Recent decades have witnessed remarkable advances in the availability and variety of online resources for research into the pre-Modern world. We often think that this will make research easier, faster and more efficient, but there is a recognition that it has also changed the nature of scholarly research and the ways in which the public can interact with it. This network will focus on the impact of digitisation on research into medieval Ireland and Scotland. We hope that a better understanding of how we currently use digital resources will lead to improved applications of technology in future research and more intelligent, innovative use of resources. Gaelic is the native language spoken in Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man for the best part of the last two thousand years. Despite its longevity, the language has been marginalised over recent centuries and has become a largely hidden heritage. However, it contains the most extensive early literature in a native language in Europe outside of Greek and Latin, stretching from the 7th century to the present day, including a vast body of tales, history, laws, and poetry which is wholly unparalleled anywhere in the world. Digitisation has the potential to open up the resources for Gaelic literature and history to a much wider audience and to transform the nature of research. Despite appearances, a medieval text in a modern edition, whether online or in print, is rarely a true reflection of what medieval scholars wrote. Modern researchers presenting such texts make certain decisions about what to display. As most texts appear in multiple manuscripts, the editor has to make many often significant choices that can radically affect the meaning of a text. This mediating of the original is often exacerbated in digital editions. When they appear in print, editions often contain an elaborate apparatus to represent the variations in the manuscripts but this is much more difficult to represent in digital editions due to technical and financial constraints. Ironically, therefore, an online edition of a text often lacks this rich contextual information and privileges a single, processed text - a single view of the past. On the other hand, digitisation also brings enormous power to view texts in new ways. By digitally tagging particular features, such as dates, names and places, researchers have created innovative methods for reading texts. Reading no longer needs to be a linear experience, going from start to finish, but users can construct their own pathways through texts and create new meaning in the process. This network will examine how digitisation has changed the way we access and read materials from the medieval world. The long-term sustainability of electronic resources remains a burning issue. Printed books are carefully catalogued and preserved in libraries, but online resources are frequently neglected by the organisations usually charged with conserving knowledge. Moreover, changes in technology can render documents inaccessible or unusable. The use of open standards can ameliorate this situation, but more complex websites require sophisticated software to perform advanced searches that allow us to access the material effectively and add value, and these programs are much more difficult to protect for the future. It is vital, therefore, that we consider not only how to represent our hidden heritage online, but also how to secure it for the future.

The British Library holds in its custodianship a vast collection of manuscripts and printed books from China and Central Asia that was gathered by Sir Marc Aurel Stein and other explorers in the early 20th century. This outstanding collection contains over 45,000 items written on paper, wood and other materials in many languages spoken in China and Central Asia. Since 1994, the British Library has played a leading role in the development of the International Dunhuang Project (IDP), a large-scale international network connecting partner institutions in Europe, Asia and the US holding collections related to Dunhuang and other Silk Road sites. All partners share the vision of making the images and metadata related to the collections under their custodianship fully and freely available online. This is made possible through the IDP website, a digital platform which is powered by the IDP database, provided by 4D. The 4D database operates across seven synchronised servers that are located at the British Library and the National Library of China, the Dunhuang Academy, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts in St Petersburg, Ryukoku University and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. This system relies on a sharing mechanism that allows access to images and data of the collections, whilst ensuring that each institution retains full ownership of their high resolution images. In turn, it enables a wide range of users of the IDP website to access and explore collections across the IDP network. This repository is an essential tool for researchers, professionals and students across the world working on Buddhist studies, Silk Road studies and Asian manuscripts. The Library has initiated the urgent upgrade of the IDP database across all the seven linked servers to ensure stabilisation and access by staff and external users for at least the coming 2-3 years, and full synchronisation of the system. The AHRC investment will provide the hardware upgrades necessary for this work, enabling the British Library to replace the existing IDP workstations with new machines, which will support the new IDP database in 2021, and the existing data storage units that have come to the end of their lifecycle with expanded and updated ones. This equipment is essential to British Library staff and research fellows working on the Stein and other collections uploaded in the IDP database. This work will ensure the sustainability of the IDP activities for the years ahead, the safe running of core operations, and access by staff and external users to the metadata and images held in separate institutions.

