The Director's Seminar (Thursdays, 10.30-12, Room 111 Foster Court) is a weekly gathering of graduate students and staff, led by Professor Lisa Jardine. As well as welcoming a dynamic group of visiting speakers from pan-disciplinary fields, we aim to discuss topics of all kinds related to the theory and practice of graduate life. Our goal is to provide graduate students with an additional set of skills to enhance those provided in the graduate skills training sessions. Please click 'read more' to see the sessions for autumn term 2013. All interested postgraduate students are welcome - whether you're from CELL, UCL, or any other university. Please contact either Robyn Adams or Matthew Symonds if you'd like to join in!
- 16 January: Graphs, Maps, Trees and Other Ways of Understanding Archives and Books
- We will dedicate this seminar to discuss information management and different ways of visualising and communicating our research. Anne Blair’s Too Much to Know and Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees will be our point of departure.
- 23 January: Avoiding hairballs: a nuanced approach to mapping data in the humanities
- Building on current research work currently being conducted at CELL, this seminar will be a group discussion of best practice in applying data visualisation techniques to humanities research
- 30 January: Tips for applying for funding
- A CELL workshop on the practical issues of academic research life
- 6 February: RSA Panel Session 1, Rumour and reputation in early modern England
- Helen Graham-Matheson (UCL), Clare Whitehead (QMUL) and Nydia Pineda (QMUL) present papers examining the role of reputation and rumour in early modern politics and science
- 13 February: Kate Maltby (UCL), Why Should We Study Lady Jane Lumley's Greek?
- Jane Lumley's translation of Iphigenia at Aulis is the first known translation of Euripides into English. Produced shortly after the execution of Lady Jane Grey, Lumley's text drastically reshapes Euripides' portrayal of a father's responsibility for his daughter's death. But before we can make historical claims about the reasons for Lumley's adaptation of the text, we need to rule out technical error. This paper thus takes an introductory look at Lumley's Greek, as a starting point for discussing the broader issues in scholarly analysis of Early Modern Greek and Latinity.
- 27 February: Katie Bank (Royal Holloway), 'Musicke doth witnesse call': representing truth and self in English vocal music
- This paper examines England’s difficult reconciliation between old truths and new at a critical point surrounding 1600, through an interdisciplinary examination of William Byrd’s consort song setting of Philip Sidney’s O You that heare this voyce, placing music at the centre of the contrastive and morphing perceptions of truth in early seventeenth-century England.
- 6 March: Heather Froehlich (University of Strathclyde), Though this be madness, yet there is a method in't: finding patterns of gender in Early Modern London plays
- This paper will discuss three binaries of gendered nouns in three increasingly larger corpora: a corpus of early modern drama, and all of EEBO. I address presence and absence of statistically-likely collocations from Shakespeare in the two larger corpora, suggesting ways digital approaches to text can help us identify these kinds of patterns (or lack thereof).
- 13 March: RSA Panel Session 2, News, Margins, Libraries
- Kirsty Rolfe (QMUL), Matthew Symonds (UCL), Robyn Adams (UCL) and Brooke Palmieri (UCL) present papers focused on their current research into news networks, marginalia, and the Bodleian Library
- 20 March: Ruth Ahnert (QMUL), Tudor surveillance, meta-data, and the case of Edward Courtenay
- Reconstructing the networks of political power in Tudor England by mining the correspondence collected in the state papers archive (via State Papers Online), and analysing them using computational tools and algorithms developed within the field of complex networks, this paper demonstrates the highly connected network of Edward Courtenay in the reign of Mary I, and not only tells us some interesting things about the man, but also about the formation of the archive, and the uses of this methodology for the study of correspondence more generally.