Hello, and welcome to Carnivalesque 86, the early modern edition! Step right up for a look at things small and large in the world of early modern blogs. I’ve been puzzling through the relationship between the fairly new field of big data in the humanities and what might be its opposite, small data, and so many of the posts that caught my attention are ones that are navigating between individual objects and networks of data. One of the objections that I have to big data is that I’m drawn to the ephemeral and the hard-to-measure. In “Early printed book contains rare evidence of medieval spectacles,” The Harry Ransom Center’s Cultural Compass blog takes a look at that trickiest of ephemera, not the object itself but the traces it left behind. The medieval manuscript used as the endpapers to a 1568 printed work show the outline of a pair of medieval glasses….
Tag: blogging
why blog once when you can blog twice or even thrice?
A quick update for those of you who have missed my online promotions: I am now in charge of a new blog at work, The Collation: a gathering of scholarship from the Folger Shakespeare Library. It is what it says it is, a blog authored by staff and scholars at the Folger that shares research and resources at the Library in terms that are accessible to the general public and of interest to scholars. If you’re interested in the early modern aspects of what I write here, you’ll like The Collation, too. But it’s not all early modern! We’ll be touching on aspects of librarianship, digital curation, theatre history, and humanities research. I wrote the introductory post on the word “collation” as well as a later post about my tweeting the @FolgerResearch #wunderkammer series. There are also posts so far from Steve Galbraith, the recently departed Curator of Books, ((“recently departed”…
UPDATE: commenting problems FIXED!
UPDATE: w00t! I think I’ve now solved the commenting glitch by returning to the hideous pop-out comments as opposed to embedded comments. The important thing is not the beauty of the design but that you can share your wisdom with me! So please do! You can ignore what follows, except that if you find you are having problems, please email me at the address given below so that I can try to fix it! I think the blogging powers that be are angry with me for being a once-a-month poster! But whatever the reason, there’s some sort of bug affecting the ability for some of you to sign in and leave comments. Of course this happens when I’ve specifically asked for your feedback! I’m working on solving the problem–if any of you bloggers have had this happen to you, I’d be happen to hear your thoughts on how to fix…
Why I blog, or, Why you should blog
Not only have I not posted in nearly a month (sorry!), I’ve missed my own blogiversary! That’s right, Wynken de Worde has been up and running for over a year now, which in blog years might mean we’ve hit cranky adolescence. Because this is a celebration, I’ll try to keep the crankiness to a minimum, although some of it is to my point. I started this blog largely because I wanted to be able to direct students toward an example of what studying “early modern book history” might entail. In order to get students into my courses, I have to reach out to them and get them excited enough that they want to apply for it. I can’t always rely on their teachers conveying what it is that they might get out of the experience of studying rare books, but I can get some of that across by sending them…
Carnivalesque 48
Welcome, one and all, to Carnivalesque 48, the early modern edition! As should come as no surprise, some of the most interesting posts on early modern studies in the last few months have come from two sources. Both Mercurius Politicus (written by Nick Poyntz) and diapsalmata (Whitney Anne Trettien) routinely have fabulous posts; I’ll single out a couple here, but really, their blogs are worth reading regularly. Mercurius’s Killing Noe Murder discusses Edward Sexby’s 1648 pamphlet justifying the murder of Cromwell; part of Nick’s concern is the production and distribution of the pamphlet, a theme he takes up in a broader examination of the rise of newsbooks in The Great Game. There is some more material book history over at diapsalmata, where Whitney has been looking at the practice of cut-ups in a series of posts. The first draws connections between early modern commonplacing, Dada cut-ups, and digital poetry–a great…