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British Society of Eighteenth Century Studies Annual Conference, St Hughs Oxford, 4-6 January 2017

British Society of Eighteenth Century Studies Annual Conference, St Hughs Oxford, 4-6 January 2017

Live notes, so an incomplete, partial record of what actually happened.

Tags: bsecs

My asides in {}

Stream/Deck: https://www.bsecs.org.uk/conferences/annual-conference/


DH and BSECS Panel

Discusion points:

  • how do we make DH approachable?
  • how do we get to people outside of this room? [isn't BSECS always a bit theme/clique]
  • what is the DH doing to BSECS? Calls attention to the fact that we don't work in a print world, and that the humanities is really the print humanities (Laura Mandell). BSECS commission a text mining exercise on its own journal to find out who we are (Past and Present did something similar) .. surely the sort of exercise a learned society should be doing?! .. we have drawn ridged lines between what is research and what is research materials (the latter isn't, for most, research proper and is the domain of GLAM)
  • BSECS as a forum for statements of need?
  • getting students to make things .. nod to their instrumental needs .. in so doing make the relationship between the past and the present.
  • BSECS have pre-conference workshops/unconference?
  • Don't make a BSECS online DH hub!
  • BSECS panels call? Decide the directions it wants to pursue.
  • Wikimedian in residence at BSECS?
  • JECS to actively accept DH contributions? Ask the editor.

Things to take forward:

  • Wikimedia in Residence for BSECS
  • Ask JECS about actively seeking DH and a set of review guidelines
  • Pre-conference workshops
  • Poster session

Fleuron: a database of eighteenth century printers' ornaments

Hazel Wilkinson

From hand press era .. decline from 1770s .. wood/metal .. provide evidence of unknown printers, but printers did sometime lend each other head/tail pieces or share printing (so not foolproof!) .. method of finding images: blurring pixels near each other together to remove text and suggest ornaments, then decide what is an ornament by hand (so deal with the false positives rather than code to precise and end up with too many false negatives) .. 3.25 million positives! Then removed 1.9 million by another filter mechanism .. still many false positives in the database, steadily removing them (library stamps!)

Giles Bergel

promiscuous use, reuse, and copying on woodblocks in the late C17 and early C18 ballad .. sticking reuse in a chronological order can help us see the wear of a block (and woodworm!): big help with dating as we can put blocks between others based on wear and other milestones (say a ballad is topical) .. can we make it possible to have a conversation with our data? Is 'this' date possible given the data you - machine - can how in memory?

“Wormholes are a bibliographer’s best friend - god knows bibliographers need a friend.” lol 😆 #bsecs

— Danni Glover (@danni_glover) January 4, 2017
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

#### Joseph Hone

But some ornaments are not the same, they are similar arrangements and that was the point (so a focus on exactitude can draw us to erroneous conclusions)

James McLaverty

{healthy reminder the movement of books can as much be to do with reprinting in a new place as opposed to objects printed in one place being imported into another}


‘Poore Strangers’ Reconsidered: Poverty, Mobility, and Community in England’s Long Eighteenth Century

Adam Crymble, Unintentional Migrants to London c. 1780s

Infrastructure of the state created the 'problem' of Irish migration .. not that nobody wanted Irish migrants, but some certainly didn't for reasons that were economic (undermined wages) or social (reputation for drunk violence) .. Irish vagrants overwhelmingly male, which differs from typical domestic vagrancy, which is overwhelmingly female (or at least, families) .. Irish migrants to London volunteered to be a classified as vagrant in order to get a 'free ride home' via a system not designed for that! .. London main site of demobilisation (near, for example, to Chelsea Hospital for army pensions and Greenwich Hospital for navy pensions) .. Chelsea records show a big spike after the signing of the Peace of Paris (end of American Civil War) of Irish getting pensions: 2000 new people! Note, this doesn't include Irish men who failed to get a pension, or other nationalities .. people paid to do a job by the government and then left in London when the job over: unintentional migrants .. young men: around 30 the average age of Chelsea pensioners in this period .. also, note potential link to Catholicisation of the military .. but these demob Irish don't appear to be using the vagrancy system to get home .. these temporary relationships between the Irish and the capital isn't captured by traditional means.

