Lives and works
At the core of CELL activities is support for scholarly editing in a way that marries traditional scholarship with cutting edge IT. An example of this is our edition of the Hooke Folio, which makes an important contribution to the history of science available as an interactive edition.
We are also interested in how biography can be used to enhance scholarship. E.H. Carr famously said, that in order to understand the history, you must first know the historian. In this spirit Jan Broadway is writing a biography of William Dugdale.
We are particularly interested in the potential for electronic publication to revolutionise the presentation of scholarly editions. To this end we published the revised edition of the Boyle Workdiaries, incorporating images of the original manuscripts, and work closely with colleagues on the Newton Project. We also investigate different methodologies, advise projects on their use and provide working examples, such as how to provide different mediations [new window] to a single source or how to represent the evolution of a text [new window].
Discussion of editorial issues is enabled through CELL's seminar series - which encourages papers that report on the progress of projects or raise issues relevant to electronic editing. These have included Jan Broadway's position paper W(h)ither the Copy Text? [PDF]; Alison Wiggins' discussion of her experience as a postdoctoral researcher on a digital facsimile-edition, The Auchinleck Manuscript Project as an exemplar of collaborative research [PDF]; and Pete Langman's paper describing the achievements of his Master's dissertation project at CELL, to produce an electronic version of Francis Bacon's New Atlantis Navigating Bacon's New Atlantis: beyond the old texts and the new.
CELL also contributes to traditional enterprises in scholarly editing. Lisa Jardine was general editor with Graham Rees of the Oxford Francis Bacon and research for volumes 1 & 2 was undertaken under the auspices of CELL.
