What Lies Beneath: Tales from the UCL Multi-modal Digitisation Suite

The talk was delivered on 27 November 2024 by Kathryn Piquette, Research Fellow at the Department of Information Studies, as part of the DIS research seminars series.

In this brief presentation, Kathryn will discuss some of the work she is doing in the UCL Multi-Modal Digitisation Suite — a shared facility for teaching and research in digitisation technologies. She will focus on the advanced imaging techniques of Multispectral Imaging and Reflectance Transformation Imaging and share some of the particularly interesting results emerging from her research and selected projects with UCL Advanced Imaging consultants (UCLAiC). She will showcase the ways in which advanced digital imaging can shed light on the life histories of ancient documentary evidence and the materiality of text and image. Kathryn will also highlight how her research and consulting inform her teaching in the areas of digitisation and digital heritage management.

Kathryn Piquette is a Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Information Studies and freelance Senior Researcher in Cultural Heritage Imaging with the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities. In addition to receiving her PhD (2007) and MA (2002), both from the UCL Institute of Archaeology in Egyptology, she specialises in computational imaging techniques including Reflectance Transformation Imaging and Multispectral Imaging. She contributes to teaching for the MA in Digital Humanities as well as provides consulting services through UCL Advanced Imaging Consultants (UCLAiC). In addition to being a founding member of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (2010), she has held post-doctoral positions at the Cologne Center for eHumanities (CCeH); Freie Universität Berlin, the University of Oxford, and Trinity College Dublin. Her academic research focusses on Egyptian and Near Eastern writing and art, and the development and application of advanced imaging techniques for the elucidation of ‘visual’ culture from wider ancient world and beyond. Her publications include the eBook “An Archaeology of Art and Writing: Early Egyptian labels in context” with supporting database (2018, Modern Academic Publishing) the co-edited Open Access volume “Writing as Material Practice: Substance, surface and medium” (2013, Ubiquity Press). Further publications are available to download via Academia.edu.

Book Owners Online

The talk was delivered on 13 November 2024 by David Pearson, Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Information Studies, as part of the DIS research seminars series.

Book Owners Online (https://bookowners.online/Main_Page) is a freely available online database hosted at UCL, developed by David Pearson, providing a reference point for book historians, collectors, dealers and anyone interested in historic book ownership. It offers an opportunity to consider the rationale, challenges and prospects for digital humanities resources like this, and David will explore these themes in his talk. Bio: David Pearson retired in 2017 as Director of Culture, Heritage & Libraries for the City of London Corporation, after a long career managing libraries and collections, mostly in London. He now focuses on his academic work as a book historian, with particular interests in the ways that books have been owned, used and bound, and his books include Provenance Research in Book History (new edn 2019), English Bookbinding Styles 1450-1800 (2005), Speaking Volumes: Books with Histories (2022) and Cambridge Bookbinding 1450-1770 (2023). He is a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the School of Advanced Study at the University of London, was Lyell Reader in Bibliography at Oxford in 2018, and Sandars Reader at Cambridge in 2023. He is a Past President of the Bibliographical Society and teaches regularly at the Rare Book Schools in London and Virginia.

British Colonial Periodicals in Context

The talk was delivered on 20 November 2024 by Prof. David Finkelstein, Honorary Senior Research Fellow, at the Department of Information Studies, as part of the DIS research seminars series.

The history of the British colonial press over two centuries of colonial expansion and contraction is one of contestation, negotiation, accommodation, and interpretation. It is a history of the acquisition and use of print communication tools for a range of purposes, including the publishing and circulation of colonial knowledge across imperial networks; the communication of information about economic activities and political events in both English and indigenous languages; the dissemination of metropolitan culture; the provision of entertainment; the creation of communities of readers; the constitution of individual and group identities; and the mobilisation of collective resistance to colonialism. This presentation, based on work emerging from a recent edited collection on the British colonial press, briefly examines the complex histories of such periodicals to gain a sense of how they functioned under colonial rule between 1800-1970.

Professor David Finkelstein is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at University College, London, and a cultural historian who has published in areas related to print, labour and press history. Recent publications include Finkelstein, David, David Johnson and Caroline Davis, eds. Edinburgh Companion to British Colonial Periodicals (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), Movable Types: Roving Creative Printers of the Victorian World (Oxford University Press, 2018), and the Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, Volume 2: Expansion and Evolution, 1800-1900 (Edinburgh University Press ,2020), winner of the 2021 Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize for its contribution to the promotion of Victorian press studies.