![Templo Antiguo de los Totonacos in Tusapan [648.c.1]](http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/americas/images/temple.jpg)
A blog about the Americas by the Americas Collection team at the British Library
Facebook logo from Wikicommons
Team Americas now has a rough-and-ready Facebook page. 'Like' us, if you like, and receive the odd update on British Library events, things we spot on the web, and news of when we've posted to the blog, as well as ask us questions via the 'Wall'. Let us know what you think of it.
[MJS]
'A General Chart of New Holland, including New South Wales & Botany Bay', in 'An Historical Narrative of the Discovery of New Holland and New South Wales'
As I mentioned in a previous post on the Terra Nova expedition, 2011 was a busy year for the Americas section of the Library and one of the other developments was being joined by our colleague responsible for Australasian Studies. Unfortunately, Nicholas has now left the Library to enjoy the warmer climes of southern France and so the rest of us from Americas Studies are doing our best to direct readers interested in researching the area for the time being. This being the case, we thought we'd start the best way we know how - blogging.
The Library has a notable collection of materials relating to Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands and we aim to show a selection of the historical works we have as 'guest posts' on the Americas blog. For today's post I happened to be looking at the voyage of Captain Cook to the west coast of Canada and thought the Australian materials included in the same volumes would make a good first Australasian post.
'A Man of Van Diemen's Land', contained in the supplementary plates to 'A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean'
Edited by John Douglas, 'A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean' (shelfmark: 10025.bbb.22) has a supplementary volume of plates and charts compiled during the journey, held at shelfmark, C.180.h.11. These charts and plates cover various parts of Cook's expedition and therefore range from Australia to Nootka Sound and illustrate the landscape, fauna and peoples encountered. The above, 'A Man from Van Diemen's Land' is an example of the illustrations included in the volume which charts the diversity of societies and environments encountered.
The Library's collections contain many materials relating to Cook's voyages, including books, maps and manuscripts. Another item I called up was the 1786 publication, 'An Historical Narrative of the Discovery of New Holland and New South Wales' (shelfmark: 1446.c.19). The piece is a much smaller, highly edited account of Cook's expedition which happens to contain the rather nice map seen at the top of this post. Given the amount of material the Library holds relating to Cook's expeditions it is tempting to keep posting highlights from the myriad publications and manuscripts in coming weeks, but rest assured a host of notable collection items on various subjects will be on display in subsequent guest posts.
[PJH]
'Kodak factory at Harrow, 1890s'. Photographer unknown. British Library Kodak Archive A.1787
The news that Kodak is formally filing for bankruptcy protection has been coming for some time but it still represents a significant moment in the history of photography. Ever since George Eastman marketed his company's first camera in 1888 Kodak has framed the personal, family, social and political histories not just of the Americas but of a significant portion of the world.
As such, I decided to dig around and see the mark Kodak has left on the British Library's collections. In short, it's a big one. Some of the earliest materials we hold relating to Kodak were published by the company itself, for example the Kodak Press publication, 'Picture Taking and Picture Making' (1898, Shelfmark: YA.1998.a.14770). This body of material is quite large and covers various subjects, from 'Motion Picture Laboratory Practice, and Characteristics of Eastman Motion Picture Films' (1936, Shelfmark: 778.1258 DSC) to the journal, 'Dental Radiography and Photography'.
Far larger is the body of material which owes a debt to Kodak equipment in its production, including a number of our photobooks, travelogues, newspapers, journals, and so on. Some early examples here include the Countess of Aberdeen's, 'Through Canada with a Kodak' (1893, Shelfmark: 10470.b.35) and Alfred Leader's, 'Through Jamaica with a Kodak' (1907, Shelfmark: 010470.e.5). Both also illustrate how quickly Kodak developed an intimate relationship with the international traveller and the travelogues many of them produced.
'Shrimp Fisher (September 1908)', entry for Eastman Plate Competition by L. Hillier. British Library Kodak Archive A.1997
The Library's Kodak related collections do not end with published material, however. Two collections of particular note are, 'The Oral History of British Photography' and the 'Kodak Ltd. Archive'. Kodak receives multiple mentions in 'The Oral History of British Photography', often as a reminiscence but also because of the interviewing of people such as Robert Lassam (former curator of the Kodak Gallery). The Kodak Archive held here was donated in 2009 and is the corporate archive of Kodak's UK arm, providing access to photographs and documents which illustrate the development of photography in the UK as well as the company's history.
Kodak's global reach and legacy is borne out by how pervasive materials relating to or facilitated by the company are in the collections of the British Library and libraries across the world. This, therefore, is one of the many ways in which the significance of today can be impressed upon us.
[PJH]
The UK Web Archive team, which includes several colleagues who sit behind the bookshelves that face me, now has a blog. They're talking a bit about what they are up to, but also highlighting websites in their collections in a kind of online Advent Calendar. Today's link seems apposite for our blog: 'Three Continents, One History: Birmingham, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, & the Caribbean'
For the US, of course, there's the Internet Archive.
[MJS]
Two of the things that happened this week were: (1) A Celebration of Swearing and Profanity, with participants from Viz and In the Thick of It, as part of our Evolving English exhibition; and (2) the launch of the Google Books Ngam Viewer Beta. Important, sensible research has taken place on this corpus of words, as the New York Times has noticed, but I did what I suspect many others did and combined (1) and (2).
What did I learn? Well, there is steady increase in the proportion of a word beginning with S, starting in the '60s, and plateauing in 1980s, before rising in the '90s.
A similar pattern is revealed by [f***]:
Except, there is more of a pronounced lull in the '80s, and its rise starts a little later.
