On annotation of the textual contents of Scottish legal instruments

We thank the funding from the University of Aberdeen’s Impact, Knowledge Exchange, and Commercialisation Award for this 10 week study. This work was also supported by the French National Research Agency (ANR-10-LABX-0083) in the context of the Labex EFL. We also thank the student staff: A. Andonov, A. Faulds, E. Onwa, L. Schelling, R. Stoyanov, and O. Toloch.Publisher PD

On Making in the Digital Humanities

On Making in the Digital Humanities fills a gap in our understanding of digital humanities projects and craft by exploring the processes of making as much as the products that arise from it. The volume draws focus to the interwoven layers of human and technological textures that constitute digital humanities scholarship. To do this, it assembles a group of well-known, experienced and emerging scholars in the digital humanities to reflect on various forms of making (we privilege here the creative and applied side of the digital humanities). The volume honours the work of John Bradley, as it is totemic of a practice of making that is deeply informed by critical perspectives. A special chapter also honours the profound contributions that this volume’s co-editor, Stéfan Sinclair, made to the creative, applied and intellectual praxis of making and the digital humanities. Stéfan Sinclair passed away on 6 August 2020. The chapters gathered here are individually important, but together provide a very human view on what it is to do the digital humanities, in the past, present and future. This book will accordingly be of interest to researchers, teachers and students of the digital humanities; creative humanities, including maker spaces and culture; information studies; the history of computing and technology; and the history of science and the humanities

Corpora, catalogues and correspondence: The item-level identification and digitisation of business letters for the British Telecom Correspondence

This paper explores some of the challenges in working with archive material to produce language corpora. It takes as a case study the British Telecom Correspondence Corpus (BTCC) which contains a selection of the letters held in the BT Archives, housed in Holborn Telephone Exchange. One of the essential differences between a corpus and an archive is that a corpus is intended to be representative of a language variety. Material makes its way into historical archives in a variety of ways, and while they may preserve a breadth of material, archives are not generally collected to be representative, nor are they primarily designed to facilitate linguistic investigation. Work on the BTCC began as part of a Jisc-funded project to digitise the BT Archives and create a ‘research resource for the higher education sector’ (Hay, 2014:12). The BT Digital Archives became available to the public in July 2013. Our experiences using this resource inform the second half of the paper, in particular regarding the identification of corpus material and the difficulty in identifying letters at an item level. This leads to a wider discussion of how best to digitise physical archives

The culture of mnemosyne: open‐book assessment and the theory and practice of legal education

The concept of open-book assessment is inherently controversial, not least because it contradicts a basic condition of examinations, one so basic to the event that we rarely question it: the single confrontation of examinee with exam question, the element of isolated and unaided struggle—Jacob wrestling with the mysterious Other. Surely it is cheating to allow texts into an exam-hall? What is the point of the exercise then

Legal Knowledge and Information Systems - JURIX 2017: The Thirtieth Annual Conference

The proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems – JURIX 2017. For three decades, the JURIX conferences have been held under the auspices of the Dutch Foundation for Legal Knowledge Based Systems (www.jurix.nl). In the time, it has become a European conference in terms of the diverse venues throughout Europe and the nationalities of participants

Calculating Value: Using and Collecting the Tools of Early Modern Mathematics

Through detailed evaluation of the Science Museum Library’s Rare Books Collection, this thesis explores the use, ownership and subsequent collection of mathematical books produced between 1550 and 1750. Research has been undertaken as part of a Collaborative Doctoral Award between Swansea University and the Science Museum, London, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council from 1 January 2016 to 31 December 2018. Consisting of close to 1,700 titles published between 1486 and 1800 encompassing the pre-modern classification of mathematics, this subset of the Rare Books Collection represents a remarkable accumulation of the practical and the theoretical across a variety of disciplines and languages. My thesis begins by characterising these mathematical holdings in aggregate, analysing the contents and physical features of the texts therein. Findings are supplemented by examination of accompanying provenance, including bindings, bookplates, and signatures. Discrete case-studies then present key texts as part of their readers’ burgeoning mathematical practice, with chapters focussing on the spread of Ramist pedagogies of arithmetic, geometry, and trigonometry in sixteenth-century Germany; the interconnected use of text, instrument and theory in early modern English intellectual and navigational cultures; and the value attached to the related disciplines of mathematical astronomy and chronology at the University of Cambridge in the late 1690s. The thesis closes with a reconstruction of the library of the clergyman and mathematician, Nathaniel Torporley (1564-1632), tracing the journey of Torporley’s materials to the collection of the antiquarian Robert Brodhead Honeyman (1897-1987) and to the Science Museum thereafter. By placing the Museum’s Library and its holdings in their correct historical contexts, this thesis contributes to our understanding of mathematical culture in the early modern period, to the history of collecting in the modern era, and to the Science Museum’s understanding of its own holdings and of its role as an institutional collector

The ‘authentick practique bookes’ of Alexander Spalding

Towards the end of his career and the beginning of mine I was fortunate to have Angelo Forte as both my colleague and my mentor. We met at the British Legal History Conference in Oxford in 2007, when I was in the first year of my doctoral studies. I have very fond memories of that conference, and one of the most treasured is of a dinner at a local restaurant which he, Andrew Simpson and I shared. Angelo and I stayed in touch after that event, and, a year later, it was he who first encouraged me to apply for the lectureship which I still hold. He was formally my first mentor as a new lecturer, and I had the pleasure of teaching Honours courses in Scottish and European Legal History with him before his retirement. As several of the contributions in this volume show, his presence is still missed by colleagues in the School of Law and across the University. One of Angelo’s great interests was the practical application of law, as is evident in many of his works on legal history. One of his collaborative projects was the editing and analysis of an eighteenth-century manuscript stylebook from the Aberdeen Sheriff and Commissary courts.1 Angelo Forte and his colleague, Michael Meston,2 identified twenty-eight styles or writs in that manuscript which were relevant to practice in the local Commissary court between 1698 and 1722.3 Analysis of these writs allowed them to conclude that this was ‘an active and busy court’4 and reflect on its jurisdiction and procedure more generally.5 One of the reasons that the stylebook is so important is that in October 1721 ‘an accidental dreadful Fire happened within the Town of Aberdeen […] whereby the Office, commonly called the Commissar Clerks Office, was suddenly consumed, and at the same Time the Registers and Records therein […] were intirely burnt and destroyed’.6 Hence David Stevenson noted that ‘Any document relating to [the] Aberdeen commissary court before 1721 is given particular interest’.

Corpora, Catalogues and Correspondence:The Item-Level Identification and Digitisation of Business Letters for the British Telecom Correspondence Corpus

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by HRI Open Book under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-ND). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/This paper explores some of the challenges in working with archive material to produce language corpora. It takes as a case study the British Telecom Correspondence Corpus (BTCC) which contains a selection of the letters held in the BT Archives, housed in Holborn Telephone Exchange. One of the essential differences between a corpus and an archive is that a corpus is intended to be representative of a language variety. Material makes its way into historical archives in a variety of ways, and while they may preserve a breadth of material, archives are not generally collected to be representative, nor are they primarily designed to facilitate linguistic investigation. Work on the BTCC began as part of a Jisc-funded project to digitise the BT Archives and create a ‘research resource for the higher education sector’ (Hay, 2014:12). The BT Digital Archives became available to the public in July 2013. Our experiences using this resource inform the second half of the paper, in particular regarding the identification of corpus material and the difficulty in identifying letters at an item level. This leads to a wider discussion of how best to digitise physical archives