# Write-ups ## expand\_more ### **Religious and Theological Note-taking (Site Visit, Andover-Havard Theological Library)** Sun, 2012-12-02 19:00 -- Presenters: Write-up by Tarek Abu Hussein (History and Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard) and Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg (History, UPenn) The Andover Theological Library site visit was useful in its exposition of several note-taking purposes and techniques from medieval to modern times, and across different cultures. On display were examples of student note-taking at university lectures; notes intended as critical commentary on certain texts or sections of them by the author himself or by his reader(s); notes compiled separately as *recollections* of sermons, rather than simultaneous or verbatim transcriptions of the speaker's words. Even some seemingly bizarre functions of note-taking were displayed, as for instance the recordings of a series of earthquakes in 18th -century Boston found pasted-over with a piece of paper in a French translation of the Bible. Another remarkable note could be found inside a copy of the *Mishna*. This particular edition of the *Mishna* was printed under the supervision of Menasseh ben Israel, a famous rabbi of the Jewish community in Amsterdam of the 17th century. One of its remarkable features, apart from its “pocket-size” format, is that it is printed complete with vowel-points, thus making it perfect for students, Christians Hebraists, and beginners. The title-page of this book contains a reference to the Hebrew date of the printing of the book, indicated by the Hebrew letters which add up to the numerical value of the year. The owner of the copy used the page facing the title-page to calculate the year: 1646. This highlights another double role that note-taking sometimes plays; it is both a way to complete missing information in the book itself – now the book contains the year of printing as well – but it is also simply a way of facilitating the thought-process, jotting down numbers as part of a calculation. This book belonged to the brother-in-law of Judah Monis, who taught Hebrew at Harvard. Monis was also the author of another item displayed, a Hebrew grammar which may have been the first book printed in the New World with Hebrew typeface. A number of interesting questions arose during the site visit. Interleaved copies of Gilbert Wakefield's translation of the New Testament, for instance, allowed students to take notes on lectures as well as on the text itself. It is apparent that bookbinders left empty leaves for the specific purpose of note-taking. It is, however, somewhat unusual that the notes in those volumes appear to have been taken not by one, but often by several, students. This indicates that ownership of the books switched hands very often, and probably very quickly, most likely as soon as the individual student felt his notes were no longer of any use to him. It is still rather odd, though, that students of theology would have wanted to give away their copies of scripture – why they should have done so (perhaps they needed the money?) is not entirely clear. Another interesting element of the Wakefield translations is finding out, if possible, who some of the students who wrote those notes were. This would obviously require a combination of some pre-existing knowledge of the identity of Wakefield's students and a considerable measure of handwriting analysis. Annie Shapleigh's notes (or, more accurately, recollections) of the sermons of Phillips Brooks were another of the more peculiar items of the Andover session. They are certainly significant in that they present us with a singular example of note-taking not as a form of writing in simultaneity, but rather as a memory-dependent practice. It is perfectly understandable that Shapleigh should have wanted to keep Brooks' sermons. What is less clear, however, is who later thought it appropriate to preserve the notes and bind them into book-like objects – and then, on what grounds. Mr. Cliff Wunderlich from the Andover Library suggested, quite reasonably, that it may have been members of the Shapleigh family who saw fit to preserve the recollections, perhaps as a tribute to Annie Shapleigh. Few of the objects on display at Andover had notes intended as critical assessments of a text or part of it. One exception was an 18th century French work on the life of the Prophet of Islam Muhammad, whose owner Convers Francis criticized severely in the book's front matter. It is interesting to speculate why Francis chose to write his comments where he did. His notes on the book were most likely not written for his own later use, but rather for the benefit of others who may have read the copy. As such, one may deduce that Francis allowed his copy of *La Vie de Mahomed* to circulate among a group of friends and/or colleagues as part of an intellectual community, a Republic of Letters of sorts. Before other readers of the work got to the actual text, therefore, Francis attempted to shape their reading of it with his own take on the book. Another special item was a set of notes written by Ezra Ripley for the 60th anniversary of his ordination. While parts of the sermon are only in outline, other parts are closer to a written-out speech, indicating that he may have had an easier time improvising or remembering certain parts of his speech as opposed to others. Several lines on the notes are crossed out. These are lines in which he refers to Emerson, who was his step-grandson. This anniversary took place not long after Emerson's “Divintiy School Address,” in 1838, which was not very positively received by its members. Apparently, Ripley decided to cross out the more explicit reference to this event and substituted it with some more general remarks. The initial comments, however, are still preserved in the notes, although they were never said as part of the spoken sermon. (You can view this item on the online exhibit). ## **Note Taker/Note-maker: The Challenges of Note Making for the Developing College Brain, (Site Visit, Bureau of Study Counsel)** Sun, 2012-12-02 13:55 -- ... Presenters: **Abigail Lipson**, Director, Bureau of Study Counsel Write-up by Teresa Trout (English, Harvard) My visit to the Bureau of Study Counsel started in the lobby while waiting for the session to begin, chatting with other visitors about the field notes site visit, and trying to add a few more pieces to the large, half-completed puzzle on the table. Once the session began, Abigail Lipson, Director of the BSC, gave us some background on the Bureau, describing the many functions that it plays in supporting students’ learning and development through counseling, peer-tutoring, and a variety of workshops and other services. Since Dr. Lipson centered our talk on the experience of the note-taker, we participated in a note-taking sample by listening to a few minutes of an Economics lecture. Reflection after the exercise revealed that some of us had taken no notes, some were trying to