The Big Ideas seminar series is a successful staff seminar that explores a variety of fascinating and thought-provoking research topics. We are delighted that the series, previously held for The National Archives staff only, is now being opened up to the wider academic community. Big Ideas aims to create opportunities for regular meetings at The National Archives to discuss cutting-edge research methodologies and theories.

The fourth Big Ideas seminar for this academic year will take place on Tuesday 20 February 2018 and welcomes Andrew Prescott, Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Glasgow, who explores the relationship between artistic practice and the archive.

To join the conversation on social media use #ResIdeas.

Programme

Welcome and introductions by Dr Anna Sexton, Head of Research at The National Archives.

13:00 - 14:00 - Professor Andrew Prescott, University of Glasgow

We mainly think of the archive as a means of recording the work and life of creative artists. When artists use the archive, it is often as raw material, a vast source of images and other media which artists mine for ideas and content. There is often a gulf between the archive, conceived as information, and artistic practice. However, as new technologies become available, it becomes possible to reconceive the shape, structure and character of the archive. We can think of the textual and other content of the archive in different ways. This seminar will explore various ways in which artistic practice can help us reconceive the archive, with reference to the works of a number of contemporay artists including Eduardo Kac, Fabio Lattanzi Antinori, Mitchell Whitelaw and Tom Jackson. It will be argued that with the development of such technologies as the internet of things, it is pressing to pursue such dialogues between archivists and artists.

Speaker biography

Andrew Prescott is Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Glasgow and Theme Leader Fellow for the Arts ans Humanities Research Council strategic theme of ‘Digital Transformations’. He trained as a medieval historian at Westfield College and Bedford College in the University of London, where he completed a thesis on the Records of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. He was from 1979 to 2000 a Curator of Manuscripts in the British Library, where he was involved in some of the Library’s first digitisation projects, including Electronic Beowulf. He has also worked at the University of Wales Lampeter and King’s College London. Andrew’s many publications include English Historical Documents (1988), Towards the Digital Library (1998), The British Inheritance (2000), The Benedictional of St Æthelwold: A Masterpiece of Anglo-Saxon Art (2002), Marking Well (2006) and London and the Kingdom (2008), as well as articles on the 1381 revolt, the history of the British Library’s collections and the history of Freemasonry.

Image credit: Still from 'Letter' (1996), a three-dimensional digital poem by Eduardo Kac. Reproduced by permission of the artist.