos, Laura
-
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
-
Journal article
Hans Sloane, Samuel Pepys, and the Evidence of a Lost Pepys Library Catalogue
This article examines the relationship between Hans Sloane (1660–1753) and Samuel Pepys (1633–1703), two celebrated book collectors of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Pepys's and Sloane's connection is traced back to the mid 1680s and to their attendance at the Royal Society. A mysterious leaf in Sloane's papers...Loveman, Kate
-
Conference paper (unpublished)
Balancing public-private partnerships with responsibilities to our communities
The Living with Machines project (2018-23) was a data science and digital history project between the British Library and The Alan Turing Institute. Its focus on the impact of mechanisation in the long 19th century was in part inspired by the Library's access to newspapers digitised for The British Newspaper...Ridge, Mia
digitisation, research project, newspapers, and Living With Machines
-
Conference paper (unpublished)
Investing in the future of open infrastructure
Kaitlin Thaney, Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI), discusses the challenges and strategies involved in fostering community-centered open infrastructure, emphasising the importance of sustainable, accessible, and open systems to advance research and knowledge sharing. Kaitlin outlines the work of IOI, focusing on their research-driven approach, the development of a catalogue of...Thaney, Kaitlin
-
Conference paper (unpublished)
Networks of libraries supporting open access book publishing
It is becoming increasingly clear that libraries, acting collectively, can have a major role in creating and sustaining non-profit, community owned, open access infrastructures as public goods. These networks may provide support indirectly, via collective financial support for third party entities, or directly by inter-connecting their existing physical infrastructures to...Gatti, Rupert
open book publishers, Thoth, open scholarship, COPIM, open book collective, and library networks
-
Conference paper (unpublished)
Where do I stand? Deconstructing digital collections [research] infrastructures: a perspective from Towards a National Collection
This presentation sheds light on the critical challenges of establishing a sustainable digital infrastructure in the United Kingdom. The work conducted by TaNC plays a crucial role in addressing key factors within the realm of digital infrastructure, including: Tools and Pipelines: This encompasses software and related components. User Knowledge Needs:...Pereda, Javier
digital infrastructure, GLAM, and Towards a National Collection
-
Conference paper (unpublished)
"This is not IP I'm familiar with." The strange afterlife and untapped potential of public domain content in GLAM institutions.
Cultural institutions are vital stewards of public domain works and artefacts, billions of which have now been digitised and placed online. Yet few institutions release this content for free and unrestricted reuse. Why? In this talk, Douglas will illuminate this complex landscape and show how open access can unlock opportunities...McCarthy, Douglas
open scholarship, GLAM, copyright, and intellectual property
-
Conference paper (unpublished)
The critical role of repositories in advancing open scholarship
There are thousands of repositories worldwide, which collectively preserve and provide access to hundreds of millions of scholarly resources. These repositories - mainly hosted by libraries, universities, governments and research centres - represent critical public infrastructure enabling researchers, students and the general public can reap the benefits of research. Yet,...Shearer, Kathleen
-
Conference paper (unpublished)
The Turing Way: Community-led resources for open research and data
The Turing Way is an open-source, community-led, and collaboratively developed project on making data science and research skills accessible, comprehensible, and beneficial for a wider research community. We bring together individuals from diverse fields and expertise to develop practices and learning resources that can make data research comprehensible and useful...Karoune, Emma
-
Conference paper (unpublished)
Open online tools for creating interactive narratives
With the increased availability of new tools, platforms, technologies and formats to create and distribute digital publications, the British Library has been researching and collecting examples of digital storytelling as part of its Emerging Formats work. This presentation will introduce some of the freely available and open-source online interactive...Rossi, Giulia Carla ; Wisdom, Stella
-
Conference paper (unpublished)
The not so quiet rights retention revolution: research libraries, rights and supporting our communities
This talk examines the growing rights retention movement within UK research libraries, outlining its importance for authors and researchers and noting a significant increase in institutions adopting rights retention policies. The conversation delves into the role of libraries in supporting researchers' rights, advocating for a shift in the academic landscape...Nixon, William
-
Conference paper (unpublished)
AHRC, digital research infrastructure and where we want to go with it
This presentation charts AHRC’s journey towards defining and creating a cohesive, community-focused digital research infrastructure for arts and humanities research and asks the audience: are we on the right track, or have we got it completely wrong?Chang, Tao
-
Journal article
American Political Pamphlets 1917-1945 at the British Library
The twentieth century was a golden age of pamphleteering in America, especially during the period between the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the conclusion of the Second World War in 1945. Pamphlets were vital tools for radical organizations in educating and communicating with their own members and persuading the public...Collins, Jodie
-
Journal article
A Sense of Place: The ‘London’ Cityscapes of BL, Royal MS. 13 A. III
The British Library, Royal MS. 13 A. III, containing a copy of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britannie, was likely produced in southeast England in or around London between the late thirteenth century and the first quarter of the fourteenth century. The only manuscript with an extended series of illustrations,...Chunko-Dominguez, Betsy
-
Journal article
Orwell’s Political Pamphlet ‘Solar System’: A Network Interpretation of a British Library Collection
This article examines the network of publishers, authors and topics included in George Orwell’s Collection of Political Pamphlets at the British Library (shelfmark 1899.ss.1-49.), some of which were catalogued as part of a Ph.D. placement in 2019. It explores how the pamphlets came to be held at the British Library,...Treacher, Claudia
-
Journal article
British Library Additional Manuscript 8537 as a Source for Florentine/Pisan University History
British Library Additional Manuscript 8537 contains a selection of statutes related to the university of Florence and Pisa from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The manuscript was originally produced to specifically document rulings between the institution and Florentine government, suggesting it may have been a personal vademecum of...Rossi, Elena
-
Journal article
Sir Hans Sloane’s Books: Seventy Years of Research
The library of Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753), became one of the foundations of the British Museum, but was dispersed among other collections within the Museum, and for over 250 years it has not been possible to view it as a whole. The Sloane Printed Books Project aims to provide a...Walker, Alison
-
Journal article
Facts, Fictions, and Fascism: A Life of Actor Mary Taviner (1909-1972)
Despite an acting career spanning both silent film and talkies, as well as London and regional theatre, Mary Taviner was not a household name. In fact she attracted more press coverage for her political views, being an active fascist from the 1930s to the 1960s. She fell in with, and...St John-McAlister, Michael