David Hitchcock, Moving the Vagrant Body: Conveyance, Correction, Transportation and Impressment in the English Long Eighteenth Century

1650-1750 .. social cleansing of vagrants .. this paper shows Vagrants coming into the system .. most of what we know about England's poor is from poor law records (relief) .. lucrative contracts - for example ~£100 in Warwickshire - available for moving vagrants across and/or beyond a county (replacing the work of the constable, which appears to disappear 1700-1710) .. nominally responsible for medical care whilst moving people around .. impulse to privatise characterises England's response to poverty .. body of the vagrant becomes commercialised, cargo held at houses of correction .. transportation: growth after 1717/18 transportation act of this at, as it was seen, of judicial mercy .. impressment: procuring vagrants for the armed forces .. moving vagrants around constructed around space and profit

Lucy Huggins, Perceptions of Poverty in the Courtroom

On language in the Old Bailey, circa 1750-1800 .. Peter King: demob doesn't necessarily create more crime but more prosecution of crime due to anxiety .. court proceedings judged by linguists as sources of spoken word .. combination in Old Bailey of recorded and reconstructed language .. contexts in which words that indicate poverty are used to describe a defendant changed depended on who was doing the talking: I committed the crime because I was poor; (witness) they said they committed the crime because they were poor .. distress, poor, necessity most used terms (on multiple meanings of words the former had a legal meaning of a distress committed against someone and an emotional/mental usage, both which have been filtered out of the dataset); though words associated with poor relief - pension, settlement, workhouse, charity - rarely appear: and when they do, defendants rarely self-identify via these terms .. grand larceny and theft from a specified place much more common among defendants described as poor than in the overall Old Bailey records .. use of these words to describe the defendant frequently reveals that the defendant and prosecutors were well known to each other .. pleading poverty in the Old Bailey more or less an admittance of guilt, as was defendant and prosecutors saying someone committed crime due to want. This was a fatal risk, unless - as it seems - Londoners were very aware of the discretionary nature of the legal system.

Q&A

Vagrancy is an ascribed category given to people by a system that few people would self-identify as .. are there other unintentional migrants: people who arrive on a ship, apprentices? .. how does seasonality play into this? Seasonal agricultural economy; you may not want to move people in a hard winter.


### Object and Identity : Jugs, Wigs, Boots

Beth Kowaleski Wallace, Character Formed into Clay: The Toby Jug and late 18th-century English Identity

Popular consumer item that gradually became an expensive collectable: and morphed into the character jug .. how do we explain the obsession around toby jugs? .. appeared at an important transitional moment in consumer culture (circa 1775) .. prototype of Toby Jug the Mr Nobody? Though former a domestic product and the latter imported from china .. Mr Nobody the premodern individual, wears self of the surface. Toby Jug has a human body, has the capacity to contain, naturalises the idea that humans are what they hold inside .. 1770s English potters learnt how to use gypsum to make plaster of paris casks, previously mistook French word alabaster for actual alabaster, so had little luck (see work by Miranda Gooby on pottery/ceramics)

Matthew McCormack, These boots aren’t made for walkin’: material culture and Georgian masculinities

Paper on late-C17 to early-C18 .. George Hobbey of St James's Street. Finest bootmaker in London. Invented the wellington. Castigated customer for wearing his boots to walk rather than to ride .. shoes are one of the key ways in which we construct masculinity .. boots outdoor wear, rustic rather than urbane, the opposite of gentility .. material culture concerned with the emotional attachment to objects .. few shoes survive, goes some way to understand why few scholars work on it: collections skewed on class terms and towards decorative items. And although some worn by the working classes - eg coachmen - they were unlikely to own them (see John Brewer's concept of involuntary consumption) .. high heel as a sign of class rather than gender: connection to polite equestrian pursuits, disassociation from manual labour .. a lot of stake here on whether men's boots were dressy or functional: the latter falls into the - now challenged (see Karen Harvey on men's breeches) - narrative that this period saw the homogenisation of men's dress, the idea that women's bodies were about displays of identity, and preparation of men for the demands of the public sphere .. Jackboot: large, bulky (up to 10 thick), thick, shiny, inflexible, heeled, fearsome objects, equestrian wear, both boots the same, didn't fit around the body rather the body fitted around it, associated with oppression (see Bute as boot) .. Top Boot: associated with John Bull, draw attention to legs and genitals, supple, flexible, low heel, suitable for walking .. Wellington: flexible, seen as acceptable for use in many social venues, elite, bespoke items, constrated bulky plebeian wear

