Visiting speaker, 14 Dec 2010: Stuart Sillars on illustrated Shakespeare

Stuart Sillars will be presenting his paper, ‘Illustrated Shakespeare and the Limits of Interpretations’ at 5.15pm on Tuesday, 14 December 2010. The talk will take place in the Cardiff Humanities Building, Room 2.48.

Abstract
Recent discussions of Shakespeare’s works as print documents have focused on scholarly editions, with illustrated editions still largely neglected, despite their far greater availability from the end of the eighteenth century. From Rowe’s edition of 1709, however, the nature, placing and frequency of illustrations had a major impact on the reading experience of the plays, being both innovative in the integrated narrative of word and image and offering important new ways of configuring the plays in terms wholly of the printed book. The paper will explore some of the operations of this complex identity, and make suggestions about how illustrated editions may be explored as an aesthetic form of parallel, yet quite distinct, identity to that of the plays in production.

An introduction to research: CEIR and the DMVI

by Marianne Fisher

My introduction to CEIR came in the summer of 2008, in the form of a month’s research placement. Funded by the Cardiff Undergraduate Research Opportunities (CUROP) scheme, a fellow-student (Simon Eckstein) and I were tasked with investigating the relationship between text and illustration in various mid-Victorian media, including novels, serials, short stories, poems, magazines, and newspapers. Our main repository of images was the Database of Mid-Victorian Illustration, itself the result of a recent CEIR project which had been funded by the AHRC.

Arriving in the office on our first day, we soon discovered what a complex task we had been set. The relationship between text and image had been little studied, and so there was no established research framework. We had to start from scratch, devising a strategy, methodology and projected outcomes. What were we looking for? How were we to go about finding it? What was important? How could we record what we found? These were the sort of questions which presented themselves—all very different from the security and structure of the undergraduate degrees we had just completed. As an introduction to the fluid nature of humanities research, it could hardly have been better.

Dr Tim Killick appointed as DMVI Research Associate

Dr Tim Killick has been appointed as the Research Associate who will be working with the project team to develop the Database of Mid-Victorian Illustration, as part of the AHRC’s Digital Equipment and Database Enhancement Funding Initiative (DEDEFI).

Tim was the Research Associate attached to the original DMVI project, and was instrumental in developing its core structures, creating its innovative iconographical description system, digitizing and editing the 868 source images and administering the day-to-day aspects of the project. Tim’s experience and expert knowledge of bibliography and 19th-century illustration will be vital in seeing through this stage of the project, which is both ambitious and tightly timetabled.

Pioneering illustrations database to be enhanced

Funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s ‘Digital Equipment and Database Enhancement for Impact’ (DEDEFI) initiative will enable the developers at CEIR to enhance and expand the pioneering Database of Mid-Victorian Illustration (DMVI) in the coming year.

Directed by Dr Julia Thomas, Dr Anthony Mandal and Professor Omer Rana, the one-year project grows out of two other AHRC  projects, in addition to DMVI: an ICT Methods Network Workshop on ‘Annotating Images’ (2007) and a Museums, Galleries and Libraries Network on Literary Images: Conservation, Access, Usage (LICAU  2007–08). The project exploits recent technical advances not only to improve DMVI as it now exists, but to enhance it so that it can become the core for more extensive database work with literary illustration.