Serendipities

Tomorrow is the first of February, and not only will there be a new History Carnival at The Elfin Ethicist, it is also the day that duelling law will change in the Netherlands.

The Dutch duelling law in question was written at the close of the nineteenth century. It was decided at the time that a violent private retribution for an injury to honour should be opposed in a civilized state. However, since the practice is based on a mutual agreement between the two duellists, it was also decided that a duelist who killed his opponent should be punished mildly. This nineteenth-century law therefore did not equal such a deed with murder. Our minister of justice, Piet Hein Donner, has now decided that this exception for duellists is no longer desirable, and as of tomorrow, duellists will be judged according to regular law.

Apparently, the defence in the case against the Dutch hooligans who arranged to meet for a fight in the meadows of Beverwijk in March 1997 — with fatal consequences — attempted to bring the duelling law into effect, since supporters of soccer teams Ajax and Feyenoord called each other on their mobile phones to set a date for the violent confrontation. In the end, though, the duelling law was not applied to this case of pre-arranged violence.

Interestingly, the Dutch media reporting on this change of law seem to think that a duel is a medieval joust. A commercial channel brought us reporters dressed up as knights, complete with damsels in distress, and newspapers assume that a duel is invariably fought over a woman.

I just discovered a blog called Academic Coach. It is owned by Mary McKinney, who has created a true treasure trove full of useful advice for dissertation writers and other academics. Check out this stimulating list of tips on “Getting it Written”, with advice on writing basics, rough drafting, and revising.

I did it! I upgraded to Wordpress 2.0 tonight. Do let me know if you find anything amiss, for it was suspiciously easy to do. There are (hopefully) no changes on this side of Wordpress, but on the administrator side many things have changed: it looks very clear and bright, and I’ve already noticed that the preview function in the “write post” screen applies my stylesheet — very good.

Update: mmm, just tried to add a new link - it shows up in the clear and bright administrator screen, but it refuses to manifest itself on my weblog… Perhaps I should reserve tomorrow evening for looking into Wordpress 2.0 bugs?

No less than 62 Calls for Papers found their way into my mailbox this Sunday morning. Here are three hand-picked early-modern ones:

The Ritual and Rhetoric of Queenship, 1250-1650
An interdisciplinary conference at Canterbury Christ Church University in Kent (24 August 2006) that will explore images and representations of queens, as well as the cultural and political narratives of queenship. The organisers seek to probe such themes as: the ritual construction of queenship; queenship, identity and power; holy and sainted queens; royal motherhood; queens as intercessors and patrons; queens in translation. Keynote speaker is Professor Lisa Hopkins. Deadline for the submission of proposals: 28 February 2006.

Novel Geographies: Space and the British Novel, 1660-1900
Call for essays for a book collection on the changes in representations of space in British prose fiction. The editors seek to discuss how historical forces, such as colonialism, slavery, industrialization, or urbanization, impact the imaginary “space” of the novel and nation, as well as how varying constructs of identity and/or experience (e.g. of race, religion, class, gender, or global location) influence these newly emerging forms of narrative imagination or “novel geographies.” Deadline for abstracts: December 2006.

Learned Love: Dutch Love Emblems Digitised
As a festive conclusion to the ambitious Dutch Emblem Project, Utrecht University will host a conference on the Dutch Love Emblem, and on the Digitisation of the Emblem (6 and 7 November 2006). The Dutch Emblem Project has digitized a large number of Dutch emblem books, both religious and profane. The emblems are annotated, translations are cross-referenced, sources and parallels are noted. Behind the images of the emblem books lies an XML structure that (eventually) allows the visitor to search the books by keywords. A number of key speakers for the conference have already been invited, but the organizers are looking for contributors who have used the Dutch Emblem Project in their research, and who would like to present a case study at the conference. Deadline for abstracts is 1 April 2006.

A post on early modern machines on Peacay’s award-winning blog BibliOdyssey reminded me of an early modern reading machine. It was designed by Agostino Ramelli who published the idea in his Le diverse et artificiose machine del Capitano Agostina Ramelli in 1588. It was apparently never built in the early modern period itself, but rumour has it that Daniel Libeskind built a version for the Biennale in Venice in 1985. The machine consists of a big wheel that can house several books, and which can be turned in order to bring the right book in front of the reader’s eyes. Ramelli writes:

This is a beautiful and ingenious machine, very useful and convenient for anyone who takes pleasure in study, especially those who are indisposed and tormented by gout. For with this machine a man can see and turn through a large number of books without moving from one spot. Moreover, it has another fine convenience in that it occupies very little space in the place where it is set, as anyone of intelligence can clearly see from the drawing.

Some see this reading machine as the forerunner of the modern computer. The funny thing is that the latest developments in the field of computer screens are paradoxically directed towards the emulation of the old-fashioned sheet of paper. Philips and Polymer Vision are developing the Readius: a screen so thin and flexible that you can roll it up and put it in your pocket, like a scroll of paper. Ideal for reading e-books on.

Update: I found a blog on the future of the book: if:book.

“Now the trouble began,” Virginia Woolf writes in A Room of One’s Own. “The student who has been trained in research at Oxbridge has no doubt some method of shepherding his question past all distractions till it runs into its answer as a sheep runs into its pen. The student by my side, for instance, who was copying assiduously from a scientific manual, was, I felt sure, extracting pure nuggets of the essential ore every ten minutes or so. His little grunts of satisfaction indicated so much. But if, unfortunately, one has had no training in a university, the question far from being shepherded to its pen flies like a frightened flock hither and thither, helter-skelter, pursued by a whole pack of hounds.”

The ‘trouble’ that Woolf identifies here, is a problem every PhD student faces at some point: how can your writing do justice to all the material you have studied and read on your subject? Because writing is linear, and research is often much more haphazard and associative, you always need to leave things out in order to make for a clear, straightforward argument. I’m always noting ideas and fascinating quotations in separate files — to be used, perhaps, for future research. But what if you keep filing those things up in your computer, like a modern Casaubon, and never get to publish them?

Hypertext could offer a solution to this problem. Since terms in the text can be linked to other pieces of writing, a more haphazard, circular form of reading and writing is possible. In a fascinating article in the online cultural studies journal Rhizomes, Michelle Kendrick compares hypertext to the écriture féminine of French feminism: “hypertext may give us a space for a poetics of the and/and/and rather than the either/or: a place where our feminist content, arguments or musings, may coexist side by side with their contradictions.” The same might go for the musings, arguments, and contradictions of a PhD research.

I know of one PhD thesis written as a hypertext website. It’s Marcel Cobussen’s amazing Deconstruction in Music. The online thesis opens with a map of its contents, based on an underground map as you find them in London or Paris. You click on the section you want to read, and the sections refer to each other through links in the text. “This work is the sediment of a quest, a wavering series of explorations, and not the presentation of a set of conclusions,” Cobussen writes in his introduction — precisely what Virginia Woolf would have been looking for.

Robert Darnton, a historian who specializes in the history of the book, aims to take the idea to an even further level. He is planning to publish an e-book that not only links the various sections of its argument, but which also links to deeper levels of research: to his research notes, background information, his sources:

Here is how my fantasy takes shape — and it’s just a fantasy at this stage, for I don’t believe any such work exists, at least not in the discipline of history. An “e-book,” unlike a printed codex, can contain many layers, arranged in the shape of a pyramid. Readers can download the text and skim through the topmost layer, which would be written like an ordinary monograph. [...] If they come upon something that especially interests them, they can click down a layer to a supplementary essay or appendix. They can continue deeper through the book, through bodies of documents, bibliography, historiography, iconography, background music, everything I can provide to give the fullest possible understanding of my subject. In the end, readers will make the subject theirs, because they will find their own paths through it, reading horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, wherever the electronic links may lead.

If this is the future of the book, I’m all for it!

This is such a cool idea: bookcrossing! I just found out that there are no less than 395 practising book-crossers living in my city. Who knows, maybe I’ll find a lonely book somewhere in a café this weekend. The idea is so popular that it’s in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary:

bookcrossing
n. the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others, who then do likewise.