With the growth of digital technology, there is a new expectation among potential users of artist books and those that collect and care for them that the activities of making, cataloguing, storing, displaying, handling and looking at artist books can and should be enhanced by the digital. This proposal begins from recognition that important national collections of artist books are, sadly, largely inaccessible to the majority of their potential users and that this situation can be transformed through digital technology. Rather than viewing the computer screen and electronic text and image as a challenge or threat to the physical printed page, the proposed research network will explore the potential of the digital to transform our understanding, appreciation and care of artist books. The workshops will each address a different theme pertinent to the study of artist books and digital transformations. Workshop One will address two different but related questions. First, it will work with technology specialists to examine the relationship of the physical book with its digital representation and how that might be rendered. Drawing on the expertise of technology specialists at Tate, the British Library and elsewhere, this first session will think through just how those transformations might be achieved. Secondly, it will work with book artists and librarians to interrogate how that transformation might affect users' experience of the book. Touch, scale and the intimate relationship of the book to its reader are important issues to be explored in this session, which will ask what might be lost, gained or elided in creating digital representations of the artist book. In exploring both of these questions, this session will also reference the findings of related projects such as 'Touch and the Value of Object Handling' (2006-7) and 'Creative Digital Media Research Practice: Production through Exhibition' (2008-10), both funded by the AHRC. Workshop Two will work with artists to better understand recent developments in the creation of artist books in digital form. By extending our understanding of the concepts and formats of artist books from the printed page to iPOD publications, free downloadable e-books, hypertext works and phone-based works, for instance, this workshop will ask how we might nurture those practices and facilitate their growth. By engaging directly with contemporary practice in this way, the network will engage with understanding significant shifts in the nature of the artist book. This session will reference the findings of related projects such as 'What Will be the Canon for the Artist Book in the 21st Century?' (AHRC funded 2008-10). It will extend those debates by asking how we might engage with these new modes of production in the art school, the museum and the library. Workshop Three will ask how artist books of all forms can be catalogued to make them more accessible and so transform the way in which people can engage with them. Should they be catalogued as both books and art objects? Should they be more fully catalogued to enable thematic searching? How we might collect new formats of artist books? Should an image be provided to allow visual browsing? And how might questions of copyright be addressed in the context of making collections more accessible?

This project focuses on a contemporary publishing phenomenon that lies at the intersection between cultural trend and social movement, artistic intervention and community environmental project. Known in Latin America as editoriales cartoneras (or catadoras in Brazil), the phenomenon is often translated as 'cardboard publishing', because one feature that unites the diverse publishing projects is the material from which they make their books: recycled cardboard. Yet the term 'cartonera' encompasses far more than the English word 'cardboard'. It is also a reference to the cartonero figure - the cardboard collector or waste picker, a product of economic crisis and unemployment - that was so central in the formation of the first cartonera publishing organisation Eloisa Cartonera in Buenos Aires (2003). It was from cartoneros that Eloisa's founding artists and writers gained inspiration and purchased cardboard, and it was with them that they set up a productive publishing workshop that has since published around 200 titles. Editoriales cartoneras might thus also be translated as 'waste-picking publishers'. Some of them, like Eloisa and Dulcineia (São Paulo), continue to work directly with waste-pickers. Many others, though, have recycled the idea, and adapted it to different local contexts, communities and social needs: some work with groups of school children from deprived areas, others with indigenous communities, to name just two examples. What underpins these divergent, fragmented projects, however, is the shared notion of working productively and creatively from a situation of precariousness - material, social, political, economic and/or environmental. In this comparative study of cartoneras from Brazil and Mexico, we explore 'precarious publishing' in its two closely inter-related guises: an artistic trend and a social movement. In methodological terms, this requires a transnational, interdisciplinary approach that analyses the projects simultaneously as a collection of artistic texts and objects (through