The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe
- Submitting institution
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University College London
- Unit of assessment
- 34 - Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, Library and Information Management
- Output identifier
- 11170
- Type
- H - Website content
- Month
- January
- Year
- 2019
- URL
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https://archaeologyofreading.org/
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe (AOR) was a major collaborative, interdisciplinary research initiative studying renaissance intellectual history through the lens of historical marginalia in books owned by two Elizabethan scholars, Gabriel Harvey and John Dee. It was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. 36 rare books were digitised and made available online, alongside transcriptions and translation of all manuscript material contained within. XML encoding of all transcriptions has allowed for a dataset that allows for statistical analysis of the marginalia, an activity not possible before. Symonds took on several roles as Co-PI. He designed a data model and XML schema to capture the marginalia. This XML schema has been made available under the terms of a Creative Commons licence and has since been used for other research projects on marginalia. With a team of postdoctoral and postgraduate researchers under his direction, he transcribed, translated and encoded into XML thousands of marginal notes. He presented papers on research deriving from the project at major conferences, including the Renaissance Society of America (2014, 2015, 2016, 2017), Digital Humanities (2017), and the annual IIIF conference (2017, 2018), as well as organising a major international symposium on marginalia in 2019.
AOR was divided into two phases, phase I (2014—2016, $488,000) and phase II (2016—2019, $451,000). The outcomes of both phases can be found at www.bookwheel.org. The data underlying the project can be downloaded at https://github.com/livesandletters/aor. The software developed as part of the project can be found at https://github.com/jhu-digital-manuscripts/rosa2.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -