The blog and me


This blog will be erratic and seldom follow themes. It will make no claims to being structured or logical. It will, I hope, be fun and occasionally insightful. I do still publish more coherent work (though in economics, and in very strange places) but that may take some believing after reading these pages. I've a PhD in economics/economic history from Cambridge, I've taught in several universities (and still do, when I get the chance) but now focus energy and attention on commercialization for a large London university, and dealing with the daily commute.

Sunday 31 May 2015

Jane Vavasor Durrel and the rural Oxfordshire of the 1810s

Jane Vavasor Durrel (1794-1871) was the granddaughter of an Oxford University Vice Chancellor and the daughter of the rector of Mongewell in Oxfordshire. The family, originally from Jersey and with longstanding - and even in her lifetime, strong - connections with the Channel Islands, had established offshoots in Oxfordshire, Wales and elsewhere by the end of the eighteenth century. Her father's long tenure of the living meant that Jane, like her sisters (who, like Jane, remained unmarried to their deaths), was closely acquainted with a rural community in Oxfordshire recovering from the Napoleonic Wars and facing the adjustment to postwar conditions in agricultural described by economic historians. Mongewell, like other rural parishes, remained essentially a stable population - few incomers, few people migrating any very great distance away. This settled order is reflected in the drawings Jane made in the late-1810s, which came into my hands from an antique dealer in London. The collection included drawing by other hands, including a sketch signed by William Crotch (1775-1847), musician and friend of J.B. Malchair. As an Oxford resident, Crotch would possibly have known the Durrels and (as often happened at the time) shared his drawings with the family. 

The small carton of drawings, papers, sermons and engravings form a collection documenting Jane's own interests - and the rural life of Oxfordshire people. The drawings are undated but almost all are on Whatman paper with a watermark for 1816. That the drawings might indeed be later is possible, but they are probably not much later, judging by the style of clothing and other evidence, than the mid-1820s. Here are a very few of them - many no more than sketches in the margin of drawings or on loose scraps of paper - as an introduction to Jane's world. They provide an insight into the daily life of an Oxfordshire parish and are offered without commentary.

Wagon entering a lane
Two people, one possibly an itinerant seller, the other off to market

Off to market

Gleaners (including two small children, probably girls)

Raft or punt fishing in Mongewell


Tuesday 26 May 2015

Country Life and the 'Shakespeare portrait'

Country Life is the magazine we Brits buy primarily, I suspect, for the lavish illustrations of country house estates, and the advertisements for houses for sale of the type most of us could only afford with a major lottery win. (It is also, incidentally, still wedded to the idea of the society portrait of what - many years ago - would have been regarded as an 'eligible debutante'). As a magazine it is possibly as far away as one can get from a quintessentially modern journalism. Its stock in trade is the celebration of a country life style now enjoyed by fewer of us than ever, and celebration - rather than detailed examination - is the weekly diet of this glossy publication. It is not, certainly, a peer reviewed academic journal.

Why, then, the editor thought it wise to feature, prominently, the claims of one of its regular authors, botanist and historian of horticulture Mark Griffiths, that he has 'discovered' - by means of 'decoding' the images appearing on its title page - a portrait of Shakespeare on the title page of John Gerard's Herball (1598) is strange and bewildering. The 'portrait', Griffiths claims, is the figure standing on the right hand plinth labelled with what Griffiths says is not a printers device - as others maintain - but a cleverly encoded cipher for Shakespeare.




I don't want to add any more to the very obvious and extensive commentary on the doubts surrounding the iconography, or the character of the rebus on the plinth. A good summary of all of that can be found here , here and here , and enough commonsense let alone research suggests that the claims for a portrait from life on the title page of a book unconnected with Shakespeare himself or his world of the theatre and literature is unlikely to say the least.

What I do want to do is to add my 'two penn'orth' on the question of how the title page should be read -  that is,what all those figures are meant to be doing. My starting point is that a very similar, but not identical, title page can be found in Gaspard Bauhin's version of Matthioli's commentary on Dioscorides (also of 1598) produced in Frankfurt (below):





For those interested, you can see a more detailed version of the page at bit.ly/1Ai5sDS.

