The Bodleian Libraries (BODcasts)

Experts discuss how the latest 3D recording technology has supported their research by revealing near-invisible markings from originals held at Oxford University Institutions The very latest in 3D recording technology has revealed near-invisible markings from originals held at Oxford University institutions. Imagery captured with this technology shows what has never before been possible to record. These recordings have assisted researchers in making exciting discoveries which will be shared at this event. In this presentation, a panel of experts will discuss how recordings have supported their research. Incised text from second century wax tablets, newly discovered designs found on the reverse of copper printing plates and examples of preparatory stylus markings from High Renaissance drawings will all be explored through these incredible new images. Recordings of specimens from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History will demonstrate how this new method for 3D acquisition could have the potential to assist in the classification of species. The technology used to create these recordings will be described and explained by their designer, and the Bodleian’s imaging specialist. Members of Bodleian Digital Library Systems and Services will demonstrate online viewers to disseminate these 3D recordings, and newly developed tools which allow users to interact with them. ARCHiOx – Analysis and Recording of Cultural Heritage in Oxford – is a collaborative project bringing together the Bodleian Libraries and the Factum Foundation. Based in Madrid, the Factum Foundation specialises in high-resolution 3D imaging and has worked in cultural heritage institutions throughout the world, producing exceptional, three-dimensional facsimiles of artworks and artefacts. Speakers Adam Lowe is the director of Factum Arte and founder of Factum Foundation for Digital Technology in Preservation. Founded in 2001, Factum Arte is a multidisciplinary workshop dedicated to digital mediation for the production of works for contemporary artists. John Barrett is Senior Photographer for the Bodleian Libraries. Since 2005, John has provided photographs of Bodleian originals for numerous publications. His work involves the development of new methods of recording special collections material. John is technical lead at the Bodleian for ARCHiOx. Jorge Cano is Head of Technology at Factum Foundation. He has developed a multidisciplinary career working in the intersections of art and technology. Jorge is an expert in 3D recording, image filtering and Geographical Information Systems. Carlos Bayod is Project Director at the Factum Foundation. His work is dedicated to the development and application of digital technology to the recording, study and dissemination of cultural heritage. Richard Allen is a Software Engineer for Bodleian Digital Library Systems and Services where he works primarily supporting Digital Bodleian and the Imaging Studio DAMS. He is also CEO of an Oxford University spinout company called Palaeopi Limited that specialises in photogrammetry. Angelamaria Aceto is a Senior Research in Italian Drawings at Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. Dr. Mark Crosby, FSA is an associate Professor and Director of the K-State Digital Humanities Center at the Department of English, Kansas State University. With an introduction by Richard Ovenden OBE, Bodley's Librarian & Head of Gardens, Libraries and Museums (GLAM) The project has been generously funded by The Helen Hamlyn Trust.

Elizabeth Savage and Ed Potten. A conversation reflecting on the techniques for ascribing dates to woodblocks and prints.

Andrew Honey and Alexandra Franklin Discovering and re-discovering the uses of wooden printing blocks within a library.

Madeleine Katkov, Alex Walker and Nicole Gilroy Exploring the conservation of the fabric and content of Bodley’s Library.

Associate Professor Donna West Brett gives a lecture on the collection of photobooks donated to the Bodleian Library in 2020 by Sir Charles Chadwyck-Healey. Conveying meaning through photos alone, the photobook is a radical format that enabled the widespread dissemination of modernist aesthetics. This lecture will take a closer look at the way photobooks portray the ‘everyday’ – the familiar, the practical, the ordinary – and its intersection with the visual languages of politics and propaganda. Speaker Donna West Brett is Associate Professor and Chair of Art History at The University of Sydney. She is author of Photography and Place: Seeing and Not Seeing Germany After 1945 (Routledge, 2016); co-editor with Natalya Lusty, Photography and Ontology: Unsettling Images (Routledge, 2019), and has published widely on photographic history. She is Research Leader for Photographic Cultures at Sydney, and Editorial Member for the Visual Culture and German Contexts Series, Bloomsbury. Brett is a recipient of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, Ernst and Rosemarie Keller Fund, and Sloan Fellow in Photography at the Bodleian Libraries for 2024.

In this webinar, Professor Marion Turner introduces some of the themes of Chaucer Here and Now, the exhibition currently on view at the Weston Library. Focusing on manuscripts and printed books from the fifteenth century to the twenty-first, Professor Marion Turner discusses some of the ways in which readers of Chaucer have responded to and reimagined Chaucer's works. From medieval scribes to Zadie Smith, via early printers, Victorian children's authors and William Morris, Professor Turner explores the afterlife of one of our greatest poets.

Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales tell the story of pilgrims 'from every shires ende / Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende’. Experience these journeys, both real and imagined, through medieval manuscripts from the Bodleian collection live under the visualiser. Dr Alison Ray, archivist at St Peter’s College, and Dr Andrew Dunning, RW Hunt Curator of Medieval Manuscripts at the Bodleian Libraries, will explore the new iconography that developed after Thomas Becket’s murder, the impact of his death on Oxford’s religious houses and how Canterbury became a significant pilgrimage destination.

Tia Blassingame introduced her work leading the Book/Print Artist/Scholar of Color Collective (aka Book/Print Collective) and shared methods for supporting and empowering BIPOC book and print artists In this lecture, Tia Blassingame introduced her work leading the Book/Print Artist/Scholar of Color Collective (aka Book/Print Collective) and shared methods for supporting and empowering BIPOC book and print artists. She also discussed her educational work centred around Black American artists working in the book form and her curatorial work challenging the exclusion and erasure of Global Majority traditions and artistry in hand papermaking. Founded in 2019 by book artist and printmaker Tia Blassingame, the Book/Print Artist/Scholar of Color Collective brings Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) book artists, papermakers, curators, letterpress printers, printmakers into conversation and collaboration with scholars of BIPOC Book History and Print Culture to build community, support systems. Biography: Tia Blassingame is an Associate Professor of Art at Scripps College, where she teaches Book Arts and Letterpress Printing, and serves as the Director of Scripps College Press. Her artist’s books and prints can be found in library and museum collections across the world. In 2019, Blassingame founded the Book/Print Artist/Scholar of Color Collective. Most recently, Blassingame has co-curated, with writer, book artist, publisher Stephanie Sauer, the NEA and Center for Craft grants-awarded exhibition, Paper Is People: Decolonizing Global Paper Cultures, held at Minnesota Center for Book Arts (14 April – 12 August 2023) and San Francisco Center for the Book (28 October -22 December, 2023). Tia Blassingame was the current Bodleian Printer in Residence, 2023. Book/Print Collective | Instagram: @bookprintcollective Programmed by The Centre for the Study of the Book, Bodleian Libraries.

In this session, we explore what Playford’s publishing activities can tell us about how music was incorporated into different social environments in seventeenth-century English society and the role music played in peoples lives. Although The Dancing Master was one of John Playford’s best-known and most widely distributed publications, it belonged within a music-publishing portfolio that provides something of a snapshot of the breadth of music-making activities in which people from different parts of society participated in the Commonwealth and Restoration periods. In this session, we explore what Playford’s publishing activities can tell us about how music was incorporated into different social environments in seventeenth-century English society, from the tavern to the concert room to the royal court, and what the writings of people known to have used his books, such as Samuel Pepys, tell us about the role music played in their lives. Rebecca Herissone is Professor of Musicology at the University of Manchester and a Fellow of the British Academy. Her research focuses on the musical cultures of early modern England, particularly issues of creativity, reception and manuscript and print cultures, which has led her to work extensively on the publishing activities of John and Henry Playford, Thomas Cross and John Walsh, and to consider the complex relationships between musical notation and performance in the period. She has written three monographs, most recently Musical Creativity in Restoration England (awarded the Diana McVeagh Prize by NABMSA in 2015), and has had articles published in journals including the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Musical Quarterly, Journal of Musicology, Music & Letters, and the Journal of the Royal Musical Association. She co-edited Music & Letters from 2007–19 and is now a Vice-President of the Royal Musical Association, Chair of the Musica Britannica Editorial Committee, Series Co-Editor of Cambridge Elements in Music, 1600–1750, a General Editor of the Works of John Eccles, and a member of the Editorial Boards of the Purcell Society and Music & Letters. Her current research focuses on Purcell’s reception, particularly the material traces we can uncover of the small network of individuals who preserved, performed and transformed his music in the 18th and 19th centuries. Alice Little is a Research Fellow at the Bate Collection of Musical Instruments, part of the Music Faculty of the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on collectors and collecting, particularly eighteenth-century tunebooks and their compilers, looking at what sources the collections were gathered from and what the selection of music says about the people and cultures that collected and used them.

