Tag: features

Pink ‘n’ Mix

/ Jane Stevenson

Tartan
For the latest installment of this month’s Pick ‘n’ Mix feature, our Digital Artist in Residence Aileen Collis has created a design based on a digital image of a pattern book in the collection of E Y Johnston, Textile Manufacturer, Galashiels, held at Heriot-Watt University.

So here’s a photo of some colourful fabric from another Heriott-Watt collection, that of Alan Paterson (died 1986), who collected and researched Highland dress and tartan. The photo shows a woman’s silk stole in Jacobite tartan.

See also: History of textiles: Scottish textile heritage.

Photo courtesy of Heriot-Watt University Archive, Records Management and Museum Service. To receive copies or permission to reproduce please write to Ann Jones, University Archivist

Syllabub extraordinary

/ Jane Stevenson

Detail of manuscript
For the first installment of this month’s Pick ‘n ‘Mix feature, our Digital Artist in Residence Aileen Collis has created a design based on a digital image of an eighteenth century manuscript recipe book, probably compiled by a Mary Bennet. Here’s a detail of the page showing recipes for "a whipp’d syllabub extraordinary" and pancakes. The John Rylands University Library has another book which includes "an excellent cake my mother’s way which never fails", but unfortunately the paper was too fragile to scan.

Image courtesy of The John Rylands University Library.
See also: Stuff the diet!

Archival Word of the Week: Calendar

/ Jane Stevenson

Calendar with picture of terrierNot to be confused with calendar. Archivists use this word for an inventory of items in a collection listed chronologically. The items themselves haven’t been re-arranged this way – a calendar is a description, or an interpretation, presenting another way of looking at the collection. But when calendars in either sense appear on the Archives Hub, they themselves tend to be items within an archival collection. Collections on the Hub are described with a hierarchical organisation, another interpretation but one providing more contextual information, and more likely to reflect the organisation of the materials.

Illustration: terrier inspired by the Underdog Show.

Archival Word of the Week: Common-place book

/ Jane Stevenson

'Twas fate,' they'll say, 'a wayward fate/Your web of discord wove;/And while your tyrants join'd in hate,/You never join'd in loveBit of a misnomer this one: common-place books are not printed books, they’re manuscript, and they are not commonplace – each one is unique.That’s why so many appear in archival collections described on the Archives Hub.

From the 16th century and on into the 19th, many people preserved snippets of conversation and interesting excerpts from books, by writing them down in a notebook, collected in a ‘common place’ for future reference.

Perhaps this blog sometimes resembles a digital common-place book, especially in the way the ‘labels’ organise our posts by theme, much as commonplace books were often organised.

Illustration: excerpt from "Weep On, Weep On" by Irish poet Thomas Moore (1779-1852).
See also: Collections of the Month: Love letters.

Archival Word of the Week: Ephemera

/ Jane Stevenson

Tonite onlyGeneric name for published documents which are designed to perform a specific task at a specific time, and expected to be forgotten or thrown away after use – although they might be retained for a striking design or as a souvenir of an event. Ephemera include posters, tickets, and leaflets. Does this blog count as ephemera? I don’t know.

These temporary documents tend to be littered with ‘linguistic shifters’ – relative terms such as ‘tonight’ or ‘here’ – which always require contextual information to make any sense at all.

Link: ephemera
Link: Carried away

Map of the human heart?

/ Jane Stevenson

portolano chart
February is LGBT History Month. This was the theme for February’s  feature last year. While sketching out an early draft, I thought of Foucault‘s observation that homosexuals didn’t exist until the 19th century, and it occurred to me that this was true in the same way that Italians didn’t exist until the 19th century either. So maybe a portolano chart on the homepage… That one didn’t get past the draft stage.

image copyright Edinburgh University Library Special Collections Division.