identify an outline that the speaker was working from, some had written down only the facts and data, others had recorded the lecturer’s key questions, etc. From there, we moved on to the “Nine Notable Non-Orthogonal Notions with Regard to the Note-Maker,” reflecting briefly on brain development, epistemological assumptions, purpose, challenges, learning style, personal experience, format, media, and capacities. Next, we looked at some of the notes from the interactive Take Note exhibit, as well as notes contributed by one of Dr. Lipson’s current freshmen advisees. Finally, we had an open discussion that mostly led us to topics surrounding technology. For example, we wondered if off-loading information onto our computers was a problem; whether the spatial perception of physical notecards versus notes taken on a Kindle or another similar device would have an influence on students; what kind of software is best for note takers; and the problem with trying to find one all-encompassing software for your notes. Overall, the presentation was excellent, and the discussion in the room was rewarding because the visitors were a diverse crowd that included graduate students, the father of a college student, a composition instructor, a computer engineer, and support and accommodations providers. My take-away from the visit was that there are a variety of strategies for note taking – the hard part is identifying the *purpose* of your notes and strategizing accordingly. ### **Capturing Nature in Field Notes (Site Visit, Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology)** Sun, 2012-12-02 14:13 -- ... Presenters: **Michael Canfield**, Lecturer in Biology, Harvard Write-up by Julia Tejblum (English, Harvard) Among the diverse objects on display today at Michael Canfield’s “Capturing Nature in Field Notes” site visit are the notebooks and sketches of scientists, naturalists, physicians, and painters like John Audubon, Louis and Alexander Aggaziz, Stanley Cobb, and Jacques Burkhardt. These objects range from text-only notebooks (contrary to common assumption, Dr. Canfield points out, most field notebooks do not contain illustrations) to annotated watercolors. The venue, the Ernst Mayr Library at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, was founded by Louis Agazziz in 1881. Our host, Dr. Canfield, teaches in Harvard’s Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and recently edited Field Notes on Science and Nature, a fascinating collection of essays and primary documents. The Ernst Mayr Library has attracted a wide ranging audience; among the site visit’s participants are a nature walk leader from the Massachusetts Audubon Society with plans for a field notebook of her own, a sociologist who records the behavior of people in bars, a biochemist interested in the contrast between field notes and lab notes, and a public school science coordinator who hopes to encourage her primary school students to record their own observations. Whether their aim is to record their own observations or interpret the records of others, the participants share a curiosity about the moment of documentation (what Dr. Canfield calls the “scribblings”). Field notebooks serve as a vehicle for information which will eventually find its way into a chart, drawing, article, or book. But we can also learn a lot from a notebook’s physical form. Dr. Canfield shows the group how one young naturalist recorded his first field notes in the blank space of a small address book. As that naturalist’s career progressed, the notebooks grew; beside the little address book lie several volumes from a fourteen-volume set of field notes which the scientist assembled later in his career. In field notebooks, spontaneous observation takes primacy over a rigid method of organization. As Dr. Canfield explains, “It's an organic process that resists standardization.” So, while a few of the field notebooks in front of us are preprinted with checklists of species and organized charts in which to record observations, these notebooks do more than store data. There is a situational and synthetic aspect of field notes which combines listed data with a unique narrative. In the last few moments of the visit, Dr. Canfield gives us an assignment: we are going to record our own observations. But while we watch a clip from the 2005 film “March of the Penguins,” each of us trying to count, sketch, and describe the birds on our own paper, he watches us. He calls our attention to the way in which we alternate between observing and recording, our eyes flicking back and forth from page to the scene before us. e page passively receives data while actively communicating back to us about where we should look next. Thus, field notes emerge out of a particular moment, in the interplay between the object we see and the movement of our pencils on the paper. ### **Special Collections of the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library (Site Visit, Loeb Music Library)** Sun, 2012-12-02 12:37 -- ... Presenters: **Robert Dennis**, Recordings Curator, Loeb Music Library; **Kerry Masteller**, Reference and Digital Program Librarian, Loeb Music Library Write-up by Nathan Vedal (East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard) Robert Dennis’ and Kerry Masteller’s intriguing presentation of materials from the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library revealed some of the ways in which notes by musicians, researchers, and fans are incorporated into musical documents. As directions for the performer, self-notated reminders, or after-the-fact documentation, these notes often play an important role in the way the music is ultimately performed for an audience or described for a reader. For example, an early 20th century score of Debussy’s *Pelléas et Mélisande* for tenor (a role originally intended for the baryton-martin range) includes handwritten annotations amending portions of the vocal line to fit the tenor range better, apparently according to one of Debussy’s manuscripts. Similarly, a score of Massenet’s *Werther*, originally for tenor, has been completely transposed for baritone, this time by pasting a slip of the transposed version on each line of the vocal part. The process of composing a musical work can also entail a great deal of note-taking, as evidenced by Lou Harrison’s drafts for his *Piano Concerto with Selected Orchestra*, which include fragments of ideas, arrows connecting sections, and various comments in different colored pencils. Georg Solti’s orchestral scores are heavily marked with tempo indications and myriad notes (again, color coded), except for abrupt sequences of blank pages in the case of opera cuts. Outside of the realm of performance indications, notes can shed light on the historical context. As Dennis vividly related, the German conductor Karl Muck’s promising tenure with the Boston Symphony Orchestra was cut short by a brouhaha surrounding his unwitting omission of “The Star Spangled Banner” at a concert during World War I, arousing