Journal articles on the topic 'Early printed books – bibliography – methodology'

Among many literary terms found in the Lexicon Latinum (1742) by Andrija Jambrešić and Franjo Sušnik (auctor and scriptor — book writer; impressio — printing; libellus — booklet; typographeum — print house; typographia — to know how to set and print letters etc.) we can also find the term libellarium — bookcase, bookshelf, for keeping different letters and papers. This descriptive definition of libellarium sums up all the three areas this journal is dedicated to — the history of the writting, the history of books, and the history of memory institutions, which is the reason why this term was selected as the name of the journal.The main aims of Libellarium are motivating and promoting the research of the history of the written word, books and heritage institutions. The Croatian written and printed heritage offers infinite possibilities of research using the most current research methodology, which has not been applied in earlier research. The editorial board of Libellarium therefore invites research papers that will throw more light on the Croatian written and printed heritage, as well as papers that will promote research in line with the prevailing and the most current research paradigms. Such a blend of source and methodology is supposed to improve research methods, increase the interest in investigating the history of the written word, books and heritage institutions, and eventually result in their establishment as modern scientific disciplines in Croatian scholarship.This especially refers to the history of books, which has, in the past 50 years (starting with the pioneering book by Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin L’Apparition du livre published in 1958) evolved as a discrete scientific discipline with a developed research methodology that leans on the achievements of the history of literature, history in the narrow sense, cultural anthropology, sociology, librarianship, and many other sciences. There is only a handful of research papers from Croatia published in the past few years which follow, but also critically examine, the authors such as Robert Darnton, Roger Chartier, Paul Saenger, and other prominent scholars, as the modern research methodology has still not been sufficiently applied in humanities and social sciences research in Croatia. The editorial board of Libellarium wishes, on the one hand, to motivate modern research such as the interaction between the book and the reader, preparation of the manuscript or the printed text for the reader, appropriation methods, etc., and on the other, motivate the examination of the whole corpus of original sources for the history of (especially Croatian) books, as well as the interplay of social, cultural, intelectual, economic, legal and political circumstances that provided the conditions for the production, distribution and appropriation of texts, i.e. work that would establish firm foundations for future research.In line with this orientation, the first issue of Libellarium brings papers devoted to two issues. The papers by Aleksandar Stipčević, Željko Vegh and Slavko Harni present some of the possible sources for the history of books: private library inventories, records of canonical visitations and bibliographies. The papers by Jelena Lakuš, Maja Krtalić, Zorka Renić and Tatjana Kreštan examine the social circumstances of reading, librarianship and periodical publishing: preconditions for reading in Dalmatian reading societies in the early 19th century, the possibilities of publishers’ advertisements in newspapers from Osijek in the late 19th century, and the context of publishing local weekly journal (Tjednik bjelovarsko-križevački) in the late 19th and early 20th century. The paper by Andy White on the modern digital environment and the return of the age-old idea of a universal library may seem to be different from the two prevailing strands in other papers in this issue, but it also focuses on the examination of the general social and technological framework that accentuates this idea in certain historical periods.In addition to publishing research papers, Libellarium will also publish reprints of sources for the history of books. In this issue, following the paper by Slavko Harni, we bring the bibliography Književnost bosanska by Ivan Franjo Jukić.Finally, following the tradition of research journals, Libellarium will also publish reviews of important works on the history of the written word, books and heritage institutions.

Purpose The access to the rare originals of the early Spanish colonial imprints of the Philippines remains problematic. The reference librarians often are restricted to directing the students and scholars to the secondary resources that are available both in print and as a part of the digital assets within the North American academic libraries. This paper aims to focus on the select primary source editions including select Spanish language colonial imprints that are available electronically on the Web along the Open Access. These Web-based resources serve as the reference tools for the early history of the Philippines and Southeast Asia. As many of these publications are rare and extremely expensive for most libraries, the Open Access resources serve as an aid to building a virtual collection of these items. Design/methodology/approach The author had to create a data set of the early imprints of the Spanish Philippines using several bibliographic resources. The data set will be submitted as an Appendix for this research paper. The author did both qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data set along with the voyant-based digital humanities approach for topic modeling. Findings The goals of this paper were to not only survey the early Spanish printing of the Philippines but also provide the reader with a somewhat complete picture of how the printing began in the Spanish Philippines, what kind of the first books were printed and how one can access them given their rarity and fragility. The collection building paradigms are undergoing significant shifts, and the focus of many academic libraries is shifting toward providing access to these items. As these items high-value low-use items continue to be part of the Special Collections, the access to these is problematic. The virtual collections thus serve as a viable alternative that enables further research and access. While the creators of these works are long gone, the legacy of the Spanish colonial domination, printing and the religious orders in the Philippines remain alive through these works. Research limitations/implications As this is an introductory paper, the author focused on the critical editions rather than providing a comprehensive bibliographic landscape of the presses that produced these editions. He also did not take into consideration many pamphlets that were published in the same period. He also did not consider the Chinese language publications of the Islands. The Chinese had been block printing since medieval times (Little, 1996). In the context of the Spanish Philippines, the Chinese migration and trade have been studied in detail by Chia (2006), Bjork (1998) and Gebhardt (2017). The scope of this paper also was centered toward building a virtual collection of these rare books. Practical implications Rare books are often expensive and out-of-reach for many libraries; the virtual collection of the same along the Open Access model represents an alternative to collect and curate these collections. The stewardship of these collections also acquires a new meaning in the digital milieu. Social implications This research paper will allow scholars to see past the analog editions and help them focus on curating a virtual collection. The questions of electronic access are often ignored when it comes to visiting and using them in a controlled environment of the reading room in the Special Collections. The author argues that one way to enable access to these rare and expensive books is to provide access to their digital counterparts. These digital/virtual surrogates of the originals will facilitate further research. Originality/value The author could not find similar research on the publications of the early Spanish colony of the Philippines.

Collection of Emblems in the Early Printed Books Department of the University of Warsaw Library: An Overview of Bibliography and Provenance Traits This paper presents synthetic information on the exhibition of early printed books from the collection of the Early Printed Books Department of the University of Warsaw Library, organized for the participants of the Seminar on emblems on 23–24 May 2019, at the Artes Liberales Faculty. The goal of this paper is to discuss a selection of emblem books being part of the library collection, with special focus on their provenance. The books are divided into four main thematic groups: 1. Meditative emblems devoted to religion; 2. Emblem literature of formative function 3. Emblems for specific occasions; 4. Emblematic compendia. It is pointed out that a large number of the emblem books under discussion originate from libraries of religious orders.

One of the planned tasks of the Provenance Working Group (coordinated by the Ossoliński National Institute) for 2018 was to compile a list of libraries with early printed books in their collections. The main objective was to disseminate information about institutions having books printed in the fifteenth–eighteenth centuries in their collections, which in turn would provide scholars studying early printed books in Poland with an insight into the current situation. Common access to the current and, as far as possible, complete data about these collections remains a proposal of librarians from the previous century that is yet to be implemented. The compilation presented here, based largely on public domain data as well as data from printed publications, is an expanded version of the compilation mentioned above. In its present form the material contains a table featuring information about over 369 institutions with early printed books in their holdings in Poland, located in over 163 towns and cities. They include the biggest collections as well as smaller holdings of academic and public libraries or libraries of church institutions, museums and archives all over the country. For most of these sites it has been possible to find, in addition to their current addresses, more or less basic data about their collections of early printed books. Another objective of the present publication — in addition to presenting information about the location and size of the collections — is to examine the condition and quality of information about them. There is still a lot to be done in this respect. Therefore, it is to be hoped that the material presented here will become an inspiration for a verification of the data collected in it as well as a discussion about a common methodology for creating a comprehensive and as complete as possible guide to early printed books in Poland.

This article describes the Knihověda.cz portal, which represents an essential infrastructure for esearching Czech book history until 1800. The portal includes three parts: its core consists of a atabase comprised of five partial bibliographic databases. This interface contains complete data on printed Bohemica and manuscripts created before 1800 and a modern bibliography for research into Czech book history. The second element of the portal is Map of Printed Production in Bohemia and Moravia up to 1800, which provides interactive access to known printed editions dating back to the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period in the territory of today’s Czech Republic; it also allows for their visualisation according to various criteria. The third element created within the project is the online Encyclopaedia of Books in the Czech Middle Ages and Early Modern Period; its explanation of book history can serve educational purposes at both high schools and universities. A use case study of the history of books from the Rudolfinian period in the Czech lands (1576–1612) supplements the information provided about the portal.

Printed Fossils. Late Editions of Bestsellers as a Source of Information on the Typographic Shape of the First Edition of a Text One of the important problems studied by book historians is the fate of those titles and editions that have not survived to our times. These were oftentimes the most popular and most frequently purchased publications, very vulnerable to destruction exactly due to their popularity. The information about lost editions usually comes from the old book lists (inventories and catalogues of early modern book collections, 18th and 19th century bibliographies), as well as from mentions by various authors. Justyna Kiliańczyk-Zięba shows that information about the existence and typographical shape of the lost editions is also to be found in preserved editions which were published decades or even centuries after the first editions. The study draws on bibliographic research and editorial work carried out over several years. Its aim is to present a methodology that allows the layout of the today unknown first print of Fortuna abo Szczęście by Stanislaw of Bochnia to be reconstructed with high probability.

The article is devoted to the memory of Irina Yurievna Fomenko (April 4, 1953 — May 30, 2020), philologist and book critic, the leading researcher in the Research Scientific Department of Rare Books (Book Museum) of the Russian State Library, responsible editor of four volumes of the “Union catalogue of Russian books. 1801—1825”. The authors give brief biography of I.Y. Fomenko, summarize information about her 150 scientific publications, which reflect the domestic publishing repertoire of the first quarter of the 19th century, relate to various aspects of working with early printed books, the subtleties of bibliographic description and book annotation. I.Y. Fomenko studied the creative heritage of M.N. Muravyev and defended PhD thesis on his prose. She wrote a number of articles for the Dictionary of Russian writers of the 18th century. With her participation, there were created catalogues of books of civil press and private owner’s collections from various holdings. Biographies of Russian writers of the 18th — 19th centuries, written by I.Y. Fomenko, were included in the collection of Russian literary studies.

Bernard M. Rosenthal is an antiquarian bookseller based in Berkeley, California. His specialties include continental manuscripts and early printed books, the history of scholarship, bibliography, and paleography. Rosenthal was born in Munich in 1920 to a family with many connections to the book trade. His mother was the daughter of Leo Olschki, a renowned Italian bookseller. His father, who specialized in medieval and illuminated manuscripts, was the son of Jacques Rosenthal, a highly regarded seller of rare books in Munich. Other members of his extended family also were involved in the commercial book world as dealers, printers, and publishers. After . . .

<p>This article shows and catalogues leafs and pieces proceeding from 16 liturgical books printed on parchment. This association has been doing by the point of view of writting support proper the significance of these units in relation to the early printing. The pieces are printed between 1488 and 1567 and add up to 49 leafs, 6 halfleafs, 7 fragments and 3 strips. The stencil, an special printing system, has been mentioned, because it's an appropiate resort to leather printing.</p><p>Finally has been marked some features of the music sings evolution, which have been influenced by the manuscript, and also by the printed tradition.</p><p>The bibliography of the page hasn't been included because the text before the catalogue pretends to show the printed papers, not to study them in their different points of view.</p>

Abstract Philological studies on Arabic and Islamic literature have traditionally been limited in many respects. The approaches to the texts and their editing have mostly reflected a primary interest in diffusing texts without sharing the editing methodology or discussing the specific problematic aspects of Arabic. In the realm of Qurʾānic studies most of the research has been devoted to the formation of the text and early manuscript evidence with some significant results but without addressing many other aspects and critical problems which still await the attention of scholarly research. Later manuscript attestations and the history of the printed Qurʾān have also been in general neglected fields of critical research.

The mission of the Institute for Hebrew Bibliography (IHB), located at the Jewish and National University Library (JNUL) in Jerusalem from the early 1960s to the present, is to describe all of the books printed in Hebrew characters since the invention of printing to 1960. The ambitious scope of the project was set only after discussions between historians and catalogers. The IHB created two card catalogs, one for bibliographic descriptions, and a second for biographies of Hebrew authors. The release, in 1994, of The Bibliography of the Hebrew Book CD-ROM, followed in 2002 by an Internet-accessible database (updated in 2004), are benchmarks that allow the public to assess the work of the IHB. Technological advances can be used to deliver a clean and easily searchable database only when basic concepts of cataloging/database retrieval have been fully addressed.

Abstract Before the advent of formal cartography, with its emphasis on observation and accuracy and its reliance on global standards, the itinerary was the height of geographic knowledge. These lists of cities and their relative distances, represented by many national “miles” or the location of postal waystations, opened European travel to a broad readership. This article traces the repetition and modification of route headings across a newly comprehensive bibliography of eighty-five itinerary books printed from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century. The application of Social Network Analysis (SNA) models the organizing logic of the itinerary genre and hierarchization of regions, cities, and routes. Digital methods prove to be key for moving between scales of consideration, from following the fate of one city, to many linked cities, to entire regions or the network as a whole. While the pilgrimage path of St. James and transalpine commercial routes were widely republished, dynamic networks based on the dates of first and last publication indicate the influence of new postal hubs, sea travel, and borders on early modern conceptions of a connected Europe. Instead of a sharp break brought by the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), the 1620s saw the extension and diversification of routes, while the 1680s marked their curtailment. State-patronized cartography reshaped the genre, as authors and publishers increasingly incorporated maps into itinerary book production.

The article tires to identify early printed editions from Novgorod churches and monasteries as part of the Russian State Library (RSL) collection. It shows the way they got to the RSL and provides a method for their attribution. In the XVIII century, the books were collected in the St. Sophia Cathedral library in Novgorod. In the middle of the XIX century, some of them were brought to the library of the St. Petersburg Theological Academy. In the 1870s, the idea of exchanging book duplicates between the St. Petersburg Theological Academy and the Moscow Public and Rumyantsev’s Museums arose. It was supported by His Eminence Metropolitan of St. Petersburg, Novgorod and Finland Isidore. In 1874, the Rumyantsev’s Museum received 126 books. Among them, there were books from the Kirillo-Belozersk Monastery, the Sofia Library and some items of an unknown origin (without owner's signs). The article shows the methodology and process of attribution the books from Novgorod monasteries and churches based on the study of owners’ signs (for example, dedicatory inscriptions, authographs and other notes) taking in account the history of the Sofia Library collection. There were some contributions from the nobility, for example, D. M. Bashmakov, a statesman of the 17th century; or Princess Natalia Kirillovna, a mother of Peter I, who made a donation to the Novgorod Convent of Great martyr Euphemia the Glorious. This fact allows us to look at the history of monastic libraries in a more detailed way exploring their parts. The attribution of the books of Novgorod origin at the RSL collection illustrates the research method for regional Cyrillic book collections, which for the most part remains unexplored.Keywords: the early Cyrillic printed books, the Sofia Library, Novgorod Books, editions of the Moscow Printing House, the history of libraries, St. Petersburg Theological Academy, monastic and church libraries, books of Ancient Russia, regional collections of old printed books.

In November 2007, l’École nationale supérieure des sciences de l’information et des bibliothèques—France’s national school for information and librarianship—launched an ambitious project, following William Kemp’s proposal: establishing, in electronic form, an exhaustive, retrospective bibliography of books printed at Lyons during the sixteenth century. The implementation of this project was the object of numerous reflections, mostly upon the way the history of the book and the history of philology complement each other. Professional and disciplinary specificities concerned the identification of the types of users of such a base, the needs of these users, the norms regularly used, and the different levels of description considered to be necessary. This article recounts these conceptual progressions as they helped define bibliography in the twenty-first century. With precise comparisons to existing databases, and with concise and detailed definitions of methodology and issues, the author exposes the necessary decisions required of any bibliographic undertaking. Public, descriptions, corpus, standardization, and use are approached with reference to both conception and concept.

What follows is a list — covering items published between 1900 and 1986 — of serious accounts of the history of important architectural projects undertaken in Ireland between the late seventeenth and early twentieth centuries. It is intended to be comprehensive in respect of monographs, collective works and articles in non-Irish periodicals, but in respect of Irish periodicals it is a supplement to Richard J. Hayes, Sources for the history of Irish civilisation: articles in Irish periodicals (9 vols, Boston, 1970). None of the above definitions is rigidly adhered to: much is included which falls outside their limits, but an attempt has been made to include everything that falls within them. The following have not been comprehensively included: (1) Monographs on non-resident architects whose careers, notwithstanding Irish commissions, were mainly abroad, e.g. Robert Adam, G.E. Street, Edwin Lutyens. This is partly because such architects are so numerous (there is evidence of over a hundred British architects having professional contacts with Ireland between 1750 and 1850) and partly because they are already well served bibliographically, e.g. by Howard Colvin, A biographical dictionary of British architects, 1600–1840 (London, 1978); (2) studies of the foreign careers of Irish architects, e.g. James Hoban, Eileen Gray; (3) studies of vernacular architecture (but see entry under this heading in the index); (4) contemporary reviews or criticism of buildings; (5) reviews of books; (6) printed primary sources, such as J.T. Gilbert, Calendar of ancient records of Dublin… (19 vols, Dublin, 1889–1944).

The catalogue of early and modern books printed in the Romanian lands that Anca Tatay and Bogdan Andriescu prepared for the Studi e testi series of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (ST 546, 2021) is an outstanding addition to the previous sources concerning this important collection. The present contribution is a commentary of this new catalogue, which also considers the records comprised in volume VI.1 of the new series of Romanian Traces Abroad (Mărturii românești peste hotare), the series initiated by Virgil Cândea and resumed by his daughter Ioana Feodorov at the Institute for South-East European Studies of the Romanian Academy. In the process, the author discusses the methodology and features of the recent catalogue, outlining its many benefits for the scholarly readers interested in the Romanian printing presses and the circulation of their production across Europe.

This paper examines the history of “Kitab Sunda”, which was written in Sundanese language but with Arabic letter, by Shaikh Mukhtar (1862 – 1930) in Mecca and printed in Cairo and Mecca. While most intellectual works in the Middle East were written in Arabic, there is convincing indication that they were written in non-Arabic language. It is surprising fact that many religious-based works (Islam) were written in Arabic letter, but they used Javanese, Malay and Sundanese. One of important agents of Muslim scholar who purposely used Sundanese language in his work is Shaikh Mukhtar. The writer, born in Bogor (West Java), was a great ulama (Muslim scholar) in Mecca. He was connected with ulama from nusantara and Middle East network in the turn of 19 and 20 century. During the important period, there were some ulama from Sunda who were teaching in Mecca. Some of them wrote books printed in several cities in the Middle East such as Mecca, Cairo and Istanbul. Shaikh Mukhtar is well-known as pioneer of authorship and publicity of Kitab Sunda in Middle East since the early 20th century. Before this period, religious works of ulama nusantara written in nusantara language and printed in the Middle East, only written in Malay language and Javanese. In the Middle East, history of authorship of kitab Sunda was initiated by Shaikh Mukhtar. This achievement is important not only to introduce Sundanese language as the intelectual language in the Middle East through his works, but also inspire his disciple to produce intellectual works in their mother tongue. By means of historical and bibliography of region approach, this study traces the role of Suandanese ulama in Middle East in the early 20th century.

The discourse surrounding the nature of the soul, a central theme in the field of psychology, has endured through centuries of scholarly inquiry. Within the rich tapestry of Islamic intellectual heritage, the systematic examination of this topic found its early champion in al-Kindi, a prominent Muslim philosopher. His contributions, as explored in this article, have left an indelible mark on the Islamic and Western traditions of soul study. Employing a library research methodology, this work draws from an array of data sources, including books, articles, pamphlets, and various other printed and non-printed materials. A documentary approach is employed to methodically gather data from these diverse sources, which is subsequently subjected to descriptive analytical scrutiny. This examination yields several key findings. Al-Kindi’s exploration of the soul is wide-ranging, encompassing its definition, its intricate relationship with the human body, its state when separated from the corporeal vessel, and its manifold powers. Of particular significance is the unique role played by the rational faculty, a power intrinsic to humanity that facilitates the generation of knowledge. Furthermore, al-Kindi’s classification of knowledge is both notable and comprehensive, contributing significantly to the development of the nascent field of Islamic psychology. In summation, al-Kindi’s profound insights have laid a robust foundation for the epistemological framework of early Islamic psychology, shaping its trajectory in enduring ways.

The main forms and methods of distribution of music publications in Galicia in the XIX — early XX centuries are scrutinized. The demand for the relevant music production is one of the determining factors in the formation of the musical publishing repertoire, its structure and special features in the process of the existence of music publications in society. It is noted that export-import trade in books has become especially widespread in Galicia; there are facts about the links between publishers and booksellers in Lviv and Warsaw. The basic types of presentation of book advertising of music products, its regional peculiarities, and ways of its placement are considered. Special emphasis is placed on the role of specialized press in the advertising of music products, typical examples of press advertising. The registration bibliographic information as the initial form of music bibliography and the forms of its compilation are distinguished. The emphasis is placed on the importance of thorough critical articles as a separate typological group of bibliographic publications under the conditions of formation of the Ukrainian bibliography, in which the main importance is given to the disclosure of the content and evaluation of the reviewed work. The combination of article genres and reviews on examples of separate publications by Stanislav Lyudkevych and Ivan Franko is traced. Special book-selling and book-publishing catalogs are characterized. While executing the marketing and advertising function, these directories were addressed primarily to foreign consumers and distributors (the so-called commissioners).One way to distribute music is to subscribe through libraries. A significant financial factor in the distribution of any printed matter was the price that depended primarily on the cost of each process associated with its publication. Keywords: music publications, bookstore, book-trading enterprise, advertising of publications, pricing.