What's useful about this comparison is that Bauhin book is also, effectively a herbal; it also rehearses the contemporary elaborations of Dioscorides; and the title page has many of the same stylistic features as the Gerard book's title page (not least the garden portrayed in the bottom middle cartouche).



The Bauhin books shows a figure, to the left on a plinth, dressed in classical garb (Dioscorides); the other three key figures shown (on the right hand plinth and in the vignette scenes at the bottom of the page) are of different ages and are either all Matthioli or (possibly) the two at the bottom are he and the figure on the plinth is Bauhin. What is clear though is that the Bauhin title page is intended to mix Dioscorides with contemporary practitioners. 


So if - and its a big if - the representations in the Gerard title page are meant to be real figures one could read the Herball's front page as carrying images of Dioscorides (in painfully inaccurate garb) on the left plinth and all of the other figures as Gerard at three different periods of his life: in the 'Shakespeare' portrait as a military figure (we know he served in the army at an early part of his life) and in the figures above the plinth as older (top left) and older still (top right).


I should stress that I don't think this the most likely reading of the design of the title page of the Herball. The most likely is that, without the evidently greater skills of the engraver of the Bauhin book, Rogers - the engraver of the images throughout the Herball - was left to invent fantasy figures connected with the world of botany.


But it does suggest that it is possible to hold to an interpretation of the title page as a selection of real or imagined portraits of contemporaries or near contemporaries without any of them coming from a domain unconnected with horticulture and the medical uses of plants.
















Thursday 21 May 2015

All about my office...

Model Farm House (built 1889) 





The Model Farm House at Church End, Hendon, is an example of late nineteenth century Queen Anne revival domestic architecture, and is sited at one of the most important and historic parts of Hendon. Together with the ‘Model Barn’1, it is a minor monument to Hendon’s agricultural past. Hendon was, until the nineteenth century, an agricultural community in which some 95% of farm and common land was used as pasture and meadow2Soil here consists for the most part of green and brown clay intermixed with coarse or yellow sand and fine gravel allowing free drainage, in which well nourished and manured pasturage grass grows well. Winter stall feeding for milk cows was well established in southern England so that barn storage for hay was an essential part of any farm. The buildings clustered around the church and the Church Farm House at the top of Greyhound Hill seem, on the basis of archaeological and historical evidence, to have consisted mainly of such storage structures well before the present buildings were conceived in the late nineteenth century. The Hendon & District Archaeological Society ‘Church End Farm Building Record’3 notes, 

Surviving mapping and a water-colour by Thomas Bailey of c.1800, (identified as ‘Church End Farm’, and almost certainly providing a view of the north side of the farm yard), gives some useful clues to the later eighteenth century aspect of the farmstead. They indicate both the early presence of the barn still standing in 1961 and the limited number of other buildings then erected on the yard frontages, with perhaps only a single structure extending the northern yard range to the west by the beginning of the nineteenth century. Buildings immediately abutting the barn to the east, however, shown on the 1789 Rankin and Johnson estate plan (and still apparently in evidence on the 1863 OS) seem to confirm the existence of two cottages depicted in the water-colour, constructed with brick stacks, and with the larger of the two presenting a two storey sash windowed bay to the yard front.  

Late Georgian pictures of the top of Greyhound Hill show most of these stall feeding and storage barn structures to be lathe and plaster buildings in a poor state of repair. While few such structures would have been improved, they were probably repaired and patched well into the middle of the century. Hay, of course, was more than just for local feeding; selling hay to London city stables was an essential part of the Hendon farm economy during the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. By the 1880s, then, the top of Greyhound Hill had several (probably dilapidated) structures and a largely undeveloped Church Farm House building with some smaller agricultural and residential buildings on the present site. When the architects Wimperis & Arber were engaged to produced the present buildings in 1889, the aim was not to produce simply an improvement in the current buildings but a whole remodelling of part of the site. 

Wimperis & Arber was a London architectural practice based at 25 Sackville Street, PiccadillyJohn Thomas Wimperis (1829-1904) commenced practice in London before 1866. From the 1870s Wimperis was involved in the development of the Grosvenor estate in London and, in 1887, became one of the Grosvenor Estate's approved architectsIn 1889 Wimperis took into partnership William Henry Arber, (b. 1847-1904)an assistant who had served articles with him from 18664. The partnership was formally dissolved in 18975 and Wimperis retired in 1898. Between 1889 and 1897, the partnership created some fine late Victorian buildings, such as Chartfield on Putney Heath (1893), St Dunstan’s House (1893) and the Grafton Galleries in Bond Street (1892), all of which were startlingly novel realisations of revival ideas. The practice had gained some experience in, and reputation for, urban ‘agricultural’ architecture (as witness the Stables in North Audley Street, Westminster and the Stables at No 3 Lees Place, London) and, when engaged for the Church End site, used it to offer a solution that was at once practical, durable and elegant. Working in Queen Anne revival style6, with an unequivocal reference to contemporary arts and crafts detail in the building materials used, Wimperis & Arber produced a simple farm house echoing the main elements of Queen Anne revival ‘grammar’ in a small space – the irregularity of the ground floor design, the mock boarding of the upper floor (at Model Farm House, in terracotta exterior tiles), the half-timbering at the road-side gable end, for example, all find echo in larger more imposing revival domestic buildings of the 1880s.


1 More properly, the ‘long milking parlour’ as described in various late nineteenth century sources. Stall feeding and milking were, in parts of the east of England, occasionally combined in longer barn-like structures from the sixteenth century so that this is not out of keeping with vernacular tradition in the region. 

2 Daniel Lysons ('Hendon' in The Environs of London: Volume 3 County of Middlesex (Cadell and Davies: London, 1795), p. 1) says that in 1794 Hendon had ‘…8204 acres of land, of which about 300 were arable, about 120 woodland, the remainder pasture and meadow’. 

3 http://www.hadas.org.uk/projects/church-end-farm-building-record 

4 Antonia Brodie (ed.), Directory of British Architects 1834-1914: A-K Volume 1 of Directory of British Architects 1834-1914, (Continuum International Publishing Group: London, 2001), qv. ‘Wimperis, J.T.’. 

5 London Gazette, 24 December 1897, col. 7768. 

6 Donald Bassett has argued that ‘[b]y the 1880s the Grosvenor Estate in Mayfair was being shared out between the 'Queen Anne' and Loire-chateau modes. French motifs were common to both. Men like J. T. Wimperis, Chatfield Clarke and Ernest George proved equally adept at the two styles, if two by then they still were.’(Donald Bassett, 'Queen Anne' and France’, Architectural History, Vol. 24 (1981), p. 90), but only a few details of Loire-chateau style (possibly the renaissance styling to the chimney-piece?) feature in the Model Farm House building itself, while the barn with the vernacular apse makes no continental stylistic references at all.

Friday 9 January 2015

A very, very few words on 'sensemaking' and historical text-based data

Information scientists, and in particular those with an interest in visualisation, have generated a number of different approaches to recovering or discovering meaning in pooled experience data (including text data). Literally 'making sense of' a variety of stimuli (sounds, images, text, interactions, feelings, impressions, memories) is something we all do within our everyday lives. What computer and information scientists within two distinct but complementary traditions (human-computer interaction [HCI] on the one hand and information science on the other) have tried to do is to create model schemes for the effective construction of meaning from these data via software tools. Some of these tools create data taxonomies and representations of meaning, some create only the latter. All are trying, though, to automate the process of making sense of data - and in a world of significant 'big data' sources, this is a vitally important tool for users as diverse as security agencies, criminal investigators, librarians and, potentially, for historians too.

If 'sensemaking' sounds like an attempt to supplant the interpretative power of historical method, historians should rest assured it isn't. Sensemaking, when deployed effectively, is a means of revealing patterns, relations and clusters of meaning in data; it does not project onto those data anything other that the assumptions necessary to 'make sense'. It does not, for example, deduce significance. Moreover in the HCI tradition of sensemaking in particular [summarised in 1], it is essential that the 'point of view' which gives rise to the clustering is informed by expertise - and here the historian can find scope for working with the software engineer to develop tools, not merely deploy the ones developed. Sensemaking software development in this sense can be creative and involve, with historial data, considerable forensic and situational historical knowledge; one useful summary by one of the leading exponents of this approach [2] shows how software developers can, and indeed must, work with and transfer control to, domain specalists to make 'sensemaking' work .

