Dear blog,

I had a great time at the third event, and so from what I’ve read on students’ evaluations, did everyone else it seems. We had twenty students at this event from a real range of institutions and disciplines, many of which had not been represented at any of the previous events.

The first day (as hot and sweaty as a day in London in July can be) was at the Royal Institution, starting with a lecture by David Knight, Emeritus Professor at the University of Durham and the author of countless books on the history of science. This was followed by a very nice lunch indeed, and then a hands-on manuscript exercise, where students transcribed pages from original texts such as James Watson’s ‘Double Helix’ and Humphry Davy’s notebooks. The activity led to lots of discussion, which I hope will continue in the discussion group set up to accompany it on the social space, where most people argued for diplomatic transcriptions of manuscript sources. Professor Michael Hunter rounded off the first day with a vigorously argued paper that instead saw merit in non-diplomatic transcriptions for printed editions. To give one example, which was I thought very persuasive, if in a handwritten manuscript, the author abbreviates a word, it is not the case that s/he intended for this abbreviation to pass into the printed version. The abbreviation (particularly ‘ye’ in Michael’s talk) can affect the way that the text is read. It was all highly interested for someone who’s spending more and more time in the company of Davy’s manuscript letters and beginning to think about how we might publish them…

Day two was spent in the gorgeous greenery of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. We had a series of fascinating and challenging talks and discussions, concerning the issues of trust in Conrad’s short stories, the social constructivisim of cartography, how different historiographies can change the way that we look at an object, and we spent some time with the paintings of William Hodges as a particular case study. Richard Dunn in the final session ran through a multitude of different ways of looking at a particular object, a sextant, from thinking of it as a status symbol to thinking about its (machine) production and marketing (it claims to be made ‘by hand’). This led into the final task where, in groups, students had to select from images owned by Greenwich to present on any topic they chose. The presentations were brilliant, especially considering the amount of time people had. I especially liked the one that concentrated on food – using the image of a dried soup cube and a ship’s biscuit – which asked us to think about ephemera and how things survive over time. This was something that chimed with the manuscripts day I thought; where we had talked about how extant manuscript sources can give a skewed sense of the past.

It was all great and lots of fun. I enjoyed meeting all the new people and finding out about some fascinating projects and am looking forward to event four in Manchester and Salford in January 2011. Over the next few weeks we’ll be updating the resources pages for event 3 and adding slides and films (courtesy of Paul Craddock!) and much, much more.

All best,

Sharon