The intersection of book conservation, codicology and digital humanities

The talk was delivered on 19th Match 2025 by Alberto Campagnolo, as part of the DIS research seminars series.

This lecture explores the intersection of book conservation, codicology, and digital humanities, focusing on how we investigate the material aspects of historical books and manuscripts through advanced digital tools. At the Book Heritage Lab at KU Leuven, we examine structural and visual elements of documentary heritage, applying methodologies that capture details essential for both conservation and scholarly research. Examples from ongoing projects—including methods for visualizing manuscript gathering structures—will demonstrate how digital tools document, preserve, and reveal new perspectives on the physical narratives embedded in historical texts. This session covers emerging methodologies and considers both challenges and possibilities for those working at the crossroads of traditional and digital approaches to heritage.

Alberto Campagnolo (ORCID: 0000-0002-8672-8400) trained as a book conservator in Spoleto, Italy, and has worked at institutions such as the Vatican Library. He holds a degree in Conservation of Library and Archive Materials from Ca’ Foscari University Venice and an MA in Digital Culture and Technology from King’s College London. He completed his PhD at the Ligatus Research Centre, University of the Arts London, focusing on the automated visualization of historical bookbinding structures. Currently, he is Assistant Professor and Director of the Book Heritage Lab at KU Leuven and Senior Researcher on the ERC-funded PRIMA project, investigating modern manuscript codicology. Alberto collaborates with Dot Porter on the VisColl project, a tool for modeling the gathering structures of books in codex format. Additionally, he serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Paper Conservation and is on the Executive Board of the IADA (International Association of Book and Paper Conservators).

Talk Title: ECycles of knowledge: ‘discoveries’ in historical library collections

The talk was delivered on 5 February 2025 by Carlotta Barranu, teaching on the module ‘Manuscript Studies’ at UCL, as part of the DIS research seminars series.

This paper reflects on a recent ‘discovery’ in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle: an early 16th-century philosophy manual assembled for the students attending the Faculty of Arts at the University of Leuven. The existence of this textbook is mentioned in documents pertaining to the University, but was presumed ‘lost’ due to the lack of known copies. The volume in the Royal Library is therefore not simply unique but also potentially meaningful in contributing to our understanding of the impact of print on the early university. The paper will assess this potential by analysing the volume and by providing an initial scope of its significance for the history of higher learning. It will then reflect on this “lost&found” process: how the cycle of gathering, storing, forgetting, and rediscovering knowledge informs the creation of categories of importance, which in turn affects object survival.

Charlie Barranu is Curator of Books and Manuscripts at the Royal Library, Windsor Castle. She previously held research positions at the University of Cambridge after getting her PhD in medieval literature. She has been teaching on the module ‘Manuscript Studies’ at UCL since 2019.

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.

Conversation Machines, Missing Secretaries, Bad Readers

The talk was delivered on 21 February 2024 by Dr. Rebecca Roach, Associate Professor of Contemporary Literature and Principle Investigator (Digital) of The Stuart Hall Archive Project at the University of Birmingham., as part of the DIS research seminars series.

‘Giant electronic brains’: it was an early model for understanding computers, one that has been enormously generative, spurring advances in cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence across the decades. In this talk I want to tell a different story. There is another metaphor about computers that is just as prevalent in our culture, but much less commented upon: computers as talking machines. Conceived as interactive, as ‘conversational’, computing technologies start to look very different and the relations that they posit across disciplines (the inherent value of literary studies in particular) very different too. Taking as my case study the ‘ur-bot’ ELIZA (1965), I will pull out some of the methodological and conceptual implications of conceiving of computers as conversational. Call it a back-history of ChatGPT if you will.

My Back Pages: A undeniably personal history of publishing

The talk was delivered on 11 October 2023 by Richard Charkin, as part of the DIS research seminars series.

Richard Charkin’s experience as a publisher is unique among his generation. Over the past half century he has been a scientific and medical publisher, a journal publisher, a digital publisher and a general publisher. He has worked for family-owned companies, public companies and start-ups. In his memoir he uses his unrivalled experience to illustrate the profound changes that have affected the identity and practices but not the purpose of publishing. Richard founded Mensch in 2018. It has no mission statement and no stated editorial strategy. Its aim is simply to help authors reach readers with minimal intervention and maximum impact and to reward them proportionately.