Corrections and updates...

A few errata and notes on the virtual pinboard, tacks don't have to be taxing...

(1) Warburg librarian Francois Quiviger kindly points out that my description of the layout of the Warburg Institute (in the Day Two blog entry) wasn't totally precise: though the overall layout matches Warburg's arbitrary Mnemosyne plan, books within a section are arranged chronologically (or rather, by date of author's death). Hmmm... hopefully it'll be 60+ years before his successors will be able to place my book in its final order... :-o

Re-reading my blog entry with Francois' other comments in mind, I think its emphasis (on madness) somewhat diverged from what I originally planned to say. In computer programming, you can "over-optimize" your solution by tailoring it too exactly to the problem: and this is how I felt about the Warburg. One tiny architectural detail at the Institute tells this story: the oddly hinged doors in the men's toilets, that appeared to have been mathematically designed to yield the most effective use of floor space. For me, this is no different to the filing cabinets full of deities, all laid out in alphabetical order: and so the Institute is like a iconological Swiss Army Knife, optimally hand-crafted for Aby Warburg and the keepers of his meme. But the cost of keeping it functioning in broadly the same way goes up each year: programming managers would call it a "brittle" or "fragile" solution, one with a high hidden cost of maintenance.

But am I still a fan of the Warburg? Yes, definitely: it's a fabulous treasure-house that only a particularly hard-hearted historian could even dream of bracketing. And in those terms, I think I'm actually a bit of a softy.

Finally, Francois very kindly offered to put in a reference for me (thank you very much indeed!!): so there should be a happy ending to the whole rollercoaster story after all. I will, of course, post updates and developments here as they happen. :-)

(2) Thanks to a flood of HASTRO-L subscribers dropping by to read my review of Eileen Reeves' "Galileo's Glassworks", Voynich News has just broken through the 1000 visitor mark (and well past the 2000 page-view mark). Admittedly, it's not a huge milestone... but it's a start, right? And though Google seems to like it, only Elias Schwerdtfeger and Early Modern Notes link to it: and nobody has yet rated it on Technorati etc, bah!

(3) Though in the end I was unable to get to the recent CRASSH mini-conference on books of secrets (which was a huge shame), I'm still up for the Treadwell's evening on Magic Circles at 7.15pm on 19th March 2008 (which I mentioned here about ten Internet years ago). Should be fascinating, perhaps see you there! ;-)

Warwick/Warburg course 2008, Day One...

The first one-day session of the Warburg/Warwick Early Modern Research Techniques course was yesterday: though it was pretty good, I think I'm breaking no great confidences if I say that this felt likely to be the, errrrrmmmm, least strongest of the three days... despite Warwick's strong Renaissance department, everyone was just itching to get on to the Warburg text and image days. But as with most post-grad things, you learn just as much from the other students as from the lecturers: so Day One was no hardship.

It became quickly apparent that all the participants were both properly web-savvy (it's nice to see people surfing at the speed of thought) and Excel-smart (for fun, I tried Access instead, but unfortunately it was just as clunky as I remembered), and had already drained all the loose juice from JSTOR, EEBO, and their low-hanging ilk. But still, everyone falls short of 100% coverage in these things, and so there were plenty of webby windfalls for us all to put into our baskets. Here are a few highlights I thought I'd share...

Richard Parker from the University of Warwick (who co-presented two of the sessions with the pleasantly dry Francois Quiviger from the Warburg Institute) has brought together a large number of art history web resources on the Warwick website here. Though Richard somewhat deprecatingly refers to his efforts as "pre-Web 2.0", his general pages page is just about as good a high-level starting point for online art history web research as any I've seen - and within the subject pages, his images link page is a bit of a gem too (and within that, check out the iconography and emblems page). His personal favourite is the TASI advice page on finding and using online images: if you're at all unsure about this kind of thing, it's an excellent link.

Bibliographical searching was another key topic. Of late, I've managed to get my research done without having to resort to Inter-Library Loans: so while I was cool with WorldCat, COPAC and (my favourite, despite its uber-dull name) the M25 consortium, I hadn't noticed the (frankly rather amazing) KVK creep up on us all... a simple way of searching a staggering number of world libraries without any significant danger of mouse-related RSI. Recommended!

Incidentally, I didn't realise that this course runs every year: I wish I'd known about it 3/4 years ago. But my guess is that as, not so many years ago, the web and historians were only just starting to 'get it on', Day One would originally have been the most eye-opening for those attending. But we're now all so wise to that stuff, it all seemed slightly, well, 'rusty', if not slightly antiquated.

Yet the world is changing blazingly fast: in a year's time, I'd hope that Day One is based instead on such amazing new Programming Historian tools as Zotero (which I found through the Early Modern Notes blog). And it would be the most amazing day once more! :-)