̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - digital resource

Hidden treasures of Cambridge Digital Library

zs332 — Wed, 08 Jul 2020 08:42:18 +0000

With almost 40,000 items to browse there is something for everyone in the Cambridge Digital Library. Here we focus on four archives showcasing the diversity of the CDL.

Bringing Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Libraries to you

sjr81 — Thu, 04 Jun 2020 12:41:56 +0000

We anticipate that by July 6, the ̽��ֱ�� Library will begin to provide limited services for students and staff to pick up books ordered online.

Captain Cook’s Maori paddles: an artefact of encounter

lw355 — Wed, 22 May 2013 09:22:28 +0000

Living in a multicultural, globalised world, it’s hard to imagine the moment when different cultures first met, or a time when people’s knowledge of each other’s worlds was nonexistent.

Yet, on 12 October 1769, seven Maori canoes paddled out from the east coast of New Zealand south of Poverty Bay to investigate a large ship. ̽��ֱ��vessel was the HMS Endeavour, captained by Captain James Cook, and this was the first time the Maori people had encountered a European.

They were at first reluctant to approach the ship but then, according to the diary of ship’s surgeon William Monkhouse, “very soon enter’d into a traffick with our people for [Tahitian] cloth… giving in exchange their paddles (having little else to dispose of) and hardly left themselves sufficient number to paddle a shore.”

A set of these finely carved and decorated paddles is now housed in the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, where an innovative research project ‘Artefacts of Encounter’ has been working with Polynesian communities to understand what the earliest Europeans to visit the Pacific Islands made of the people they met, and what those people made of them.

Rather than turning to the written evidence of Europeans, the researchers have placed at the heart of their investigation the objects the Polynesians gave in exchange for goods. For the Polynesians, the paddles and pots, feathered cloaks and woven helmets, nose whistles and shell horns are often the only surviving evidence of a contact with other cultures that happened centuries ago.

“Artefacts help us to study what parties on either side of the encounters were trying to achieve through these seminal transactions,” explained researcher Dr Julie Adams. “They help us to consider new evidence of the nature of these encounters and of the changes in social practices, ideas and beliefs they engendered, both in the Pacific and in Europe. Artefacts are key to understanding how socio-cultural change unfolds.”

But with more than 650 voyages from Europe and the Americas entering Polynesia between 1765 and 1840, the artefacts the explorers brought back are both plentiful and largely scattered throughout museums of the world. Artefacts were divided up between crew members as ships returned home; today, no single museum houses the bounty of any single expedition.

Focusing initially on 40 ‘priority’ voyages – among them those of Cook (1768-80), Malaspina (1789-94), d’Entrecasteaux (1791-1793) and d’Urville (1822-40) – the team has re-analysed over 1,000 objects from 30 museums and Carl Hogsden has built a digital research environment that brings them back together for the first time.

Named KIWA after the great Polynesian navigator, the digital resource manages a wealth of widely dispersed data through a series of active collaborations with holding institutions, scholars and Polynesian communities, “enabling the discovery of new connections between hard-to-access material,” as Hogsden explained. KIWA is designed to enable the sharing of data and research insights among the geographically dispersed project team (based in the UK, New Zealand and Brazil) as well as between research and curatorial staff worldwide.

For the Maori wooden paddles, for instance, the researchers have traced back almost 250 years from the artefact to the first encounter – through close study of the wooden paddles themselves, which are intricately decorated in red ochre, as well as through sea charts, ship’s log records, diary entries, inventories and, significantly, discussions with a Maori kin-group whose ancestors may have been among those who exchanged paddles for goods with Cook’s crew.

“ ̽��ֱ��paddles would have been part of a set used to paddle a waka taua, a large canoe embodying the spiritual potency (mana) of a kin-group personified by their chief,” explained Adams. “They were probably given as a gift to Tupaia, the Tahitian priest-navigator-interpreter who accompanied Cook and his men to New Zealand, possibly in an effort to bind him and his own mana to the local genealogical networks.”
Tupaia was to die of typhus at Batavia and his possessions were brought back to Britain, where they were sent by Lord Sandwich, then Lord of the Admiralty and Cook’s patron, to Trinity College, Cambridge, in October 1771. After being exhibited for many decades in Trinity College Library, they were deposited in the Museum in 1914.