Abstract: Biblissima (Bibliotheca bibliothecarum novissima) is a digital humanities project which aims to create a federated access point for approximately 40 partner databases dedicated to the history of manuscripts and early printed books, to their circulation and their readers, from the 8th to 18th centuries. These databases contain different data types and use different database systems, which are added complications when building a unique access point. This contribution will focus on the various challenges to be faced in standardising the data and achieving image interoperability, as well as on the technical solutions that have been adopted: choosing to define an ontology based on CIDOC-CRM and FRBRoo in order to encompass all the data types found in the partner databases, building a thesaurus for the concepts indexed in the databases (especially for scientifc terminology and iconographic descriptors) and an XML-TEI authority file for all non-concept data. The article will also present the tools and methods used to align different data types (people, corporate bodies, places, etc.) with international resources such as the Bibliothèque nationale de France authority file, VIAF, DBpedia and GeoNames, as well as the standards adopted for image interoperability and the scientific contributions that image annotation tolos based on IIIF standards can provide.Keywords: cultural heritage, manuscripts, early printed books, Middle Ages, Renaissance, Early Modern Period, semantic web, data interoperability, ontology, data alignment, thesaurus, Linked Open Data, image interoperability, IIIF, Mirador, image viewer. Resumen: Biblissima (Bibliotheca bibliothecarum novissima) es un proyecto de humanidades digitales cuyo objeto es la creación de un punto de acceso federado para aproximadamente 40 bases de datos asociadas sobre la historia de los manuscritos y los antiguos libros impresos, su circulación y sus lectores entre los siglos VIII y XVIII. Estas bases de datos contienen datos distintos y usan sistemas de bases de datos diferentes, lo que complica la labor de construcción de un único punto de acceso. Esta contribución se centra en los desafíos varios que supone estandarizar los datos y alcanzar la interoperabilidad de las imágenes, además de las soluciones técnicas que se han adoptado. Dichas soluciones incluyen la selección de una ontología basada en CIDOC-CRM y FRBRoo con el fin de abarcar todos los tipos de datos que se encuentran en las bases de datos asociadas; la construcción de un diccionario de sinónimos para los conceptos indexados en las bases de datos (en especial para la terminología científica y los descriptores iconográficos); y un archivo de autoridad XML-TEI para los datos no conceptuales. El artículo también introduce los instrumentos y métodos empleados para aliñar diferentes tipos de datos (gente, corporaciones, lugares, etc.) con recursos internacionales como el archivo de autoridad de la Biblioteca nacional de Francia, VIAF, DBpedia y GeoNames, así como los estándares adoptados para la interoperabilidad de las imágenes y de las contribuciones científicas que las herramientas de anotación de imágenes basadas en estándares de IIIF pueden proporcionar.Palabras clave: Patrimonio cultural, manuscritos, antiguos libros impresos, Edad Media, Renacimiento, temprana Edad Moderna, web semántica, interoperabilidad de datos, ontología, alineación de datos, diccionario de sinónimos, datos abiertos enlazados, interoperabilidad de imagen, IIIF, Mirador, visualizados de imágenes.

The article is a brief overview of the seminar “Monuments of written culture of Islam in Russia: problems and research approaches”, held on October 25, 2023 by the Center of Islamic Manuscripts named after Sheykh Zayed of the IOS RAS with the participation of the IHAE of the DNC RAS. The seminar covered a wide range of topics: private and public collections and archives of manuscripts; principles and problems of digitization of manuscript collections and private archives; results of archaeographic research in different regions of Russia; methodology of study of the arabographic manuscripts; new finds of manuscripts and early printed books in public and private collections of our country and abroad; paleography and codicology of Islamic manuscripts. The seminar was attended by employees of various research institutes, museums and the largest universities of the country — IOS RAS, IOM RAS, The State Museum of Oriental Art, IHAE of Dagestan Federal Research Center of RAS, HSE University, Kazan Federal University, Ufa Institute of Science and Technology, Faculty of Oriental Studies of St. Petersburg State University.

Purpose This paper aims to describe the Rosarium Project, a digital humanities project being undertaken at the Phillips Memorial Library + Commons of Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island. The project focuses on a collection of English language non-fiction writings about the genus Rosa. The collection will comprise books, pamphlets, catalogs and articles from popular magazines, scholarly journals and newspapers written on the rose published before 1923. The source material is being encoded using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Consortium’s P5 guidelines and the extensible markup language (XML) editor software <oXygen/>. Design/methodology/approach This paper outlines the Rosarium Project and describes its workflow. This paper demonstrates how to create TEI-encoded files for digital curation using the XML editing software <oXygen/> and the TEI Archiving Publishing and Access Service (TAPAS) Project. The paper provides information on the purpose, scope, audience and phases of the project. It also identifies the resources – hardware, software and membership – needed for undertaking such a project. Findings This paper shows how straightforward it is to encode transcriptions of primary sources using the TEI and XML editing software and to make the resulting digital resources available on the Web. Originality/value This paper presents a case study of how a research project transitioned from traditional printed bibliography to a web-accessible resource by capitalizing on the tools in the TEI toolkit using specialized XML editing software. The details of the project can be a guide for librarians and researchers contemplating digitally curating primary resources and making them available on the Web.

Among the decorative binding papers of the 18th century, brocade papers, so called because of their resemblance to expensive gold woven fabrics, can be recognized as particularly spectacular. The rich relief pattern, the combination of gold and silver lustre with a multi-coloured paper backing was the secret of their popularity in European countries for a whole century.The technique of paper gilding and embossing originated in the early 18th century in Augsburg. Subsequently, brocade papers were produced in various cities in Germany and mainly spread throughout Europe from there. Although brocade papers were also used by Russian masters, there are no special works about this binding material in the Russian historiography.The article is devoted to the description of the collection of brocade papers preserved as covers and forzats in Russian civil books of the 18th century in the collection of the Book Museum of the Russian State Library (RSL). The questions of terminology, production technology and systematization of brocade papers are considered. The main types of domestic publications characterized by the use of this material are calendars, published annually at the Academy of Sciences printing house in St. Petersburg, and descriptions of various celebrations, speeches “on occasion”, odes, “instructive words” and “reasonings”, produced by different printing houses and usually small in volume.The collection provides rich material for a more accurate understanding of the role of the printing house and the aesthetic preferences of the reading public in the external design of books in the period of the birth of bookbinding in Russia. Decorative binding papers are valuable not only for the researcher of old-printed books, librarian, collector or restorer, but also for the cultural historian in a broad sense, as content, stylistically and technologically they reflect general trends in the production of wallpapers, fabrics, furniture and trade packaging. On the basis of the description of the quantitative and qualitative composition of the collection of the RSL Book Museum a methodology of working with brocade papers is proposed, which can be applied to the collections of other fund holders as well.

The beginning of 2006 marked two decades since the death of Stana Djuric-Klajn, the first historian of Serbian musical literature. This is the exterior motive for presenting a summary of the state and results of up-to-date musicology research into Serbian musical criticism and essay writings during the XIXth and the first half of the XXth century, alongside the many works dedicated to this branch of national musical history, recently published. In this way the reader is given a detailed background of these studies ? mainly the authors' names, books, studies, articles, as well as the problems of this branch of Serbian musicology. The first research is associated with the early years of the XXth century, that is, to the work of bibliography. The pioneer of Serbian ethnomusicology, Vladimir R. Djordjevic composed An Essay of the Serbian Musical Bibliography until 1914, noting selected XIXth century examples of Serbian literature on music. Bibliographic research was continued by various institutions and experts during the second half of the XXth century: in Zagreb (today Republic of Croatia); the Yugoslav Institute for Lexicography, Novi Sad (Matica srpska); and Belgrade (Institute for Literature and Art, Slobodan Turlakov, Ljubica Djordjevic, Stanisa Vojinovic etc). In spite of the efforts of these institutions and individuals, a complete analytic bibliography of music in Serbian print of the last two centuries has unfortunately still not been made. The most important contributions to historical research, interpretation and validation of Serbian musical criticism and essay writings were given by Stana Djuric-Klajn, Dr Roksanda Pejovic and Dr Slobodan Turlakov. Professor Stana Djuric-Klajn was the first Serbian musicologist to work in this field of Serbian music history. She wrote a significant number of studies and articles dedicated to Serbian musical writers and published their selected readings. Prof. Klajn is the author and editor of the first and only anthology of Serbian musical essay writings. Her student Roksanda Pejovic published two books (along with numerous other factually abundant contributions), where she synthetically presented the history of Serbian criticism and essay writings from 1825 to 1941. Slobodan Turlakov, an expert in Serbian criticism between the World Wars, meritorious researcher and original interpreter, especially examined the reception of music of great European composers (W. A. Mozart, L. v. Beethoven, F. Chopin, G. Verdi, G. Puccini etc) by Serbian musical critics. Serbian musical criticism and essay writings were also the focus of attention of many other writers. The work quotes comments and additions of other musicologists, but also historians of theatre, literature and art philosophers, aestheticians, sociologists, all members of different generations, who worked or still work on the history of the Serbian musical criticism and essay writings. The closing section of the text suggests directions for future research. Firstly, it is necessary to begin integral bibliographical research of texts about music published in our press during the cited period. That is a project of capital significance for national science and culture; realization needs adequate funding, the involvement of many academic experts, and time. Work on bibliography will also enable the collection and publication of sources: books and articles by Serbian music writers who worked before 1945. A separate problem is education of scholars. To study musical literature, a musicologist needs to be knowledgeable about the history of Serbian literature, aesthetic theory, and theatre, national social, political and cultural history, and methodology of literary study. That is why facilities for postgraduate and doctorial studies in musicology are necessary at the Faculties of Philology and Philosophy.

In Viktor Sokolov’s article «Bibliographic research in the national libraries of Ukraine in 2016–2020: a summary analysis» based on the analysis of materials of scientific publications and reports on the scientific research work of national libraries, the state and directions of the development of bibliographic research are summarized and highlighted using the example of the characteristics of the study books in certain specified institutions. The article clarifies the place and significance of bibliographic research in the study and popularization of specialized funds of national libraries, as well as in the preparation of relevant materials for the State Register of National Cultural Heritage; the topics, peculiarities of conducting and organizing bibliographic studies in the researched library institutions are disclosed; the importance of the study of rare and valuable books, library collections and book collections for the development of national culture is confirmed. The purpose of the proposed article is to characterize the content and directions of bibliographic research carried out in the national libraries of Ukraine in 2016–2020. The research methodology consists in applying both general scientific research methods (description, comparison, analogy, deduction, induction, analysis, etc.) and historical ones (historical-comparative, historical-typological, chronological, etc.). The scientific novelty of the work is that the state and nature of bibliographic research in the national libraries of Ukraine in 2016–2020 was analyzed for the first time; their place and importance in the research work of the mentioned institutions is substantiated. Conclusions. It is substantiated that in the period 2016–2020 in the national libraries of Ukraine, the development of scientific research work in the field of bibliography was characterized by the activation of research in historical, theoretical and methodological directions, among which, in particular, the issue of the creation and functioning of the book as a type of communicative- cognitive tool occupied an important place activities aimed at meeting information needs by means of printed and electronic information. It has been established that the specified bibliographic studies can be classified: by the nature of scientific knowledge into fundamental and applied; according to the scope or limits of the implementation on local, regional, national level; according to the time of implementation into permanent and episodic. It has been proven that medium-term local applied scientific research, designed for 1–3 years, prevailed, and the subject of bibliographic research was aimed not only at ensuring the disclosure of the informational and source- research resource of book funds, but also at solving theoretical fundamental scientific problems. Based on the analysis of the topics of scientific projects, publications and reports at scientific and practical conferences organized by national libraries, it is substantiated that a significant part of bibliographic research was devoted to the historical aspect of the development of book collections and the libraries themselves; analysis of a set of prints by a certain feature; study of individual types and types of publications. It was found out that studies related to bibliography were actively developing, in particular, in the art of books, book historical studies, publishing history, bibliographic studies, library history, Ukrainian history, and other fields of social sciences. It is motivated that bibliographic studies contribute to the mutual enrichment of these sciences, significantly expand the cognitive capabilities of their methods, and have a positive effect on the improvement of theory.

The article is devoted to handwritten documents of the 18th – early 20th century containing Komi-Permyak language material. Although archives and libraries in Russia and abroad hold many well-known, but unstudied manuscripts, and information on previously unknown documents continues to appear, study of the manuscript traditions of various Permyak languages in general, and of the Komi-Permyak in particular, remains lacunar. There is no archaeographic and palaeographic description of documents, which should precede textual and linguistic analysis of the manuscripts and their subsequent publication. The study is to offer a brief overview of the history of the Komi-Permyak language written monuments of the 18th – early 20th century and to develop a concept of their archaeographic description. The first part of the article outlines the main milestones in the history of the Komi-Permyak manuscript tradition, indicating types and authors of the written monuments: (1) the century of travelers and scientific expeditions (N. Witsen 1641–1717, Ph. J. von Strahlenberg 1676–1747, D. G. Messerschmidt 1685–1735, J. E. Fischer 1697–1771, G. F. M?ller 1705–83, I. I. Lepekhin 1740–1802); (2) the era of Catherine II (Nikita Ovchinnikov, A. I. Popov 1748–88); (3) the first half of the 19th century (Georgy Chechulin, F. F. Lyubimov 1779/1780–1851, F. A. Volegov 1790–1856); (4) the time of the first printed books (P. M. Sorokin 1860–95, A. F. Teploukhov 1880–1943). All manuscripts fall into the following genres: (1) dictionaries of the Komi-Permyak language; (2) Permyak dictionaries included in multilingual collections; (3) grammatical essays on the Komi-Permyak language; (4) translations of religious texts (Gospels, prayers) into the Permyak. The second part of the article, taking into account specifics of the Komi-Permyak writing manuscript monuments and time of their creation, proposes to consider the following elements in their archaeographic description: (1) place of storage, code, date; (2) name; (3) volume, format; (4) binding; (5) numbering; (6) filigree, stamps; (7) notebooks; (8) handwriting; (9) records, labels; (10) Russian graphics and spelling; (11) Komi-Permyak graphics and spelling; (12) content; (13) additional information; (14) history of manuscript description and its study; (15) bibliography. In the course of archaeographic description, the history of the Komi-Permyak writing and manuscript tradition is reconstructed; links between various Finno-Ugric manuscripts are established; previously unknown monuments of the Finno-Ugric writing and new facts regarding dating of various papers of the 18th–19th centuries come to light.

The article explains the objective reason for the emergence of documentology along with documentation and documentary studies, the relevance and practical significance for library science and bibliography. Attention is drawn to the outstanding role of Paul Otlet (Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet; 1868–1944) in the promotion and development of the theoretical foundations of the general theory of the document. The concept of three worlds, in particular, “the world of logical content of books, libraries, computer memory, and the like”, developed by Karl Popper (Karl Raimund Popper; 1902–1994) enabled to bring documentology to the level of a philosophical discipline. The stages of development of documentology are defined. The first stage embraces the late 19th – first half of the 20th centurys, the second covers the mid-20th century (1950–60s), when in the USSR it was known as “documentalistics”. Simultaneously, since the early 1960s, the document science has been developing with its specific methodology, individual acts and systems of documenting and creating documents, and on this foundation, their complexes and systems (the third stage). The documentation is contradictory: it claims to study both documents as proper objects, and those objects of workflow management, which have got the term “records” used in the Western countries. The fourth stage of development of the document general theory originates in the second half of the 1980s. In the early 1990s, Moscow State Institute of Culture proposed the term documentology to be used for the general theory of documents. The discipline core embraces the issues related to the conceptual apparatus, functional analysis of documents, study of their characteristics, parameters and properties, document classification, as well as study of the documents as a means of communication and an element of document collections.

The renowned panoramic plan of Vilnius, Vilna Litvaniae metropolis, was for the first time printed in Cologne in 1581. It appeared in the third volume of Civitates orbis terrarum, an atlas of the world’s most important cities, the publication of which was initiated in 1572 by Georg Braun (1541–1622), Cologne church dean, geographer and publisher, and Franz Hogenberg (1535–1590), Flemish cartographer and engraver. The six-volume atlas was first released in Latin (1572–1617/1618), then in German (1574–1618), and finally in French (1579–1618). City images featured in this very popular atlas also were published as separate prints. The copper plates for these images were sold by Hogenberg’s heirs to the Amsterdam atlas publisher Johannes Janssonius (1588–1664), who published his own atlas in 1657. Later purchased by other cartographic publishers of Amsterdam, the plates kept being republished until completely worn out in the mid-18th century. The panoramic plan from this atlas is the earliest image of Vilnius that has reached us today. It features mid-16th-century Vilnius shown as if from a bird’s eye view – such was the tradition of depicting cities at that time. Researchers agree that this Vilnius image is not historically accurate and contains numerous errors. The creators of the plan are believed to have based their city image on an earlier work, probably by Italian cartographers, adding to it various travellers’ depictions of the then capital of the Grand Duchy. The Rare Books Department of the Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences holds three copies of Vilna Litvaniae metropolis. They were all printed in the times of Braun and Hodenberg using the same copper plates. The earliest of them is the copy with the second part of the text in German. According to the bibliography Koeman’s Atlantes Neerlandici, it may have been printed in 1582. Previously, this copy was in possession of Petras Klimas (1891–1969), Lithuanian statesman and bibliophile. It was received by the library currently known as the Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences together with Petras Klimas’ archive (F 191) from the former Kaunas State University in 1950. The other two copies have no provenance marks. They presumably used to belong to the Wroblewski State Library, which was active in Vilnius in the interwar period. The second copy was published between 1588 and 1593; the third, between 1616 and 1623, both have Latin text. The Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences holds several later derivatives of this panoramic plan of Vilnius. A several-times-reduced (16×24) panoramic plan was engraved by Georg Christoph Kilian (1709–1781) circa 1740 and published by the Bodenehrs, Augsburg engravers and publishers. A lithographic image of Vilnius in an even smaller format (17.5×13.5) was included in the history of Vilnius published by Józef Ignacy Kraszewski (1812–1887) in 1840. It was created in Vilnius at the lithographic firm of Józef Ozębłowski (Oziębłowski, 1805–1878), which existed in 1833–1863. Three other plans of Vilnius deriving from the Vilnius image in the Braun-Hogenberg atlas were lithographed in the late 19th – early 20th century. One of them was redrawn at a smallish lithographic company belonging to the Vilnius City Board and active from 1877 to approximately 1915. Unlike the other derivatives, it contains not only objects copied from earlier Vilnius city images, but also new ones: the Rasos Cemetery, the Green Bridge, the Franciscan monastery, etc. – its creators attempted to bring it closer to their time. The two other Vilnius images are identical to the plan in the Braun-Hogenberg atlas. One of them was printed in Vilnius at the lithographic firm of Notel Matz, which existed from 1873 to 1938, the other, at A.Transhel’s printing house in St. Petersburg, which was active in the second half of the 19th century – the early 20th century. These plans were lithographed in the late 19th – early 20th century. They have so far been little studied and still await attention from researchers. Keywords: Braun-Hogenberg atlas; panoramic plan; Vilnius; copper engravings; lithography; Georg Bodenehr; Vilnius City Board lithography; Notel Matz; A.Transhel’s printing company.

The Fourth Speech of Erasm Ciołek (1474–1522), Delivered in Rome Before Pope Leo X: An Edition, Translation into the Polish Language and Commentary The paper presents the first critical edition of the fourth political speech delivered by the bishop of Płock, Erazm Ciołek (1474–1522), in 1518 in Rome before Pope Leo X and the college of cardinals. In the 16th-century Europe, speeches delivered by politicians on the international arena had an important function: not only did they serve representative purposes, but they also played a key part the diplomatic missions. Rhetorical success was often accompanied by a political one. In order to increase the impact and prestige of the politician and his tasks, and to spread the ideas of his mission, political speeches were often published. Erazm Ciołek, an ambassador of the King of Poland and the Grand Duke of Lithuania, during his third legation to the Holy See had an important tasks to accomplish, which included watching the preparations for a general expedition against the Ottoman Empire, regulation of the dragging matter of paying homage by the Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, and securing the diplomatic assistance of the Holy See in stabilizing the situation on the eastern borders of the Great Duchy of Lithuania in the ongoing armed conflict with Moscow. In addition, travelling to Rome immediately after the Diet in Augsburg, Ciołek had also been entrusted with tasks by the emperor Maximilian. An audience granted to the legation by the Pope and the college of cardinals, where the ambassador delivered a speech and presented credential letters, was the official beginning of the diplomatic mission. In his oration, Erazm Ciołek included all the most important threads, skillfully guiding the minds of the recipients towards the only logical solution that would be identical with the results desired by the legation. The fourth speech of Erazm Ciołek was first published in 1519 in Rome, a few months after it was delivered, and has not been reprinted since then. The oration by one of the most important politicians during the Renaissance in Poland and Lithuania was preserved only in a few copies and remains almost unknown to contemporary researchers. In this edition, the Latin text was translated into Polish and provided with an introduction and an appropriate philological and historical commentary based on a wide bibliography including manuscripts and early printed books.