This talk will consider how and why the frontispiece to this edition was different from those in earlier editions and place the image in relation to other images of ballroom dance bands before and after 1728. The music publisher John Playford built his success on the publication in 1651 of the first book to give tunes and dance instructions for country dances. He named it The English Dancing Master and in subsequent editions The Dancing Master. The frontispiece to the eighteenth and final edition of vol. 1 (c.1728) shows a trio of musicians – violin, oboe, bassoon – accompanying a group of country dancers in a ballroom. This talk will consider how and why the frontispiece to this edition was different from those in earlier editions and place the image in relation to other images of ballroom dance bands before and after 1728. The speakers will also examine Hogarth’s print A Country Dance and what it tells us about decorum and licence in mid-18th century ballroom dancing. Jeremy Barlow specialises in English popular and dance music from 1550 to 1750, and also has a particular interest in the illustration of music and social dance over the centuries. He has lectured on a variety of subjects for organisations such as the The Arts Society, U3A, the Art Fund and National Trust. His books include The Enraged Musician: Hogarth’s Musical Imagery (Ashgate) and The Cat & the Fiddle: Images of Musical Humour from the Middle Ages to Modern Times (Bodleian Library). The Bodleian Library has also published A Dance Through Time: Images of Western Social Dancing from the Middle Ages to Modern Times. Jeremy is well known for his work on Playford and has published an edition of Playford's dance tunes, The Complete Country Dance Tunes from Playford’s Dancing Master (1651–ca.1728) (Faber Music). Alice Little is a Research Fellow at the Bate Collection of Musical Instruments, part of the Music Faculty of the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on collectors and collecting, particularly eighteenth-century tunebooks and their compilers, looking at what sources the collections were gathered from and what the selection of music says about the people and cultures that collected and used them.

Conservation Scientist Prof. Dr. Mandana Barkeshli looks at lacquered bookbindings made by Persian artisans in the 16th to 19th centuries. Persian artisans are known for their contributions to the field of bookbinding, with the lacquered bookbinding technique being one of their notable breakthroughs. This intricate technique involves multiple layers, each with their own materials, methods, and motifs that have been used from the Safavid to Qajar periods. Professor Barkeshli delves into the details of each layer and explores the various treatments used during manufacture, as well as providing insight into the environmental enemies of the lacquered bookbinding. Prof. Dr. Mandana Barkeshli is Head of Research and Post Graduate Studies of De’ Institute of Creative Arts and Design UCSI University in Malaysia and Principle Fellow at University of Melbourne. Her current research project is titled, 'Paper Dyes Used in Persian Medieval Manuscripts: Creating a Materials Construction Digital Database'.

An introduction to the analysis of painted Byzantine and Japanese manuscripts by the Bodleian Libraries' new Heritage Scientist. The post of Heritage Scientist at the Bodleian Libraries was re-instated at the beginning of 2023, enabling the analysis of manuscripts in the library’s collection. The focus so far has been on Byzantine manuscripts from the 10th to 13th centuries, and Japanese scrolls from the 17th century which contain painted pictures.

Daniel Meadows is a pioneer of contemporary British documentary practice. A photographer, documentarian and digital storyteller. He returns to the Bodleian library to muse on his life and archive and the power of photography. Photographer Daniel Meadows is a pioneer of contemporary British documentary practice. A photographer, documentarian and digital storyteller, he has spent his life recording British society, challenging the status quo by working in a collaborative way to capture extraordinary aspects of ordinary life through pictures, audio recordings and short movies.   Fifty years ago, photographer Daniel Meadows set out in The Free Photographic Omnibus, a Leyland Titan double-decker remodelled as his mobile home, darkroom and gallery. He drove it around towns and villages and offered free portraits to the people he met on his travels. The photographs became a vast and beautiful archive, now safely deposited in the Bodleian Library. In this talk, Daniel Meadows triumphantly returns to muse on his life and work and the power of photography. He shows examples of his archive and reflects on a lifetime of creative work.   The Bodleian Library acquired the full Daniel Meadows Archive in 2018.

What is queer bibliography? How does it intersect with other critical bibliographies, (feminist, Black and liberation bibliography)? How does it relate to traditional bibliographic practice? What opportunities might queer methods and approaches provide? Following the inaugural symposium Queer Bibliography: Tools, Methods, Practices and Approaches in early February 2023 at the Institute of English Studies, hear Sarah Pyke and JD Sargan discuss this emerging subfield with Adam Smyth. Organised by Oxford Bibliographical Society. Speakers, Sarah Pyke (Institute of English Studies, London), and JD Sargan (University of Limerick). Chaired by Adam Smyth (Oxford University).

