Video

Speaker(s): Toby Burrows

Related events: New sources for book history – International Conference

Releated Working Group(s):

Collection: CERl conferences

Recorded: November 28, 2017

Abstract:

Toby Burrows (University of Western Australia and of Oxford), Combining and visualising evidence for manuscript provenance: a digital environment for reconstructing the collection of Sir Thomas Phillipps The evidence for the history of the 40,000 or more manuscripts which were once in the collection of Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792-1872) is vast and varied.

Phillipps himself struggled to catalogue his own manuscripts; his printed Catalogus librorum manuscriptorum, which was produced in stages between 1837 and 1871, only managed to reach manuscript number 23,837. Since his death, the dispersal of the collection and the subsequent movements of the manuscripts have been recorded in numerous sales and auction catalogues, library catalogues, museum databases, archival materials and other documentary sources. Several methods for collating this information have already been tried, notably by A.N.L. Munby, author of the definitive study of Phillipps as a collector. Munby used interleaved pages in a copy of the Catalogus to note references to sales and auction catalogues and to library holdings of individual manuscripts.

The British Library has an extensive, but outdated, card index which records similar information. There are also specialist publications like Sir John Baker’s List of legal manuscripts formerly in the collection of Sir Thomas Phillipps (2008). With the increasing availability of digital data for reuse, both from generic sources like library catalogues and from specialist provenance resources like the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts, it is possible to envisage new methods for combining information relating to the Phillipps manuscripts into a single digital environment.

This approach might also make it possible to experiment with new ways of visualising the aggregated data, within a geographical framework or in the form of a network graph. This presentation will focus on a pilot project which aimed to test these ideas, using software called nodegoat. I will discuss the lessons learned from this project, as well as outlining plans to apply this method to the study of manuscript provenance on a larger scale.

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