Laura Griffin, The “company of our Relations, acquaintances, and familiars”: America and the English wig

Paper circa 1750-1800 .. how far do colonies retain the culture of their mother country? .. British immigrant identity .. British liberty hooked around trade and ownership .. role of the wig indicative of identification with England: eg, wigs in New York promoted as having English hair .. fashionable nationalism may have been a socio-political need in the 13 colonies .. settlers importing their European culture as part of the exclusion of native americans .. Elite americans still wearing wigs in portraits in 1770s at a time when in England wig wearing was in decline and subject to ridicule .. American cultural dependence for identity on Britain continued well into the C19

John Greene, Rosseau: an enemy of the marriage?

Negative description of carriages in French literary works published during the Ancien Regime .. luxury that has corrupted good taste and undermined city walking .. what does Rosseau not like about carriages? does it change? was it adopted by others? .. reputable artists known to paint carriages: work of art on wheels being dragged - literally! - through the dart, corrupting - for Rosseau - both the subject matter and the artist (for it is a waste of time and talent!) .. baulks at ++ cash used to make the vehicles beautiful .. helps explain why revolutionaries so vengeful against carriages.

Q&A

How can we avoid imposing anachronism and unfelt/assumed emotion to objects? .. What about modification of boots, wigs? {nothing about smell here: for example, men's wigs are identikit but perhaps the use of different perfumes/powder/scent changes their use?}


Panel: Adventures in Print : Coding, Blasphemy, Injury, and the Stationers’ Register

James Baker, Strain, odour, discomfort, and pain: occupational stress and the making of the printed image in long eighteenth century Europe

Me!

Paul Whickman, The Age of Toleration: Blasphemy, Aesthetics and Copyright in the Long Eighteenth Century

Unruly press .. rise of print intertwined with copyright .. manner of expression could be seen as as important as matter under discussion .. lapsing of 1662 act (pre-publication censorship) in 1695 meant that keeping track of publications was tricky .. by the end of the century libel main route through which public opinion controlled .. but post the lapse, many attempts were made to take back some of the control the 1662 act offered .. sense - for Defoe - that onus on publishers important .. 1710 Statue of Anne. Copyright worked in theory to protect all writers and publishers regardless of content, seen as a reward as result of labours: but once the law was tested in the court in emerged that reward could be rescinded if - for example - those labours were judged as blasphemous or injurious (see Rex v Curle and Bernard v Chetwood) .. so intertwined with censorship .. the judgment 'obscene libel' was a response to Venus in the Cloister, even though it wasn't a libel against a person (though it probably was obscene): rather it was judged as a libel against society as it was a book that could be disseminated .. this then was an age of toleration of private belief, but not of published work.

Sarah Hodgson, Printing, publishing and bookselling: Creating a digital version of The Stationers’ Register

Register of books published after 1557 {though value lapsed late-1600s) .. they were a body that acquired information to register copyright .. Copyright Register data: name of entering printer or publisher, author, title, how much they paid to have it added .. entries for books, pamphlets, poems, musical scores .. don't want to guide scholars too much by adding too much metadata to a digitised item .. does a split screen with an index on one side an the document on the other useful to scholars?

Simon D A O'Sullivan, Le Grand Chiffre de Paris

Great Cipher .. system of communication based on natural language that has infinitely possibilities for creating infinite codes .. linguistics and NLP .. the more secret you want to make the code the less information you give away


Some admin...

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