a degree of negative public sentiment that eventually led to his imprisonment. He was arrested after a rehearsal of the *Saint Matthew Passion*, and when Isabella Stewart Gardner (evidently present at the rehearsal) visited him after the fact, she inscribed her score of the *Saint Matthew Passion* with the note: “The rehearsal was conducted Monday evening March 25th 1918 by -- .” Filling in the blank, Muck signed: “Dr. Karl Muck (now in jail)”. Masteller presented another fascinating Bostonian document from about 20 years later — Leonard Bernstein’s 1939 senior thesis from Harvard College, entitled “The Absorption of Race Elements into American Music.” As Masteller observed, Bernstein’s over-the-top -- and in this case, somewhat arrogant -- personality shines through in even this early work. Marginal comments from peeved Harvard professors grading his thesis illustrate the function of notes as a form of interacting and, in this case, expression of frustration with a text. Finally, the notes of an ethnomusicologist studying church music from a Greek monastery in 1960 demonstrate the utility of notes to a researcher in the field. Occurring in all manner of texts relating to music, these notes should make clear that the musical notes, on their own, do not always tell the whole story. ### **Notes in the Collections 1 (Site Visit, Fine Arts Library and Harvard Art Museums Archives)** Sun, 2012-12-02 10:31 -- ... Presenters: **Mary Clare Altenhofen**, Acting Herman and Joan Suit Librarian for the Fine Arts Library; **Susan von Salis**, Associate Curator of Archives (Harvard Art Museums Archives); **Joanne Bloom**, Photographic Resources Librarian; **Andràs Riedlmayer**, Bibliographer (Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture); **Amanda Bowen**, Head of Collections; **Nanni Deng**, Asian Art Bibliographer Write-up by Matt Franks (English, Harvard) Susan von Salis, a curator from Harvard Art Museums Archives, began with some notes by Harvard Fine Arts professor Arthur Pope, including a page of notes on color theory made in the 1940s. Among his students was Perry Rathbone, who received a “B” for his color-wheel, but nevertheless went on to direct the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Von Salis also presented student notes from a lecture by Paul Sachs, a former associate director of the Fogg Museum, wherein Sachs somewhat controversially contends that Cezanne and Gauguin paved the way for mediocre contemporary art. Amanda Bowen, Head of Collections at the Fine Arts Library, presented an annotated auction book from Berlin belonging to Edward Waldo Forbes, a former director of the Fogg Museum. Bowen explained how the art market and the museum world intersect with the university’s collections, observing that lawyers, vendors, and curators consult the Fine Arts Library just as often as scholars. Nanni Deng, an Asian Art bibliographer, presented a photo album by Langdon Warner, Harvard’s first Professor of Asian Art. Much controversy surrounds Warner’s actions acquiring art for Harvard in China, split among those who see his work as “pillaging” and those who see it as “preservation.” Warner’s notes also relay an anecdote concerning the transportation of a fragile bodhisattva statue from the Peabody Museum to the Fogg Museum. Because the statue was too delicate to be transported by motor vehicle, Warner and several others carried it on a makeshift platform from one museum to another, coincidentally crossing Harvard’s campus at a time of day when students were walking between classes and inadvertently creating a spectacle. Joanna Bloom Toplyn, the photographic resources librarian, presented field notebooks by André Godard of archeological site visits throughout Iran. Andràs Riedlmayer, a bibliographer of Islamic Art & Architecture, concluded the presentation with field notes Richard Frye, Harvard professor of Iranian Studies, made during his visit to Baluchistan in 1951-52. Frye used his notes to edit a documentary film, suggesting the importance of notes to intermedial arts. ### **Notes in the Collections 2 (Site Visit, Fine Arts Library and Harvard Art Museums Archives)** Sun, 2012-12-02 13:43 -- ... Presenters: **Mary Clare Altenhofen**, Acting Herman and Joan Suit Librarian for the Fine Arts Library; **Susan von Salis**, Associate Curator of Archives (Harvard Art Museums Archives); **Joanne Bloom**, Photographic Resources Librarian; **Andràs Riedlmayer**, Bibliographer (Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture); **Amanda Bowen**, Head of Collections; **Nanni Deng**, Asian Art Bibliographer Write-up by Shuichi Wanibuchi (History, Harvard) On the afternoon of November 1, when I entered the Fine Arts Library, I found the audience already chatting and exchanging opinions in a lively give-and-take concerning the exhibited items for our “Take Note” event. About twelve in total had come to see a wide-ranging collection in the Harvard Art Museums on the subject of note-taking. Although the room was not big enough, the variety of notes the Fine Arts Library possesses informed us of the fundamental and inseparable relationship between art and notes, especially at academic-art institutions like Harvard. Note-taking in art history is the meeting point of visual culture with text-based records and analyses. What we were shown here also spoke to us about the varieties of the media used in note-taking – paper notebooks, teaching records, art catalogues, bounded portfolios, photographs, and film. From this exhibition we learned much about the multimedia nature of note-taking throughout its history. The presentation began with an introduction of the staff – curators, librarians, and bibliographers – of the fine arts library. The first presentation concerned notes on art education at Harvard in the 1940s and 1950s. After talking about some student works and records related to teaching practices at Harvard, as well as an appreciation of art created by students themselves, the presenter showed us some students’ notebooks preserved in the collection. One student, who later became the director of the MFA, left his notebook from a seminar on color theory. Another notebook on color theory that once belonged to Henry Edward Scott offered very important clues on the ‘history of art history’ at Harvard. Scott had taken notes of a lecture on French paintings by Paul Sachs, the director of the Harvard Art Museum. His notebook thus revealed how Sachs appreciated the art of his age. Notes can therefore tell a story that printed materials never tell. The second treasure was Edward Forbes’ Berlin Auction Catalogue from 1914. As a former director of Harvard’s art museums, Forbes was eager to buy works for the museum collection. His notes in the catalogue recount his shopping experiences as a museum director. Indicating the price of items and the names of those who bought them, etc. – Scott’s notes serve as a window onto the art market in the early twentieth century. Next, the presenters moved to the global history of