One of the great things about running the @FolgerResearch twitter account is pulling together the Wednesday Wunderkammer from the Folger Digital Image Collection. It’s a chance for me to explore what’s in the constantly growing collection, making new discoveries and highlighting some of the things that catch my eye. It’s a different sort of interaction with the Folger’s collections than I usually have. As a scholar and a teacher, I am usually looking for something specific—a book by a particular author, a work on a certain subject, an object with specific characteristics. But in doing the #wunderkammer, I get to browse and experience the collection serendipitously. It’s a joy to shift gears from searching to browsing and to look at something for no more reason than it tickles my fancy. Yesterday, for instance, I tweeted about a recently digitized mid-sixteenth-century six-language dictionary: Get ready for school with a mid-16C dictionary…
Category: The Collation
Posts first published on The Collation, the Folger Shakespeare Library’s blog. The original posts and comments can be found by substituting “collation.folger.edu” for “sarahwerner.net/blog” on the individual post urls.
Welcome to The Collation
For many people, the copier is probably the first place they first encounter the idea of collating. Do you want the copier to collate your 50 copies of that 3-page document? Or do you want to turn your 3 piles of 50 pages into 50 piles of 3 pages by hand? That might be the most common usage, but it’s not why we wanted to call this new publication The Collation. As you’ll see, collation is a word gathering together rich associations, many of which are of particular relevance to scholars at the Folger Shakespeare Library. For editors and textual scholars, collation refers to an intricate method of comparing copies of texts, looking for moments where the text differs. Sometimes this means looking at multiple copies of the same text. Especially in the early modern period, where textual variants are common in printed works because the press could be stopped…