Adams, who with Dr Amiria Salmond and others has helped amass the object-centric evidence that underpins the digital resource, explained the resource’s significance: “For the very first time, it is now possible for researchers to reassemble all of the artefacts collected on a certain expedition – such as the Bellingshausen voyage from Russia to the Marquesas Islands in 1803. These are now dispersed across various institutions and have never been studied in their entirety.

“Or researchers could ask the database to show all the carved wooden clubs collected from Tonga, or all objects made from barkcloth, dog skin or feathers, or all the objects collected by an individual, such as the missionary George Bennet who toured Polynesia in the 1820s.”

One aim of the project, which is led by Professor Nicholas Thomas and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, is to expose variations in patterns of exchange among different island groups (including Tonga, the Society Islands and New Zealand) as well as between different voyages over time. Such a comparative approach will enable new conclusions to be drawn not only about the voyages themselves and their immediate aftermath, but about the divergent trajectories of first imperial, then (post-)colonial relationships.

̽��ֱ��project has taken a lead from present-day Polynesians, who assert strong ancestral interests in these encounters and their artefacts. A key aspect of the project has been collaboration with a Māori tribal group, Te Aitanga a Hauiti (represented by the arts management group Toi Hauiti) – whose forefathers encountered early European explorers from the arrival of Cook in 1769. For six months, Hogsden worked with Toi a Hauiti to help create a digital research network that allows the Cambridge-based system to share content with a digital archive under development by the Maori community and local web developers, CodeShack.

“This work forms the basis for a reciprocal relationship between networked research hubs where ownership and control of information lies with the source,” explained Hogsden. “Although the networked content is collaboratively produced, the interpretation of digital objects differs. This is important because the Maori community views objects in a highly relational way – everything is connected to everything else – and so whereas our database is object-centric, theirs is relationship-centric. ̽��ֱ��two databases can nonetheless talk to each other and share content.”

For the paddles, members of the project team visited New Zealand to discuss the objects with the Ngai Tamanuhiri tribe, whose ancestors were probably part of the party who paddled out to the Endeavour in 1769. ̽��ֱ��importance of the paddles as early examples of kowhaiwhai painting has been recognised by those engaged in the revitalisation of Maori arts, and research is in progress to establish their genealogical connections to present-day Maori communities.

̽��ֱ��Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology holds a world-class collection of Oceanic, Asian, African and Native American artefacts and has been shortlisted for the Art Fund’s Museum of the Year 2013.
For more information, please visit the Artefacts of Encounter project website

Maori paddles presented to Captain Cook’s crew on their first voyage of discovery capture the spirit of a first encounter between two cultures.

they enter'd into a traffick with our people... giving in exchange their paddles

William Monkhouse, Ship's Surgeon, HMS Endeavour

Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

Maori paddles collected on Captain Cook's first voyage

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Yes

Read all about it!

lw355 — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 10:44:19 +0000

̽��ֱ��flip side of contemporary fear of crime is our fascination with it. Repelled we might be, but the popularity of watching CCTV footage of real crimes or reading the latest salacious scandals in tabloids is testament to modern society’s appetite for stories that shock.

But this fascination with crime is not new; nor is the popularity of the materials that purvey it. Cambridge researcher Professor Alison Sinclair has set out to discover what Spain thought about wrongdoing between 1800 and 1936 by examining a wide range of sources, and in particular the equivalent of the mini-tabloids of the time – so-called chapbooks or pliegos sueltos – of which an extensive archive exists in Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library.

Sold on street corners by hawkers and luridly illustrated, the sueltos carried vivid tales of the unlawful, the improper and the morally corrupt.