literary analysis) and a set of production methods, everyday interactions, organizational logics and social networks oriented toward social transformation (through ethnographic fieldwork). This project makes a number of contributions to research across different humanities and social science disciplines. From sociological and anthropological perspectives, it explores the ways in which theories of social movements can be productively broadened out to include - or dialogue with - phenomena that, like cartoneras, are not only artistic in character, but also fragmentary, fragile and precarious in nature. From a literary angle, it fills a significant gap in research: though these publishers have attracted attention from scholars and journalists since 2003, their focus has largely been on the unusual ways in which they publish (organizational structures and processes), leaving the literary form and content of the books untouched. Our project explores how the content and form of the books (as literary, philosophical or political texts and as art objects) play a key part in creating new relations, communities and meaning. Finally, our innovative use of interdisciplinary methods makes this a ground-breaking study for scholars approaching similarly complex movements that are emerging worldwide in response to increasingly precarious economic, social and environmental conditions. Beyond academia, our project is designed to create productive international collaborations between academics, publishers, cultural promoters and library archivists, which will lead to a number of shared outputs: a series of blog posts co-written by publishers, academics and librarians; a participative exhibition in London, in which participants will contribute to a new cartonera book; and a collection of cartonera texts accessible to UK-based readers and researchers at Senate House Library, Cambridge University Library and the British Library.

During 24 months, Abolition Song and its Legacies ('ASaiL') will probe the previously unknown repertories of British Abolition song (1788-1830s) and music associated with Britain's Black communities until 1830. Partner institutions Goldsmiths Dept of Music, the British Library ('BL'), and the Handel Hendrix House ('HHH') will collaborate to digitise this forgotten music, facilitate research into it, and bring it to public performance and recording. Abolition song consists of c70 high-style airs promoting Abolitionism. Though composed for private and public concerts, the reach of these airs was transatlantic: at least 20 were exported to the United States. Abolition song is a fraught performance text, often portraying 'the African' as without culture and dependent on White salvation. Yet it is crucial to understanding anti-slavery debates, and as the protest song of its day argued for Africans' needs and rights as these were then understood. It followed on from Black artists' performances in British concerts from the 1780s onwards, and Black communities' musical presence generally in Britain since the 16th century. Through its interlocked work packages, ASaiL will research, publish, perform, and record these repertories. The first package will produce BL-digitised scores with metadata following Inclusive Descriptive Practice. The second package will consist of six seminar days (one per term) with a 12-member network of scholars, three each from music, literature, history, and the visual arts. A senior scholar in each discipline will mentor two more junior scholars; working with scores and audio recordings provided by PI Berta Joncus, junior scholars will research, debate, and present transdisciplinary findings about Abolition song and Black heritage music. The ASaiL scholars' network will apply to Goldsmiths Press to publish its outputs as an on-line book with sound files. The third package will prepare and perform six concerts at the HHH featuring Abolition song and Black heritage music. ASaiL artistic director Joseph McHardy will invite six musicians to each prepare one concert per term. The three-hour group rehearsal for each concert will be a workshop for all six musicians, at which early career research practitioners will train them in practice research. Network scholars will attend each concert, which will end with a Q&A and be recorded by a Goldsmiths audio technician. Research findings will also be disseminated through ASaiL-dedicated pages in the BL's Discovering Music web environment, and for toolkits/education packs for use in BL, HHH, and Goldsmiths community/school engagement programmes. Aims: To make Abolition song and pre-1830 music associated with Britain's Black communities accessible through digitisation and concerts. To investigate how Abolition song positioned itself vis-à-vis concurrent music of Black British communities, musical representations of Black dramatis personae onstage, and the Black virtuosi leading British concerts. To explore, through academic and practice research, various narratives promoted by Abolitionism. To train musicians in practice research, thereby developing their ability to negotiate the problems of race theory raised by Abolition song and pre-1830 music about Blackness. Beneficiaries will be scholars, professional musicians, and general audiences engaging with ASaiL concerts and outputs, all of which will be open access.