Now for the C-word:
A little more random, a later start, but more of a backlash in the 1980s. As a control, here's [Apple Pie]:
What explains this? Can we tie it into a narrative of progressive easing up in censorship (or a decline in literary standards), followed by a backlash, perhaps lead by Reagan-era cultural politics and embodied by Tipper Gore's explicit lyrics stickers? Does the line of the C-word graph point to the extra-layers of profanity attached to that epithet? And what does it mean in terms of gender politics? I'm sure we'll here a lot more about this sort of research, not least as a starting off point for more in-depth enquiry and for raising questions. That's my excuse.
Update: more in the Grauniad.
[M.S.]
Google Books does some interesting things, and the cloud of 'common terms' is often one of them, as this rather saddening image attests. I happened to be looking up some resources on oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico. Environmental effects of offshore oil production: the buccaneer gas and oil field study (New York: Plenum Press, 1981) looked promising. Google Books has just a snippet view; it's held by the Library's Document Supply service at v14 5378.132000 if you want the whole thing.
Elsewhere, an electronic resource looks useful: French, Christopher D. Map showing geology, oil and gas fields, and geologic provinces of the Gulf of Mexico region (Denver, Co.: U.S. Geological Survey, 2005), and this may offer helpful lessons: Long-term assessment of the oil spill at Bahía Las Minas, Panama : synthesis report ( 1993, New Orleans, La.: U.S. Department of the Interior, Minerals Management Service, Gulf of Mexico OCS Region).
The wider political and economic context is investigated by Juan Carlos Boué, A question of rigs, of rules, or of rigging the rules?: upstream profits and taxes in US Gulf offshore oil and gas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)
[M.S.]
The Arctic Perspective Initiative team with Igloolik members, August 2009 (Courtesy of The Arts Catalyst, © Matthew Biederman)
You may remember a previous post suggesting that the future of the Polar regions could see these areas becoming less ‘out there’ and more part of the fabric of our increasingly globalised world. On the 20th May I was at a panel discussion entitled ‘Contemporary Nomadism: Autonomy and Technology in the North’ (hosted at Canada House and run by the Arts Catalyst), and I was fortunate to witness another stage in this inexorable drawing of spaces together through technology.
The discussants were from The Arctic Perspective Initiative and the main event was a live Skype video call from two project members who were currently out on the land in Nunavut. Being ‘on the land’ implicitly means an absence of mains power, server access, wireless broadband and the other necessities required for internet access but yet the two panellists, one of whom was Zacharias Kunuk, the director of Atanarjuat, joined the room for a lengthy discussion. This was made possible by the project’s emphasis on facilitating the use of open and free media, communication and sensing technologies to increase connectivity between the Arctic and the rest of the globe. The discussion covered many contemporary cultural, environmental and geopolitical challenges facing the Arctic and you felt that the web-link facilitating the discussion and the possibilities it provided could intensify these debates in coming years.
As with maps, tall ships and radio previously, these interactions of people and technology increasingly draw the Arctic and those who live there into the global everyday, with myriad potential effects. An exhibition documenting the work of The Arctic Perspective Initiative is on at Canada House until the end of September and provides a forum to illustrate their work and an opportunity to think through some of the outcomes. Also, our Arctic collections are always here.
[P. J. H.]
As Coolidge put it, 'the chief business of the American people is business', but what is now business is sometimes hard to understand. Silicon Valley is the engine of an online economy that is now the size of a medium country, but a lot of what it does is free, or at least appears to be be done for nothing. Twitter is perhaps the most famous current U.S. innovation that, at the moment, is not 'monetised' (this, though, will surely not be long - it's already valued at $1 billion).
Americas Collections is, of course, interested in the business of the U.S., and not just from a cultural or historical perspective - colleagues in Business and IP Centre in particular make great efforts to make information available to entrepreneurs, lawyers, NGOs, and so on. So, I was pleased to get an invitation to a talk at NESTA on Social Media - a force for good as part of the Silicon Valley comes to the UK programme (it also ties into some of my work on 'C21st curatorship'). Not only could we hear Biz Stone, the founder of Twitter and Reid Hoffman, co-founder of Linkedin, but also on offer was Stephen Fry, who, as the NESTA chair said, needs no introduction.
There were some of the usual venture capital types and web startups doing their delicate courtship dance, but also a mix of politicians, journalists and think tankers. The talk itself was unusually interesting - and should be available online, if NESTA's servers take the strain. Fry, in particular, responding with charm, elegance, placed these new communication tools in a broader context, alluding to the changes wrought by the printing press, and reminding us that the titles we remember from the eighteenth century are the Tatler, the Idler, the Spectator - magazines and journals that offered a human, amusing, interesting, and quite often apparently trivial view on the human carousel. For Fry, the joyous thing about Twitter is that it makes communication personal and human; it invests work with emotion. The internet, he argued passionately, is at heart a deeply literary thing.
There were also questions about the 'road map' for Twitter, privacy, 'deadwood' news, mob rule, and the intersection between politics and international relations; again, they should be on the NESTA stream. Matthew Taylor of the RSA asked two very important questions about the lack of real sociological and orthographical research on social media, and the extent to which powerful organisation and governments were able to manipulate or exploit sites such as Twitter. I wanted to ask about how this stuff might be accessed by future historians. Next time...
Americas Collections also has its own Twitter stream (the term 'feed' sounds too much like Reuters, it seems). It's turning out to be a useful way to communicate with scholars, publishers and others libraries, so feel free to join in.
In some ways, though, it's not so much about the tools, as the communication and the contacts that make up this new 'Republic of Letters'. And sometimes the old ones are the best. I brought a pencil with me to make some notes, but not a sharpener. So, thanks are due to Basheera Khan of the Telegraph (@bash) who lent me a very nice pen.
[@_MattShaw]