The Fourth Speech of Erasm Ciołek (1474–1522), Delivered in Rome Before Pope Leo X: An Edition, Translation into the Polish Language and Commentary The paper presents the first critical edition of the fourth political speech delivered by the bishop of Płock, Erazm Ciołek (1474–1522), in 1518 in Rome before Pope Leo X and the college of cardinals. In the 16th-century Europe, speeches delivered by politicians on the international arena had an important function: not only did they serve representative purposes, but they also played a key part the diplomatic missions. Rhetorical success was often accompanied by a political one. In order to increase the impact and prestige of the politician and his tasks, and to spread the ideas of his mission, political speeches were often published. Erazm Ciołek, an ambassador of the King of Poland and the Grand Duke of Lithuania, during his third legation to the Holy See had an important tasks to accomplish, which included watching the preparations for a general expedition against the Ottoman Empire, regulation of the dragging matter of paying homage by the Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, and securing the diplomatic assistance of the Holy See in stabilizing the situation on the eastern borders of the Great Duchy of Lithuania in the ongoing armed conflict with Moscow. In addition, travelling to Rome immediately after the Diet in Augsburg, Ciołek had also been entrusted with tasks by the emperor Maximilian. An audience granted to the legation by the Pope and the college of cardinals, where the ambassador delivered a speech and presented credential letters, was the official beginning of the diplomatic mission. In his oration, Erazm Ciołek included all the most important threads, skillfully guiding the minds of the recipients towards the only logical solution that would be identical with the results desired by the legation. The fourth speech of Erazm Ciołek was first published in 1519 in Rome, a few months after it was delivered, and has not been reprinted since then. The oration by one of the most important politicians during the Renaissance in Poland and Lithuania was preserved only in a few copies and remains almost unknown to contemporary researchers. In this edition, the Latin text was translated into Polish and provided with an introduction and an appropriate philological and historical commentary based on a wide bibliography including manuscripts and early printed books.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to contribute an illustrative case study on the application of participatory and learner-centred model, using a highly international cohort of students’ tacit knowledge and shared experiential learning in the context of integrating mainstreaming sustainability-focused topics in business education at undergraduate level. Design/methodology/approach – This paper is about the development of a participative experiential learning pedagogical framework which the authors named “experiential simulation learning approach”, with the acronym ELSA, designed to meet the specific needs of a highly international cohort of rather sustainability-reluctant undergraduate management students. Findings – Using students’ diverse tacit knowledge and developing a relevant experiential active learning (EAL) model stood out as being a most powerful teaching-and-learning tool. It seemed to help to enhance critical thinking and trigger cohesiveness in class; this favoured a collaborative learning climate which in turn might lead to the tacit acquisition of life-long skills. Research limitations/implications – The main limitations to the development of this approach were: the lack of context-specific updated and academically reliable bibliography; the undergraduate students’ widespread tendency to refer mainly to “digests” of information (preferably online), rather than engaging in critical analysis of contents in academically acknowledged books and journals; the international undergraduate students’ personal challenges as “foreigners” which may affect them mainly in relation to: group work, independent learning, confidence and communication. Practical implications – It seems that integrating EAL is quite effective in the context of undergraduate management students, particularly in view of leading rather reluctant students to understand and be willing to positively apply sustainability-based principles to their own change management process and to become active leaders of organisational change. Originality/value – The methodological framework hereby presented is quite innovative, as it seems to be among the very first to be implemented in view of enhancing undergraduate students’ learning experience, instead of targeting post-graduate students. This is extremely relevant in regards to embedding sustainability concepts, frameworks and tools, as they prove to be much more significant and long-lasting if integrated in the early stages of training of future business management professionals.

Introduction: Optimum infant feeding practices, during the first 1000 days of life, are essential for children's health and development. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends putting the infant to the breast within the first hour of life, and exclusively breastfeeding for six months. If every infant was exclusively breastfed 823,000 infant deaths could be avoided annually. Despite this fact only 41% of infants worldwide are exclusively breastfed. The Global Nutrition Target 5 seeks to increase this figure to 50% by 2025. In the UK, although there is widespread knowledge on the benefits of breastfeeding, with 81% mothers initiating breastfeeding, only 24% are exclusively breastfeeding at 6 weeks. By six months only 1% of mothers are still exclusively breastfeeding. This is the lowest rate in Europe. This research aimed to explore the infant feeding practices and perceptions of a small group of working mothers, with children under the age of five, in the London Borough of Ealing. Methodology: This study applied a qualitative methodology to gain a deeper understanding of factors influencing infant and young child feeding practices in a small group of working women. Two gatekeepers were used to recruit 14 participants through a mixture of convenience and snowball sampling. All mothers included were working and living in the Ealing Borough of London with children under five. Methods utilised for data collection included online interviews and open-ended surveys. Data were analysed using an inductive thematic approach, identifying four themes and eleven sub themes from the participants. Results: The study identified that mothers sought information on infant feeding from online sources, printed books, family and friends, and educational classes. However, most mothers expressed the need to have more information on different feeding methods and childbirth in general. Mothers highlighted that the main factors influencing their decision on how to feed their baby included the need to develop a strong connection with their baby, nutritional benefits for the infant and general knowledge about the benefits of breastfeeding. Most participants reported that they started breastfeeding at birth. Six mothers exclusively breastfed their baby until six months, followed by the introduction of complementary foods. Three of these mothers continued to breastfeed until nine months. Five mothers started formula feeding within two months due to personal challenges such as lack of support, perceived lack of milk supply and anatomical challenges such as tongue-tied infants. Mothers did not find work as a major barrier to breastfeeding. Conclusions: Increased information and support on all aspects of infant feeding could help the UK achieve their 2025 target. The timing of complementary feeding and clear advice on where to seek nutrition support could be included in an English Infant Feeding Strategy, like the strategy implemented in Scotland. More discussion on the small size of an infant’s stomach could reduce early breastfeeding cessation due to perceptions around lack of milk.

Purpose Integration and use of technology in teaching and learning in the education sector from pre-primary education (PPE) to the higher levels of education, is a policy issue. In developed countries, including Tanzania, information and communication technology (ICT), especially in PPE, is inadequately researched for laying evidence on its applicability in instruction and learning. Therefore, this paper aims to determine pre-primary teachers’ preparedness in integrating ICT in classroom instruction and challenges teachers face in integrating it for child’s meaningful learning. Design/methodology/approach Methods and instruments: a qualitative transcendental phenomenological approach was used in determining teachers’ preparedness in integrating ICT in PPE in Tanzania. It was further used to collect data that describe the teaching and learning through the integration of ICT in every session as their lived experience for pre-primary teachers. Its selection was appropriate as it allowed researchers to systematically analyse for description the commonalities and differences existing among the involved teachers in integrating ICT in teaching and learning as their lived experiences (Moerer-Urdahl and Creswell, 2004). To appropriately analyse teachers’ understanding and experiences regarding ICT and its integration in teaching and learning in pre-primary classes, semi-structured interviews and open-ended questionnaires were used for in-depth understanding of the study problem. Semi-structured interviews were used to collect data through open-ended questions where researchers took an average of 40 min per session with participants’ (teachers) using notebooks to take note of their thoughts, feelings and beliefs about ICT integration in PPE. Use of the semi-structured interview was based on the reality that it provides in-depth information pertaining to participants’ experiences and viewpoints of a particular topic (Turner, 2010). Once the interview session was complete, each teacher was given a questionnaire to fill in for triangulating their experiences. Description of participants: a total of 14 schools constituting 28 teachers were purposively sampled and engaged in this study. Analysis of participants’ demographic characteristics indicates that all of the involved teachers had certificate in teacher education that qualified them as primary school teachers. Meanwhile, 18 (66.7 per cent) of the pre-primary school teachers who were involved in this study were female with only 10 (33.3 per cent) had working experience at and above five years of teaching in early grade classes. Study participants (teachers) from Itilima and Meatu Districts were purposively involved in the study as their experiences in young children’s learning and contextual influences (educational and training policy of 2014, the ICT policy of 2007, and foreign studies) are potential in improving the quality of learning. Study area: the current study was conducted in two districts (Itilima and Meatu) all found in Simiyu region. The two districts were selected and considered appropriate by the study as they constituted the 17 most disadvantaged rural areas in Tanzania (Mosha et al., 2015). Authors describe the two districts as having poor educational outcomes mainly relatively low pass rates in the primary school leaving examination results. In Itilima, one ward out of 22 was studied in which its six schools [with a total of 12 teachers] among 87 schools in the district were involved. While in Meatu district, eight of 121 schools [with a total of 16 teachers] in one ward of 29 wards were studied. This implies that a total of 14 schools and 28 teachers were involved in this study. Data analysis: the data collected through the interviews and open-ended questionnaires were subjected to content analysis procedures (reading and re-reading notes and transcripts followed by a three-steps-coding process consisting of open, axial and selective coding procedures). The analysis process was informed by the Vagle’s (2014) six steps for phenomenological research data analysis procedure (holistic reading of the entire text, first line-by-line reading, follow up questions, second line-by-line reading, third line-by-line reading, and subsequent readings). Practically, the researchers read and re-read the texts and transcribed data from the language used during data collection that is Kiswahili, into the reporting language that is English. Following transcription, data were coded for developing categories of data through axial and elective coding processes. Findings The data analysis was conducted and results and its discussion are presented in three sub-sections: preparedness of teachers in using ICT in teaching and learning; teachers’ views about the integration of ICT in teaching and learning; and challenges faced by teachers in integrating ICT in teaching and learning. Teacher’s preparedness in the use of ICT in teaching: exploration of teachers’ preparedness in integrating ICT in teaching and learning was preceded by exploration of teachers’ understanding of ICT in teaching and learning. Analysis revealed that majority of teachers were aware about ICT in teaching and learning and they understood it as the implementation of curriculum at school level that involves use of ICT-based facilities such as television, mobile phones, computer and radio. Teacher elaborated that appropriate use of ICT-based facilities that would later develop children to potentially improve their understanding and practical application in daily life. Other teachers understood ICT in teaching and learning as use of printed materials [newspapers and magazines] in facilitating pupil’s learning of planned lessons. While other teachers were aware of what ICT means the second category of teachers as noted in their responses, had limited understanding, as to them, ICT in education meant use of printed materials. Difference in teachers’ understanding of the ICT in teaching and learning also indicate some teachers viewing it as use of ICT facilities in developing children’s competencies in the specific subject. In the teachers’ views, ICT is considered as subject content and they delimited their understanding into that perspective ignoring it as technological use for facilitating meaningful learning in all subjects. Their views are based on the development of children with competencies useful in facilitating further learning in the subject known as Teknolojia ya Habari na Mawasiliano. Following the question based on exploring teachers’ understanding of ICT in teaching and learning, researchers explored teachers’ preparedness in using ICT in teaching and learning. Table 1.0 illustrates teachers’ multiple responses regarding their preparation. Table I: teacher’s preparedness in using ICT in teaching and learning. S/N; preparedness; freq; and per cent. Enhancing child’s understanding on the use of ICT-based facilities-20, 71.4; using remedial sessions teaching ICT-12, 42.8; using ICT-based facilities for teaching other classes-8, 28.5. Table 1.0 illustrates that teachers are prepared to enable children use ICT to access information and more knowledge related to their school subjects and general life. They were of the view that ICT could serve well in areas where text and supplementary books are scares or torn-out by pupils because were poorly bound or due to poor quality of papers used. Therefore, availability of ICT facilities in schools would become important resource-materials for pupils, as well as teachers. For instance, a teacher said that; Availability of ICT facilities, such as computers in schools will help us in preparing notes or content for supplementing their learning. Different from the paper-based notes, computers will keep our notes properly compared to the papers that get easily displaced and hard to retrieve notes when lost (Interview, 20 April 2016). In addition to the use of ICT facilities in serving as resource material, their use in schools would aid pupils and teachers to use them beyond teaching and learning. Teachers narrated that children may find games and puzzles that all help in stimulating their thinking, hence interest in schooling and further learning. Teachers also said they are prepared to use even extra hours that are beyond school timetable to ensure children learn well to meet the uncovered periods once facilities are placed in school. Use of extra hours beyond the normal school timetable comm. Research limitations/implications The study was limited to the accessed and involved schools as some schools were found to have no specific teachers teaching a pre-primary class on reasons the responsible teacher for the class had retired. As a result, researchers spend extended time to travel and reach schools that were located far from one school to the other. Again, some teachers were reluctant in participation on reasons that researchers are evaluating their competency for reporting to the higher authorities. Practical implications Differences in teachers’ understanding of the ICT in teaching and learning also indicate some teachers viewing it as the use of ICT facilities in developing pupils’ competencies in the specific subject. In the teachers’ views, ICT is considered as subject content and they delimited their understanding into that perspective ignoring it as technological use for facilitating meaningful learning in all subjects. Effective integration of ICT for efficiency in instruction depends on the teacher’s preparedness especially competency in using the equipments and infrastructures especially electric power. Social implications Integration of Information and Communication Technology in teaching and learning in PPE is socially important in the view that all children regardless of their background (urban or rural, affluent or poor) benefits in learning through use of technology. The children’s access to education integrating ICT would ensure equal opportunities for quality learning outcomes. In contrast, lack of exposing young children early in using ICT facilities for interaction and learning would adversely impact their participation in knowledge sharing in later years of schooling and employability opportunities. Originality/value There is limited empirical evidence about teachers' engagement in research particularly in PPE in Tanzania. Together with limited research in the level of education, this study is the original contribution to state of teachers at the school level about their engagement in integrating information and communication technology for informing education decision makers and administrators on matters of focus to improve educational instruction and implementation of Tanzania education and training policy, as well as the implementation of the ICT policy of 2016.

The online resource Marlowe in Sheets, a sister project to Prof. Tara Lyons’ Shakespeare in Sheets, puts forth Marlowe’s works in a manner never offered before to students and scholars: the original printed but unfolded and uncut quartos and octavos from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, reformatted and rebuilt into custom downloadable PDFs for academic and public use. Playing with digital reproductions of Marlowe’s widely studied works in their first printed form enriches the study of pre-modern literature by enabling users to navigate and engage critically with the fields of the history of the book, bibliography, and the history of reading. A strong focus on how readers first came across and interacted with early printed texts highlights the marked differences these unassembled works possess in terms of form and appearance compared to their modern-day equivalents, which are generally heavily edited, annotated, prefaced, equipped with reading aids and guides, and, most of all, ready-made.

Taking into account the fact that in recent years, forensic institutions began to receive printed publications for research and realizing the value and value of book wealth, it became necessary to develop a methodology for the study of old-print books (old-timers). Today, old-timers are called publications that were published before 1830 inclusive. Rare in historical and cultural terms is not limited to the number of copies that have survived, although this fact should be taken into account. The rarest are, as a rule, not small-circulation, but mass editions, the number of surviving copies of which today is not great. The study of the Slavic editions brings a lot of valuable information on the history of both book publishing itself and the paper production and engraving art connected with it. Almost all the books at that time were illustrated with engravings and decorated with ornaments. Therefore, they are a source of valuable information on the history of art, The RV process of studying early printed books should adhere to the following algorithm: book size, external signs, edition, form, term, font height, sheet composition, signatures, alphabet, font, output, headings, author of the book, misreading, printer, date, prints, ornament, tie, lettering and binding. Key words: art criticism, early printed book (old print), cyrillic printing.

The article presents the old printed encyclopedic and reference editions stored in different collections of the Old and Rare Books Department of the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine (VNLU) – incunabula, paleotypes, foreign old books, rare editions, editions in civil and Cyrillic font. The largest number among them is foreign old printed books, but information on domestic editions is also provided. The main goal of the publication is to draw the attention of specialists to these forgotten book monuments of the past and, if possible, to return them to scientific circulation. The methodology of the research and their subsequent quite brief characteristics involved structuring the information according to the chronology of book printing, importance in the society of the time, typological classification of publications, etc. For the convenience of further research work with these sources, each description of the monument is accompanied by a shelf number, assigned by the department. The study has revealed a significant amount and historical importance of encyclopedic and reference publications of the 15th and 18th centuries in the collections of a single specialized department of the library. It is reasonable to continue studying copies of encyclopedic editions of the 19th – early 20th centuries in the collections of the Old and Rare Books Department, as well as conducting a similar study in the collections of other specialized departments of the VNLU.

The purpose of the article is to confirm the peculiarity of expert research of printed publications from the standpoint of modern research as a separate field of professional knowledge that combines bibliography, history, and art of books, book monuments and emphasizes the importance of source data and preservation status in formulating expert opinions, clarify the parameters to rare or valuable publications. Research methodology. Analytical, historical,epistemological-axiological, and theoretical generalization methods were used to achieve the goal to specify the problem of expert activity. Scientific novelty the obtained results consist in theoretical comprehension of information from art and bibliographic sources, methods of examination of book editions, algorithm and sequence of work of the expert, differences of concepts "rare book" and "valuable book" are covered. Conclusions. To understand the place of expertise in the system of protection and promotion of cultural property, the systematization of existing basic concepts related to book editions was carried out. The process of expert research of book editions begins with a visual, optical, and physical study of the state of preservation, attribution, and identification of the circumstances that caused the damage and ends with the display of the monument in the museum space. The study outlined the sequence of examination of book editions, which determined the interaction of the following three concepts: data collection on the object of study; consultations with museum researchers and research institutions; specified parameters for classifying publications as rare or valuable books.Key words: examination of cultural property, "rare book", "valuable book".

Islam is a comprehensive religion that emphasizes the importance of education for every individual. Islam views education as the most effective way to shape a prosperous society, as stated in the Quran. One important aspect is early childhood education. Efforts to elevate early childhood education can be seen through the initiatives taken by government agencies, such as the establishment of nurseries, kindergartens, daycare centers, and private agencies offering similar services. Additionally, private entities have also published modules for early childhood education that are used in preschool and kindergarten curricula. This article aims to examine the implementation of Islamic education among children in Malaysia through the module book of the hadiths of Prophet Muhammad. The methodology used is descriptive, utilizing qualitative methods to analyze documents. The researcher reviewed several module books that were successfully obtained and published in the market, subsequently analyzing and evaluating their content based on aspects of hadith narration, the number of hadiths, themes of the hadiths, appropriate writing techniques and styles for children's age groups, and the teachings derived from the hadiths. The study found that efforts have been made by private agencies and individuals to collect and compile the hadiths of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) for the purpose of early childhood education. The study also found that the printed modules of hadiths available in the market still have room for improvement based on the analysis and comments made by the researcher in the study findings. The author also suggests that these books be reviewed by advisory panels for further improvement and be transformed into learning modules for early childhood education

Purpose The purpose of this study is to investigate if and how government intervention can nudge students to become ebook readers. Design/methodology/approach A cross-sectional survey research design was adopted for this study. A total of 1,144 students from four middle and high schools in urban and rural areas of Indonesia participated in this study. The results from statistical analyses were further discussed through the lens of the nudge theory. Findings This paper founds evidence that government intervention in the form of the Buku Sekolah Elektronik (BSE) policy that has been providing free electronic textbooks for more than a decade can help nudge students to become ebook readers. After controlling for student’s demographic information, this paper founds that their awareness of such a policy is significantly associated with a stronger preference toward ebooks while having no significant effect on their preferences toward printed book format. This paper also founds that mobile device adoption plays an important role where early adopters tend to prefer ebook format, whereas laggards are more associated with printed book format. Originality/value Many have studied the benefits of using ebooks in learning, but the literature also shows that most students still prefer reading printed books over ebooks. This is true not only in developing countries where problems with infrastructures can hamper the adoption of ebooks in general but also in developed countries where ebooks are much more prevalent, even among the general population. This paper showed how government interventions have the potency to help tip the scales and nudge students to become ebook readers.

Objective/Context: This research aims to analyze the editorial practice of the ssa, especially the Sudam publishing house; as well as to identify what were the functions of the published writings and what motives drove the organization to sustain its editorial efforts in the repressive conjuncture of the 1930s. Methodology: We used a qualitative methodology, which consists of the analysis and interpretation of a vast body of documents (composed of internal documents and the public press of the ssa, correspondence, pamphlets and books published by Sudam and Ediciones Europa-América), in relation and dialogue with the secondary bibliography referred to the history of communist books and publishing, of the Communist International and of communism in South America. Originality: The Sudam publishing house has not been approached by historiography as an object of specific analysis so far. This research seeks to contribute to the studies on the Latin American communist book and publishing in the early 1930s, and to favor the understanding of the role of publishing in the development of communist ideology in South America. Conclusions: Although Sudam’s production and diffusion level was limited, its main contribution was to propose a political-editorial practice based on militant and partisan networks, on which the editorial proposals with regional projection of the later period, during the years of the Popular Front policy, were based. Likewise, the titles introduced had a strong ideological and political indoctrination content, so that they collaborated in the Bolshevization and Stalinization of the South American communist parties.

The foundations of almost all Islamic sciences were laid in the first and second centuries of hijra. With the expansion of the Islamic world since the first century of hijra, the existence of a collective effort to transfer oral information into writing is notable. With the invitation of the prophet Muḥammad to Islam, an unprecedented increase in the culture of writing has been observed. Since the emergence of Islam, the world history scene has witnessed feverish writing activity. Especially in the 2th/8th century, when the transition from oral culture to written culture accelerated, the founding texts of the science of language and religion, which were the carriers of these sciences related to aqāid-kalām, fiqh and uṣūl al-fiqh, tasawwuf, tafsir, and hadith, were compiled. Thanks to the founding texts containing the basic principles, the sciences have had the opportunity to develop by deepening. In this study, the contribution of Fiqh al-akbar, the founding text of the science of creed, to the science of kalam, which has made significant progress, will be discussed. In order for a text to be considered a founding and root, there must be a system that it establishes as the fruit of the tree. In this sense, Fiqh al-akbar established a moderate and defensible belief system. There is an organic link between the most concise faith texts and the most voluminous kalām books. While the creed texts, which consist of writing the goals at the end of the road, are the counting of the principles of faith, the texts of the kalām represent the walking of the road that leads to the goal of faith. Fiqh al-akbar, which marks the end of the road by finishing the roads to be walked, is the first and most important of the milestones of Islamic thought. In this study, the contribution of Fiqh al-akbar, the founding text of the science of aqāid, to the science of kalām will be discussed in the context of its belonging to its author. This text gave direction to Ahl al-Sunna theology, which would be written in the later stages of Islamic thought. In this study, the internal and external contexts of the founding text mentioned will be confirmed in terms of its relative acumen to Abū Ḥanīfa. In addition, the reason for the increase in the commentaries (Sharḥ) of Fiqh al-akbar during the Ottoman period will be shown. As a matter of fact, each annotation strengthens that it belongs to the author. In the annotations, there is no sentence stating that the text does not belong to Abū Ḥanīfa, on the contrary, the authenticity of the belonging is emphasized. Of course, not all the annotations of the relevant text will be included here, but mostly printed works will be emphasized. Theology, prophecy and the hereafter are discussed in Fiqh al-akbar. Here, how theological debates and problems related to the history of theological concepts are handled in the commentaries will be shown. In this article, within the framework of the method discussed as an example, a preparation will be made for further studies to evaluate the topics and concepts of prophecy and the hereafter in the context of commentaries. The point that should be emphasized here is that none of the scholars who commented on the text pointed out that the subject or concept was not discussed in the period of Abū Ḥanīfa. Moreover, from the early period until as late as the 7th/13th century, both theology and bibliography books did not have any doubts about the belonging of Fiqh al-akbar to Abū Ḥanīfa. Moreover, since the early period, both theological and bibliographical works did not have any doubts about Fiqh al-akbar’s belonging to Abū Ḥanīfa.