In this lecture, Matthew Kirschenbaum considers textual stability, a concern of publishers and readers since before the advent of printing, in the post-digital era. Books are not dead as was once feared. But they are not the same either. With digital processes and workflows now thoroughly integrated into the art and industry of publishing and printing them, books are altered by the post-digital moment in which we have arrived. Matthew Kirschenbaum’s lecture will pay particular attention to questions of textual stability, a concern of publishers and readers since before the advent of printing. How stable are texts when the book is now manifest as a collection of digital assets, a network which only might, at times, assume the physical and tangible form of the familiar codex?

Social documentary photographer Jim Mortram and photographer and publisher Craig Atkinson ponder why should we care about photography? Why take photographs? Why preserve them. Why should we care about photography? Why take photographs? Why preserve them? Social documentary photographer Jim Mortram and photographer and publisher Craig Atkinson ponder these questions and more, using their own work as guides towards a photography that is humane and politically-engaged. Jim Mortram is an award-winning social documentary photographer and the creator of Small Town Inertia. Craig Atkinson is an award-winning publisher, artist and lecturer. He runs Café Royal Books, an independent publisher of photography photobooks or zines based in Southport, England.

Thomas Gravemaker explores the history of wood type printing as well as his own recent manufacture using digital design and a CNC router. Wood type has a history as long as printing itself. Thomas Gravemaker, Printer in Residence at the Bodleian Bibliographical Press during March 2023, tells the story of the materials, manufacture and use of wood type since the nineteenth century and brings this up to date with an account of his own recent manufacture using digital design and a CNC router.

Geoffrey Batchen explores the first fifty years of photography in Britain. The announcement of photography’s invention in January 1839, first in Paris and then in London, introduced a new power into British life. This new power—derived from photography’s capacity to automatically capture the images created in a camera—was soon being used for every conceivable purpose. The two exhibitions curated by Geoffrey Batchen for the Bodleian Libraries focus on those uses by tracing the development and dissemination of photographic images within Britain during the medium’s first fifty years. By identifying the key themes addressed in the exhibitions, Batchen shows how photography intersected with all aspects of a nascent modernity, helping to make Britain the society it is today.

A research collaboration between the Bodleian Libraries and the Factum Foundation The Factum Foundation for Digital Technology in Conservation is a not-for-profit organisation, founded by Adam Lowe in 2009 in Madrid. The Foundation was established to demonstrate the importance of documenting, monitoring, studying, recreating and disseminating the world’s cultural heritage through the rigorous development of high-resolution recording and re-materialisation techniques. Using technology conceived and developed at Factum Arte, the ARCHiOx Project will use both a prototype photographic system (Selene Stereo Photometric Scanner, developed by Jorge Cano) and 3D scanning (Lucida 3D Scanner, developed by artist-engineer Manuel Franquelo and the team at Factum) to bring to life relief surfaces of some of the Bodleian’s most celebrated artefacts. This relatively unexplored path to mapping and digitisation should in turn present fascinating new avenues of exploration and research, as it reveals aspects of the item hitherto unrealised or recorded. ARCHiOx will provide a free exchange of knowledge and approaches between the academic and technical team at the Bodleian and Factum Foundation’s experts, as we explore and demonstrate the potential of applying non-contact digital technologies to the study of materials held by the Bodleian Libraries. This session demonstrates how the technology is used and the benefits it brings to researchers of manuscripts

Drawing on a detailed survey of shareholders of the Marconi in 1897 and 1900, this lecture will trace an overall profile of the diverse categories of investors who dared to back this venture through it's experimental phase to becoming commercially viable. What were the economics of radio’s invention? How did wireless communication manage to get through the costly experimental phase and develop into a commercially viable technology? How did the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company not only survive, but also raise the stakes by attempting to establish a transatlantic connection? Drawing on a detailed survey of the shareholders of the company in 1897 and 1900, Dr Anna Guagnini will trace an overall profile of the diverse categories of investors who dared to partake in this adventure. This lecture will throw new light on how financial backing was obtained in the face new challenges and divergent perspectives and expectations about the commercial future of the company. Dr. Anna Guagnini is a Byrne Bussey Marconi Visiting Fellow at the Bodleian Libraries, and a former Research Fellow at Linacre College and at the University of Bologna. The lecture is organised jointly by the Centre for the Study of the Book and the Oxford Centre for the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology.