On Dec. 5th one equall musick and McGill's Centre for Research on Religion (CREOR) co-hosted a Restoration Evensong to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. It was a great success - we had c. 100 people in McGill's Birks Chapel at 530 on a cold wednesday night at the end of term. Quite the turn out considering it was the middle of the week - in some respects a bit of a gamble, but one that paid off immensely. The musical line-up was fairly accurate we thought, without going into too much precision on what might have actually appeared in a Chapel Royal Service c. 1667. The choral music was as follows: William Smith, Preces and Responses Psalm tunes from British
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Just back from Sixteenth-Century Studies 2012 in Cincinnati, despite the Sandy / Frankenstorm. On the whole a good conference; my plenary panel on Thursday night went well considering that we really didn't have an idea about the format. At the end of it, it became clear however that there is a theme of connecting the senses and the emotions in a much more nuanced and robust manner. In numerous panels and papers the experiential, the sensuous, the emotional, and the role of practice were front and centre! quite a happy turn of events I think, considering these define my work in so many ways. Solid outcomes - seeing the Religion and the Senses in print for the first time (out on Oct 23 2012!),
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I decided (during my lunch) to see what Stefan Sinclair and Geoff Rockwell's Voyant Tools would tell me about my monograph. I guess some kind of self-discovery over a sandwich is OK - especially when it combines two aspects of your own work. Here are some visuals generated by Voyant: So my book is about the senses and religion. I'm genuinely surprised though at how low the raw count is on the senses themselves - then again, it's about the sensorium as a whole, not each individual sense per se. Another view is rather interesting I think - word trends that more or less follow what each chapter is about. Knowing how I intended my argument to flow, this graph is comforting - it actually sh
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We survived - it was intense, but actually quite productive. And I think that we didn't have to wrangle as much about terminology and miscommunications between c. 4 distinct academic cultures as much as I had thought. Perhaps that speaks volumes for me nagging my student researchers all summer about thinking outside the box and to try and grasp where other students on the RDF project are coming from. Of course the biggest gap is between the humanists and the computer scientists, but even this was bridged quite easily. The excitement in the room about some of the questions we've been wrestling with - the nature of how we might map social processes as networks - was palpable, and there was int
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It looks like the holy oats article is going to make it into the 2013 open issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies: fingers crossed, it's going through post-revision reviews at the moment. If it makes it in, I'll be extremely happy. The project has been a long haul from finding some indications that Aquinas thought grace had intentional being as a quality, through the work at the Pontifical Institute in Toronto, and the submission of the LMS paper version, to the complete redrafting and rewriting of the research as a paper for McGill Medievalists in the winter of 2010. Finding the oats recipe was a godsend as it let me deal with the complex issues, I think, in a slightly hu
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Most of my attention at the moment is on finalizing the draft chapter on The Senses and Religion for the forthcoming volume on The Senses in the Renaissance (Berg). Wrestling with these two vast topics is proving interesting for a chapter length piece. I'm happy to say that previous research interests on the continent are proving assets!
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I've received a SSHRC Grant for the coming year! I'm quite pleased about this - it will give me funds (shared with four co-applicants) to pursue developing the new Making Publics website into a RDF resource. In short, the work will examine how humanities research might be disseminated into the world of Linked Open Data using the standards and forms associated with the Resource Description Framework. For most humanists this sounds a bit technical - it is - but in short, it's a way of getting archival and humanistic research out into websites and other data formats.
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The Holy Oats article is finally submitted to the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Fingers crossed it will be accepted for their 2013 open volume.
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