Dear Blog,
The week has been dominated by thinking about what the Calendar of Letters should look like for our Davy letters project. We’re at the stage where we are building the database and have to decide some tricky things – what should the fields be for the letters, how will people want to search them, how do we ensure that all eventualities (eg letters in French, letters using symbols, letters without a certain date) are accommodated by the database created for them? We’ve had some good discussions among the consultancy group (Tim Fulford, Jan Golinksi, Frank James, and David Knight) and there are more meetings planned. We are also regularly turning up new letters by Davy, this week David Knight noticed that the Linnaean Society has some and a few weeks ago a few turned up on Ebay of all places (thanks to David Fallon for pointing them out to me). We can’t afford to buy them unfortunately but I’m going to ask whether we can transcribe them for the edition.
I have a question about how to use the social space. We have recorded a number of the sessions at the Literature, Culture, and Science symposium held at the University of Salford and were thinking of posting them on the social space so that people could see/listen to them. Before Cristina begins editing these though, I’d like to know whether thsi would be of interest, and whether there are particular sessions people would like to see. The programme for the day can be seen at http://www.espach.salford.ac.uk/cms/news/article/?id=20. If people are particularly keen to see papers on eco-criticism, medical journals in the US, experiential theatre performances, or polaroid cameras, let me know and we’ll publish them.
Cristina also wondered about the following activity for the social space: ‘why not ask students to host their own discussions? Since most students will be participating in all the face to face events… Why not ask 2 -3 of them to host a small discussion about a topic related to their dissertation? This could be done in turns. Each week a new discussion moderated by a student. Then after the face to face event, other students would take that role, etc…’ I think this is a great idea but am interested to see what others think to. Let me know – you can leave comments at the bottom of the blog or send me a message.
Right, I’m off now to the John Ryland’s library at Deansgate in Manchester to read some letters by John Aikin (brother to Anna Barbauld) to someone called James Montgomery, whom I’m yet to identify. Am hoping this will help for an article I’m writing.
Best,
Sharon