note-taking, presenting a book of prints and lithographs. It consisted of twenty-five hand-colored images of people and landscapes from Ottoman Turkey by the Italian engraver Eugenio Fulgenzi and the printer Raffaele Fulgenzi in Smyrna (now called Izmir) ca. 1836-1838. The book features only signatures of the names and places of each image’s production. It also lacks the title page. But the ex-libris signature on the inside cover tells us another story. The name inscribed there – Thomas W. Langdon – was that of a Boston merchant engaged in the Smyrna trade in the early nineteenth century. He imported many goods, including silk, spices, and other luxury items. This book is believed to be a souvenir that Langdon had purchased for his wife. In this instance, just one hand-written signature speaks to the consumption, circulation, and reception of a book on a global scale. The fourth was the photo collection of Chinese Buddhist cave temples near Dunhuang taken by Langdon Warner, the first Harvard professor of Asian art, in the 1920s. While he took photographs of these ancient Buddhist art works, his wife recorded their travels in her notebook, offering us useful information about their experiences in China. Harvard has now digitized the Langdon Warner collection for academic use. After this, the audience feasted on a photo-book of Ali Khan Vali, an Iranian provincial governor in the late nineteenth century. What astonished us were not only the 4,000-plus pictures of portraits and landscapes across 900 pages, but also the Persian captions filling the margins around the images. Having learned the new art of photography at the imperial Russian court, Ali Khan Vali went on to document local people and friends, landscapes, architecture, travelling tribes, and foreign missionaries – both privately and publicly. His photos and captions, both of which fall under the category of a kind of memory-art, serve as a great historical and ethnographical record on nineteenth-century Iran. The last two items were field notebooks by two archaeologists in Iran. As Peter Burke would later remark at Friday’s Take Note conference, the academic field notebook is an important modern form of the note-taking tool. French archaeologists André and Yedda Godard’s notebook was meticulously filled with their field research notes, in both French and Arabic. Arabic transcriptions in notes were annotated with French translations. Their multilingual notebooks then became the basis for their scholarly publications. In contrast, Harvard professor Richard Frye’s field notes were multimedia as well as mutilingual. His “field notes” included notebooks (manuscript), telegraphed documents (typescript), photographs, slides, and films. His use of film as field notes demonstrates an especially interesting appropriation of modern technology into note-taking in the mid twentieth century. Indeed, the exhibition at the Fine Arts Library testified to the “multi-“ nature of note-taking throughout its history. First, note-taking is *multilingual* practice. This means not only that note-taking is practiced across world, but also that individuals take notes in multiple languages. The case of modern French archaeologists in Iran was but one good example. Second, taking notes is a *multimedia* practice. The collection taught us that different types of media – books, photos, and films – could work as notes for different purposes. At a more basic level, notes are often composed of drawn images (architectural designs, route maps, ethnographic symbols, etc) rather than the written word. Through this, we witness the very explicit connection between ‘art’ and ‘note’ (more precisely, of note-taking and visual culture). Such a trait seems not to be limited to the art museums’ collections discussed here. For instance, the use of such symbols and images is present also in medieval European manuscripts marginalia. The abundant collection presented at the site visit told us much of the nature(s) of note-taking. Postscript: The Q&A session was almost entirely devoted to a discussion of the conservation of artworks and their records (including notes, of course). Compiling files and catalogues in a museum requires huge efforts. It is one of the most important tasks of information management in the art field. The issue of digitalization was also a hot discussion topic. The current project of digitizing museum collection catalogues has had a huge impact on the field. The temporality of the object is a common problem for artworks and notes. Conservation and information management are major issues in each field. **Treasures from the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine (Site Visit, Countway Library of Medicine)** Sun, 2012-12-02 14:31 -- ... Presenters: Write-up by Tuo Liu (Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard) Because the Public Services librarian of the Center for the History of Medicine, Mr. Jack Eckert, thought it might be inconvenient for visitors to go all the way to Longwood, he was kind enough to bring some of the most interesting Countway texts to the Radcliffe Institute. Throughout the years, the Harvard Medical Library and the Boston Medical Library have amassed amazing historical resources that many would not even suspect of. The documents exhibited in Radcliffe attested to the strength and diversity of Countway`s collection, especially in regard to American medical documents. There were a few manuscripts, including a list of recipes for common illnesses from 1643 (one of the oldest medical manuscripts in America) as well as a Newton manuscript that revealed his rarely known interest in alchemy. Among the more ancient artifacts were included some gold touchpieces, dating from the time of the last Stuart monarchs. These objects attested to the monarch’s supposed power to cure scrofula with his or her touch. Anatomical charts and notebooks (both from students and professors/doctors) were also part of the exhibit. Yet the documents exhibited are not just of interest to scholars of medicine or history of science. Countway has a cornucopia of documents that can interest scholars across a wide variety of disciplines. For instance, literary scholars could be interested in a letter by Henry James to a psychiatrist, whose writing style was reminiscent of his prose. Students of political history could well be interested in documents related to the Garfield assassination attempt (poems written by Guiteau while he was in prison and trial-related texts such as dialogues between him and his spiritual advisor) , or even in some Roosevelt charts about the development of his polio. Musicologists could seek out the medicine-related musical sheets of Countway. There are countless gems waiting to be discovered in the Countway building, so a trip to Longwood is well worth the time! For more information on what’s happening at Countway, check out this blog: [**https://cms.www.countway.harvard.edu/wp/**](https://cms.www.countway.harvard.edu/wp/) ### **Noting the Law: Informal Note-taking