The Matrix Reloaded: Establishing Cataloguing & Research Guidelines for Artefacts of Printing Images
The material turn in fields that rely on historical printed material has led to interest in how material was—and is—produced. Those objects (cut woodblocks, etched/engraved metal plates, lithographic stones) could be fundamental to research. Tens of thousands survive from the last 500 years, but many are inaccessible because they do not fit into the cataloguing structures and controlled vocabularies used by the libraries, archives and museums that hold them. Even the basic term is debated: to book historians/in libraries, pieces of type are multiples cast from a matrix (mould); to artists and art historians/in museums, those types are matrices (and the sheets printed from them the multiples).
Given the new possibilities to catalogue and digitise these artefacts to reveal their research potential, a common framework could advance knowledge of image-printing processes and images’ role in the print trade. This twelve-month project will create a research network and distil a single, interdisciplinary best practice from existing standards across disciplines and heritage collections to train researchers to engage with them.
As a precondition for this training is consensus on terminology, methodology and best practice, (1) an international, interdisciplinary working group will be formed. It will agree on recommendations at (2) a closed symposium. The aim of BARSEA scheme is to cascade benefits to early career researchers, so this framework will be put into practice at (3) a training session for ECRs, refined, and (4) published open access so that researchers in many places and disciplines can use these objects in their research from the start of their academic careers. This research is supported by a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award.
Early Career Researchers Training Day (1 December 2017)
This free, hands-on, object-based training day will introduce 10 ECRs to the research of historical matrices/printing surfaces (e.g. cut woodblocks, etched metal plates, litho stones). The emphasis is pre-1830. By analysing the objects and resulting impressions, participants will learn how to describe them; identify how they were made, used and copied; relate them to printed content; and use them as primary material in their own research.
The interdisciplinary remit includes text and image, as well as decorations, initials, medicine, music, mathematical symbols, scientific imagery, and more. This event is the first application of a new research framework, which will later be published open access. Participants will learn new research skills and, through their feedback, help shape the future of research in fields related to print heritage. The training is convened by Elizabeth Savage and facilitated by Giles Bergel and Roger Gaskell.
Working Group
Laura Aldovini (Università Cattolica, Milan; Project Census Italian Renaissance Woodcuts, Fondazione G. Cini, Venice); Ilaria Andreoli (Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), Paris; Museo Correr, Venice); Giles Bergel (Oxford University); Erin Blake (Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials: Graphics (DCRM(G)); Rosalba Dinoia (independent researcher); Cristina Dondi (15cBOOKTRADE; Oxford University; Consortium of European Research Libraries); Caroline Duroselle-Melish (Folger Shakespeare Library); Richard S. Field (Yale University); Roger Gaskell (Roger Gaskell Rare Books); Shelley Langdale (Philadelphia Museum of Art; Print Council of America); Katherine Martin (V&A); James Mosley (University of Reading; Institute of English Studies); Paul Nash (The Strawberry Press; Printing Historical Society); Nadine Orenstein (Metropolitan Museum of Art); Christiane Pagel (Graphikportal; Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum); Liam Sims (Cambridge University Library); Linda Stiber-Morenus (Library of Congress); Ad Stijnman (Herzog August Bibliothek); May Sung (FoGuang University, Taiwan); Jonathan Whitson Cloud (ICOM-CIDOC Documentation Standards Working Group; Horniman Museum)
For more information please click "Further Official Information" below.
This opportunity has expired. It was originally published here:
http://www.ies.sas.ac.uk/research-projects-archives/matrix-reloaded-establishing-cataloguing-research-guidelines-artefacts