DMVI schools workshops

On Thursday 13 October, we held two workshops with local schools to explore the potential use of the Database of Mid-Victorian Wood-Engraved Illustration as a teaching and learning tool. The fact that the database is full of images that illustrate literary texts and contain a wealth of historic detail makes it significant for a range of humanities subjects, including English literature, history and religious studies.

The morning workshop consisted of staff and students from Stanwell Comprehensive School in Penarth. The first exercise involved giving the participants 25 illustrations and asking them to arrange them in order, with the aim of analysing how pictures can create narratives. Anthony had spent a considerable amount of time cutting the images out with great precision and they looked impressive spread along the desks. Some interesting stories emerged, a few of which came near to recreating the actual source text (Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner). We then gave out the captions to see if that would help or hinder the creation of the story. The exercise was a very valuable one both for the participants and for us because it made us think about the relation between word and image in illustration and how these Victorian pictures can be ‘read’. The second half of the session involved a demonstration of the database and the new social networking features, which the students seemed to particularly enjoy. They were given the chance to try it out for themselves before a very hearty buffet lunch was served.

We had just about demolished the chocolate éclairs when the next school arrived for the afternoon session: St David’s College, Cardiff. We tried out the same exercises again with similar interesting results. This group were slightly older and managed to work out that the pictures were from Coleridge’s poem. After another demonstration of the database, tea arrived, so we forced ourselves to eat more plates of sandwiches and crisps.

The day provided us with lots of ideas of how to go forward with the education strand of the project and convinced us that this was really something worth doing. The feedback from the students suggested that the workshop had made them think differently about illustration and its value, so our job was done. Now all that was left was to do was to finish off that plate of muffins …

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.