in Law Books Across the Centuries (Site Visit, Harvard Law School Library)** Sun, 2012-12-02 18:37 -- ... Presenters: **Karen Beck**, Historical & Special Collections and Rare Book Curator, Harvard Law School Library; **Mary Person**, Rare Books Cataloger, Harvard Law School Library Write-up by Marissa Grunes (English, Harvard) On first entering the magisterial Harvard Law School Library, visitors are greeted by a seated figure that looks as if it could be Justice personified, draped in ceremonial robes, with one hand on a book and the other raised in a gesture perhaps of admonition or of teaching. Both were themes of the site visit to the Law Library’s Historical and Special Collections, hosted by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study’s Take Note conference. We were welcomed to the Historical and Special Collections reading room by Karen Beck, the collection’s manager and Curator for Rare Books and Early Manuscripts, and by Mary Person, Rare Books Cataloguer, who guided us through the items on display. From the Harvard Law School’s historical archives, which range from 12th century manor rolls to 20th century Supreme Court Justice’s papers, and span the globe from New England to Russia and China, our guides had chosen a wide array of beautiful and intriguing texts. The earliest, and one of the most visually impressive (see photo detail), is a “Registrum Brevium” from the late 14th century, containing 308 folios of writs starting in the reign of Richard II, all bound together in a composite manuscript. Various techniques have been used to make this massive tome manageable: vellum leaves with a detailed table of contents are bound in the front, and within each numbered gathering is a consecutive list of some marginal lemmata (the “arguments” or subjects of each page). Decisions in selecting and describing content for inclusion in the table of contents reveal the compiler’s particular emphases. Of the Rare Book Collection’s roughly 200,000 printed works, a number of early modern examples were on display. A page from a “year book,” published between 1571 and 1572 and bearing careful marginal notes and citations by the owner, exemplified a form of legal note-taking produced from the early 14th through the 16th centuries to help lawyers study past cases. A 1584 copy of Sir Anthony Fitzherbert’s popular treatise on the duties of justices of the peace had been bound to the 16th-century owner’s specifications with partial interleaving for note-taking. Small vellum tabs, labeled by topic, are stitched rather irregularly onto the edges of certain leaves, possibly by the owner for easier navigation. Interleaving for handwritten notes is still in evidence as we move into the 18th century, when the displayed copy of Johann Gottlieb Heineccius’s rare treatise on Roman law was published in the Netherlands. In a few places, the annotating owner takes occasion to ponder issues from his own day, including extensive handwritten theories of punishment, to which he argues the populace is becoming desensitized, so that “Horror is diminished and the number of crimes is not lessened.” More sensational than horrifying, the plot thickens as a dramatic court battle between Richard, Earl of Anglesey, and one James Annesley, claiming to be the legitimate son of the Earl’s defrauded older brother, unfolds through official trial transcripts. Published in London in 1744, shortly after the protracted and highly public scandal finally went to trial, the transcripts evidently roused the indignation of one anonymous reader, who privately advocates serving “Justice” by fining the Earl not 30 but 30,000 pounds. Fun fact: the saga was adapted by Robert Louis Stevenson for his novel *Kidnapped*. Our final batch of treasures comes from a place many of us know well: the classroom. Here we see note-taking becoming increasingly individualized, from meticulously-rendered transcripts of lectures at the Litchfield Law School (run 1782 to 1833), to notebooks revealing penchants—doodling or personal shorthand systems—of particularly distinguished 19th century Harvard Law students. The Litchfield Law School in Connecticut, perhaps the first American law school, graduated around 1,000 law students, each of whom was expected to leave with what amounted to a personal textbook of lectures. Some students, as you can see below, took these compilations quite seriously, and you yourself can read the immortal words of Professors Reeves or Gould through Harvard’s digital archive. Harvard’s own law students, though no less serious, were allowed more liberties in their note-taking. Frederic Dodge’s draughtsmanship (see below) ornaments notes from his year at the law school (1868-9), though the professor he depicted hasn’t yet been identified. Samuel Williston’s notes present an even greater mystery: composed entirely in shorthand, these notes by the future author of famous multivolume treatise, *The Law of Contracts*, served as the text from which James Barr Ames’s lectures on legal history were printed. For the icing on the cake, our hosts led us to the Caspersen Room to peruse an exhibition on Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, whose imposing statue had first ushered us into the library. The personal and professional correspondence on display hints at a tirelessly experimenting legal thinker, who used his duty on the First Judicial Circuit as his “own laboratory for legal reform,” and—to circle back to note-taking—compiled a massive “personal digest” of American and international law, alphabetically organized into standard treatise categories, and including commentary that reappears decades later in the famous legal treatises that became foundational to early American jurisprudence. Today, thankfully, we are saved from hand-stitched vellum tags and laboriously-composed indices, as the [**HLS Joseph Story Digital Suite**](http://library.law.harvard.edu/suites/story/) has rendered the collection searchable—even to those of you virtual travelers following the Take Note conference from home. ### **Touch the Harvard Library’s Collections Through Surface Technology (Site Visit, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)** Sun, 2012-12-02 11:27 -- ... Presenters: **Chris Erdmann**, Head Librarian, Wolbach Library; **Susan Berstler**, Information and Technology Coordinator, Tozzer and Cabot Libraries Write-up by Hansun Hsiung (History and East Asian Languages, Harvard) [**Nominated by Pierre Nora as one of the Third Republic’s “sites of memory,”**](http://perso.univ-lyon2.fr/~jkempf/LDM_intro_eng.pdf) Ferdinand Buisson’s *Dictionnaire de pédagogie* (1882-87) was both the sum and celebration of European educational knowledge in the nineteenth century – a massive editorial task of over 5,500 pages, with contributions from such renowned scholars as Émile Durkheim, Victor Duruy, Ernest Lavisse, and Camille Flammarion, just to list a few. But amidst the intimidating index of memorable entries – “Arithmetic” and “History,” “Condorcet” and “Voltaire,” we