‘Spain in the 19th century was chaotic and troubled. It has no literary work that is the equivalent of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and yet the figures for violent crime in the 19th century in Europe place Spain as one of the countries highest on the list,’ explains Professor Sinclair, whose three-year research project has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

‘With their mix of fact and fantasy, the sueltos provide a window not only into wrongdoing at the time but also into its representation and the way people perceived it, thus complementing in a completely original way other literary and cultural representations of wrongdoing.’

̽��ֱ��sueltos spoke to an audience entranced by the exploits of such characters as Francisquillo the Tailor, a boastful chap whose scissors turn out to be his major weapon in a series of dramatic standoffs about honour. A recurring (and real) character is Diego Corrientes, a Spanish Robin Hood figure who took from the rich and gave to the poor, and who died by hanging aged 24 years.

A key feature of the project will be to catalogue and digitise 4,470 sueltos held in the ̽��ֱ�� Library and the British Library. Many are in an exceptionally fragile state and a goal of the project is to create a world-class and accessible collection, which will be held in the ̽��ֱ��’s central repository DSpace@Cambridge (www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/).

Clearly related to a specific time and place, the project raises questions relevant for modern society. As Professor Sinclair, from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, comments: ‘ ̽��ֱ��research will help us to question, as cultural consumers, our excited and emotional responses to this sort of material, including processes of identification and voyeurism.’

For more information, please contact Professor Alison Sinclair (as49@cam.ac.uk).

A new study of wrongdoing and its cultures in Spain from 1800 to 1936 will explore the fascination of popular versions of crime and other misdemeanours.

With their mix of fact and fantasy, the sueltos provide a window not only into wrongdoing at the time but also into its representation and the way people perceived it..

Professor Alison Sinclair

Reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library

Pliegos sueltos Diego Corrientes (S743.1.c.8.2)

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Yes

Ancient Bible fragments reveal a forgotten history

ns480 — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 10:56:50 +0000

̽��ֱ��study by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� researchers suggests that, contrary to long-accepted views, Jews continued to use a Greek version of the Bible in synagogues for centuries longer than previously thought. In some places, the practice continued almost until living memory.

̽��ֱ��key to the new discovery lay in manuscripts, some of them mere fragments, discovered in an old synagogue in Egypt and brought to Cambridge at the end of the 19th century. ̽��ֱ��so-called Cairo Genizah manuscripts have been housed ever since in Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library.

Now, a fully searchable online corpus (http://www.gbbj.org) has gathered these manuscripts together, making the texts and analysis of them available to other scholars for the first time.

" ̽��ֱ��translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek between the 3rd and 1st centuries BCE is said to be one of the most lasting achievements of the Jewish civilization - without it, Christianity might not have spread as quickly and as successfully as it did," explained Nicholas de Lange, Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies in the Faculties of Divinity and Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, who led the three-year study to re-evaluate the story of the Greek Bible fragments.

"It was thought that the Jews, for some reason, gave up using Greek translations and chose to use the original Hebrew for public reading in synagogue and for private study, until modern times when pressure to use the vernacular led to its introduction in many synagogues."

Close study of the Cairo Genizah fragments by Professor de Lange led to the discovery that some contained passages from the Bible in Greek written in Hebrew letters. Others contained parts of a lost Greek translation made by a convert to Judaism named Akylas in the 2nd century CE. Remarkably, the fragments date from 1,000 years after the original translation into Greek, showing use of the Greek text was still alive in Greek-speaking synagogues in the Byzantine Empire and elsewhere.

Manuscripts in other libraries confirmed the evidence of the Cambridge fragments, and added many new details. It became clear that a variety of Greek translations were in use among Jews in the Middle Ages.

Not only does the new research offer us a rare glimpse of Byzantine Jewish life and culture, but it also illustrates the cross-fertilisation between Jewish and Christian biblical scholars in the Middle Ages. "This is a very exciting discovery for me because it confirms a hunch I had when studying Genizah fragments 30 years ago," said Professor de Lange.

