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.

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.

In 1757 King George II presented the approximately 1950 manuscripts of the royal library to the newly founded British Museum. Since that time, the manuscripts have remained together as a distinct collection: ROYAL. Royal preserves the medieval and Renaissance library of the kings and queens of England, and includes within the illuminated manuscripts most surviving medieval paintings owned by them. Hence its importance can hardly be overstated. \n\nYet remarkably, the Royal illuminated manuscripts have been little researched, and have never been presented to a scholarly or wider public as a group. The British Library, home of the Royal collection since its creation in 1973, plans to change this situation by working collaboratively with the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, to present in October 2011-March 2012 a major exhibition of illuminated Royal manuscripts at the British Library in London. To make this possible a research project on these manuscripts will be undertaken, responding to research questions at complementary levels. \n\nThe project team will be led by two internationally-recognised experts in illuminated manuscripts: Dr Scot McKendrick, Head of Western Manuscripts at the British Library, and Professor John Lowden of the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. They will be assisted by a postdoctoral scholar, providing opportunities for this scholar to develop her or his expertise and career, and to develop expertise in medieval and Renaissance art, history, and presenting manuscripts to a range of audiences. The scholarly research resulting from the experience and expertise of this team will allow the Royal manuscripts to be presented and contextualised in new and creative ways. \n\nTo build further collaborative relationships between the British Library and higher education experts and fellow curators within the United Kingdom and internationally, the project will be overseen by an international advisory board, and will include an international conference on the collection to be held at the end of the project.\n\nEach of the approximately 400 illuminated manuscripts in Royal with significant medieval or Renaissance decoration will be examined individually, to research its patronage, artist, scribe, models and function. The results of this analysis will allow thematic questions to be formulated and answered, and the approximately 150 exhibition manuscripts to be chosen. The exhibition will then be structured around these thematic questions. These themes are likely to include studies in the formation and development of the collection of illustrated manuscripts by English monarchs, the role of pictorial narrative in illuminated vernacular histories ordered by Edward IV, the change in function of monastic illuminated manuscripts after the dissolution of the monasteries, and the way in which illuminated manuscripts in the library were used and received by their owners. \n\nThe project will interpret and present medieval and Renaissance painting in Royal manuscripts in an innovative way in an exhibition in London, which will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated exhibition catalogue. The research will also be disseminated freely to an international audience through an online virtual exhibition and online introductory 'tours' for a general audience explaining aspects of the Royal collection of illuminated manuscripts. \n\nIn addition, in order to respond to the needs of the wider scholarly community and provide long-term research benefits, the information on all 400 manuscripts will be made available online as part of the BL's free, illustrated Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts (CIM). The research made available through the CIM and the other online resources will allow scholars and the general public to formulate their own further research questions, promoting active learning.

Human experiences are recorded and communicated mostly as text which are increasingly available as digital corpora. A major challenge for researchers in the social sciences, humanities and computer sciences is how to use these texts in interdisciplinary settings to develop cohesive understandings of the experiences described. Understanding geographies in textual sources has received a significant amount of research interest in recent years across fields as diverse as geographical information science (GISc), corpus linguistics, natural language processing (NLP), human geography, literary studies, and digital humanities. The current state of the art involves using geoparsing to automatically identify the place names in texts and allocate them to a coordinate (Grover et al 2010). Once georeferenced in this way, place names can be read into a geographical information system for mapping and spatial analysis. Analysis can also be conducted using techniques from corpus linguistics and NLP to see what words or themes are associated with the place name such as the place being associated with emotional responses such as being beautiful or inspiring fear. This combination of approaches is known as geographical text analysis (GTA) (Gregory et al 2015). While GTA provides a useful starting point for understanding the geographies within a corpus, it is highly quantitative, is limited to named places for which coordinates can be found, and has little concept of time. Yet, as narratives of journeys make abundantly clear, human experiences of geography are more often subjective and more suited to qualitative representation. In these cases, "geography" is not limited to named places; rather, it incorporates the vague, imprecise, and ambiguous, with references to, for example, "the camp", "the hills in the distance", or "further down the road", and includes the relative locations using terms such as "near to", "on the left", or "a few hours' journey" from. These qualitative representations are necessary contextual referents but cannot be managed within geospatial technologies such as GIS. To understand on a large scale the ways in which humans describe and relate to the world around them, then, we need to be able to visually represent and interpret the geographies authors describe in ways that combine the qualitative nature of described spatial experiences with methods that render them quantitatively analysable. Drawing on a strongly interdisciplinary team, this grant will develop approaches that allow us to identify, extract, visualise, and analyse qualitative and quantitative references to place and time. These methods will be applied to analyses of two large corpora: one a corpus of travel writing about the English Lake District, predominantly written in the 18th and 19th centuries; the other, a corpus of Holocaust survivor testimonies. Although based on very different types of journey - leisure travel and forced migration respectively - both corpora represent a collection of unique voices that coalesce to generate complex cultural and experiential geographies. The project will explore how cutting-edge digital technologies from NLP, corpus linguistics, Qualitative Spatio-Temporal Reasoning (QSTR), GISc, and visual analytics can help us understand how authors themselves represented the geographies that surrounded them and explore the individual and aggregate representation of the sense and experience of place that these texts contain. The resulting applications will have great significance for scholarly and non-academic audiences alike.