also find some topics that seem altogether forgettable. One, in particular, seems so innocuous as to be surely overlooked were it not being deliberately sought after: *le tableau noir*, or, the *blackboard*. Cross-referenced with “Teaching Aids,” the *Dictionnaire* tells us of a by-law from August 1851, stipulating, “There will be, in schools, at least one blackboard for exercises in writing, spelling, mathematics, and drawing.” Then, on June 16, 1865, “The objects essential for each school are: a lecturing platform, a clock, a bookcase, blackboards, wall maps….” The [**last edition of the** ***Dictionnaire*****, dating to 1911**](http://www.inrp.fr/edition-electronique/lodel/dictionnaire-ferdinand-buisson/), reports a more specific decree of 1887: “Blackboards will be arranged along the walls of the classroom, placed at 0.5 meters above the floor, and reaching from there up to 1.2 meters.” It is worth calling attention to an age when the technology of the blackboard seemed, if not new, at least noteworthy – the object of so much care, such geometrically precise legislation. To think again about the forgotten furniture of pedagogical practice allows us, paradoxically, to refocus on the rapid changes happening in our day. In particular, for those in attendance at [**Harvard Library UX’s presentation on Thursday, November 1st**](http://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/event/take-note-site-visits)**,** it allows us to wonder whether there will be time when readers, paging through a twenty-first century dictionary of education and catching glimpse of an entry labeled “Touch Tables,” will exclaim to themselves, “How quaint!” But in thinking of the future, we are getting ahead of ourselves. [**Harvard Library UX**](http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/harvardux/) – ***U**ser e**X**perience* – is a curatorial and pedagogical initiative to redefine the way libraries interact with patrons, and the way patrons communicate to one another. Headed by Chris Erdmann, Head Librarian of the [**Wolbach Library**](http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/lib/), the team currently includes Lynne Schmelz, Susan Berstler, Michael Leach, Martin Schreiner, Paul Worster, Enrique Diaz, Rong Tang, and the members of the Harvard Library Lab. The founding frustrations of Harvard Library UX were simple. First, the Wolbach Library’s special collections are available only during specific, limited hours that are inconvenient for many. Second, attempts to bring greater awareness of their holdings through standard exhibitions often go ignored. Lastly, the fruits of labor of those who do use the special collections are often ill publicized – notebooks privately kept in offices or articles in journals read only by specialists. The comprehensive solution to these problems, championed by Harvard Library UX, lies in one key piece of technology: [**touch tables**](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmOku92MlQc). On the simplest of levels, touch tables can be thought of as tablets – e.g. iPads, Kindle Fires, etc. – on massive steroids. The current vanguard of these devices, developed together by Microsoft and Samsung under the name [**PixelSense**](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58dsqozft3k), boasts a forty-inch screen, and weighs almost as much in kilograms. The size alone creates new imaging possibilities, a facet that Microsoft has capitalized on through the introduction of [**Deep Zoom**](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Zoom) imaging software to capture extremely [**high-resolution images**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuiqUutDkHA&feature=plcp) for touch table display. The real novelty, however, lies in features apart from its dimensions. PixelSense’s infrared technology allows for multiple points of simultaneous contact (up to fifty-two), and thus serves as a site for multiple users to interact with one another on the same screen at the same time. Furthermore, the PixelSense touch table can recognize outside objects placed on the screen based on their infrared profile. Most commercial products – whether it’s a soda can, a phone, or a book – can be put directly onto the “table,” upon which the software will automatically call up reviews, videos, and other related data to the item. Or, if the object isn’t recognized, users can input and share data about – even scan an image of it directly from the table – into the computer. The New York Times has already been using this technology to [**re-conceptualize what it means to read the news**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DTQqhFtNXs). And while the Harvard Library UX initiative lacks the funding necessary to procure its own full-time software developers, it has successfully collaborated both with a team under Brown’s [**Andy Van Dam**](http://www.cs.brown.edu/~avd/), as well as the company [**Intuilab**](http://intuiface-presentation.com/), to create touch-table software for librarians and curators. Successful exhibits using this software – called [**Harvard Library Explorer**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHbvs5DqtDQ&feature=plcp) – have already been staged at [**Houghton**](http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/harvardux/blog/2012/11/pixelsense-travels-houghton) and the [**Museum of Natural History**](https://lifeonearth.seas.harvard.edu/deeptree/), along with ongoing demonstrations at Wolbach, Cabot, and – in the near future – Lamont libraries. In conjunction with Intuiface’s Presentation Composer, curators can [**design virtual exhibits**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLvQGpXlzLs&feature=plcp) that allow patrons to freely explore through and [**manipulate catalogue items**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAl9U2QOSgA&feature=plcp). Such manipulation occurs on multiple levels. Apart from the obvious ability to zoom in on display objects at an extremely fine scale, users can also experiment with image settings such as contrast, brightness, saturation, and saturation. Although not yet incorporated into the Harvard Library Explorer software itself, Erdmann cited examples of how these types of settings are currently being used in the humanities to revolutionize the way in which researchers approach documents. In particular, certain file types used by astronomers – for instance, [**FITS format**](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FITS) – allow for multi-spectral images that can then be filtered by wavelength. Vatican archivists have already [**opted for this format**](http://evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.com/2010/03/80000-vatican-mss-to-be-digitized.html), in part because it allows them to see features of the document invisible to the naked eye, such as writing that has either faded or even been erased. More simply and directly, however, patrons at a touch table can take and e-mail to themselves unlimited snapshots of whole works or segments