̽��ֱ��online resource enables comparison of each word of the Hebrew text, the Greek translation - knows as the Septuagint after the 70 Jewish scholars said to have translated it - and the fragments of Akylas' and other Jewish translations from antiquity.

̽��ֱ��resource was created following collaboration between research teams at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��, including Dr Cameron Boyd-Taylor and Dr Julia Krivoruchko, and King's College London. "This ambitious piece of collaborative digital scholarship required challenging technical difficulties to be solved," explained Paul Spence, who led the team at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's. "It draws together a wide variety of materials under a standards-based framework which provides multiple entry points into the material."

̽��ֱ��research was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Image: Genizah palimpsest with Hebrew (shown upside down) written over the top of a 6th-century copy of Akylas' Greek translation (c. 125 CE) of the Books of Kings (shown the right way up); T-S 12.184r. Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library.

New research has uncovered a forgotten chapter in the history of the Bible, offering a rare glimpse of Byzantine Jewish life and culture.

̽��ֱ��translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek between the 3rd and 1st centuries BCE is said to be one of the most lasting achievements of the Jewish civilization - without it, Christianity might not have spread as quickly and as successfully as it did.

Professor Nicholas de Lange

Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit

Genizah fragment

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Yes

Managing the data deluge

bjb42 — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 12:32:28 +0000

̽��ֱ��volume of digital data created during the lifetime of a research project is expanding rapidly. Scholars across all disciplines are increasingly able to access, share, transform and connect large and diverse sets of data. However, this ‘data deluge’ introduces new challenges, as the volume becomes difficult to manage, hardware and software become obsolete, and the original contexts of data are lost.

̽��ֱ��‘Incremental’ project, funded by JISC, is a collaboration between Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library and the ̽��ֱ�� of Glasgow, and aims to improve and increase research curation within UK higher education institutions. Both the Digital Curation Centre and Digital Preservation Coalition are providing support and guidance.

A scoping study conducted earlier this year identified the attitudes, experiences and needs of a range of researchers at both universities. Now the project is taking simple and pragmatic steps to meet these needs, including the creation of jargon-free web resources offering guidance on planning, organising, accessing and storing data in the long term.

‘Managing data well ensures research integrity and replication, provides opportunities for researchers to discover and share information, and increases the longevity of research,’ says Grant Young, the Library’s digital preservation specialist. ‘Incremental aims to provide researchers with the services and resources they need to ensure that their digital data can have a lasting impact.’

For more information, please contact Catharine Ward, Incremental Project Manager (cw330@cam.ac.uk) or visit www.lib.cam.ac.uk/dataman/

A project at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library is developing services and resources to help academics manage their digital data.

Managing data well ensures research integrity and replication, provides opportunities for researchers to discover and share information, and increases the longevity of research.

Grant Young

Looking Glass from flickr

Deluge

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Yes

̽��ֱ��Book of Kings: the epic continues

bjb42 — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 11:30:43 +0000

̽��ֱ��Shahnama Centre at Pembroke College has opened its doors for the study of Persian culture and arts, marking a new phase for a project that has amassed the largest digital collection of one of the world’s greatest literary epics: the 1,000-year-old Persian ‘Book of Kings’, or Shahnama.

Firdausi’s stirring poem, which was completed in the year 1010, explores the Persian Empire’s history, beliefs, myths and chivalrous code. For the next 800 years, successive court scribes copied and recopied the text, often using the richest of pigments to create exquisite illustrations (almost 100 of which have been brought together in the spectacular Epic of the Persian Kings exhibition currently at ̽��ֱ��Fitzwilliam Museum).

Professor Charles Melville, Director of the new Centre and an expert on Persian history in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, has led a decade-long study of the Shahnama masterpiece, which is regarded as one of Iran’s national treasures. Over the millennium, many of the manuscripts had become scattered worldwide, some as isolated pages. ̽��ֱ��aim of the Shahnama Project, initially funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, was to bring together the Book of Kings in an online environment.

