Catherine Clarke was filmed recently talking about the ‘Mapping Medieval Chester’ research and the new ‘Discover Medieval Chester’ Knowledge Transfer project which will share the academic work with new audiences.
You can view the video here or here.
The video was filmed by the Research Institute for Arts and Humanities at Swansea University.
The ‘Mapping Medieval Chester’ website is continuing to develop, and this post is to let you know about some changes to the interactive digital atlas (high bandwidth version). A while ago, we asked you to send in your photos of medieval locations and features in Chester via Flickr. Thank you so much for your response and the many wonderful photos of medieval sites in Chester today.
These photos have now been added to the digital atlas as an additional layer which you can select. They represent a key new feature, meaning that users can get a sense of how each of these locations appear today. This is especially useful for the international users of this website, who now have the chance to make a ‘virtual visit’ to these places. It’s also very fitting that, as part of a project which focuses on different perspectives on the city, we have this new collection of different views and vantage-points.
Thank you again for contributing to our project and enabling us to extend the resource in such a useful way.
We’ve recently received the excellent news that the Arts and Humanities Research Council will be funding our new Knowledge Transfer project, ‘Discover Medieval Chester: place, heritage and identity’. This will build on the ‘Mapping Medieval Chester’ research and develop innovative and creative ways of sharing our work with new audiences. Our planned outputs will include a new set of digital resources, including an interactive map with multi-media materials and resources for visitors to the city, a major exhibition in Chester (which will tour to Wrexham) and a permanent public art installation in Chester city centre.
Our ‘Mapping Medieval Chester’ project has expanded to include a volume of essays relating to the city. You can see details of the book here, or search on any major online bookstore. It’s due to be published on May 31, 2011. Here’s the publisher’s blurb:
This ground-breaking volume brings together contributions from scholars across a range of disciplines (including literary studies, history, geography and archaeology) to investigate questions of space, place and identity in the medieval city. Using Chester as a case study – with attention to its location on the border between England and Wales, its rich multi-lingual culture and surviving material fabric – the essays seek to recover the experience and understanding of the urban space by individuals and groups within the medieval city, and to offer new readings from the vantage-point of twenty-first century disciplinary and theoretical perspectives.
The individual essays included within the volume are:
Three members of the ‘Mapping Medieval Chester’ project team will be speaking at the Chester 2010 symposium in Toronto, Canada, to share our research on the medieval city. Catherine Clarke, Mark Faulkner and Paul Vetch will be giving presentations in a special session sponsored by the Toronto Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies. Mark will speak on ‘Schematic Topography in Lucian’s De Laude Cestrie‘, Catherine on ‘A Tale of Two Cities? English and Welsh Perspectives on Medieval Chester’, and Paul will discuss the innovative technical aspects of the project in his contribution ‘Mapping Medieval Chester: Creating a Hybrid Digital Publication’.
The Chester 2010 symposium will offer some unique new perspectives on place and identity in Chester. As well as presentations from a wide range of scholars, the symposium includes a staging of the complete Chester cycle, with each pageant produced and performed by a group from a different North American university or college. We hope to bring back lots of new ideas about the interactions between the plays, their physical environment, and their audiences in the late-medieval / early modern city.
We’ve received some enquiries via our Mailing List about the future of this project and ways in which people can get involved. We’re really grateful for your continued interest and hope to keep in touch via the Blog about news, developments and future activities.
We’re currently working with the Grosvenor Museum Chester, and other partners in Chester itself, to look at ways in which we could share our project research with the local community and visitors to the city. We’re hoping to apply for funding to make this possible and have several meetings coming up to discuss ideas. Watch this space for news as our plans take shape!
On a separate note, we’ve just found out that the ‘Mapping Medieval Chester’ project will be featuring in an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) report for government and other stakeholders entitled ‘Changing the World: the impact of the arts and humanities’. We’re really pleased to be included in a report which shows the value that this kind of research can have both within and beyond academia. Who knows – perhaps Peter Mandelson will soon be reading about Lucian and Henry Bradshaw over his morning cup of coffee…
Yesterday the project team met at Swansea University with three of our advisors – Rob Barrett (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Sue Hughes (Grosvenor Museum, Chester) and Simon Ward (Chester Archaeology) – to share our progress and gather some feedback on our work so far.
Over the past few weeks I’ve been reading two new books which are directly relevant to our project research: Jane Laughton’s Life in a Late Medieval City: Chester, 1275-1520 and Robert Barrett’s Against All England: Regional Identity and Cheshire Writing, 1195-1656. I’m planning to share my thoughts on each of them here on the project blog. Today, I’m going to discuss my responses to Rob Barrett’s excellent book.
Well, I’ve just sent off 1200 lines of the Bradshaw text, edited and XML encoded, to the team at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London. I think I’m ordering take-away tonight.
This feels like a major milestone: over the past four months I’ve been working hard on the text itself, as well as getting to grips with the encoding language. In fact, the XML has proved rather satisfying in the end. Whilst I suspect I’ve been using parts of my brain I’ve never exercised before, it’s very pleasing to get a feel for the protocols and patterns and watch the lines of code grow – a bit like knitting a scarf.
First, let me apologise for the recent silence on the blog. The project team has been working hard to get ready to submit its first data to CCH, enabling them to produce the first visualisations of the website. These are exciting times and we may soon be able to put some of these visualisations online for public comment.
I just wanted to post this, which gives an introduction to Lucian’s In Praise of Chester and some representative samples from his work. I’ll be discussing these with Swansea University’s Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Research on Tuesday, January 20. Online comments are also encouraged. I’ll post an account of the fruits of the discussion in due course!
