Enfilade

Following up on yesterday’s postings on the digital humanities, I include two examples of how the web might be used for sharing original, in-progress research, both from Jason M. Kelly. It seems to me that they raise interesting questions related to process, transparency, and audience. As I regularly suggest to my students, I don’t think we yet know what the web is really for; the web experience of the 2020s will surely look quite different from that of 2012. My own expectations have changed substantially since the 90s, when the web seemed pretty terrific because it meant I didn’t have to make space in a small Chicago apartment for a phonebook and Yellow Pages! I would have simply had no way to comprehend the likes of Twitter or Pinterest. In the world of web analytics — a world in which web-users are, above all, consumers — I think there’s probably more at stake with the scholarly potential of the digital realm than we might like to acknowledge, whatever that future might hold. -CH

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History Working Papers Project: Open Peer Review for the Humanities

The creators of the History Working Papers Project are Jason M. Kelly and Tim Hitchcock. HWPP has one goal. To develop an open source platform that allows for continuous revision, review, and evaluation from the earliest draft of an academic conference presentation and article, through publication and beyond. It is designed to bring the process of exposing one’s work at a conference, and revising it for peer review publication, in to the digital age.

HWPP is an online space for scholars to share works-in-progress with their peers. After uploading a conference paper, essay, or article manuscript to the HWPP website, authors can invite others to read their work and make comments in the margins. As more people respond, writers get more feedback. But, unlike traditional comments done on paper, HWPP allows commenters and authors to interact with each other. They can read each other’s marginalia and engage in dialogue about it. In fact, entire threaded discussions can take place in the margins. Here’s what it looks like:

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From the site’s about page:

Secrets of the Hellfire Club

The Hellfire Club, or, more appropriately, the Monks of Medmenham Abbey, was an association that met in Buckinghamshire between the 1740s and the 1760s. Controversy and mystery surrounds the group and has defined the histories written about them. Stories of sex, witchcraft, satanism, and spirits define the popular memory of the club. Misinformation abounds and has led to many misconceptions about the organization and its members. As part of my research on the history of eighteenth-century clubs and societies, I have studied the group and had a chance to access the surviving public and private manuscripts. This site is devoted to exposing the history of Monks of Medmenham Abbey. It will reveal new facts about the group while putting its activities into the context of its age. Using the surviving fragments of their activities, rare books, and even the odd film or television episode, this site tells a centuries-long tale of secret societies, ghost stories, illicit activities, rumor, and gossip.

One aim of Enfilade has been to help bridge the divide between academics and a much larger world also interested in the eighteenth century. While the site is intended to serve scholars, I’ve always hoped to make others welcome here, too. With that spirit of inclusiveness in mind, I’m especially excited to hear about The 18-Century Common. The following announcement from Jessica Richard appeared on the C18-L listserv. -CH

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I want to announce and solicit contributions to a new public humanities website called The 18th-Century Common which will debut at ASECS. The 18th-Century Common is a joint project of scholars and students of the long eighteenth century at Union College and Wake Forest University and is funded by the Wake Forest University Humanities Institute.

The aim of the website is to present the published work of eighteenth-century scholars to a general audience. Our initial focus is Richard Holmes’ popular book The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (2009). This book captured the imagination of the general reader, but it omits the more complex contexts that scholarly accounts offer. We hope to provide general readers an accessible view of those contexts, and to move beyond Holmes’ book to the wide range of eighteenth-century studies. The site will feature short versions of published scholarship written for a general audience, as well as links to related resources, texts, and images around the web for readers who want to explore further.

We think this is the beginning of an exciting opportunity to reach the interested nonacademic, nonstudent readers who made Holmes’ book a bestseller, to “translate” what we do and to reach out beyond the academy as digital platforms in the humanities make particularly possible. We’ll be demonstrating the site near the registration table at ASECS Thursday and Friday; please stop by and chat with us. We encourage you to contact us if you are interested in contributing to the site or have ideas about how it can develop.

–Jessica Richard: richarja@wfu.edu and Andrew Burkett: burketta@union.edu

From the Bard Graduate Center:

Your Paintings is a project to put the UK’s entire national collection of oil paintings on one website. It is a partnership between the BBC, the Public Catalogue Foundation and 3,000 collections around the United Kingdom including museums, universities, civic collections, the Arts Council and the National Trust.

The purpose of the project is to open up the UK’s 200,000-strong oil painting collection for learning, research and public enjoyment. To this end, over the last nine years the PCF has been making a photographic record of all oil paintings in public ownership in the United Kingdom. 80% of these paintings are in storage. And at least two thirds of these paintings have not been photographed before.

When complete at the end of 2012 the website will show 200,000 paintings by some 40,000 artists.

Discover the website – Over 100,000 paintings are already online

Historians of British Art Publication Grant
Proposals due by 15 January 2012

The Historians of British Art (HBA) invites applications for its 2012 publication grant. The society will award up to $750 to offset publication costs for a book manuscript in the field of British art or visual culture that has been accepted by a publisher. Applicants must be current members of HBA. To apply, send a 500-word project description, publication information (name of journal or press and projected publication date), budget, and CV to Renate Dohmen, Prize Committee Chair, HBA, brd4231@louisiana.edu.

As noted by Emile de Bruijn at Treasure Hunt (and he includes terrific images), a new program developed at Warwick University aims to explore the routes by which Asian luxury goods arrived in Britain’s country houses. From the program’s website:

The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 is a 3-year research project (beginning in September 2011 and ending in August 2014) funded by the Leverhulme Trust. The project is one of the many externally-funded research programmes developed under the aegis of Warwick University’s Global History & Culture Centre.

This new project is led by Margot Finn, a professor of modern British History at Warwick. Dr Helen Clifford will play a leading role in orchestrating the project’s engagement with local and family historians, working together with the project’s full-time postdoctoral research fellow, Dr Kate Smith. Ms Ellen Filor will be funded by the grant to complete a doctoral dissertation on East India Company family networks and identities in Roxburghshire, Scotland (c. 1780-1857) as an integral part of the larger research team.

The project seeks to enhance historical understanding of the form and function of British country house culture by situating changes in elite domestic interiors within wider global contexts. Specifically, it explores the regional, national and imperial routes by which Asian luxury goods – ceramics, textiles, metal-ware, furniture, fine art and the like – found their way into the homes of Britain’s governing elite in the Georgian and early Victorian periods, and examines what these exotic objects meant in these domestic settings and in wider national and international contexts. The project builds upon recent developments in the study of consumer culture, gender studies, globalisation, and material culture.

The project also capitalises upon the recent explosion of historical research conducted by community-based family historians. The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 seeks to integrate the findings produced by family and local historians, curators, academics and other researchers into a wider collaborative research project that illuminates Britain’s global material culture from the eighteenth century to the present.

For more information, visit the program’s website or click here to download a brochure.