of works that interest them, as well as interact with tagged hotspots that link to other items, readings, and all types of further information. Erdmann sums this all up under the larger rubric of “gesture-based” exhibits. While museums and special collections can make their works available to multiple patrons in display cases, touch tables running Harvard Library Explorer allow visitors to take an active role both with the exhibit *and* with one another as they interact at the same table to explore catalogue items. Test-runs at Cabot and Wolbach have repeatedly indicated that patrons are intuitively more attracted to items they see on touch table screens than they are by physical objects in front of their faces. The promise of simulated tangibility and tactile manipulation excites both imagination and curiosity. It invites patrons to *take part* in the exhibit, rather than rest in distant awe behind velvet ropes, glass encasings, and alarm sensors. There are, of course, still other barriers to be overcome. Funding is the obvious issue – technology doesn’t simply develop itself. In addition, the hardware is currently rather unreliable, prone to various crashes and hiccups, and highly sensitive to changes in ambient lighting. There are also certain logistical problems. To take advantage of the touch table’s capacity for high image quality, many Harvard items already scanned would have to be re-scanned using Deep Zoom software, a task that consumes not only time, but also huge quantities of storage (each image is around 2 to 4 GB). The Harvard Library UX team, however, is hopeful. Tools such as touch tables that allow patrons to gather around and interact with collection items contain, for Erdmann, the potential for both a new kind of librarianship, and a new kind of curatorship. By capitalizing upon the intuitive appeal of gestural manipulation, we can appreciate historical artifacts in a way that resembles less the respectful observation of current museums than the playful curiosity of children in a sandbox. Therein lies at least one vision for the future of learning. And lest readers remain too skeptical of such new technology, let us remember: there was a time, too, when blackboards, positioned on walls between half a meter and 1.2 meters above the floor, were considered wholly new. **Further Information:** Readers interested in further information on Harvard Library UX can visit [**http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/harvardux/**](http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/harvardux/). ### **Notes and Manuscripts: East Asian Materials and the Stories They Tell (Site Visit, Harvard-Yenching Library)** Sun, 2012-12-02 11:52 -- ... Presenters: **Kuniko McVey**, Librarian for the Japanese Collection, Harvard-Yenching Library; **Raymond Lum**, Librarian of the Western Languages Collection, Harvard-Yenching Library; **Devin Fitzgerald**, PhD Candidate, History and East Asian Languages, Harvard Write-up by Devin Fitzgerald (History and East Asian Languages, Harvard) When I first heard about the Take Note conference, I was dealing with a unique and unknown Manchu text discovered in the Harvard-Yenching Library. The text, simply entitled *Unpolished Words*, is a heavily annotated manuscript in which each entry seems entirely unrelated to the next entry: ***\[exercise\] 16*** Manchu and Chinese are just the same – both are limitless. However deep and detailed Chinese writings might get, Manchu can get, too. Some people think of the Manchu language as simplistic; really, how is that any different from sitting in a well and looking up at the sky? ***\[exercise\] 17*** So I have been hiring a matchmaker. *What day has been fixed?* Dream on! \[lit., “you’re still dreaming”\] Just yesterday we went and paid our respects \[lit., kowtowed\]. And today they said they would be sending food to the son-in-law. So the match is set. *This* *marriage of theirs will be great. They are cousins to begin with. To marry kinfolk will be all the closer and sweeter*. (translation by Mark Elliott and the Manchu Studies Group) After the initial discovery, we found more of these texts. Considering the red annotations and frequent corrections, it became apparent that these texts were 18th and 19th century Manchu language practice exercises written mostly by children in Beijing. In effect, they were a pile of student’s notes. Until a few months ago, this entire genre was unknown. They were gathering dust in the rare books room at the largest academic library for East Asian studies in the western world, the Harvard-Yenching Library. The library, with its collection of over 1.3 million texts, is an endless maze of possibilities (the only Minotaur being the skills needed to read them). The rare books room is a space of constant discovery. The holdings are vast, only recently catalogued, and still largely unexplored. If you examine rare books in the library without discovering an unknown (or miscataloged) text of historical importance, then you haven’t tried hard enough. The Take Note conference site visit to the Harvard-Yenching Library captured the library’s atmosphere of constant discovery. The three presentations on Japanese, Western, and Chinese/Manchu/Mongolian materials started with Kunikio McVey, the Librarian for the Japanese Collection. She began her presentation with an erudite introduction to a wide assortment of early modern manuscripts and ended with the annotated books of Tsurumi Shunsuke, a Japanese philosopher who studied at Harvard in the early 1940s. The audience was stunned by her explanation of superbly illustrated Tokugawa period falconry manuals and travel journals. The texts blurred the lines between notes, manuscript, and print. The early falconry manuals were privately transmitted within a family of falconry experts. They are product of generations of practical experience with the realities of falconry \[for a more detailed introduction see the [**Take Note interactive exhibition**](/takenote/node/41)\]. These notes on falconry, like many of the manuscripts we examined, were eventually printed for popular consumption, bringing together the full spectrum of textual potentialities. Following the early modern texts, we learned about the library’s collection of Tsurumi Shunsuke’s annotated books. \[for another wonderful introduction, see the [**interactive exhibition**](/takenote/node/43)\]. Tsurumi’s books and their annotations arrived at Harvard after World War II. Tsurumi, like many Japanese Americans (and Japanese in America), was arrested shortly after the outbreak of the war. His books were confiscated and examined by the Department of War, and eventually, through rather mysterious circumstances, arrived back in the Harvard-Yenching Library. In the next presentation, Dr. Raymond Lum, the Librarian of the Western Languages Collection, enraptured the group with his examples of western language notes buried in the library’s special collections. The first note (note in the sense of a letter) he introduced