First estimates indicated that there could be a few thousand illustrated pages in existence. But, as Professor Melville explains, the true number has surpassed all expectations. ‘What began as a task that involved physically searching out, photographing and documenting each manuscript has taken on a life of its own. Curators and museums are beginning to send us new data, dispersed manuscripts are being reunited, and the corpus now contains over 12,000 images, and counting.’

With the opening of the Shahnama Centre, supported by the Aga Khan Development Network, the Iran Heritage Foundation and the Isaac Newton Trust, the Project can now enter a new phase. ‘Just as this iconic text has nurtured many different fields of study,’ says Professor Melville, ‘the Centre will now nurture research and teaching in the fascinating and exotic world of Persian culture and the arts of the book.’

For more information, please contact Professor Charles Melville (cpm1000@cam.ac.uk).

A millennium after its completion, an epic Persian poem is providing the springboard for a new centre of Persian studies in Cambridge.

Just as this iconic text has nurtured many different fields of study, the Centre will now nurture research and teaching in the fascinating and exotic world of Persian culture and the arts of the book.

Professor Charles Melville

Shahnama (c.1435)

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Yes

Reading closely: Faculty of English

bjb42 — Sat, 01 May 2010 14:17:12 +0000

̽��ֱ��Faculty of English boasts one of the largest concentrations of research activity in the discipline in the UK. ‘Perhaps we could be accused of being overambitious but we’d like to think that, across the 100 or so Faculty members here, our combined research areas gather together all the threads that make up the fabric of English,’ said Professor Adrian Poole, Head of the Faculty.

Research ranges chronologically from the 7th to the 21st centuries; linguistically from Classical to French and German literary traditions; geographically from colonial America to post-colonial India; thematically from early Christian music to 21st-century environmentalism; intellectually from the history of the language to the history of moral philosophy; even alphabetically from Aaron’s Rod to Louis Zukofsky.

‘To some extent, what we’re doing is preserving and keeping alive the great heritage of English Literature,’ added Professor Poole. ‘Of course this might take a multitude of different forms, whether it’s constructing arguments for the importance of a certain poet, bringing a fresh perspective to a genre, or drawing comparisons between contemporary literature and screen media.’

Founded in 1919, the Faculty was the first in the country to encourage the study of English literature up to the present day and to approach the discipline from a ‘literary’ point of view, rather than as a product of the history of the language. In 2004, a new chapter began, with the opening of a £15 million building funded by the ̽��ֱ��, external donors, including major gifts from Garfield Weston Foundation, ̽��ֱ��Kirby Laing Foundation and ̽��ֱ��Atlantic Philanthropies, and the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE).

For the first time in the history of the Faculty, its research and teaching, a drama studio and 80,000 library books were together, as well as the closely linked Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic (ASNC) and the Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics (RCEAL).

A close read

Great importance is attached to the ability to read literary texts closely and attentively, combining this with detailed historical research. New vistas in understanding writers and their work can be opened up by unpicking the rich historical patchwork that influences them, as Professor Helen Cooper, expert in medieval and Renaissance literature, is finding.

Professor Cooper’s most recent research, due to be published later this year, investigates Shakespeare and the medieval world. ‘Although we think of him as quintessentially belonging to the English Renaissance, Shakespeare’s world was still largely a medieval one,’ she explained. ‘ ̽��ֱ��cityscape of London was still medieval, his ideas about what could be staged and how it was done were carried forward from the late days of the Mystery Cycles, and half his plays have medieval roots. We can only measure what he achieved, or even see it clearly, when we recognise how much the underlying culture of the Middle Ages shaped the world’s greatest playwright.’

Working in a very different period, Dr Ben Etherington, a newly arrived Faculty-funded Research Fellow, also brings together close reading with an awareness of historical context. His research focuses on post-colonial and international literatures in English, a fast-growing research area in Cambridge and elsewhere. Studying literary primitivism in the early 20th century, and reading the work of writers and intellectuals from the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean, Britain, West Africa and France, Dr Etherington is interested in the spread of primitivist modes of writing and what this can tell us about colonialism in the early to mid-20th century.