Introduction Cookbooks are an exceptional written record of what is largely an oral tradition. They have been described as “magician’s hats” due to their ability to reveal much more than they seem to contain (Wheaton, “Finding”). The first book printed in Germany was the Guttenberg Bible in 1456 but, by 1490, printing was introduced into almost every European country (Tierney). The spread of literacy between 1500 and 1800, and the rise in silent reading, helped to create a new private sphere into which the individual could retreat, seeking refuge from the community (Chartier). This new technology had its effects in the world of cookery as in so many spheres of culture (Mennell, All Manners). Trubek notes that cookbooks are the texts most often used by culinary historians, since they usually contain all the requisite materials for analysing a cuisine: ingredients, method, technique, and presentation. Printed cookbooks, beginning in the early modern period, provide culinary historians with sources of evidence of the culinary past. Historians have argued that social differences can be expressed by the way and type of food we consume. Cookbooks are now widely accepted as valid socio-cultural and historic documents (Folch, Sherman), and indeed the link between literacy levels and the protestant tradition has been expressed through the study of Danish cookbooks (Gold). From Apicius, Taillevent, La Varenne, and Menon to Bradley, Smith, Raffald, Acton, and Beeton, how can both manuscript and printed cookbooks be analysed as historic documents? What is the difference between a manuscript and a printed cookbook? Barbara Ketchum Wheaton, who has been studying cookbooks for over half a century and is honorary curator of the culinary collection in Harvard’s Schlesinger Library, has developed a methodology to read historic cookbooks using a structured approach. For a number of years she has been giving seminars to scholars from multidisciplinary fields on how to read historic cookbooks. This paper draws on the author’s experiences attending Wheaton’s seminar in Harvard, and on supervising the use of this methodology at both Masters and Doctoral level (Cashman; Mac Con Iomaire, and Cashman). Manuscripts versus Printed Cookbooks A fundamental difference exists between manuscript and printed cookbooks in their relationship with the public and private domain. Manuscript cookbooks are by their very essence intimate, relatively unedited and written with an eye to private circulation. Culinary manuscripts follow the diurnal and annual tasks of the household. They contain recipes for cures and restoratives, recipes for cleansing products for the house and the body, as well as the expected recipes for cooking and preserving all manners of food. Whether manuscript or printed cookbook, the recipes contained within often act as a reminder of how laborious the production of food could be in the pre-industrialised world (White). Printed cookbooks draw oxygen from the very fact of being public. They assume a “literate population with sufficient discretionary income to invest in texts that commodify knowledge” (Folch). This process of commoditisation brings knowledge from the private to the public sphere. There exists a subset of cookbooks that straddle this divide, for example, Mrs. Rundell’s A New System of Domestic Cookery (1806), which brought to the public domain her distillation of a lifetime of domestic experience. Originally intended for her daughters alone, Rundell’s book was reprinted regularly during the nineteenth century with the last edition printed in 1893, when Mrs. Beeton had been enormously popular for over thirty years (Mac Con Iomaire, and Cashman). Barbara Ketchum Wheaton’s Structured Approach Cookbooks can be rewarding, surprising and illuminating when read carefully with due effort in understanding them as cultural artefacts. However, Wheaton notes that: “One may read a single old cookbook and find it immensely entertaining. One may read two and begin to find intriguing similarities and differences. When the third cookbook is read, one’s mind begins to blur, and one begins to sense the need for some sort of method in approaching these documents” (“Finding”). Following decades of studying cookbooks from both sides of the Atlantic and writing a seminal text on the French at table from 1300-1789 (Wheaton, Savouring the Past), this combined experience negotiating cookbooks as historical documents was codified, and a structured approach gradually articulated and shared within a week long seminar format. In studying any cookbook, regardless of era or country of origin, the text is broken down into five different groupings, to wit: ingredients; equipment or facilities; the meal; the book as a whole; and, finally, the worldview. A particular strength of Wheaton’s seminars is the multidisciplinary nature of the approaches of students who attend, which throws the study of cookbooks open to wide ranging techniques. Students with a purely scientific training unearth interesting patterns by developing databases of the frequency of ingredients or techniques, and cross referencing them with other books from similar or different timelines or geographical regions. Patterns are displayed in graphs or charts. Linguists offer their own unique lens to study cookbooks, whereas anthropologists and historians ask what these objects can tell us about how our ancestors lived and drew meaning from life. This process is continuously refined, and each grouping is discussed below. Ingredients The geographic origins of the ingredients are of interest, as is the seasonality and the cost of the foodstuffs within the scope of each cookbook, as well as the sensory quality both separately and combined within different recipes. In the medieval period, the use of spices and large joints of butchers meat and game were symbols of wealth and status. However, when the discovery of sea routes to the New World and to the Far East made spices more available and affordable to the middle classes, the upper classes spurned them. Evidence from culinary manuscripts in Georgian Ireland, for example, suggests that galangal was more easily available in Dublin during the eighteenth century than in the mid-twentieth century. A new aesthetic, articulated by La Varenne in his Le Cuisinier Francois (1651), heralded that food should taste of itself, and so exotic ingredients such as cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger were replaced by the local bouquet garni, and stocks and sauces became the foundations of French haute cuisine (Mac Con Iomaire). Some combinations of flavours and ingredients were based on humoral physiology, a long held belief system based on the writings of Hippocrates and Galen, now discredited by modern scientific understanding. The four humors are blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. It was believed that each of these humors would wax and wane in the body, depending on diet and activity. Galen (131-201 AD) believed that warm food produced yellow bile and that cold food produced phlegm. It is difficult to fathom some combinations of ingredients or the manner of service without comprehending the contemporary context within they were consumeSome ingredients found in Roman cookbooks, such as “garum” or “silphium” are no longer available. It is suggested that the nearest substitute for garum also known as “liquamen”—a fermented fish sauce—would be Naam Plaa, or Thai fish sauce (Grainger). Ingredients such as tea and white bread, moved from the prerogative of the wealthy over time to become the staple of the urban poor. These ingredients, therefore, symbolise radically differing contexts during the seventeenth century than in the early twentieth century. Indeed, there are other ingredients such as hominy (dried maize kernel treated with alkali) or grahams (crackers made from graham flour) found in American cookbooks that require translation to the unacquainted non-American reader. There has been a growing number of food encyclopaedias published in recent years that assist scholars in identifying such commodities (Smith, Katz, Davidson). The Cook’s Workplace, Techniques, and Equipment It is important to be aware of the type of kitchen equipment used, the management of heat and cold within the kitchen, and also the gradual spread of the industrial revolution into the domestic sphere. Visits to historic castles such as Hampton Court Palace where nowadays archaeologists re-enact life below stairs in Tudor times give a glimpse as to how difficult and labour intensive food production was. Meat was spit-roasted in front of huge fires by spit boys. Forcemeats and purees were manually pulped using mortar and pestles. Various technological developments including spit-dogs, and mechanised pulleys, replaced the spit boys, the most up to date being the mechanised rotisserie. The technological advancements of two hundred years can be seen in the Royal Pavilion in Brighton where Marie-Antoinin Carême worked for the Prince Regent in 1816 (Brighton Pavilion), but despite the gleaming copper pans and high ceilings for ventilation, the work was still back breaking. Carême died aged forty-nine, “burnt out by the flame of his genius and the fumes of his ovens” (Ackerman 90). Mennell points out that his fame outlived him, resting on his books: Le Pâtissier Royal Parisien (1815); Le Pâtissier Pittoresque (1815); Le Maître d’Hôtel Français (1822); Le Cuisinier Parisien (1828); and, finally, L’Art de la Cuisine Française au Dix-Neuvième Siècle (1833–5), which was finished posthumously by his student Pluméry (All Manners). Mennell suggests that these books embody the first paradigm of professional French cuisine (in Kuhn’s terminology), pointing out that “no previous work had so comprehensively codified the field nor established its dominance as a point of reference for the whole profession in the way that Carême did” (All Manners 149). The most dramatic technological changes came after the industrial revolution. Although there were built up ovens available in bakeries and in large Norman households, the period of general acceptance of new cooking equipment that enclosed fire (such as the Aga stove) is from c.1860 to 1910, with gas ovens following in c.1910 to the 1920s) and Electricity from c.1930. New food processing techniques dates are as follows: canning (1860s), cooling and freezing (1880s), freeze drying (1950s), and motorised delivery vans with cooking (1920s–1950s) (den Hartog). It must also be noted that the supply of fresh food, and fish particularly, radically improved following the birth, and expansion of, the railways. To understand the context of the cookbook, one needs to be aware of the limits of the technology available to the users of those cookbooks. For many lower to middle class families during the twentieth century, the first cookbook they would possess came with their gas or electrical oven. Meals One can follow cooked dishes from the kitchen to the eating place, observing food presentation, carving, sequencing, and serving of the meal and table etiquette. Meal times and structure changed over time. During the Middle Ages, people usually ate two meals a day: a substantial dinner around noon and a light supper in the evening (Adamson). Some of the most important factors to consider are the manner in which meals were served: either à la française or à la russe. One of the main changes that occurred during the nineteenth century was the slow but gradual transfer from service à la française to service à la russe. From medieval times to the middle of the nineteenth century the structure of a formal meal was not by “courses”—as the term is now understood—but by “services”. Each service could comprise of a choice of dishes—both sweet and savoury—from which each guest could select what appealed to him or her most (Davidson). The philosophy behind this form of service was the forementioned humoral physiology— where each diner chose food based on the four humours of blood, yellow bile, black bile, or phlegm. Also known as le grand couvert, the à la française method made it impossible for the diners to eat anything that was beyond arm’s length (Blake, and Crewe). Smooth service, however, was the key to an effective à la russe dinner since servants controlled the flow of food (Eatwell). The taste and temperature of food took centre stage with the à la russe dinner as each course came in sequence. Many historic cookbooks offer table plans illustrating the suggested arrangement of dishes on a table for the à la française style of service. Many of these dishes might be re-used in later meals, and some dishes such as hashes and rissoles often utilised left over components of previous meals. There is a whole genre of cookbooks informing the middle class cooks how to be frugal and also how to emulate haute cuisine using cheaper or ersatz ingredients. The number dining and the manner in which they dined also changed dramatically over time. From medieval to Tudor times, there might be hundreds dining in large banqueting halls. By the Elizabethan age, a small intimate room where master and family dined alone replaced the old dining hall where master, servants, guests, and travellers had previously dined together (Spencer). Dining tables remained portable until the 1780s when tables with removable leaves were devised. By this time, the bread trencher had been replaced by one made of wood, or plate of pewter or precious metal in wealthier houses. Hosts began providing knives and spoons for their guests by the seventeenth century, with forks also appearing but not fully accepted until the eighteenth century (Mason). These silver utensils were usually marked with the owner’s initials to prevent their theft (Flandrin). Cookbooks as Objects and the World of Publishing A thorough examination of the manuscript or printed cookbook can reveal their physical qualities, including indications of post-publication history, the recipes and other matter in them, as well as the language, organization, and other individual qualities. What can the quality of the paper tell us about the book? Is there a frontispiece? Is the book dedicated to an employer or a patron? Does the author note previous employment history in the introduction? In his Court Cookery, Robert Smith, for example, not only mentions a number of his previous employers, but also outlines that he was eight years working with Patrick Lamb in the Court of King William, before revealing that several dishes published in Lamb’s Royal Cookery (1710) “were never made or practis’d (sic) by him and others are extreme defective and imperfect and made up of dishes unknown to him; and several of them more calculated at the purses than the Gôut of the guests”. Both Lamb and Smith worked for the English monarchy, nobility, and gentry, but produced French cuisine. Not all Britons were enamoured with France, however, with, for example Hannah Glasse asserting “if gentlemen will have French cooks, they must pay for French tricks” (4), and “So much is the blind folly of this age, that they would rather be imposed on by a French Booby, than give encouragement to an good English cook” (ctd. in Trubek 60). Spencer contextualises Glasse’s culinary Francophobia, explaining that whilst she was writing the book, the Jacobite army were only a few days march from London, threatening to cut short the Hanoverian lineage. However, Lehmann points out that whilst Glasse was overtly hostile to French cuisine, she simultaneously plagiarised its receipts. Based on this trickling down of French influences, Mennell argues that “there is really no such thing as a pure-bred English cookery book” (All Manners 98), but that within the assimilation and simplification, a recognisable English style was discernable. Mennell also asserts that Glasse and her fellow women writers had an enormous role in the social history of cooking despite their lack of technical originality (“Plagiarism”). It is also important to consider the place of cookbooks within the history of publishing. Albala provides an overview of the immense outpouring of dietary literature from the printing presses from the 1470s. He divides the Renaissance into three periods: Period I Courtly Dietaries (1470–1530)—targeted at the courtiers with advice to those attending banquets with many courses and lots of wine; Period II The Galenic Revival (1530–1570)—with a deeper appreciation, and sometimes adulation, of Galen, and when scholarship took centre stage over practical use. Finally Period III The Breakdown of Orthodoxy (1570–1650)—when, due to the ambiguities and disagreements within and between authoritative texts, authors were freer to pick the ideas that best suited their own. Nutrition guides were consistent bestsellers, and ranged from small handbooks written in the vernacular for lay audiences, to massive Latin tomes intended for practicing physicians. Albala adds that “anyone with an interest in food appears to have felt qualified to pen his own nutritional guide” (1). Would we have heard about Mrs. Beeton if her husband had not been a publisher? How could a twenty-five year old amass such a wealth of experience in household management? What role has plagiarism played in the history of cookbooks? It is interesting to note that a well worn copy of her book (Beeton) was found in the studio of Francis Bacon and it is suggested that he drew inspiration for a number of his paintings from the colour plates of animal carcasses and butcher’s meat (Dawson). Analysing the post-publication usage of cookbooks is valuable to see the most popular recipes, the annotations left by the owner(s) or user(s), and also if any letters, handwritten recipes, or newspaper clippings are stored within the leaves of the cookbook. The Reader, the Cook, the Eater The physical and inner lives and needs and skills of the individuals who used cookbooks and who ate their meals merit consideration. Books by their nature imply literacy. Who is the book’s audience? Is it the cook or is it the lady of the house who will dictate instructions to the cook? Numeracy and measurement is also important. Where clocks or pocket watches were not widely available, authors such as seventeenth century recipe writer Sir Kenelm Digby would time his cooking by the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. Literacy amongst protestant women to enable them to read the Bible, also enabled them to read cookbooks (Gold). How did the reader or eater’s religion affect the food practices? Were there fast days? Were there substitute foods for fast days? What about special occasions? Do historic cookbooks only tell us about the food of the middle and upper classes? It is widely accepted today that certain cookbook authors appeal to confident cooks, while others appeal to competent cooks, and others still to more cautious cooks (Bilton). This has always been the case, as has the differentiation between the cookbook aimed at the professional cook rather than the amateur. Historically, male cookbook authors such as Patrick Lamb (1650–1709) and Robert Smith targeted the professional cook market and the nobility and gentry, whereas female authors such as Eliza Acton (1799–1859) and Isabella Beeton (1836–1865) often targeted the middle class market that aspired to emulate their superiors’ fashions in food and dining. How about Tavern or Restaurant cooks? When did they start to put pen to paper, and did what they wrote reflect the food they produced in public eateries? Conclusions This paper has offered an overview of Barbara Ketchum Wheaton’s methodology for reading historic cookbooks using a structured approach. It has highlighted some of the questions scholars and researchers might ask when faced with an old cookbook, regardless of era or geographical location. By systematically examining the book under the headings of ingredients; the cook’s workplace, techniques and equipment; the meals; cookbooks as objects and the world of publishing; and reader, cook and eater, the scholar can perform magic and extract much more from the cookbook than seems to be there on first appearance. References Ackerman, Roy. The Chef's Apprentice. London: Headline, 1988. Adamson, Melitta Weiss. Food in Medieval Times. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood P, 2004. Albala, Ken. Eating Right in the Renaissance. Ed. Darra Goldstein. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002. Beeton, Isabella. Beeton's Book of Household Management. London: S. Beeton, 1861. Bilton, Samantha. “The Influence of Cookbooks on Domestic Cooks, 1900-2010.” Petit Propos Culinaires 94 (2011): 30–7. Blake, Anthony, and Quentin Crewe. Great Chefs of France. London: Mitchell Beazley/ Artists House, 1978. Brighton Pavilion. 12 Jun. 2013 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/interactive/2011/sep/09/brighton-pavilion-360-interactive-panoramic›. Cashman, Dorothy. “An Exploratory Study of Irish Cookbooks.” Unpublished Master's Thesis. M.Sc. Dublin: Dublin Institute of Technology, 2009. Chartier, Roger. “The Practical Impact of Writing.” Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. A History of Private Lives: Volume III: Passions of the Renaissance. Ed. Roger Chartier. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap P of Harvard U, 1989. 111-59. Davidson, Alan. The Oxford Companion to Food. New York: Oxford U P, 1999. Dawson, Barbara. “Francis Bacon and the Art of Food.” The Irish Times 6 April 2013. den Hartog, Adel P. “Technological Innovations and Eating out as a Mass Phenomenon in Europe: A Preamble.” Eating out in Europe: Picnics, Gourmet Dining and Snacks since the Late Eighteenth Century. Eds. Mark Jacobs and Peter Scholliers. Oxford: Berg, 2003. 263–80. Eatwell, Ann. “Á La Française to À La Russe, 1680-1930.” Elegant Eating: Four Hundred Years of Dining in Style. Eds. Philippa Glanville and Hilary Young. London: V&A, 2002. 48–52. Flandrin, Jean-Louis. “Distinction through Taste.” Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. A History of Private Lives: Volume III : Passions of the Renaissance. Ed. Roger Chartier. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap P of Harvard U, 1989. 265–307. Folch, Christine. “Fine Dining: Race in Pre-revolution Cuban Cookbooks.” Latin American Research Review 43.2 (2008): 205–23. Glasse, Hannah. The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy; Which Far Exceeds Anything of the Kind Ever Published. 4th Ed. London: The Author, 1745. Gold, Carol. Danish Cookbooks: Domesticity and National Identity, 1616-1901. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2007. Grainger, Sally. Cooking Apicius: Roman Recipes for Today. Totnes, Devon: Prospect, 2006. Hampton Court Palace. “The Tudor Kitchens.” 12 Jun 2013 ‹http://www.hrp.org.uk/HamptonCourtPalace/stories/thetudorkitchens› Katz, Solomon H. Ed. Encyclopedia of Food and Culture (3 Vols). New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2003. Kuhn, T. S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1962. Lamb, Patrick. Royal Cookery:Or. The Complete Court-Cook. London: Abel Roper, 1710. Lehmann, Gilly. “English Cookery Books in the 18th Century.” The Oxford Companion to Food. Ed. Alan Davidson. Oxford: Oxford U P, 1999. 277–9. Mac Con Iomaire, Máirtín. “The Changing Geography and Fortunes of Dublin’s Haute Cuisine Restaurants 1958–2008.” Food, Culture & Society 14.4 (2011): 525–45. Mac Con Iomaire, Máirtín, and Dorothy Cashman. “Irish Culinary Manuscripts and Printed Cookbooks: A Discussion.” Petit Propos Culinaires 94 (2011): 81–101. Mason, Laura. Food Culture in Great Britain. Ed. Ken Albala. Westport CT.: Greenwood P, 2004. Mennell, Stephen. All Manners of Food. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1996. ---. “Plagiarism and Originality: Diffusionism in the Study of the History of Cookery.” Petits Propos Culinaires 68 (2001): 29–38. Sherman, Sandra. “‘The Whole Art and Mystery of Cooking’: What Cookbooks Taught Readers in the Eighteenth Century.” Eighteenth Century Life 28.1 (2004): 115–35. Smith, Andrew F. Ed. The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink. New York: Oxford U P, 2007. Spencer, Colin. British Food: An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History. London: Grub Street, 2004. Tierney, Mark. Europe and the World 1300-1763. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1970. Trubek, Amy B. Haute Cuisine: How the French Invented the Culinary Profession. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000. Wheaton, Barbara. “Finding Real Life in Cookbooks: The Adventures of a Culinary Historian”. 2006. Humanities Research Group Working Paper. 9 Sep. 2009 ‹http://www.phaenex.uwindsor.ca/ojs/leddy/index.php/HRG/article/view/22/27›. Wheaton, Barbara Ketcham. Savouring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300-1789. London: Chatto & Windus, 1983. White, Eileen, ed. The English Cookery Book: Historical Essays. Proceedings of the 16th Leeds Symposium on Food History 2001. Devon: Prospect, 2001.

Data becomes something of a mirror in which people see themselves reflected. (Sorapure 270)In a 2014 essay for The New Yorker, the humourist David Sedaris recounts an obsession spurred by the purchase of a Fitbit, a wearable activity-tracker that sends a celebratory “tingle” to his wrist every 10, 000 steps. He starts “stepping out” modestly but is soon working hard, steadily improving on the manufacturer’s recommended baseline. “But why?” asks Sedaris’ partner Hugh: “Why isn’t twelve thousand enough?” “Because,” I told him, “my Fitbit thinks I can do better” (n.p.).The record of daily, incidental activity that the Fitbit collects and visualises is important to Sedaris as a record of his (increasing) bodily fitness but it is also evidence in another way, a testament to virtue and a correlate of self-improvement: “The tingle feels so good,” Sedaris says, “not just as a sensation but also as a mark of accomplishment” (n.p.). Improvement is presented as both traceable and quantifiable; data and self are inextricably, though also ironically, linked. With his Fitbit, Sedaris accesses new and precise degrees of bodily information and he connects himself to a visible community of wearers. At first, Sedaris is smug and optimistic; by the time he begins “rambling” compulsively, however, and achieving his “first sixty-thousand-step day,” he has also had an epiphany: “I staggered home with my flashlight knowing that I’d advance to sixty-five thousand, and that there will be no end to it until my feet snap off at the ankles. Then it’ll just be my jagged bones stabbing into the soft ground” (n.p.). When the device finally “dies,” Sedaris experiences an immediate feeling of freedom; within five hours he has “ordered a replacement, express delivery” (n.p.).In their book Self-Tracking, Gina Neff and Dawn Nafus note that both digital technology and a turn to biomedicalisation in the broader culture have amplified the capacity and reach of quantification practices in everyday life. Wearable activity trackers, of which the Fitbit is arguably the most iconic, offer individuals the ability to track minute or previously imperceptible permutations of bodily sensation within an everyday and non-medical context. It is a technological capacity, however, thoroughly embedded in a mobilising rhetoric of “health,” a term which itself has “become a loaded word, not merely a description of a bodily state but also a euphemism for what the speaker believes is desirable” (Neff and Nafus 19). The Fitbit measures movement, but it also signals something about the wearer’s identity that is framed, in the device’s marketing at least, in positive and desirable terms as an indication of character, as a highly desirable aspect of self.In a recent discussion of new forms of online life writing, Madeline Sorapure argues that acts of interpretation and representation in relation to biometric data are “something very similar to autobiographical practice. As in autobiography, subject and object, measurer and measured, are collapsed” (270). In its capacity to track and document over time and its affective role in forming a particular experience of self, the Fitbit bears a formal resemblance to autobiographical practice and specifically to modes of serial self-representation like diaries, journals, or almanacs. The discursive context is crucial here too. Early self-trackers use the pre-formatted almanac diary or calendar to better organise their time and to account for expenditure or gain. The pocket calendar was an innovation that had mass-market appeal and its rapid circulation in the early twentieth century directly shaped diary and account-keeping habits amongst historical populations, and to this day (McCarthy). Such forms are not simply passive repositories but bear cultural ideology. As popular templates for practices of accounting, self-documentation, and affecting, pocket calendars shape what content an individual across their individual day or week is coaxed to attend to or record, and effects what might then be relegated “marginal” or less consequential in relation.How do the technological affordances of the Fitbit similarly coax and shape self-knowledge or ideas of value and worth in relation to personal experience? What kinds of formal and discursive and resonance might there be drawn between wearable personal devices like the Fitbit and historical forms of tracking self-experience, like the diary? Is a Fitbit a diary? In this discussion, I consider pre-formatted diaries, like the almanac or pocket calendar, as discursive and technological precursors or adjuncts to wearable personal trackers like the Fitbit and I explore some assertions around the kinds of subject that digital forms and modes of self-tracking and personal data might then seem to coax or imagine.Tracking SelvesSelf-tracking is a human activity, one far more interesting than the gadgets that have made it easier and far more widespread. (Neff and Nafus 2)In 1726, at the age of 20, the inventor and polymath Benjamin Franklin recorded in his journal the inception of a plan to improve his character. In a chart created to track goals of virtue and progress in character, “black marks” are literal and symbolic, denoting when he has failed to live up to his expectations—two black marks represent a particularly bad effort (Rettberg 438). At age 79, Franklin was still tracking his progress when he wrote about the project in his Autobiography:It was about this time I conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection. I wished to live without committing any fault at any time; I would conquer all that either natural inclination, custom, or company might lead me into. (89)Franklin’s desire to document and chronicle the self-conscious development of his character drives his interest in the form. He was as an almanac devotee and an innovative publisher of the form, which gained immense popularity at this time. Franklin added blank pages to the almanacs he helped produce in the mid eighteenth century and this addition expanded the possibilities for the kinds of data that might be recorded, particularly personal and anecdotal material. The innovation also earned the publishers a good deal more money (McCarthy 49). The mass production of printed almanacs thus had a profound effect on how individuals engaged in various kinds of daily and temporal and social regulation and documentation, including of the self:At the same time as it kept readers aware of the outside world, the almanac could also direct them to the state of their own being. Almanacs were all about regulation, inside and out. Almanacs displayed a regulated universe governed by the laws of planetary motion, by the church calendar, by the zodiac. It seemed natural, then, that some readers might turn to an almanac to regulate themselves. What better way to do that than in a text that already possessed its own system? All one had to do was insert one’s own data in that printed form, like connecting the dots. (McCarthy 53)Mass-market forms that engender habits of accounting are also cultural templates: pre-formatted journals are systems for private documentation that reflect broader cultural and social ideologies. Rebecca Connor observes that historical gender assumptions in relation to time “well-spent” are frequently visible in eighteenth-century mass-market journals explicitly aimed at women, which tended to allocate more space for “social” engagements versus, for example, financial accounting (18).In the twenty-first century, technologies like the Fitbit promise access to data in relation to personal experience but they also reveal dominant cultural and social attitudes to bodies and selves. Deborah Lupton argues that self-tracking as a phenomenon is essentially connected to specific ideological imperatives: “Underlying many accounts of self-tracking is a barely hidden discourse of morality, which takes the form of championing those who take action to improve themselves” (74). Within these influential discourses, acts of self-tracking, no less than Franklin’s virtue chart, acquire significance as moral activities and as the outward sign of good character.Neither self-tracking nor the ideology of virtue that underwrites it are new phenomena. In their cultural study of weight measurement devices, Kate Crawford, Jessa Lingl, and Tero Karpii have explored how both weight scales and wearable devices “emphasize self-knowledge and control through external measurements” (479). Similarly, Lupton has noted that, the “metrics” generated by personal self-tracking devices are “invested with significance” because “data visualisation” is “viewed as more credible and accurate by participants than the ‘subjective’ assessments of their bodily sensations” ("Personal Data" 345).In various historical cultures, objectivity about one’s self is seen as a desire (if not a fact) in relation to conscious self-examination; externalisation, through written or oral confession, is both a virtue and a discipline. While diary writing is, particularly in popular culture, often derided as an overly subjective and narcissistic mode, the diary is also framed within contexts of therapy, or spiritual development, as a possible methodology for self-improvement. For Puritans, though, the act was also understood to entail risks; recording one’s thoughts into a written journal could enable the individual to see patterns or faults in everyday behaviour, and so to identify and rectify habits of mind holding back personal spiritual development. In the twentieth century, “how-to write a diary” self-help guidebooks remediate the discourse of self-knowledge as self-improvement, and promised to refine the method, advising adherents on the kinds of writing practices that might best circumvent problems of individual bias or subjectivity (a claim of an ever-more objective methodology that reverberates to the current moment). Invariably, the more “unconscious” the diary writing practice, the greater the assumed potential for “objective” knowledge (Cardell 34).Contemporary practices of self-tracking extend the prioritisation of external, objective measurement in relation to documenting personal experience. Crawford, Lingel, and Karppi observe that “the discourse around wearable devices gives the impression of radical new technology offering precise and unambiguous physical assessment: devices that reflect back the ‘real’ state of the body” (480). The technology, of course, is not new but it is “improved.” The ideal of a better, more accurate (because externalised and so auditable by the community) self-knowledge sought by Puritans in their journals, or by Benjamin Franklin in his charts and almanacs, resurfaces in the contemporary context, in which wearables like the Fitbit assume powerful discursive status in relation to ideals of truth and objectivity and where the individual is decentred from the position of as “the most authoritative source of data about themselves” (Crawford, Lingel, and Karppi 479).Data SelvesWhat kind of selves do people develop in relation to the technology they use to record or visualise their experience? “There is no doubt,” writes Jill Walker Rettberg, in Seeing Our Selves through Technology, “that people develop ‘affective ties’ to the data they track, just as diaries, blogs, photo albums and other material archives are meaningful to those who keep them” (87). That the data is numerical, or digital, does not lessen this connection:Apps which allow us to see our data allow us to see ourselves. We look at our data doubles as we gazed into the mirror as teenagers wondering who we were and who we might be. We look at our data in much the same way as you might flick through your selfies to find the one that shows you the way you want to be seen. (Rettberg 87)Crucially, Rettberg sees data as both affective and agential and she observes that data can also be edited and shaped by the individual. Some of this practice is deliberate, taking the form of an engagement with narrative as a “story” of self that underpins the practice of writing autobiography, for example. However, the representation of self can also be more oblique. “The first writing” says Rettberg, “was developed not to record words and sentences but to keep accounts. Arguably, recording quantities of grain or other valuables can be a form of self-representation, or at least representation of what belongs to the self” (10).Like log-books or field notebooks, like calendars or almanacs—prosaic forms of daily sequential recording that are understood to prioritise information capture over self-reflection—the Fitbit is usually presented as a method for accruing and representing personal data. In contemporary digital culture, “data” is a complex and fraught term and recent debates around “big data,” which describes the capacity of machines to make connections and perform calculations that a human might not necessarily notice or be able to perform, has crystallised this. What Melissa Gregg calls the power and “spectacle” of data is an ideological pivot in digital cultures of the twenty-first century, one that turns in conjunction to discourses of evidence and authority that emerge in relation to the visual: “sharing the same root as ‘evidence,’ vision is the word that aligns truth and knowledge in different historical moments” (3).For autobiography scholars exploring how formal modes of capture might also be genres, or how a Fitbit might coax a narrative of self, these questions are formative. Sorapure says: Information graphics that visually represent personal data; collaboratively constructed and template-based self-representations in social media and networking sites; the non-narrative nature of aggregated life writing: in these and other new practices we see selves emerging and being represented through interactions with technologies. (271)In the twenty-first century, self-quantification and tracking technologies like the Fitbit are ever more present in individual spheres of everyday activity. These devices prompt behaviour, affect self-knowledge, and signal identity: I am a fit person, or trying to be, or was. A Fitbit cannot record how it feels to spend 34 minutes in the “peak zone,” but it can prompt recollection, it is a mnemonic, and it provides an account of time spent, how, and by whom. Is a Fitbit a diary? The diary in the twenty-first century is already vastly different to many of its formal historical counterparts, yet there are discursive resonances. The Fitbit is a diary if we think of a diary as a chronological record of data, which it can be. However, contemporary uses of the diary, just like their historical antecedents, are also far more diverse and complex than this.Crucially, the Fitbit, like the diary, signals identity in relation to experience and so it reflects various and shifting cultural values or anxieties over what is worth measuring or documenting, and conversely, over what is not. “The private diary,” as Lejeune asserts, is a way of life: “the text itself is a mere by-product, a residue” (31). Historical diary keeping practices unfold from and emerge within cultures that position self-expression and its documentation of this as a means to self-improvement. Seeing the Fitbit within this tradition draws attention to the discursive ideology behind self-tracking as a personal practice that nonetheless positions itself in relation to cultural norms and to ideals (such as health, or fitness, or conscientiousness, or goodness).ConclusionWhat kind of self-representation is produced by practices of self-quantification, where personal data is amassed continuously and contiguously to individual experience? The legacy of centuries of historical diary-practice has been evident to various scholars exploring the cultures of self-tracking that are evolving in response to wearable technologies like the Fitbit. In her book length study of self-tracking cultures, The Quantified Self, Lupton observes that “self-tracking tools” are inevitably “biographical and personal” and that “contemporary self-tracking tools and records are the latter-day versions of the paper diary or journal, photo album, keepsake and memento box or personal dossier” (73). While, in Self-Tracking, Neff and Nafus argue that new technologies “intersect with the way that people have self-tracked for centuries like keeping diaries or logs. The growth of these digital traces raises new questions about this old practice” (2).What does it mean to think of wearable technology like Fitbits in relation to diaries, and what are the implications of such a conception? Privacy settings allow the Fitbit to comply with popular stereotypes of diaries that exist in popular culture; that is, as a locked or secret record. However, in the case of wearable technology the content is in the form of data. While data often poses as neutral and objective information, seeing this instead as diaristic can draw valuable attention to dominant cultural ideals that shape value in relation to self and technology in the twenty-first century. Crucially, “while self-knowledge may be the rhetoric of wearable device advertising, it is just as much a technology of being known by others” (Crawford, Lingel, and Karppi 493-494).Is my Fitbit a diary? It tracks my body’s movements and gestures and reports them to the conscious self. It stores chronologically accumulated data over time. It enables self-reflection and the visualisation of a set of daily habits, and it may produce or coax new behaviour. Diaries have long performed this function: tracking, recording and, documenting for making sense of later, on reflection, or after enough time has passed. Contemporary advances in technology related to self-tracking and personal data collection make possible a new range of previously unimaginable information in relation to individual experience. However, the diary’s cultural status as a “confessional” form intersects with exigencies around “health” and “self-improvement” that corporations producing devices like Fitbit promote to their customers in ways that will demand further attention.ReferencesCardell, Kylie. Dear World: Contemporary Uses of the Diary. Wisconsin UP, 2014.Connor, Rebecca Elisabeth. Women, Accounting and Narrative: Keeping Books in Eighteenth-Century England. London: Routledge, 2011.Crawford, Kate, Jessa Lingel, and Tero Karppi. “Our Metrics, Ourselves: A Hundred Years of Self-Tracking From the Weight Scale to the Wrist Wearable Device.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 18.4-5 (2015): 470-96.Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: The Complete Illustrated History. Minneapolis: MN Voyageur Press, 2016.Gregg, Melissa. “Inside the Data Spectacle.” Television & New Media 16.1 (2014): 1-15.Lejeune, Philippe. On Diary. Eds. Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak. Trans. Katherine Durnin. Honolulu: U of Hawai’i P, 2009.Lupton, Deborah. “Personal Data Practices in the Age of Lively Data.” Digital Sociologies. Eds. Jessie Daniels, Tressie McMillan Cottom, and Karen Gregory. Bristol: Policy P, 2016. 339-54.———. The Quantified Self. Cambridge: Polity, 2016.McCarthy, Molly A. The Accidental Diarist: A History of the Daily Planner in America. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2013.Neff, Gina, and Dawn Nafus. Self-Tracking. Cambridge: The MIT P, 2016.Rettberg, Jill Walker. Seeing Our Selves through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Technology to Shape Ourselves. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.———. “Self-Representation in Social Media.” The Sage Handbook of Social Media, Eds. Jean Burgess, Alice E. Marwick, and Thomas Poell. London: Sage, 2017. 429-43.Sedaris, David. “Stepping Out.” The New Yorker 30 Jun. 2014. 18 Apr. 2018 <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/30/stepping-out-3>.Sorapure, Madeleine. “Autobiography Scholarship 2.0?: Understanding New Forms of Online Life Writing.” Biography 38.2 (2015): 267-72.

