Dear blog,

It’s been a while since I’ve written a blog entry and lots has happened in that time. There’s been some activity on the Davy project: on 9th March I gave a paper on ‘The Collected Letters of Sir Humphry and his Circle’ at the University of Northumbria, which was a great opportunity to reflect on the project and see how much we’d done. So far we’ve transcribed 183 new letters and have visited something like 31 archives. We must have checked hundreds of letters against the transcripts that we had from June Fullmer. There have been some real discoveries so far and the paper I gave at Northumbria mentioned some of these and argued that Davy was a far more central figure to British Romanticism than he has been thought previously. We had a meeting of the editorial group on the Davy Letters project a week later, on the 15th March. It was good for all five of us to meet up (Tim Fulford, Jan Golinski, Frank James, David Knight and myself) and we made a few decisions. One is that we are only going to include letters written by John (Davy’s brother) and Jane (Davy’s wife) where these pertain to Davy himself. We also decided that the website will carry the text of letters (http://www.davy-letters.org.uk/) with the disclaimer (on the home page) that the texts given here are in various states of editorial completeness: some have been checked against the originals and some haven’t yet. There are also footnote references but not yet any footnotes. I think this is a good decision, since it makes the full text of these important letters accessible to all, but readers need to remember that we are still in the early stages with this edition and that these are not necessarily reliable texts yet. We also decided to continue with the checking and transcription for a further year; there are many more archives to visit and the grants we had have been used up. It’s time for some more bid writing I think…

In other news, I have done a podcast! (http://soundingoutaeolus.wordpress.com/category/podcast/). This is for the Aeolus project (a joint project between the Universities of Salford and Southampton and the artist Luke Jerram). A huge sound sculpture (an Aeolian harp in effect!) is being built and it will move around Britain, making music from the natural landscape. The Romantic poets were fascinated by the Aeolian harp and it features in a number of poems; this project is such a great idea, particularly as it brings together art and science.

I saw Danny Boyle’s Frankenstein as part of the NT live series on 17th March and it was really very good indeed. Though it bore little resemblance in its plot and detail to Mary Shelley’s novel I really thought that the production demonstrated a real understanding of the novel, of its issues and characters. The dialogue was steeped in the language of the book, but nothing was quoted verbatim; instead words and phrases kept bubbling up, often used in a way that expressed the ethical issues of the book far more explicitly that the novel itself does. Benedict Cumberbatch was magnificent as the Creature; his performance made me think again about the character he plays, particularly about the way that he moves, as a body relearning how to walk and act.

We’re a few weeks away now from event 5 of the LitSciMed training programme (14-15 April) and I’d like to start the discussion off using the discussion group facility on the social space (http://litscimed.org/). Anyone can join in but I’d especially like to hear from people who are coming to Event 5. You can find the discussion group that I’ve started up if you click on ‘Newest’ (to the right-hand side below the word ‘Groups’); it’s called ‘Science, Art, and Film’. Please post your comments on the questions I’ve already asked and feel free to pose new questions too.

All best,

Sharon