One example of such a 'sensemaking' tool in the public domain is Invisque [3], a simple tool for visualising the 'sense made' of large collections of text data, resulting from a project funded by Jisc. As a video of the software in use shows [4], it is possible to use the HCI approach to sensemaking to 'make sense' of loosely categorised text data, or plain text sources. In an example given by Wong et al [3], a PhD student could use the sensemaking approach and the visualisation tools to shape a detailed literature search. Equally, however, the same student could make use of the technology to make sense of analogous corpuses of data - such as texts from the BL Incunabula Short Title Catalogue [5]. Other sensemaking tools, such as Stasko et al's Jigsaw [6] allows sensemaking among large corpuses of text documents where the finding and mapping of connections between data can help identify patterns in text records. Text, let it be remembered, is not the only material for sensemaking tools like Invisque. In my own university for example, where the software tool originated, we have been discussing potential applications within the extensive artefact and image collections of the university's Museum of Domestic Architecture (MODA) [7]. Yet greater potential exists in the ability of sensemaking tools to seek coherence among a disparate collection of sources (for example lyrics in Victorian popular songs, Victorian newspaper poetry, manuscript poetry in private archives).

The Invisque tool
There are methodological issues that will be of concern to the historian at the heart of this approach, of course, which will already have occurred to the patient scholar. In J.H. Hexter's terms the gestalt implied by sensemaking is very much more 'lumper' than 'splitter' in character [8, p. 242] - sensemaking allows one to frame connections in order to make sense of a whole corpus. 'Lumping' has consequences (ignoring 'blindspots' in the record, eliding meaning etc.). That, however, is more than made up for by the explanatory potential of (in particular, visualised) sensemaking to show in sharp relief just how clustered meaning might be framed even where the complexity of a text suggests layered or textured, or even hidden, meanings. Secondly it seeks meaning in data by inferring potential clustered association, but does not impute - only suggests - causation within it. If, for example, one were to frame a sensemaking analysis of single author texts such the The Entring Book of Roger Morrice (a very possible project given the scale of the text corpus and the sophistication of layered meanings within it), or multiple author documents such as selected texts from the Patrologia Latina, the historian would be left to hypothesize, weigh and assess causal theories behind the clustered meanings. Moreover one must be careful to recognise the generality of the claim made by sensemaking: it seeks to make 'senses' of data, not one - for example 'historians'-type - sense. Sensemaking techiques could be used to interrogate the texts of the Patrologia Latina for meaning in schemes not related to historical questions but to questions of an etymological kind.

What sensemaking may offer historians is a vehicle for investigating - 'trying out', if you will - meaningful clustering schemes in textual data. It will certainly do more, for digital text files, than might be accomplished by text analysis tools alone, which seek patterns in word representations, not intuitive 'sense'.

[1] Pirolli, Peter, and Daniel M. Russell. "Introduction to this special issue on sensemaking," Human–Computer Interaction 26.1-2, 2011, pp. 1-8.

[2] Youn-ah Kang and Stasko, J., "Examining the Use of a Visual Analytics System for Sensemaking Tasks: Case Studies with Domain Experts," Visualization and Computer Graphics, IEEE Transactions on , vol.18, no.12, Dec. 2012, pp. 2869-78.

[3] Wong, BL William, et al. "Invisque: technology and methodologies for interactive information visualization and analytics in large library collections," Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2011, pp. 227-235.

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDmswS6cceg (accessed 8th January 2015)

[5] http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/istc/index.html (accessed 8th January 2015)

[6] Stasko, John, Carsten Görg, and Zhicheng Liu. "Jigsaw: supporting investigative analysis through interactive visualization," Information Visualization 7.2, 2008, pp. 118-132

[7] http://www.moda.mdx.ac.uk/home (accessed 8th January 2015)

[8] Hexter, J.H., On Historians: Reappraisals of the Masters of Modern History. Harvard University Press 1979.