You are here

Launch event for The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe (AOR)

poster for AOR1 launch

On Thursday October 13, the UCL Centre for Editing Lives and Letters (CELL) are hosting a launch event for The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe (AOR), a digital humanities initiative from CELL, Johns Hopkins University, and Princeton University, generously funded by the Mellon Foundation.

The activities conducted in the first two years of the project have resulted in the construction of a IIIF-compliant viewer containing digitised images of thirteen books annotated by Gabriel Harvey as well as fully searchable transcriptions of all of Harvey's annotations and other interventions with the material text. Enhanced by a wide-ranging set of functionalities relating to image viewing and manipulation, transcription viewing, and the construction of query-based searches, AOR makes possible innovative and systematic research on historical reading practices and strategies. 

The launch will be at the UCL Institute for Advanced Study’s Common Ground and comprises:

A two-hour workshop (15:00-17:00) for graduate students and researchers on the history of reading and the Digital Humanities run by Prof Earle Havens (Johns Hopkins, PI of AOR), Dr Matthew Symonds (CELL/UCL, co-PI), Dr Jaap Geraerts (postdoctoral fellow at CELL/UCL), and Prof Arnoud Visser (Utrecht University, director of Annotated Books Online). Subjects covered will include renaissance and early modern reading practices, bibliography and book history, the conceptualization of annotated books as “big data”, and how to construct Open Access and Open Source digital projects for the humanities. 

A two-hour drinks reception (17:00-19:00) with short talks by Dr Alex Sampson (UCL, Director of CELL), Prof Earle Havens, and Prof William Sherman (V&A, author of Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England) and a hands-on, interactive demonstration of AOR.  

Invitees are welcome to attend either or both parts of the event.