Material Culture (8)

• Digital Humanities
• Material Culture

From Handwriting to Footprinting: Text and Heritage in the Age of Climate Crisis

• Anne Baillot

Integrating historical, archival and environmental perspectives, From Handwriting to Footprinting illuminates the impact that digitisation has had on the dissemination and preservation of textual heritage and reflects on what its future may hold. It is invaluable reading for anyone interested in textual history from a linguistic or philological perspective, as well as those working on publishing, archival and infrastructure projects that require the storing and long-term preservation of texts, or who want to know how to develop a more mindful attachment to digitised material.

• Law
• Law: Intellectual Property
• Material Culture
• Visual Arts

Circulation and Control: Artistic Culture and Intellectual Property in the Nineteenth Century

• Marie-Stéphanie Delamaire
• Will Slauter

The nineteenth century witnessed a series of revolutions in the production and circulation of images. From lithographs and engraved reproductions of paintings to daguerreotypes, stereoscopic views, and mass-produced sculptures, works of visual art became available in a wider range of media than ever before. But the circulation and reproduction of artworks also raised new questions about the legal rights of painters, sculptors, engravers, photographers, architects, collectors, publishers, and subjects of representation (such as sitters in paintings or photographs). Copyright and patent laws tussled with informal cultural norms and business strategies as individuals and groups attempted to exert some degree of control over these visual creations.

• Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures
• Material Culture

Jewish-Muslim Intellectual History Entangled: Textual Materials from the Firkovitch Collection, Saint Petersburg

• Adang Camilla
• Bruno Chiesa
• Omar Hamdan
• Wilferd Madelung
• Sabine Schmidtke
• Jan Thiele

This timely volume presents, for the first time, edited fragments of six texts by adherents of the Muʿtazila, a school of rational theology that emerged in the eighth century CE, including Karaite copies and recensions of works by Muslim authors, notably ʿAbd al-Jabbār al-Hamadhānī and ʿAbd Allāh b. Saʿīd al-Labbād, as well as original Jewish Muʿtazilī treatises. The collection is concluded by an anonymous Rabbanite refutation of the highly influential polemical tract against Judaism, entitled Ifḥām al-yāhūd.

• Material Culture
• Visual Arts

From Darkness to Light: Writers in Museums 1798-1898

• Rosella Mamoli Zorzi
• Katherine Manthorne

Written by an array of international experts, these collected essays gather perspectives from a diverse range of cultural sensibilities. From sensitive discussions of Tintoretto’s unique approach to the play of light and darkness as exhibited in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice, to the development of museum lighting as part of Japanese artistic self-fashioning, via the story of an epic American painting on tour, museum illumination in the work of Henry James, and lighting alterations at Chatsworth (to name only a few topics) this book is a treasure trove of illuminating contributions.

• Anthropology, Archaeology and Religion
• Digital Humanities
• Material Culture

Remote Capture: Digitising Documentary Heritage in Challenging Locations

• Patrick Sutherland
• Adam Farquhar
• Jody Butterworth
• Andrew Pearson

This is a must-read how-to guide if you are planning to embark on a scholarly digitisation project. Tailored to the specifications of the British Library’s EAP (Endangered Archives Programme) projects, it is full of sound, practical advice about planning and carrying out a successful digitisation project in potentially challenging conditions.

• African Studies
• Anthropology, Archaeology and Religion
• Digital Humanities
• Material Culture

Searching for Sharing: Heritage and Multimedia in Africa

• Daniela Merolla
• Mark Turin

In a world where new technologies are being developed at a dizzying pace, how can we best approach oral genres that represent heritage? Taking an innovative and interdisciplinary approach, this volume explores the idea of sharing as a model to construct and disseminate the knowledge of literary heritage with the people who are represented by and in it.

• Anthropology, Archaeology and Religion
• Digital Humanities
• Material Culture

From Dust to Digital: Ten Years of the Endangered Archives Programme

• Maja Kominko

Much of world’s documentary heritage rests in vulnerable, little-known and often inaccessible archives. Many of these archives preserve information that may cast new light on historical phenomena and lead to their reinterpretation. But such rich collections are often at risk of being lost before the history they capture is recorded. This volume celebrates the tenth anniversary of the Endangered Archives Programme at the British Library, established to document and publish online formerly inaccessible and neglected archives from across the globe.

• Law
• Law: Intellectual Property
• Material Culture

Privilege and Property: Essays on the History of Copyright

• Ronan Deazley
• Martin Kretschmer
• Lionel Bently

What can and can’t be copied is a matter of law, but also of aesthetics, culture and economics. The act of copying, and the creation and transaction of rights relating to it, evokes fundamental notions of communication and censorship, of authorship and ownership – of privilege and property. Exploring developments in the regulation of printing in Europe and North America from the fifteenth century onwards, as well as the specific evolution of rights associated with the visual and performing arts, this volume conceives a new history of copyright law that has its roots in a wide range of norms and practices.