Special Care NoticeThis article discusses trauma and violence inflicted upon the Indigenous peoples of Tasmania through the processes of colonisation. Content within this article may be distressing to some readers. IntroductionThis article looks briefly at the collection, consultation, and digital sharing of stories essential to the histories of the First Nations peoples of Australia. Focusing on materials held in Sydney, New South Wales two case studies—the object known as the Proclamation Board and the George Augustus Robinson Papers—explore how materials can be shared with Aboriginal peoples of the region now known as Tasmania. Specifically, the authors of this article (a Palawa man and an Australian woman of European descent) ask how can the idea of the privileging of Indigenous voices, within Eurocentric cultural collections, be transformed from rhetoric to reality? Moreover, how can we navigate this complex work, that is made even more problematic by distance, through the utilisation of knowledge networks which are geographically isolated from the collections holding stories crucial to Indigenous communities? In seeking to answer these important questions, this article looks at how cultural, emotional, and intellectual ownership can be divested from the physical ownership of a collection in a way that repatriates—appropriately and sensitively—stories of Aboriginal Australia and of colonisation. Holding Stories, Not Always Our OwnCultural institutions, including libraries, have, in recent years, been drawn into discussions centred on the notion of digital disruption and “that transformative shift which has seen the ongoing realignment of business resources, relationships, knowledge, and value both facilitating the entry of previously impossible ideas and accelerating the competitive impact of those same impossible ideas” (Franks and Ensor n.p.). As Molly Brown has noted, librarians “are faced, on a daily basis, with rapidly changing technology and the ways in which our patrons access and use information. Thus, we need to look at disruptive technologies as opportunities” (n.p.). Some innovations, including the transition from card catalogues to online catalogues and the provision of a wide range of electronic resources, are now considered to be business as usual for most institutions. So, too, the digitisation of great swathes of materials to facilitate access to collections onsite and online, with digitising primary sources seen as an intermediary between the pillars of preserving these materials and facilitating access for those who cannot, for a variety of logistical and personal reasons, travel to a particular repository where a collection is held.The result has been the development of hybrid collections: that is, collections that can be accessed in both physical and digital formats. Yet, the digitisation processes conducted by memory institutions is often selective. Limited resources, even for large-scale digitisation projects usually only realise outcomes that focus on making visually rich, key, or canonical documents, or those documents that are considered high use and at risk, available online. Such materials are extracted from the larger full body of records while other lesser-known components are often omitted. Digitisation projects therefore tend to be devised for a broader audience where contextual questions are less central to the methodology in favour of presenting notable or famous documents online only. Documents can be profiled as an exhibition separate from their complete collection and, critically, their wider context. Libraries of course are not neutral spaces and this practice of (re)enforcing the canon through digitisation is a challenge that cultural institutions, in partnerships, need to address (Franks and Ensor n.p.). Indeed, our digital collections are as affected by power relationships and the ongoing impacts of colonisation as our physical collections. These power relationships can be seen through an organisation’s “processes that support acquisitions, as purchases and as the acceptance of artefacts offered as donations. Throughout such processes decisions are continually made (consciously and unconsciously) that affect what is presented and actively promoted as the official history” (Thorpe et al. 8). While it is important to acknowledge what we do collect, it is equally important to look, too, at what we do not collect and to consider how we continually privilege and exclude stories. Especially when these stories are not always our own, but are held, often as accidents of collecting. For example, an item comes in as part of a larger suite of materials while older, city-based institutions often pre-date regional repositories. An essential point here is that cultural institutions can often become comfortable in what they collect, building on existing holdings. This, in turn, can lead to comfortable digitisation. If we are to be truly disruptive, we need to embrace feeling uncomfortable in what we do, and we need to view digitisation as an intervention opportunity; a chance to challenge what we ‘know’ about our collections. This is especially relevant in any attempts to decolonise collections.Case Study One: The Proclamation BoardThe first case study looks at an example of re-digitisation. One of the seven Proclamation Boards known to survive in a public collection is held by the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, having been purchased from Tasmanian collector and photographer John Watt Beattie (1859–1930) in May 1919 for £30 (Morris 86). Why, with so much material to digitise—working in a program of limited funds and time—would the Library return to an object that has already been privileged? Unanswered questions and advances in digitisation technologies, created a unique opportunity. For the First Peoples of Van Diemen’s Land (now known as Tasmania), colonisation by the British in 1803 was “an emotionally, intellectually, physically, and spiritually confronting series of encounters” (Franks n.p.). Violent incidents became routine and were followed by a full-scale conflict, often referred to as the Black War (Clements 1), or more recently as the Tasmanian War, fought from the 1820s until 1832. Image 1: Governor Arthur’s Proclamation to the Aborigines, ca. 1828–1830. Image Credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Call No.: SAFE / R 247.Behind the British combatants were various support staff, including administrators and propagandists. One of the efforts by the belligerents, behind the front line, to win the war and bring about peace was the production of approximately 100 Proclamation Boards. These four-strip pictograms were the result of a scheme introduced by Lieutenant Governor George Arthur (1784–1854), on the advice of Surveyor General George Frankland (1800–38), to communicate that all are equal under the rule of law (Arthur 1). Frankland wrote to Arthur in early 1829 to suggest these Proclamation Boards could be produced and nailed to trees (Morris 84), as a Eurocentric adaptation of a traditional method of communication used by Indigenous peoples who left images on the trunks of trees. The overtly stated purpose of the Boards was, like the printed proclamations exhorting peace, to assert, all people—black and white—were equal. That “British Justice would protect” everyone (Morris 84). The first strip on each of these pictogram Boards presents Indigenous peoples and colonists living peacefully together. The second strip shows “a conciliatory handshake between the British governor and an Aboriginal ‘chief’, highly reminiscent of images found in North America on treaty medals and anti-slavery tokens” (Darian-Smith and Edmonds 4). The third and fourth strips depict the repercussions for committing murder (or, indeed, any significant crime), with an Indigenous man hanged for spearing a colonist and a European man hanged for shooting an Aboriginal man. Both men executed in the presence of the Lieutenant Governor. The Boards, oil on Huon pine, were painted by “convict artists incarcerated in the island penal colony” (Carroll 73).The Board at the State Library of New South Wales was digitised quite early on in the Library’s digitisation program, it has been routinely exhibited (including for the Library’s centenary in 2010) and is written about regularly. Yet, many questions about this small piece of timber remain unanswered. For example, some Boards were outlined with sketches and some were outlined with pouncing, “a technique [of the Italian Renaissance] of pricking the contours of a drawing with a pin. Charcoal was then dusted on to the drawing” (Carroll 75–76). Could such a sketch or example of pouncing be seen beneath the surface layers of paint on this particular Board? What might be revealed by examining the Board more closely and looking at this object in different ways?An important, but unexpected, discovery was that while most of the pigments in the painting correlate with those commonly available to artists in the early nineteenth century there is one outstanding anomaly. X-ray analysis revealed cadmium yellow present in several places across the painting, including the dresses of the little girls in strip one, uniform details in strip two, and the trousers worn by the settler men in strips three and four (Kahabka 2). This is an extraordinary discovery, as cadmium yellows were available “commercially as an artist pigment in England by 1846” and were shown by “Winsor & Newton at the 1851 Exhibition held at the Crystal Palace, London” (Fiedler and Bayard 68). The availability of this particular type of yellow in the early 1850s could set a new marker for the earliest possible date for the manufacture of this Board, long-assumed to be 1828–30. Further, the early manufacture of cadmium yellow saw the pigment in short supply and a very expensive option when compared with other pigments such as chrome yellow (the darker yellow, seen in the grid lines that separate the scenes in the painting). This presents a clearly uncomfortable truth in relation to an object so heavily researched and so significant to a well-regarded collection that aims to document much of Australia’s colonial history. Is it possible, for example, the Board has been subjected to overpainting at a later date? Or, was this premium paint used to produce a display Board that was sent, by the Tasmanian Government, to the 1866 Intercolonial Exhibition in Melbourne? In seeking to see the finer details of the painting through re-digitisation, the results were much richer than anticipated. The sketch outlines are clearly visible in the new high-resolution files. There are, too, details unable to be seen clearly with the naked eye, including this warrior’s headdress and ceremonial scarring on his stomach, scars that tell stories “of pain, endurance, identity, status, beauty, courage, sorrow or grief” (Australian Museum n.p.). The image of this man has been duplicated and distributed since the 1830s, an anonymous figure deployed to tell a settler-centric story of the Black, or Tasmanian, War. This man can now be seen, for the first time nine decades later, to wear his own story. We do not know his name, but he is no longer completely anonymous. This image is now, in some ways, a portrait. The State Library of New South Wales acknowledges this object is part of an important chapter in the Tasmanian story and, though two Boards are in collections in Tasmania (the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart and the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston), each Board is different. The Library holds an important piece of a large and complex puzzle and has a moral obligation to make this information available beyond its metropolitan location. Digitisation, in this case re-digitisation, is allowing for the disruption of this story in sparking new questions around provenance and for the relocating of a Palawa warrior to a more prominent, perhaps even equal role, within a colonial narrative. Image 2: Detail, Governor Arthur’s Proclamation to the Aborigines, ca. 1828–1830. Image Credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Call No.: SAFE / R 247.Case Study Two: The George Augustus Robinson PapersThe second case study focuses on the work being led by the Indigenous Engagement Branch at the State Library of New South Wales on the George Augustus Robinson (1791–1866) Papers. In 1829, Robinson was granted a government post in Van Diemen’s Land to ‘conciliate’ with the Palawa peoples. More accurately, Robinson’s core task was dispossession and the systematic disconnection of the Palawa peoples from their Country, community, and culture. Robinson was a habitual diarist and notetaker documenting much of his own life as well as the lives of those around him, including First Nations peoples. His extensive suite of papers represents a familiar and peculiar kind of discomfort for Aboriginal Australians, one in which they are forced to learn about themselves through the eyes and words of their oppressors. For many First Nations peoples of Tasmania, Robinson remains a violent and terrible figure, but his observations of Palawa culture and language are as vital as they are problematic. Importantly, his papers include vibrant and utterly unique descriptions of people, place, flora and fauna, and language, as well as illustrations revealing insights into the routines of daily life (even as those routines were being systematically dismantled by colonial authorities). “Robinson’s records have informed much of the revitalisation of Tasmanian Aboriginal culture in the twentieth century and continue to provide the basis for investigations of identity and deep relationships to land by Aboriginal scholars” (Lehman n.p.). These observations and snippets of lived culture are of immense value to Palawa peoples today but the act of reading between Robinson’s assumptions and beyond his entrenched colonial views is difficult work.Image 3: George Augustus Robinson Papers, 1829–34. Image Credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, A 7023–A 7031.The canonical reference for Robinson’s archive is Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson, 1829–1834, edited by N.J.B. Plomley. The volume of over 1,000 pages was first published in 1966. This large-scale project is recognised “as a monumental work of Tasmanian history” (Crane ix). Yet, this standard text (relied upon by Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers) has clearly not reproduced a significant percentage of Robinson’s Tasmanian manuscripts. Through his presumptuous truncations Plomley has not simply edited Robinson’s work but has, quite literally, written many Palawa stories out of this colonial narrative. It is this lack of agency in determining what should be left out that is most troubling, and reflects an all-too-familiar approach which libraries, including the State Library of New South Wales, are now urgently trying to rectify. Plomley’s preface and introduction does not indicate large tranches of information are missing. Indeed, Plomley specifies “that in extenso [in full] reproduction was necessary” (4) and omissions “have been kept to a minimum” (8). A 32-page supplement was published in 1971. A new edition, including the supplement, some corrections made by Plomley, and some extra material was released in 2008. But much continues to be unknown outside of academic circles, and far too few Palawa Elders and language revival workers have had access to Robinson’s original unfiltered observations. Indeed, Plomley’s text is linear and neat when compared to the often-chaotic writings of Robinson. Digitisation cannot address matters of the materiality of the archive, but such projects do offer opportunities for access to information in its original form, unedited, and unmediated.Extensive consultation with communities in Tasmania is underpinning the digitisation and re-description of a collection which has long been assumed—through partial digitisation, microfilming, and Plomley’s text—to be readily available and wholly understood. Central to this project is not just challenging the canonical status of Plomley’s work but directly challenging the idea non-Aboriginal experts can truly understand the cultural or linguistic context of the information recorded in Robinson’s journals. One of the more exciting outcomes, so far, has been working with Palawa peoples to explore the possibility of Palawa-led transcriptions and translation, and not breaking up the tasks of this work and distributing them to consultants or to non-Indigenous student groups. In this way, people are being meaningfully reunited with their own histories and, crucially, given first right to contextualise and understand these histories. Again, digitisation and disruption can be seen here as allies with the facilitation of accessibility to an archive in ways that re-distribute the traditional power relations around interpreting and telling stories held within colonial-rich collections.Image 4: Detail, George Augustus Robinson Papers, 1829–34. Image Credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, A 7023–A 7031.As has been so brilliantly illustrated by Bruce Pascoe’s recent work Dark Emu (2014), when Aboriginal peoples are given the opportunity to interpret their own culture from the colonial records without interference, they are able to see strength and sophistication rather than victimhood. For, to “understand how the Europeans’ assumptions selectively filtered the information brought to them by the early explorers is to see how we came to have the history of the country we accept today” (4). Far from decrying these early colonial records Aboriginal peoples understand their vital importance in connecting to a culture which was dismantled and destroyed, but importantly it is known that far too much is lost in translation when Aboriginal Australians are not the ones undertaking the translating. ConclusionFor Aboriginal Australians, culture and knowledge is no longer always anchored to Country. These histories, once so firmly connected to communities through their ancestral lands and languages, have been dispersed across the continent and around the world. Many important stories—of family history, language, and ways of life—are held in cultural institutions and understanding the role of responsibly disseminating these collections through digitisation is paramount. In transitioning from physical collections to hybrid collections of the physical and digital, the digitisation processes conducted by memory institutions can be—and due to the size of some collections is inevitably—selective. Limited resources, even for large-scale and well-resourced digitisation projects usually realise outcomes that focus on making visually rich, key, or canonical documents, or those documents considered high use or at risk, available online. Such materials are extracted from a full body of records. Digitisation projects, as noted, tend to be devised for a broader audience where contextual questions are less central to the methodology in favour of presenting notable documents online, separate from their complete collection and, critically, their context. Our institutions carry the weight of past collecting strategies and, today, the pressure of digitisation strategies as well. Contemporary librarians should not be gatekeepers, but rather key holders. In collaborating across sectors and with communities we open doors for education, research, and the repatriation of culture and knowledge. We must, always, remember to open these doors wide: the call of Aboriginal Australians of ‘nothing about us without us’ is not an invitation to collaboration but an imperative. Libraries—as well as galleries, archives, and museums—cannot tell these stories alone. Also, these two case studies highlight what we believe to be one of the biggest mistakes that not just libraries but all cultural institutions are vulnerable to making, the assumption that just because a collection is open access it is also accessible. Digitisation projects are more valuable when communicated, contextualised and—essentially—the result of community consultation. Such work can, for some, be uncomfortable while for others it offers opportunities to embrace disruption and, by extension, opportunities to decolonise collections. For First Nations peoples this work can be more powerful than any simple measurement tool can record. Through examining our past collecting, deliberate efforts to consult, and through digital sharing projects across metropolitan and regional Australia, we can make meaningful differences to the ways in which Aboriginal Australians can, again, own their histories.Acknowledgements The authors acknowledge the Palawa peoples: the traditional custodians of the lands known today as Tasmania. The authors acknowledge, too, the Gadigal people upon whose lands this article was researched and written. We are indebted to Dana Kahabka (Conservator), Joy Lai (Imaging Specialist), Richard Neville (Mitchell Librarian), and Marika Duczynski (Project Officer) at the State Library of New South Wales. Sincere thanks are also given to Jason Ensor of Western Sydney University.ReferencesArthur, George. “Proclamation.” The Hobart Town Courier 19 Apr. 1828: 1.———. Proclamation to the Aborigines. Graphic Materials. Sydney: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, SAFE R / 247, ca. 1828–1830.Australian Museum. “Aboriginal Scarification.” 2018. 11 Jan. 2019 <https://australianmuseum.net.au/about/history/exhibitions/body-art/aboriginal-scarification/>.Brown, Molly. “Disruptive Technology: A Good Thing for Our Libraries?” International Librarians Network (2016). 26 Aug. 2018 <https://interlibnet.org/2016/11/25/disruptive-technology-a-good-thing-for-our-libraries/>.Carroll, Khadija von Zinnenburg. Art in the Time of Colony: Empires and the Making of the Modern World, 1650–2000. Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2014.Clements, Nicholas. The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania. St Lucia, U of Queensland P, 2014.Crane, Ralph. “Introduction.” Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson, 1829-1834. 2nd ed. Launceston and Hobart: Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, and Quintus Publishing, 2008. ix.Darian-Smith, Kate, and Penelope Edmonds. “Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers.” Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers: Conflict, Performance and Commemoration in Australia and the Pacific Rim. Eds. Kate Darian-Smith and Penelope Edmonds. New York: Routledge, 2015. 1–14.Edmonds, Penelope. “‘Failing in Every Endeavour to Conciliate’: Governor Arthur’s Proclamation Boards to the Aborigines, Australian Conciliation Narratives and Their Transnational Connections.” Journal of Australian Studies 35.2 (2011): 201–18.Fiedler, Inge, and Michael A. Bayard. Artist Pigments, a Handbook of Their History and Characteristics. Ed. Robert L. Feller. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. 65–108. Franks, Rachel. “A True Crime Tale: Re-Imagining Governor Arthur’s Proclamation Board for the Tasmanian Aborigines.” M/C Journal 18.6 (2015). 1 Feb. 2019 <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1036>.Franks, Rachel, and Jason Ensor. “Challenging the Canon: Collaboration, Digitisation and Education.” ALIA Online: A Conference of the Australian Library and Information Association, 11–15 Feb. 2019, Sydney.Kahabka, Dana. Condition Assessment [Governor Arthur’s Proclamation to the Aborigines, ca. 1828–1830, SAFE / R247]. Sydney: State Library of New South Wales, 2017.Lehman, Greg. “Pleading Robinson: Reviews of Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson (2008) and Reading Robinson: Companion Essays to Friendly Mission (2008).” Australian Humanities Review 49 (2010). 1 May 2019 <http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p41961/html/review-12.xhtml?referer=1294&page=15>. Morris, John. “Notes on A Message to the Tasmanian Aborigines in 1829, popularly called ‘Governor Davey’s Proclamation to the Aborigines, 1816’.” Australiana 10.3 (1988): 84–7.Pascoe, Bruce. Dark Emu. Broome: Magabala Books, 2014/2018.Plomley, N.J.B. Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson, 1829–1834. Hobart: Tasmanian Historical Research Association, 1966.Robinson, George Augustus. Papers. Textual Records. Sydney: Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, A 7023–A 7031, 1829–34. Thorpe, Kirsten, Monica Galassi, and Rachel Franks. “Discovering Indigenous Australian Culture: Building Trusted Engagement in Online Environments.” Journal of Web Librarianship 10.4 (2016): 343–63.

