Those working on the material text may be aware of the glorious new enterprise that is Inscription: the Journal of Material Text – Theory, Practice, History. Created and edited by Gill Partington, Adam Smyth and Simon Morris, the journal exists both as a lavish large format physical production and an online marvel. Two issues have […]
Tag Archives: paper
Virtual unfolding: New digital techniques for opening complex documents
posted by mdever
An exciting breakthrough has been announced this week, one that permits researchers to read letters without unfolding them, offering new ways of managing sealed and fragile documents. Using a combination of X-rays and 3-D imagining techniques, researchers virtually “opened” four letters from the Brienne Collection, a trunk filled with 2,600 notes sent from Europe to the […]
NEW BOOK: On manuscripts, materiality and ‘thinking through paper’.
posted by mdever
New out from Palgrave: Paper, Materiality and the Archived Page. The emergence of digital technologies in the realm of archives has enlivened our understandings of archival materialities and lent a new intensity to our engagements with the archived page by prompting us to consider the potential of paper and the page in ways that we […]
Image, Knife, Gluepot: Open access book
posted by mdever
While this title technically falls outside the period generally covered in this blog, the topic is nevertheless of interest to those concerned with paper and materiality. Image, Knife, and Gluepot: Early Assemblage in Manuscript and Print by Kathryn M Rudy explores how manuscript pages and fragments travel through time. In her introduction, “Hybrid Books in Flux”, Rudy […]
Brittle paper: what can it stand?
posted by mdever
Taking a literal turn in our thinking around materiality and the archived page, the following recent publications examine the mechanics of aged and brittle paper: “Comparing Non-destructive Mechanical Testing Methods for the Assessment of Brittle Papers – The Cantilever, Hanging Pear Loop, and Clamped Fold Tests” by Andrea K. I. Hall, Raymond H. Plaut and Patricia M. McGuiggan, […]
Article: Of mind and matter: The archive as object
posted by mdever
In the following article in Archives and Records (39.1 2018) Peter Lester advances an argument about materiality and the nature of archival evidence. Of mind and matter: The archive as object Abstract Archives are not only sources of evidence and information; they are also material objects with physical, tangible characteristics such as size, weight and […]
New article: Paper tools
posted by mdever
Boris Jardine’s article, “State of the Field: Paper Tools” in Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science (Volume 64, August 2017, Pages 53-63) makes interesting reading for those concerned with questions of paper and materiality. Jardine asks whether scholars across diverse fields are talking about the same thing ‘when they talk of paper, its qualities, affordances and […]
Plath poems identified in carbon paper
posted by mdever
An article in The Guardian reports on the work of Gail Crowther and Peter K Steinberg, who identified two previously unknown poems by Sylvia Plath. The poems were on carbon paper found in the back of an old notebook owned by Sylvia Plath. “Written at the start of Plath and Hughes’s relationship in autumn 1956, the two […]
Getty acquires concrete poetry
posted by mdever
The following reposted from ArtfixDaily.com raises particularly interesting questions around the materiality of these acquisitions: The Getty Research Institute (GRI) announced today the acquisition of a suite of prints, a folded paper poem, and an artist’s book by the Scottish artist and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, as well as a 3D “cubepoem” by the Brazilian artist […]
CFP: Paper Trails Workshop
posted by mdever
Workshop, 19-21* June 2017 University College London Often there is more than research inside the books we read. Bookmarks, train tickets, receipts, and menus tucked into pages offer clues about the life of the book itself. Yet the lives of our research material often go unmarked, lost between the gaps in disciplinary boundaries […]
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