Embracing a digital age

Members of the Faculty have been in the vanguard when it comes to embracing the changing landscape brought about by digital advances. ̽��ֱ��recently completed Scriptorium project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, has assembled a digital archive of medieval and early modern manuscripts, and teamed this up with a fully interactive online course to help scholars learn how to read these notoriously difficult texts.

A computational approach is being taken in a groundbreaking collaborative research programme in RCEAL called English Profile, supported by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press and Cambridge ESOL. ‘ ̽��ֱ��idea is to understand how English is acquired as a second language and then apply this knowledge to improving textbooks and testing,’ explained Dr Henriëtte Hendriks, Acting Director of RCEAL and one of its Principal Investigators. A corpus of 26 million words taken from test sheets for speakers representing over 100 different languages is being analysed by linguists and computational linguists for the common developmental paths that learners of English follow over time. This study is just one of several RCEAL projects that are helping to solve practical problems involving the English language – in language teaching, textbook publishing and even medical diagnosis.

A pioneering study by Professor Peter de Bolla could have implications for transforming research methodologies of the future. In a project funded by the Leverhulme Trust, Professor de Bolla has been mapping how an idea, or concept, develops through literature. Rather than attempting the impossible task of reading many thousands of books, letters and manuscripts, Professor de Bolla has taken the innovative step of searching for and counting the incidence of sets of keywords in the huge digital archives that have only recently become available to scholars. It’s new territory for scholars of English, forging a methodology that has the potential to reap significant academic dividends.

Anglo-Saxon gold

Recent headlines might give the impression that to strike Anglo-Saxon gold you need a metal detector but, as ASNC academics Professor Simon Keynes and Dr Rosalind Love discovered, there’s still plenty awaiting the historians and literary scholars who depend on texts.

When a 14th-century compilation of historical materials that had lain undiscovered in the library of the Earl of Devon for centuries went under the hammer at Sotheby’s, an eagle-eyed expert (and former ASNC graduate student) spotted that it contained a copy of a much older and incredibly rare text. It was the Encomium Emmae Reginae, a highly charged polemic written on behalf of Queen Emma, wife of King Æthelred the Unready and then of King Cnut, in 1041. But, unlike the only other surviving copy, it was preserved here in a version with a different ending, added after the accession of her son Edward the Confessor in 1042. Coincidentally, a related discovery was made in Oxford, where papers of a 16th-century antiquary were found to include a long-lost section from a biography of King Edward, written soon after his death in 1066.

Both ‘new’ texts have now been studied closely at ASNC, and interpreted in relation to each other. ‘ ̽��ֱ��variant ending of the Encomium is rather explosive in its implications for our understanding of how Edward’s accession was perceived by contemporaries, spinning it as the longed-for restoration of the Anglo-Saxon royal line,’ explained Professor Keynes. ‘And it provides the perfect context for understanding a poem, now fully recovered, which describes a magnificent ship given to Edward at precisely that time,’ added Dr Love.

̽��ֱ��word in the world

̽��ֱ��newest initiative for the Faculty of English has been the launch of the Centre for Material Texts, which will foster the next generation of research and teaching relating to texts of any form, from spoken words to celluloid, from manuscript to XML. As any academic in the Faculty will attest, text is the product both of its creator and a mass of worldly circumstances; unravelling how texts of many kinds have been embodied and circulated is becoming one of the most exciting areas of humanities research today, and continues a tradition at the Faculty of English of getting close to the written word.

For more information about research at the Faculty of English, please visit www.english.cam.ac.uk/

ASNC: www.asnc.cam.ac.uk/

Close scrutiny of text is the bedrock of a research culture that spans practically the whole range of contemporary English studies.

To some extent, what we’re doing is preserving and keeping alive the great heritage of English Literature.

Professor Adrian Poole

Dr Jason Scott-Warren and Dr Andrew Zurcher

English collage

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Yes