IntroductionFirmly located within the discourse of visible culture as the lofty preserve of art exhibitions and museum artefacts, the noun “curate” has gradually transformed into the verb “to curate”. Williams writes that “curate” has become a fashionable code word among the aesthetically minded to describe a creative activity. Designers no longer simply sell clothes; they “curate” merchandise. Chefs no longer only make food; they also “curate” meals. Chosen for their keen eye for a particular style or a precise shade, it is their knowledge of their craft, their reputation, and their sheer ability to choose among countless objects which make the creative process a creative activity in itself. Writing from within the framework of “curate” as a creative process, this article discusses how the state banquet for Queen Elizabeth II, hosted by Irish President Mary McAleese at Dublin Castle in May 2011, was carefully curated to represent Ireland’s diplomatic, cultural, and culinary identity. The paper will focus in particular on how the menu for the banquet was created and how the banquet’s brief, “Ireland on a Plate”, was fulfilled.History and BackgroundFood has been used by nations for centuries to display wealth, cement alliances, and impress foreign visitors. Since the feasts of the Numidian kings (circa 340 BC), culinary staging and presentation has belonged to “a long, multifaceted and multicultural history of diplomatic practices” (IEHCA 5). According to the works of Baughman, Young, and Albala, food has defined the social, cultural, and political position of a nation’s leaders throughout history.In early 2011, Ross Lewis, Chef Patron of Chapter One Restaurant in Dublin, was asked by the Irish Food Board, Bord Bía, if he would be available to create a menu for a high-profile banquet (Mahon 112). The name of the guest of honour was divulged several weeks later after vetting by the protocol and security divisions of the Department of the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Lewis was informed that the menu was for the state banquet to be hosted by President Mary McAleese at Dublin Castle in honour of Queen Elizabeth II’s visit to Ireland the following May.Hosting a formal banquet for a visiting head of state is a key feature in the statecraft of international and diplomatic relations. Food is the societal common denominator that links all human beings, regardless of culture (Pliner and Rozin 19). When world leaders publicly share a meal, that meal is laden with symbolism, illuminating each diner’s position “in social networks and social systems” (Sobal, Bove, and Rauschenbach 378). The public nature of the meal signifies status and symbolic kinship and that “guest and host are on par in terms of their personal or official attributes” (Morgan 149). While the field of academic scholarship on diplomatic dining might be young, there is little doubt of the value ascribed to the semiotics of diplomatic gastronomy in modern power structures (Morgan 150; De Vooght and Scholliers 12; Chapple-Sokol 162), for, as Firth explains, symbols are malleable and perfectly suited to exploitation by all parties (427).Political DiplomacyWhen Ireland gained independence in December 1921, it marked the end of eight centuries of British rule. The outbreak of “The Troubles” in 1969 in Northern Ireland upset the gradually improving environment of British–Irish relations, and it would be some time before a state visit became a possibility. Beginning with the peace process in the 1990s, the IRA ceasefire of 1994, and the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, a state visit was firmly set in motion by the visit of Irish President Mary Robinson to Buckingham Palace in 1993, followed by the unofficial visit of the Prince of Wales to Ireland in 1995, and the visit of Irish President Mary McAleese to Buckingham Palace in 1999. An official invitation to Queen Elizabeth from President Mary McAleese in March 2011 was accepted, and the visit was scheduled for mid-May of the same year.The visit was a highly performative occasion, orchestrated and ordained in great detail, displaying all the necessary protocol associated with the state visit of one head of state to another: inspection of the military, a courtesy visit to the nation’s head of state on arrival, the laying of a wreath at the nation’s war memorial, and a state banquet.These aspects of protocol between Britain and Ireland were particularly symbolic. By inspecting the military on arrival, the existence of which is a key indicator of independence, Queen Elizabeth effectively demonstrated her recognition of Ireland’s national sovereignty. On making the customary courtesy call to the head of state, the Queen was received by President McAleese at her official residence Áras an Uachtaráin (The President’s House), which had formerly been the residence of the British monarch’s representative in Ireland (Robbins 66). The state banquet was held in Dublin Castle, once the headquarters of British rule where the Viceroy, the representative of Britain’s Court of St James, had maintained court (McDowell 1).Cultural DiplomacyThe state banquet provided an exceptional showcase of Irish culture and design and generated a level of preparation previously unseen among Dublin Castle staff, who described it as “the most stage managed state event” they had ever witnessed (Mahon 129).The castle was cleaned from top to bottom, and inventories were taken of the furniture and fittings. The Waterford Crystal chandeliers were painstakingly taken down, cleaned, and reassembled; the Killybegs carpets and rugs of Irish lamb’s wool were cleaned and repaired. A special edition Newbridge Silverware pen was commissioned for Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip to sign the newly ordered Irish leather-bound visitors’ book. A new set of state tableware was ordered for the President’s table. Irish manufacturers of household goods necessary for the guest rooms, such as towels and soaps, hand creams and body lotions, candle holders and scent diffusers, were sought. Members of Her Majesty’s staff conducted a “walk-through” several weeks in advance of the visit to ensure that the Queen’s wardrobe would not clash with the surroundings (Mahon 129–32).The promotion of Irish manufacture is a constant thread throughout history. Irish linen, writes Kane, enjoyed a reputation as far afield as the Netherlands and Italy in the 15th century, and archival documents from the Vaucluse attest to the purchase of Irish cloth in Avignon in 1432 (249–50). Support for Irish-made goods was raised in 1720 by Jonathan Swift, and by the 18th century, writes Foster, Dublin had become an important centre for luxury goods (44–51).It has been Irish government policy since the late 1940s to use Irish-manufactured goods for state entertaining, so the material culture of the banquet was distinctly Irish: Arklow Pottery plates, Newbridge Silverware cutlery, Waterford Crystal glassware, and Irish linen tablecloths. In order to decide upon the table setting for the banquet, four tables were laid in the King’s Bedroom in Dublin Castle. The Executive Chef responsible for the banquet menu, and certain key personnel, helped determine which setting would facilitate serving the food within the time schedule allowed (Mahon 128–29). The style of service would be service à la russe, so widespread in restaurants today as to seem unremarkable. Each plate is prepared in the kitchen by the chef and then served to each individual guest at table. In the mid-19th century, this style of service replaced service à la française, in which guests typically entered the dining room after the first course had been laid on the table and selected food from the choice of dishes displayed around them (Kaufman 126).The guest list was compiled by government and embassy officials on both sides and was a roll call of Irish and British life. At the President’s table, 10 guests would be served by a team of 10 staff in Dorchester livery. The remaining tables would each seat 12 guests, served by 12 liveried staff. The staff practiced for several days prior to the banquet to make sure that service would proceed smoothly within the time frame allowed. The team of waiters, each carrying a plate, would emerge from the kitchen in single file. They would then take up positions around the table, each waiter standing to the left of the guest they would serve. On receipt of a discreet signal, each plate would be laid in front of each guest at precisely the same moment, after which the waiters would then about foot and return to the kitchen in single file (Mahon 130).Post-prandial entertainment featured distinctive styles of performance and instruments associated with Irish traditional music. These included reels, hornpipes, and slipjigs, voice and harp, sean-nόs (old style) singing, and performances by established Irish artists on the fiddle, bouzouki, flute, and uilleann pipes (Office of Public Works).Culinary Diplomacy: Ireland on a PlateLewis was given the following brief: the menu had to be Irish, the main course must be beef, and the meal should represent the very best of Irish ingredients. There were no restrictions on menu design. There were no dietary requirements or specific requests from the Queen’s representatives, although Lewis was informed that shellfish is excluded de facto from Irish state banquets as a precautionary measure. The meal was to be four courses long and had to be served to 170 diners within exactly 1 hour and 10 minutes (Mahon 112). A small army of 16 chefs and 4 kitchen porters would prepare the food in the kitchen of Dublin Castle under tight security. The dishes would be served on state tableware by 40 waiters, 6 restaurant managers, a banqueting manager and a sommélier. Lewis would be at the helm of the operation as Executive Chef (Mahon 112–13).Lewis started by drawing up “a patchwork quilt” of the products he most wanted to use and built the menu around it. The choice of suppliers was based on experience but also on a supplier’s ability to deliver perfectly ripe goods in mid-May, a typically black spot in the Irish fruit and vegetable growing calendar as it sits between the end of one season and the beginning of another. Lewis consulted the Queen’s itinerary and the menus to be served so as to avoid repetitions. He had to discard his initial plan to feature lobster in the starter and rhubarb in the dessert—the former for the precautionary reasons mentioned above, and the latter because it featured on the Queen’s lunch menu on the day of the banquet (Mahon 112–13).Once the ingredients had been selected, the menu design focused on creating tastes, flavours and textures. Several draft menus were drawn up and myriad dishes were tasted and discussed in the kitchen of Lewis’s own restaurant. Various wines were paired and tasted with the different courses, the final choice being a Château Lynch-Bages 1998 red and a Château de Fieuzal 2005 white, both from French Bordeaux estates with an Irish connection (Kellaghan 3). Two months and two menu sittings later, the final menu was confirmed and signed off by state and embassy officials (Mahon 112–16).The StarterThe banquet’s starter featured organic Clare Island salmon cured in a sweet brine, laid on top of a salmon cream combining wild smoked salmon from the Burren and Cork’s Glenilen Farm crème fraîche, set over a lemon balm jelly from the Tannery Cookery School Gardens, Waterford. Garnished with horseradish cream, wild watercress, and chive flowers from Wicklow, the dish was finished with rapeseed oil from Kilkenny and a little sea salt from West Cork (Mahon 114). Main CourseA main course of Irish beef featured as the pièce de résistance of the menu. A rib of beef from Wexford’s Slaney Valley was provided by Kettyle Irish Foods in Fermanagh and served with ox cheek and tongue from Rathcoole, County Dublin. From along the eastern coastline came the ingredients for the traditional Irish dish of smoked champ: cabbage from Wicklow combined with potatoes and spring onions grown in Dublin. The new season’s broad beans and carrots were served with wild garlic leaf, which adorned the dish (Mahon 113). Cheese CourseThe cheese course was made up of Knockdrinna, a Tomme style goat’s milk cheese from Kilkenny; Milleens, a Munster style cow’s milk cheese produced in Cork; Cashel Blue, a cow’s milk blue cheese from Tipperary; and Glebe Brethan, a Comté style cheese from raw cow’s milk from Louth. Ditty’s Oatmeal Biscuits from Belfast accompanied the course.DessertLewis chose to feature Irish strawberries in the dessert. Pat Clarke guaranteed delivery of ripe strawberries on the day of the banquet. They married perfectly with cream and yoghurt from Glenilen Farm in Cork. The cream was set with Irish Carrageen moss, overlaid with strawberry jelly and sauce, and garnished with meringues made with Irish apple balsamic vinegar from Lusk in North Dublin, yoghurt mousse, and Irish soda bread tuiles made with wholemeal flour from the Mosse family mill in Kilkenny (Mahon 113).The following day, President McAleese telephoned Lewis, saying of the banquet “Ní hé go raibh sé go maith, ach go raibh sé míle uair níos fearr ná sin” (“It’s not that it was good but that it was a thousand times better”). The President observed that the menu was not only delicious but that it was “amazingly articulate in terms of the story that it told about Ireland and Irish food.” The Queen had particularly enjoyed the stuffed cabbage leaf of tongue, cheek and smoked colcannon (a traditional Irish dish of mashed potatoes with curly kale or green cabbage) and had noted the diverse selection of Irish ingredients from Irish artisans (Mahon 116). Irish CuisineWhen the topic of food is explored in Irish historiography, the focus tends to be on the consequences of the Great Famine (1845–49) which left the country “socially and emotionally scarred for well over a century” (Mac Con Iomaire and Gallagher 161). Some commentators consider the term “Irish cuisine” oxymoronic, according to Mac Con Iomaire and Maher (3). As Goldstein observes, Ireland has suffered twice—once from its food deprivation and second because these deprivations present an obstacle for the exploration of Irish foodways (xii). Writing about Italian, Irish, and Jewish migration to America, Diner states that the Irish did not have a food culture to speak of and that Irish writers “rarely included the details of food in describing daily life” (85). Mac Con Iomaire and Maher note that Diner’s methodology overlooks a centuries-long tradition of hospitality in Ireland such as that described by Simms (68) and shows an unfamiliarity with the wealth of food related sources in the Irish language, as highlighted by Mac Con Iomaire (“Exploring” 1–23).Recent scholarship on Ireland’s culinary past is unearthing a fascinating story of a much more nuanced culinary heritage than has been previously understood. This is clearly demonstrated in the research of Cullen, Cashman, Deleuze, Kellaghan, Kelly, Kennedy, Legg, Mac Con Iomaire, Mahon, O’Sullivan, Richman Kenneally, Sexton, and Stanley, Danaher, and Eogan.In 1996 Ireland was described by McKenna as having the most dynamic cuisine in any European country, a place where in the last decade “a vibrant almost unlikely style of cooking has emerged” (qtd. in Mac Con Iomaire “Jammet’s” 136). By 2014, there were nine restaurants in Dublin which had been awarded Michelin stars or Red Ms (Mac Con Iomaire “Jammet’s” 137). Ross Lewis, Chef Patron of Chapter One Restaurant, who would be chosen to create the menu for the state banquet for Queen Elizabeth II, has maintained a Michelin star since 2008 (Mac Con Iomaire, “Jammet’s” 138). Most recently the current strength of Irish gastronomy is globally apparent in Mark Moriarty’s award as San Pellegrino Young Chef 2015 (McQuillan). As Deleuze succinctly states: “Ireland has gone mad about food” (143).This article is part of a research project into Irish diplomatic dining, and the author is part of a research cluster into Ireland’s culinary heritage within the Dublin Institute of Technology. The aim of the research is to add to the growing body of scholarship on Irish gastronomic history and, ultimately, to contribute to the discourse on the existence of a national cuisine. If, as Zubaida says, “a nation’s cuisine is its court’s cuisine,” then it is time for Ireland to “research the feasts as well as the famines” (Mac Con Iomaire and Cashman 97).ConclusionThe Irish state banquet for Queen Elizabeth II in May 2011 was a highly orchestrated and formalised process. From the menu, material culture, entertainment, and level of consultation in the creative content, it is evident that the banquet was carefully curated to represent Ireland’s diplomatic, cultural, and culinary identity.The effects of the visit appear to have been felt in the years which have followed. Hennessy wrote in the Irish Times newspaper that Queen Elizabeth is privately said to regard her visit to Ireland as the most significant of the trips she has made during her 60-year reign. British Prime Minister David Cameron is noted to mention the visit before every Irish audience he encounters, and British Foreign Secretary William Hague has spoken in particular of the impact the state banquet in Dublin Castle made upon him. Hennessy points out that one of the most significant indicators of the peaceful relationship which exists between the two countries nowadays was the subsequent state visit by Irish President Michael D. Higgins to Britain in 2013. This was the first state visit to the United Kingdom by a President of Ireland and would have been unimaginable 25 years ago. The fact that the President and his wife stayed at Windsor Castle and that the attendant state banquet was held there instead of Buckingham Palace were both deemed to be marks of special favour and directly attributed to the success of Her Majesty’s 2011 visit to Ireland.As the research demonstrates, eating together unites rather than separates, gathers rather than divides, diffuses political tensions, and confirms alliances. It might be said then that the 2011 state banquet hosted by President Mary McAleese in honour of Queen Elizabeth II, curated by Ross Lewis, gives particular meaning to the axiom “to eat together is to eat in peace” (Taliano des Garets 160).AcknowledgementsSupervisors: Dr Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire (Dublin Institute of Technology) and Dr Michael Kennedy (Royal Irish Academy)Fáilte IrelandPhotos of the banquet dishes supplied and permission to reproduce them for this article kindly granted by Ross Lewis, Chef Patron, Chapter One Restaurant ‹http://www.chapteronerestaurant.com/›.Illustration ‘Ireland on a Plate’ © Jesse Campbell BrownRemerciementsThe author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their feedback and suggestions on an earlier draft of this article.ReferencesAlbala, Ken. The Banquet: Dining in the Great Courts of Late Renaissance Europe. Chicago: University of Illinois, 2007.———. “The Historical Models of Food and Power in European Courts of the Nineteenth Century: An Expository Essay and Prologue.” Royal Taste, Food Power and Status at the European Courts after 1789. Ed. Daniëlle De Vooght. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2011. 13–29.Baughman, John J. “The French Banqueting Campaign of 1847–48.” The Journal of Modern History 31 (1959): 1–15. Cashman, Dorothy. “That Delicate Sweetmeat, the Irish Plum: The Culinary World of Maria Edgeworth.” ‘Tickling the Palate': Gastronomy in Irish Literature and Culture. Ed. Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire, and Eamon Maher. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014. 15–34.———. “French Boobys and Good English Cooks: The Relationship with French Culinary Influence in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Ireland.” Reimagining Ireland: Proceedings from the AFIS Conference 2012. Vol. 55 Reimagining Ireland. Ed. Benjamin Keatinge, and Mary Pierse. Bern: Peter Lang, 2014. 207–22.———. “‘This Receipt Is as Safe as the Bank’: Reading Irish Culinary Manuscripts.” M/C Journal 16.3 (2013). ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal›.———. “Ireland’s Culinary Manuscripts.” Irish Traditional Cooking, Recipes from Ireland’s Heritage. By Darina Allen. London: Kyle Books, 2012. 14–15.Chapple-Sokol, Sam. “Culinary Diplomacy: Breaking Bread to Win Hearts and Minds.” The Hague Journal of Diplomacy 8 (2013): 161–83.Cullen, Louis M. The Emergence of Modern Ireland 1600–1900. London: Batsford, 1981.Deleuze, Marjorie. “A New Craze for Food: Why Is Ireland Turning into a Foodie Nation?” ‘Tickling the Palate': Gastronomy in Irish Literature and Culture. Ed. Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire, and Eamon Maher. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014. 143–58.“Details of the State Dinner.” Office of Public Works. 8 Apr. 2013. ‹http://www.dublincastle.ie/HistoryEducation/TheVisitofHerMajestyQueenElizabethII/DetailsoftheStateDinner/›.De Vooght, Danïelle, and Peter Scholliers. Introduction. Royal Taste, Food Power and Status at the European Courts after 1789. Ed. Daniëlle De Vooght. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2011. 1–12.Diner, Hasia. Hungering for America: Italian, Irish & Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001.Firth, Raymond. Symbols: Public and Private. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1973.Foster, Sarah. “Buying Irish: Consumer Nationalism in 18th Century Dublin.” History Today 47.6 (1997): 44–51.Goldstein, Darra. Foreword. ‘Tickling the Palate': Gastronomy in Irish Literature and Culture. Eds. Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire and Eamon Maher. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014. xi–xvii.Hennessy, Mark. “President to Visit Queen in First State Visit to the UK.” The Irish Times 28 Nov. 2013. 25 May 2015 ‹http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/uk/president-to-visit-queen-in-first-state-visit-to-the-uk-1.1598127›.“International Historical Conference: Table and Diplomacy—from the Middle Ages to the Present Day—Call for Papers.” Institut Européen d’Histoire et des Cultures de l’Alimentation (IEHCA) 15 Feb. 2015. ‹http://www.iehca.eu/IEHCA_v4/pdf/16-11-3-5-colloque-table-diplomatique-appel-a-com-fr-en.pdf›.Kane, Eileen M.C. “Irish Cloth in Avignon in the Fifteenth Century.” The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland. 102.2 (1972): 249–51.Kaufman, Cathy K. “Structuring the Meal: The Revolution of Service à la Russe.” The Meal: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2001. Ed. Harlan Walker. 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Dear Colleagues, In the previous editorial paper published by Balat et al. [1] as an Early View Article a few months ago, it was reported that there were changes in the Editorial Team of the European Journal of Therapeutics (Eur J Ther). During these few months, while the preparations for the new issue (June 2023, volume 29, Issue 2) continued, the editorial board also was revised. We would like to inform you that the Editorial Board has been strengthened by academics who are competent in their fields from many countries of the world and will continue to be strengthened in the future. As it is known, Eur J Ther started broadcasting in 1990 as a Journal of the Faculty of Medicine University of Gaziantep (In Turkish: Gaziantep Üniversitesi Tıp Fakültesi Dergisi). In the first paper titled “While Starting” (In Turkish: Başlarken) of the first issue, Prof. Sabri Güngör, who was the first Editor-in-Chief, stated that the aim of the journal is to have an influential place in the field of science [2]. Over the past three decades, the journal has continued to advance. At the present time, it is inevitable to reorganise the editorial board of the journal and enrich it with leading international editors in order to move the journal to better places. This editorial will explain essential developments in the journal in the last few months, and the new Editorial Board Members of the Eur J Ther will be introduced. Changes are inevitable, and we are delighted to announce that this issue marks several significant improvements. Specifically, we bolstered our editorial team with esteemed international academics and expanded our pool of referees. Consequently, the evaluation period for the submitted articles was significantly reduced. In the last two months, the journal metrics are as follows: Acceptance rate: %29 Average time until the final decision: 24.4 days Average time to publish as Accepted/Early View Article, after acceptance: 4.8 days. Thanks to these improvements, as you will notice, there are 25 articles in this issue. In this way, this issue has been the issue in which most articles have been published so far. In addition, applications were made to DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) and BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine), among the most essential open-access databases in the world, in May 2023. Moreover, cited references to the previous and/or alternative names of the journal (Gaziantep Medical Journal, Gaziantep Med J, Gaziantep Tıp Dergisi and Gaziantep Üniversitesi Tıp Fakültesi Dergisi) in Web of Science that were not reflected in the journal metrics were identified and reported to the Web of Science. Some of these correction requests have been finalized and corrected, and thus the total number of citations and the H-index of the journal increased [3]. After all these data are updated, it will be seen that the citation values of the Eur J Ther will increase even more. We will also update the guidelines for the authors and reviewers with respect to the ICMJE [4] and EQUATOR Network [5], which will enhance the quality of research in the medical fraternity. Additionally, the use of DOI for articles published in the journal started in 2011 (2011, volume 17, Issue 2). In order to facilitate the recognition and access of the articles, DOIs have also been defined for all articles published in previous issues. Editors Ayşe Balat, MD, became the new Editor-in-Chief of Eur J Ther for the second time, the first between 2007-2010. She is a Professor in Pediatrics and a specialist in Pediatric Nephrology and Rheumatology. She has been working as Vice President of Gaziantep University since October 2020. She was the Dean of Gaziantep University Medical Faculty (2007-2010), President of the Mediterranean Kidney Society (MKS) between 2015 to 2018, and Secretary beginning in 2018. She is also President of the International Association for the History of Nephrology (IAHN) since 2022. In Gaziantep, she first established Pediatric Nephrology and Pediatric Rheumatology Units, and the first peritoneal dialysis was performed by her. She has several studies published in international and national peer-reviewed scientific journals (H-Index: 26, i10-index: 59 and approximately 2500 citations). She was the Guest Editor of the International Journal of Nephrology in 2012 (special issue titled “Devil’s Triangle in Kidney Diseases: Oxidative Stress, Mediators, and Inflammation”). She is a member of many national and international associations related to her field, including membership in the Turkish Pediatric Nephrology Association board in the past. She has several scientific presentation awards at national and international congresses. She has been joined as an “invited speaker” at 20 International Meetings. As of 2007, she organizes World Kidney Day activities within the scope of the “Survival is not Enough” program (in the first rank among European pediatric nephrologists as an organizer of those activities). Recently, she was elected as a “lifelong member of the Academy of Medicine and Surgical Sciences” of the University of Naples, which is one of the four important academies in Naples. Şevki Hakan Eren, MD, is the new Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the Eur J Ther. Dr Eren graduated from the Medical School, University of Gaziantep, Turkey and completed Emergency training at Cumhuriyet University. He has been working as a Professor at Gaziantep University, Department of Emergency Medicine, Gaziantep, Turkey. He is interested in traumatology, and toxicology. Mehmet Sait Menzilcioğlu, MD, is the new Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the Eur J Ther. Dr. Menzilcioğlu graduated from the Medical School, University of Gaziantep, Turkey and completed Radiology training at the same University. He has been working as an Associate Professor at Gaziantep University, Department of Radiology, Gaziantep, Turkey. He is interested in neuroradiology, ultrasonography, doppler Ultrasonography, Computerized Tomography, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, interventional radiology, and obstetric sonography. İlhan Bahşi, MD, PhD, is the new Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the Eur J Ther. Dr Bahşi is also on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Craniofacial Surgery, Frontiers in Neuroanatomy, and Mersin University School of Medicine Lokman Hekim Journal of History of Medicine and Folk Medicine. In addition, he has published more than 80 articles (H-index: 12 and i10-index: 15) and has been a referee for more than 600 academic papers in many internationally indexed journals. Dr Bahşi, who has been working in the Department of Anatomy at the Gaziantep University Faculty of Medicine since 2012, completed his doctorate education in 2017 and obtained the title of PhD. Besides anatomy, he is particularly interested in the history of medicine, medical ethics, and education. İlkay Doğan, PhD, is the new Editorial Board member of the Eur J Ther for Statistics and Methodology. He is in the Department of Biostatistics at the Gaziantep University Faculty of Medicine. His professional focus lies in research about Structural Equation Modeling, Multivariate Analysis. With a wealth of experience spanning over 15 years across multiple disciplines, including veterinary, nursing, sport and medicine, Dr Doğan has held various notable articles. He is a member of the Turkish Biostatistics Association. Ahmet Acıduman, MD, PhD, graduated from Ege University Faculty of Medicine in 1987 and later specialized in Neurosurgery in 1997. Dr Acıduman further expanded his academic credentials by completing a PhD in the History of Medicine and Ethics in 2005. Currently, he is a Professor in the Department of History of Medicine and Ethics at Ankara University Faculty of Medicine. With a notable record of over 200 academic publications, Dr Acıduman’s contributions to the field continue. Bilal Çiğ, PhD, is a new Editorial board member of the Eur J Ther. Associate Prof Bilal Çiğ is a Postdoctoral researcher at King's College London Wolfson Card. He has been investigating the roles of ion channels in neurological diseases using the patch clamp technique for nearly 15 years. For the past few years, he has focused on the interactions of TRPA1 and Kir 4.1 channels in demyelination. He has 40 SCI-E and international publications, with about 1300 citations. Tsvetoslav Georgiev, MD, PhD, holds an esteemed position as an associate professor at the First Department of Internal Medicine in Varna, Bulgaria, while also working as a clinician at the University Hospital St. Marina. He has successfully defended his doctoral dissertation in 2018 at the Medical University in Sofia. Having obtained a specialization in rheumatology that same year, Dr Georgiev has extensive expertise in this intricate field of medicine. He further expanded his knowledge and skills by attending comprehensive courses on imaging diagnostics and musculoskeletal ultrasound in rheumatology held in various locations. Dr Georgiev has been involved in formulating the Bulgarian consensus on osteoarthritis and EULAR recommendations for the non-pharmacological core management of osteoarthritis. Notably, Dr Georgiev has received recognition for his outstanding contributions as a reviewer, earning awards in 2019 and 2021 from the Korean Academy of Medical Sciences. Davut Sinan Kaplan, PhD, is a new Editorial Board Member of the Eur J Ther. Dr Kaplan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physiology at Gaziantep University Faculty of Medicine. He is also the Graduate School of Health Sciences’ Director. He has taken involved in a wide variety of research with animal models. His research generally focuses on Endocrinology, Metabolism, Physical Activity, and Breast Milk. He has mentored a large group of master’s and PhD students. He has served for many years as a member of the local animal experiments ethics committee. Mehmet Karadağ, MD, is a new Editorial Board Member of the Eur J Ther for Psychiatry. Dr. Karadag is an Associate Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. He is in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the Gaziantep University School of Medicine. He has experience on Posttraumatic Stress, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity, Autism Spectrum, Anxiety, Depressive Disorders and EMDR Therapy. He is also EMDRIA accredited EMDR Consultant. Murat Karaoglan, MD, is a new Editorial Board Member of the Eur J Ther for Endocrinology. Dr. Karaoglan is an Associate Professor of Pediatric Endocrinology. He is in the Department of Pediatric Endocrinology at the Gaziantep University School of Medicine. He has experience on growth disorder, diabetology and disorder of sexual development. Waqar M. Naqvi, PhD, is a faculty in the Department of Physiotherapy at the College of Health Sciences, Gulf Medical University, Ajman, UAE. His professional focus lies in the development of the research ecosystem within healthcare education, with a particular interest in AI, AR, VR, Sensors, and innovation in health sciences. With a wealth of experience spanning over 14 years across multiple countries, including India, Canada, Cameroon, Hong Kong, and Saudi Arabia, Dr Naqvi has held various notable positions. These include his roles as the Associate Director of Research at the NKP Salve Institute of Medical Sciences, Acting Dean and Vice Dean of the Physiotherapy College, Convener for the International Admission Office, International Accreditation and Quality Assurance Wing, Staff Selection Committee, and Coordinator for a Staff-Student Exchange Program. In recognition of his outstanding contributions, Dr Naqvi was honored with the Distinguished Service Award and Young Achiever Award from the Indian Association of Physiotherapy. Dr Naqvi is widely recognized for his expertise in conducting seminars and workshops on research, publications, and intellectual property rights. Specializing as a research trainer in the fields of medicine, dentistry, physiotherapy, and health sciences, Dr Naqvi's unwavering commitment to research excellence and his genuine passion for mentoring aspiring researchers are instrumental in shaping the future of healthcare. He firmly believes in the power of evidence-based practice and actively advocates for its implementation. Ali Nasimi is a neuroscientist in the field of central regulation of the cardiovascular system. Victor Nedzvetsky, PhD, DrSc is a full professor of Physiology, Biochemistry and Lab Diagnostics, where coordinates courses on Neurochemistry, Molecular and Cell Biology. Additionally, he is a vice-director of “The Biosafety Center” research and development company (Ukraine). He obtained PhD in biochemistry at Dnipropetrovsk University, Ukraine (1990). After postdoctoral training, he received a degree of Doctor Science at Kyiv National University (2006). Since 2015 he was involved as an invited professor of Bingol University, Turkey as a supervisor of PhD projects on genetic and molecular biology. He has participated in both the education and research work of the Dept. Art and Science of Bingol University from 2015 to 2021. His current research interests are focused on intestinal barrier function, brain blood barrier, astrocytes, cognitive deficits, bioactive compounds as anticancer agents, nanomaterials, and neuroprotection. He is the author of over 230 research publications and ten patents. He is a member of the editorial board of the journal “Regulatory Mechanisms of Biosystems”. Raphael Olszewski, DDS, MD, PhD, DrSc is a full professor of oral surgery and dentomaxillofacial radiology at the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain), Brussels, Belgium. Professor Olszewski is an oral surgeon and member of the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery at Cliniques Universitaires Saint Luc, UCLouvan, Brussels, Belgium. Prof Olszewski is the Editor-in-Chief of NEMESIS: Negative effects in medical sciences: oral and maxillofacial surgery. Janusz Ostrowski, MD, PhD. Internal medicine, nephrology, and public health specialist. Former Head of the Department of Internal Medicine and Nephrology at the Provincial Hospital in Wloclawek, Poland. Director for Peritoneal Dialysis in Diaverum Company Poland. Secretary of the Historical Section of the Polish Society of Nephrology. Former President of the International Association for the History of Nephrology. Professor, Vice Dean of the School of Public Health and Head of the Department of the History of Medicine in the Centre of Postgraduate Medical Education in Warsaw, Poland. Ayşe Aysima Özçelik, MD, is a new Editorial Board member of Eur J Ther for Neurology. She is the head of the pediatric neurology department and works at Gaziantep University Faculty of Medicine. She is the regional manager for the treatment of spinal muscular atrophy disease. She is an experienced physician in the treatment and follow-up of genetic neurological disorders, epilepsy, and neuromuscular diseases. Maria Piagkou, DDS, MD, MSc, PhD is a new Editorial Board member of Eur J Ther for Neurology. She is an associate professor at the Department of Anatomy, School of Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She is a Deputy Vice-President of the Hellenic Association of Public Health in Greece and a President of the printed material handling committee of the National Organization for Medicines. She has twenty-one years of teaching activity in the field of anatomy, focused on head and neck, oral and maxillofacial area, as well as on skull base anatomy and anatomical variants. Her main areas of interest are head and neck anatomy and surgery, skull base anatomy, oral surgery, maxillofacial and dental trauma, rehabilitation, intraoral fixation after condylar fractures, and teeth replantation. She is an associate editor in 2 journals of Anatomy and acts as Editorial Board Member in six other journals. She authored six chapters in neuroanatomy and oral and maxillofacial surgery and thoracic surgery books, two monographs, and edited the translation of 9 books. She is a reviewer in 30 international scientific journals. She authored 156 publications in PubMed, 91 abstracts in 26 international congresses, and 318 abstracts in Greek scientific meetings. She is General Secretary of the Sports Medicine Association of Greece and treasurer of the Hellenic Association of Anatomy. Halima Resić, MD, PhD is a Professor of Internal medicine – nephrology in Sarajevo. Professor Resić studied medicine at the University of Belgrade where she also undertook a clinical fellowship in nephrology. She finished her postgraduate studies also at the University of Belgrade in 1987. Professor Resić worked at the Clinical Centre of Belgrade from 1972. to 1992. In 1993. She worked at the Marmara University of Istanbul. Also, in the period from 1994. to 1996. she took part in projects for refugees in Munich with the support of the Ministry of Health of the city of Munich. From 1996. till 2019. professor Resić worked at the Clinical Center University of Sarajevo, where she was head of the Clinic of Hemodialysis. In 2001. She obtained her PhD degree in Nephrology. She became a professor at the Medical Faculty of the University of Sarajevo in 2013. Professor Resić published about 180 professional and scientific papers in relevant journals. She has been a president of organizations of a few national congress and nephrology schools, and also an active participant of ERA congress and WCN congress. She has also been invited lecturer in over 60 different international and national congresses. Professor Resić was President of the BANTAO Society (2017-2019), and President of the Mediterian Kidney Society. She has been President of the Society of Nephrology, Dialysis and Kidney Transplantation in Bosnia and Herzegovina (2010-2020) and also, she is President of Donor’s network of Bosnia and Herzegovina. She is a member of ERA EDTA and ISN, and also a member of the Committee of SRC by ISN. She is a member of the Council of EAPE (European Association of Professor Emerita). She is also vice president of IANUBIH (International Academy of Science and Arts in Bosnia and Herzegovina) and a member of the board of South Eastern Europe by ISN. In her carrier, she obtains many international awards for her work in the field of Nephrology. Aldo Rogelis Aquiles Rodrigues is a new Editorial Board member of Eur J Ther for Neurology. Currently, he is an associate professor in physiology at the Federal University of Triângulo Mineiro, MG, Brazil since 2006. Before that, he worked as a research associate at the Department of Neurophysiology, Madison, USA from 2002 to 2005. He has experience in auditory neurons electrophysiology, enteric neurons and ion channels in general. Domenico Santoro is a Full Professor of Nephrology, Director of the Division of Nephrology and Coordinator of the Nephrology Fellowship Program University of Messina, AOU G. Martino – Messina. He is s a clinical expert in glomerular disorders with a scientific formation at the section of renal Pathology of the CSMC UCLA Los Angeles. He collaborated in genetic studies in glomerular disease. He coordinates as principal investigators several studies in glomerular disease both in clinical/therapeutical as well genetic aspects. He is the Associate Editor of the Journal of Nephrology and MBC Nephrology. Author of more than 270 scientific publications indexed on Scopus, H-index in Scopus: 38; H-index in Google Scholar: 46. Onur Taydaş, MD, is a new Editorial Board Member of the Eur J Ther for Radiology. Dr Taydas is an Associate Professor in the Department of Radiology at the Sakarya University School of Medicine. He has a Turkish Society of Radiology Proficiency Certificate, a European Diploma in Radiology, and a Turkish Interventional Radiology Diploma. He has experience in neuroradiology, musculoskeletal radiology, and interventional radiology. Gregory Tsoucalas (or Tsoukalas), born in 1974 and originated from the Island of Skopelos in the center of the Aegean Sea, he had studied Medicine in the University of Saint Kliment Ohridski in Sofia Bulgaria. He had then continued his studies in Lyon France and Athens Greece. He had been a Nuclear Medicine-Oncology-End stage physician in Saint Savvas Anticancer Hospital of Athens. He had after that moved to the city of Volos where he had been a physician in the Saint George Clinic for Alzheimer and Related Dementia Syndromes-End stage. He had finally moved to the General Clinic Anassa of Volos in the Internal Pathology Department. He currently holds the position of the Assistant professor of the History of Medicine, and head of the Department of History of Medicine and Medical Deontology, Medical School, University of Crete, Heraklion, Greece. Specialized in Nuclear Medicine, MSc in Palliative Medicine and PhD in the History of Medicine from National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, History of Medicine Diploma from Claude Bernard Lyon 1 University, post-doc in Anatomy from Democritus University of Thrace, Anthropology Course Diploma from Leiden University. He holds diplomas in Mastology and Clinical Nutrition for the related European Societies. He is the General Secretary of the Hellenic Branch of the Balkan Medical Union. Interested in the fields of History of Medicine, Deontology, Bioethics, Anatomy and Humanities, he is the writer of more than 200 articles in the PubMed database and more than 200 in other bases. He loves books and had published 10, while he had participated with chapters in various publications. Member of the International Society of the History of Medicine he had presented more than 130 speeches and 50 lectures in international level. Member of DELTOS (Hellenic Society) he had presented more than 400 speeches in local level. He enjoys more than 2500 citations, H-index: 17, and i10-index: 41. Hamit Yıldız, MD, PhD, is the new editorial Board member for Internal Medicine. Dr Yildiz is an internal medicine specialist and practices in Gaziantep University Hospital. He is Board Certified in Internal Medicine. He completed his internship at Gaziantep University in Gaziantep and also graduated with a PhD in molecular biology. He has more than ten years of experience as a specialist who focuses on patients with diabetes, hypertension and thyroid diseases. His special interest is recombinant DNA technologies and the development of biotechnological drugs. Betül Yılmaz Furtun, MD, FASE, FAAP, is a new Editorial Board Member for the Eur J Ther. She is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the Texas Children's Hospital, Baylor College of Medicine and Associate Medical Director of the Fetal Cardiology/Fetal Cardiac Intervention Program at Texas Children's Hospital. Dr Yilmaz Furtun is also a Course Director of Fetal Cardiology Education/Curriculum Development for advanced and categorical cardiology fellows and an Associate Director of the Fetal Care Center Steering Committee for fetal cardiology at Texas Children's Hospital. Dr Yilmaz Furtun is a pediatric cardiologist with expertise in advanced imaging modalities including fetal echocardiography, transthoracic and transesophageal echocardiography. Dr Yilmaz Furtun completed her pediatrics training at Washington University in St. Louis, pediatric cardiology training at Columbia University Medical Center, New York Presbyterian Hospital, and fetal cardiology/advanced imaging training at Cincinnati Children's Hospital. Dr Yilmaz Furtun actively participates in fetal and pediatric echocardiography laboratory protocol development and fetal and echocardiography lab and Fetal Care Center quality and improvement initiatives. Dr Yilmaz Furtun has been a member of the American Society of Echocardiography, the International Society of Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology, the Fetal Heart Society as well as American College of Cardiology. Dr Yilmaz Furtun’s clinical and research focus relates to cardiac imaging by echocardiography and fetal echocardiography. She utilizes her experience in these areas to study how we can use non-invasive imaging modalities for investigating normal and abnormal cardiac function in patients with congenital heart disease and in fetuses with cardiac compromise. Her primary research interests focus on fetal cardiovascular assessment and cardiac dysfunction in patients with congenital heart disease, in fetuses with congenital abnormalities, and in multiple gestation pregnancies complicated by twin-twin transfusion syndrome. Matthew Zdilla, DC, is a new Editorial Board Member for the Eur J Ther. Dr Zdilla was educated at the University of Pittsburgh and Northeast College of Health Sciences. He serves as an Associate Professor at the West Virginia University School of Medicine in the United States of America. He is an award-winning, internationally recognized clinical anatomist who has published scores of high-impact research papers regarding human diversity and the impact of anatomical variation on clinical procedures. In addition to his experience as an accomplished researcher, Zdilla brings his experience as an ad hoc reviewer for nearly 40 journals to the European Journal of Therapeutics. Joseph Schmidt, MFA has taught academic writing for the University of Louisville and various campuses of The City University of New York (CUNY). An accomplished poet, he has contributed content to, and edited a number of small literary journals. At Gaziantep University, he has lent his editorial and native English language talents to some of his Turkish colleagues in the sciences. He teaches in the university’s School of Foreign Languages (YDO).

This paper provides embedded, reflective practice-based insight arising from my experience collaborating to produce online and print-on-demand editions of a magazine showcasing the photography of members of haphazart! Contemporary Abstracts group (hereafter referred to as haphazart!). The group’s online visual, textual and activity-based practices via the photo sharing social networking site Flickr are portrayed as achieving cohesive visual identity. Stylistic analysis of pictures in support of this claim is not attempted. Rather negotiation, that Elliot has previously described in M/C Journal as innate in collaboration, is identified as the unifying factor. However, the collaborators’ adherence to Flickr’s communication platform proves problematic in the editorial context. Some technical incoherence with possible broader cultural implications is encountered during the process of repurposing images from screen to print. A Scan of Relevant Literature The photographic gaze perceives and captures objects which seem to ‘carry within them ready-made’ a work of art. But the reminiscences of the gaze are only made possible by knowing and associating with groups that define a tradition. The list of valorised subjects is not actually defined with reference to a culture, but rather by familiarity with a limited group. (Chamboredon 144) As part of the array of socio-cultural practices afforded by Web 2.0 interoperability, sites of produsage (Bruns) are foci for studies originating in many disciplines. Flickr provides a rich source of data that researchers interested in the interface between the technological and the social find useful to analyse. Access to the Flickr application programming interface enables quantitative researchers to observe a variety of means by which information is propagated, disseminated and shared. Some findings from this kind of research confirm the intuitive. For example, Negoecsu et al. find that “a large percentage of users engage in sharing with groups and that they do so significantly” ("Analyzing Flickr Groups" 425). They suggest that Flickr’s Groups feature appears to “naturally bring together two key aspects of social media: content and relations.” They also find evidence for what they call hyper-groups, which are “communities consisting of groups of Flickr groups” ("Flickr Hypergroups" 813). Two separate findings from another research team appear to contradict each other. On one hand, describing what they call “social cascades,” Cha et al. claim that “content in the form of ideas, products, and messages spreads across social networks like a virus” ("Characterising Social Cascades"). Yet in 2009 they claim that homocity and reciprocity ensure that “popularity of pictures is localised” ("Measurement-Driven Analysis"). Mislove et al. reflect that the affordances of Flickr influence the growth patterns they observe. There is optimism shared by some empiricists that through collation and analysis of Flickr tag data, the matching of perceptual structures of images and image annotation techniques will yield ontology-based taxonomy useful in automatic image annotation and ultimately, the Semantic Web endeavour (Kennedy et al.; Su et al.; Xu et al.). Qualitative researchers using ethnographic interview techniques also find Flickr a valuable resource. In concluding that the photo sharing hobby is for many a “serious leisure” activity, Cox et al. propose that “Flickr is not just a neutral information system but also value laden and has a role within a wider cultural order.” They also suggest that “there is genuinely greater scope for individual creativity, releasing the individual to explore their own identity in a way not possible with a camera club.” Davies claims that “online spaces provide an arena where collaboration over meanings can be transformative, impacting on how individuals locate themselves within local and global contexts” (550). She says that through shared ways of describing and commenting on images, Flickrites develop a common criticality in their endeavour to understand images, each other and their world (554).From a psychologist’s perspective, Suler observes that “interpersonal relationships rarely form and develop by images alone” ("Image, Word, Action" 559). He says that Flickr participants communicate in three dimensions: textual (which he calls “verbal”), visual, and via the interpersonal actions that the site affords, such as Favourites. This latter observation can surely be supplemented by including the various games that groups configure within the constraints of the discussion forums. These often include submissions to a theme and voting to select a winning image. Suler describes the place in Flickr where one finds identity as one’s “cyberpsychological niche” (556). However, many participants subscribe to multiple groups—45.6% of Flickrites who share images share them with more than 20 groups (Negoescu et al., "Analyzing Flickr Groups" 420). Is this a reflection of the existence of the hyper-groups they describe (2009) or, of the ranging that people do in search of a niche? It is also probable that some people explore more than a singular identity or visual style. Harrison and Bartell suggest that there are more interesting questions than why users create media products or what motivates them to do so: the more interesting questions center on understanding what users will choose to do ultimately with [Web2.0] capabilities [...] in what terms to define the success of their efforts, and what impact the opportunity for individual and collaborative expression will have on the evolution of communicative forms and character. (167) This paper addresseses such questions. It arises from a participatory observational context which differs from that of the research described above. It is intended that a different perspective about online group-based participation within the Flickr social networking matrix will avail. However, it will be seen that the themes cited in this introductory review prove pertinent. Context As a university teacher of a range of subjects in the digital media field, from contemporary photomedia to social media to collaborative multimedia practice, it is entirely appropriate that I embed myself in projects that engage, challenge and provide me with relevant first-hand experience. As an academic I also undertake and publish research. As a practicing new media artist I exhibit publically on a regular basis and consider myself semi-professional with respect to this activity. While there are common elements to both approaches to research, this paper is written more from the point of view of ‘reflective practice’ (Holmes, "Reconciling Experimentum") rather than ‘embedded ethnography’ (Pink). It is necessarily and unapologetically reflexive. Abstract Photography Hyper-Group A search of all Flickr groups using the query “abstract” is currently likely to return around 14,700 results. However, only in around thirty of them does the group name, its stated rules and, the stream of images that flow through the pool arguably reflect a sense of collective concept and aesthetic that is coherently abstract. This loose complex of groups comprises a hyper-group. Members of these groups often have co-memberships, reciprocal contacts, and regularly post images to a range of groups and comment on others’ posts to be found throughout. Given that one of Flickr’s largest groups, Black and White, currently has around 131,150 members and hosts 2,093,241 items in its pool, these abstract special interest groups are relatively small. The largest, Abstract Photos, has 11,338 members and hosts 89,306 items in its pool. The group that is the focus of this paper, haphazart!, currently has 2,536 members who have submitted 53,309 items. The group pool is more like a constantly flowing river because the most recently added images are foremost. Older images become buried in an archive of pages which cannot be reverse accessed at a rate greater than the seven pages linked from a current view. A member’s presence is most immediate through images posted to a pool. This structural feature of Flickr promotes a desire for currency; a need to post regularly to maintain presence. Negotiating Coherence to the Abstract The self-managing social dynamics in groups has, as Suler proposes to be the case for individuals, three dimensions: visual, textual and action. A group integrates the diverse elements, relationships and values which cumulatively constitute its identity with contributions from members in these dimensions. First impressions of that identity are usually derived from the group home page which consists of principal features: the group name, a selection of twelve most recent posts to the pool, some kind of description, a selection of six of the most recent discussion topics, and a list of rules (if any). In some of these groups, what is considered to constitute an abstract photographic image is described on the group home page. In some it is left to be contested and becomes the topic of ongoing forum debates. In others the specific issue is not discussed—the images are left to speak for themselves. Administrators of some groups require that images are vetted for acceptance. In haphazart! particular administrators dutifully delete from the pool on a regular basis any images that they deem not to comply with the group ethic. Whether reasons are given or not is left to the individual prosecutor. Mostly offending images just disappear from the group pool without trace. These are some of the ways that the coherence of a group’s visual identity is established and maintained. Two groups out of the abstract photography hyper-group are noteworthy in that their discussion forums are particularly active. A discussion is just the start of a new thread and may have any number of posts under it. At time of writing Abstract Photos has 195 discussions and haphazart! — the most talkative by this measure—has 333. Haphazart! invites submissions of images to regularly changing themes. There is always lively and idiosyncratic banter in the forum over the selection of a theme. To be submitted an image needs to be identified by a specific theme tag as announced on the group home page. The tag can be added by the photographer themselves or by anyone else who deems the image appropriate to the theme. An exhibition process ensues. Participant curators search all Flickr items according to the theme tag and select from the outcome images they deem to most appropriately and abstractly address the theme. Copies of the images together with comments by the curators are posted to a dedicated discussion board. Other members may also provide responses. This activity forms an ongoing record that may serve as a public indicator of the aesthetic that underlies the group’s identity. In Abstract Photos there is an ongoing discussion forum where one can submit an image and request that the moderators rule as to whether or not the image is ‘abstract’. The same group has ongoing discussions labelled “Hall of Appropriate” where worthy images are reposted and celebrated and, “Hall of Inappropriate” where images posted to the group pool have been removed and relegated because abstraction has been “so far stretched from its definition that it now resides in a parallel universe” (Askin). Reasons are mostly courteously provided. In haphazart! a relatively small core of around twelve group members regularly contribute to the group discussion board. A curious aspect of this communication is that even though participants present visually with a ‘buddy icon’ and most with a screen name not their real name, it is usual practice to address each other in discussions by their real Christian names, even when this is not evident in a member’s profile. This seems to indicate a common desire for authenticity. The makeup of the core varies from time to time depending on other activities in a member’s life. Although one or two may be professionally or semi-professionally engaged as photographers or artists or academics, most of these people would likely consider themselves to be “serious amateurs” (Cox). They are internationally dispersed with bias to the US, UK, Europe and Australia. English is the common language though not the natural tongue of some. The age range is approximately 35 to 65 and the gender mix 50/50. The group is three years old. Where Do We Go to from Here? In early January 2009 the haphazart! core was sparked into a frenzy of discussion by a post from a member headed “Where do we go to from here?” A proposal was mooted to produce a ‘book’ featuring images and texts representative of the group. Within three days a new public group with invited membership dedicated to the idea had been established. A smaller working party then retreated to a private Flickr group. Four months later Issue One of haphazart! magazine was available in print-on-demand and online formats. Following however is a brief critically reflective review of some of the collaborative curatorial, editorial and production processes for Issue Two which commenced in early June 2009. Most of the team had also been involved with Issue One. I was the only newcomer and replaced the person who had undertaken the design for Issue One. I was not provided access to the prior private editorial ruminations but apparently the collaborative curatorial and editorial decision-making practices the group had previously established persisted, and these took place entirely within the discussion forums of a new dedicated private Flickr group. Over a five-month period there were 1066 posts in 54 discussions concerning matters such as: change of format from the previous; selection of themes, artists and images; conduct of and editing of interviews; authoring of texts; copyright and reproduction. The idiom of those communications can be described as: discursive, sporadic, idiosyncratic, resourceful, collegial, cooperative, emphatic, earnest and purposeful. The selection process could not be said to follow anything close to a shared manifesto, or articulation of style. It was established that there would be two primary themes: the square format and contributors’ use of colour. Selection progressed by way of visual presentation and counter presentation until some kind of consensus was reached often involving informal votes of preference. Stretching the Limits of the Flickr Social Tools The magazine editorial collaborators continue to use the facilities with which they are familiar from regular Flickr group participation. However, the strict vertically linear format of the Flickr discussion format is particularly unsuited to lengthy, complex, asynchronous, multithreaded discussion. For this purpose it causes unnecessary strain, fatigue and confusion. Where images are included, the forums have set and maximum display sizes and are not flexibly configured into matrixes. Images cannot readily be communally changed or moved about like texts in a wiki. Likewise, the Flickrmail facility is of limited use for specialist editorial processes. Attachments cannot be added. This opinion expressed by a collaborator in the initial, open discussion for Issue One prevailed among Issue Two participants: do we want the members to go to another site to observe what is going on with the magazine? if that’s ok, then using google groups or something like that might make sense; if we want others to observe (and learn from) the process - we may want to do it here [in Flickr]. (Valentine) The opinion appears socially constructive; but because the final editorial process and production processes took place in a separate private forum, ultimately the suggested learning between one issue and the next did not take place. During Issue Two development the reluctance to try other online collaboration tools for the selection processes requiring visual comparative evaluation of images and trials of sequencing adhered. A number of ingenious methods of working within Flickr were devised and deployed and, in my opinion, proved frustratingly impractical and inefficient. The digital layout, design, collation and formatting of images and texts, all took place on my personal computer using professional software tools. Difficulties arose in progressively sharing this work for the purposes of review, appraisal and proofing. Eventually I ignored protests and insisted the team review demonstrations I had converted for sharing in Google Documents. But, with only one exception, I could not tempt collaborators to try commenting or editing in that environment. For example, instead of moving the sequence of images dynamically themselves, or even typing suggestions directly into Google Documents, they would post responses in Flickr. To Share and to Hold From the first imaginings of Issue One the need to have as an outcome something in one’s hands was expressed and this objective is apparently shared by all in the haphazart! core as an ongoing imperative. Various printing options have been nominated, discussed and evaluated. In the end one print-on-demand provider was selected on the basis of recommendation. The ethos of haphazart! is clearly not profit-making and conflicts with that of the printing organisation. Presumably to maintain an incentive to purchase the print copy online preview is restricted to the first 15 pages. To satisfy the co-requisite to make available the full 120 pages for free online viewing a second host that specialises in online presentation of publications is also utilised. In this way haphazart! members satisfy their common desires for sharing selected visual content and ideas with an online special interest audience and, for a physical object of art to relish—with all the connotations of preciousness, fetish, talisman, trophy, and bookish notions of haptic pleasure and visual treasure. The irony of publishing a frozen chunk of the ever-flowing Flickriver, whose temporally changing nature is arguably one of its most interesting qualities, is not a consideration. Most of them profess to be simply satisfying their own desire for self expression and would eschew any critical judgement as to whether this anarchic and discursive mode of operation results in a coherent statement about contemporary photographic abstraction. However there remains a distinct possibility that a number of core haphazart!ists aspire to transcend: popular taste; the discernment encouraged in camera clubs; and, the rhetoric of those involved professionally (Bourdieu et al.); and seek to engage with the “awareness of illegitimacy and the difficulties implied by the constitution of photography as an artistic medium” (Chamboredon 130). Incoherence: A Technical Note My personal experience of photography ranges from the filmic to the digital (Holmes, "Bridging Adelaide"). For a number of years I specialised in facsimile graphic reproduction of artwork. In those days I became aware that films were ‘blind’ to the psychophysical affect of some few particular paint pigments. They just could not be reproduced. Even so, as I handled the dozens of images contributed to haphazart!2, converting them from the pixellated place where Flickr exists to the resolution and gamut of the ink based colour space of books, I was surprised at the number of hue values that exist in the former that do not translate into the latter. In some cases the affect is subtle so that judicious tweaking of colour levels or local colour adjustment will satisfy discerning comparison between the screenic original and the ‘soft proof’ that simulates the printed outcome. In other cases a conversion simply does not compute. I am moved to contemplate, along with Harrison and Bartell (op. cit.) just how much of the experience of media in the shared digital space is incomparably new? Acknowledgement Acting on the advice of researchers experienced in cyberethnography (Bruckman; Suler, "Ethics") I have obtained the consent of co-collaborators to comment freely on proceedings that took place in a private forum. 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