Coding and standardisation
project: The Italian Academies 1530-1650: a themed collection database
Grant Holder: Professor Jane Everson
The project promotes and facilitates research on the Italian learned Academies of the late Renaissance and early modern periods and their relationship to book production, printing and publishing in this period. The precise aim is to compile a comprehensive database of information relating to the membership and activities of Academies in Bologna, Naples, Padua and Siena and their links to the book trade as represented in the holdings of the British Library.
The database is designed and developed as one of the BL Themed Collections series. [read more]
project: Beyond the Book: Mass Reading Events and Contemporary Cultures of Reading
Grant Holder: Dr Danielle Fuller
Mass reading events – ‘Richard & Judy's Book Club,’ ‘One Book, One Chicago’ – are a new, proliferating literary phenomenon that remains uninvestigated. They raise important questions: why do they cause people to come together to share reading? Do they attract marginalized communities, foster new reading practices, enable social change? Our interdisciplinary project produces a trans-national analysis of contemporary shared reading practices, the formation of reading communities and the popular function of literary fiction in the UK, USA and Canada. [read more]
project: The Soldier in Later Medieval England
Grant Holder: Professor Adrian Bell
It has been argued that standing armies and professional soldiers were a phenomenon of the early modern state. There can be no doubt, however, that the period from 1369 to 1453 witnessed hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the pay of the crown. Although these dates themselves relate to the beginning and end of important phases in the war with France commonly known as the Hundred Years War, soldiers were dispatched for campaign and garrison service not only across the Channel, but also in the Iberian Peninsular, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. [read more]
project: The Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing (1700-1945)
Grant Holder: Professor John Corbett
The Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing (1700-1945) project will provide an evidence-based platform for a new account of the development of Modern Scots and Scottish English. It will create a major research resource, namely a publicly available, digitised archive of texts in language varieties ranging from Broad Scots to Scottish Standard English. This corpus will provide the 'missing link' between the Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots and its related projects (1375-1700) and the Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech (1945-present day; www.scottishcorpus.ac.uk ). [read more]
project: Londoners and the Law: pleadings in the court of common pleas 1399-1509
Grant Holder: Dr Matthew Davies
The project seeks to answer the question: why and how did 15th-century Londoners make use of the royal court of common pleas at Westminster? It will track and analyse the litigation brought both by and against Londoners in the common pleas over the course of the period 1399-1509, and use the data gathered to answer a series of questions that will significantly enlarge our understanding go how the law was regarded and employed both in London, and more widely in late medieval England.
These questions include: what types of suits were brought by and against Londoners? [read more]
project: The morphosyntactic typology of European Romani dialects
Grant Holder: Professor Yaron Matras
The project is concerned with a structural and typological as well as contact-theoretical comparative and historical description of the dialects of Romani. The data are administered in a database, which will be made accessible online. [read more]