The one-year project Spanish chapbooks 1700-1900 in CUDL: dating ephemeral literature, made possible by a Cambridge Humanities Research Grant (CHRG) with the support of Cambridge Digital Humanities, has come to an end (see our earlier blog post on the project here).
Continue reading “Dating Spanish chapbooks: preliminary findings of a Digital Humanities project”Tag: digital humanities
A paper on Visualization of French Book Covers from the Liberation Collection (1944-1946) at Cambridge University Library
A few years ago, Cambridge University Library funded a temporary position to finish most of the cataloguing of the Chadwyck-Healey Liberation collection, which is now considered complete and contains more than 3,200 titles, mostly French, published between the summer of 1944 and the end of 1946. At the time, we also pioneered an additional technical feature which was to add thumbnails of the book covers (and links to the full-size images) in the library catalogue. We are delighted that the final phase of this project was recently completed, with the support of Charles Chadwyck-Healey, the work of photographer Fanny Bara, and the help of our colleague Tristram Scott in Digital Services. You can see the results with keywords search in the catalogue. The thumbnail of the cover picture allows readers and researchers to have a glimpse of the physical aspect of the books, ahead of a potential visit to the library, or in order to carry out bibliographic checks. It also sheds light on the iconographic interest of the Liberation collection, which contains many illustrated books and many illustrated covers (some of them feature in the Liberation collection Flickr album).
3-year Postdoctoral Fellowships in Digital Humanities and the Cambridge 1870-71 French caricature collection
Re-blogged from the French Studies Francofil mailing list:
The nineteenth-century French group at the University of Cambridge is keen to attract applicants to come to work as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities in Cambridge for 3 years on the large collection in the University Library of caricatures from the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune (KF.3.9-14). Details of the overall scheme are available here.
Applicants may have doctoral qualifications in Digital Humanities, but applications are also welcomed from postdoctoral researchers in cognate areas (including Modern Languages). Applicants should demonstrate an engagement with DH issues, familiarity with DH methods, and an understanding of the changes in epistemic cultures digital transformation produces. High-level technical skills are not necessarily required but may be part of the application to Cambridge Digital Humanities. The application closing date is 10 November 2019. Continue reading “3-year Postdoctoral Fellowships in Digital Humanities and the Cambridge 1870-71 French caricature collection”
Judging books of the Liberation of France by their cover: a new feature of Cambridge University Library catalogue
Book covers, originally designed to protect the pages of a book, now serve a commercial purpose: they attract the gaze, aiming at inducing the purchase and reading of a book. Their design and appearance are determined by national or sectorial rules and traditions: academic versus popular publishing, paperbacks versus hardbacks. In this blog, I will explore some of the characteristics of current French book covers’ design, the growing importance of book covers images in social media and digital collections, and a specific project designed at Cambridge University Library: adding pictures of book covers to catalogue records of the Liberation collection, 1944-46. Continue reading “Judging books of the Liberation of France by their cover: a new feature of Cambridge University Library catalogue”
Cambridge caricatures of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune (1870-71)
Cambridge University Library holds six large volumes of illustrated plates entitled Collection de caricatures et de charges pour servir à l’histoire de la guerre et de la révolution de 1870-1871 (KF.3.9-14). Among those, the digitisation of volume 1 is now available on Cambridge Digital library. This is a set of highly interesting primary material, visual sources dealing with the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune. The caricatures, most of them coloured, make fun of politicians and public figures of the time, soldiers and civil populations during the war and the siege of Paris by the Germans. They were probably assembled in Paris shortly after the events, then brought to London, where several sets were compiled and subsequently sold or donated to different institutions, up to the 1880s: the British Library (at least 10 vols), Heidelberg University Library (9 vols), the Victoria & Albert Museum (9 vols), Cambridge University Library (6 vols) and the Bodleian Library (1 vol.).
Continue reading “Cambridge caricatures of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune (1870-71)”
Languages across Borders 