was written by Aeneas Anderson, a servant to Lord George Macartney during his 1792 embassy to China. Anderson’s note, like many of the more remarkable objects in the library, was hiding between the pages of an unrelated text, unknown until fortuitously discovered by Dr. Lum. The other set of notes Dr. Lum introduced were likewise related to one of the most significant events of Sino-Western relations: the Boxer Rebellion. These fascinating notes were short letters written on scraps of paper by the besieged Beijing legation community to the consul in Tianjin. Some of the letters were written in a still-unsolved cipher, but the small readable sections vividly portray the danger facing the besieged foreigners by ending with an ominously final “Good Bye.” \[A page from Aeneas Anderson's notes\] The final presentation on Chinese/Manchu/Mongol materials was given by me, and introduced the aforementioned Manchu texts, two examples of Chinese annotated texts, and a well-loved trilingual dictionary. Both of the Chinese texts introduced were 16th century editions of classical poetry. The first text, *A Commentary on the Odes of Chu*, perfectly illustrated standard Chinese reading practices: the lines were manually punctuated, and the owner’s reflections were written in red before poems or above particularly noteworthy lines. The second text was a commercially printed edition of Du Fu’s poetry including the notes of the famous Guo Zhengyu. Like the texts introduced by Kuniko McVey, they illustrate the movement of note-taking from private reflection to desirable commodity. The last text I introduced was an 18th century printing of *A Trilingual Glossary of Chinese, Manchu, and Mongolian*. The owner of this text liberally annotated and corrected sections of the dictionary. Almost every page adds additional glosses to terms in one of the three languages, but we still have no idea how these dictionaries were being used in practice. \[Pages from the Chinese, Manchu, and Mogolian *Trilingual Glossary* with accompanying exercise book\] All of the notes introduced during the site visit raised interesting questions about the nature of ‘notes.’ We continually wondered where to draw the line between notes, manuscripts, and publication. In many cases, the notes we examined transformed from private reflection to publicly available manuscript or text. But the most remarkable aspect of the presentation was Harvard-Yenching itself. From knowledgeable research librarians such as Kuniko McVey and Raymond Lum down to hapless graduate students such as myself, the library offers an impossibly rich locus for exploration and discovery. The best advice I can offer is this: learn an Asian language and join the fray. You’ll discover more than you can possibly ever publish, and someday someone will study your research notes! ### **Tour of Houghton Library (Site Visit, Houghton Library)** Sun, 2012-12-02 14:23 -- ... Presenters: **William Stoneman**, Florence Fearrington Librarian of Houghton Library; **Susan Halpert**, Reference Librarian, Houghton Library Write-up by Rachel Stern (English, Harvard) At the Houghton Rare Books Library site visit, the focus was on broadening visitors’ ideas of what note-taking means. Although, unfortunately, Houghton’s full slate of ongoing exhibitions allowed only limited room for materials selected specifically for the Take Note conference, this constraint rendered historical shifts in note-taking technologies the more striking: an ancient Greek potsherd apparently bearing part of a second-century price list or inventory shared a display case with a 1581 pocket-sized book consisting of a 23-year calendar and set of writing tables (an artifact of particular interest in light of Tiffany Stern’s Friday talk on the role of writing tables in 16th-century piracy at the theater and its effect on Renaissance drama). The rest of the exhibition rooms at Houghton were opened up for the occasion by the library’s friendly and extremely knowledgeable curators, affording a look at the diverse forms and purposes of the practice of note-taking across Harvard’s collection, but particularly surrounding literary works and their authors. The current exhibit, drawn from Amy Lowell’s rich and extensive collection (From Austen to Zola: Amy Lowell as Collector, which runs through January 12, 2013), was rife with examples of different forms of note-taking occurring at various points in the life of a literary work, ranging from the notebook in which George Eliot sketched out the plot of *Middlemarch* to the poetess Anna Seward’s annotations in her copy of Scott’s *Marmion*. At the same time, the exhibit’s emphasis on Lowell as a collector provided valuable insight into the shifting status of notes in the field of rare book collection over the course of the 20th Century. As librarian Bill Stoneman pointed out, marginalia used to be prized only if they had “association value,” if they were the notes of a figure important in his own right. Anonymous marginalia was considered to detract significantly from the value of rare books, and the margins of many books in Houghton were “washed” by earlier collectors before eventually coming to Houghton’s collection. Now, as a function of rising scholarly interest in the material history of books and reading, such marginalia is increasingly sought after. Stoneman and fellow librarian Susan Halpert, in their commentary, emphasized the equally dramatic shift in scholarly practices of note-taking in the past several decades, discussing its impact on the research process within Houghton’s own reading room. With the advent, first of portable cameras and now increasingly of Internet-related devices such as tablets and iPhones, research has become much more targeted; researchers are more likely to come in knowing exactly what they want, take a picture of it, and leave. While acknowledging that this represents a gain in efficiency, Stoneman and Halpert expressed concerns that such efficiency comes at the expense of breadth in early phases of the research process, such as the exploration of a wider range of materials while in the reading room: the Internet may be phasing out the chance discovery (or, perhaps, giving it a new form). I am very grateful to Susan Halpert and Bill Stoneman for their assistance with this write-up. ### **Connected Collective Knowledge: The New Annotation-Citation Paradigm (Site Visit, HUIT Academic Technologies)** Sun, 2012-12-02 10:20 -- ... Presenters: **Philip Desenne**, Academic Technologies Senior Product Manager, Harvard University; **Marty Schreiner**, Head of Maps, Media, Data, and Government Information, Harvard College Library; **Paolo Ciccarese**, Ph.D., Instructor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School, Assistant in Neuroscience at Mass General Hospital This session focused on current initiatives for digital annotation and for using new technology in diverse areas of academic enterprise. The former was represented particularly by [**Domeo**](http://annotationframework.org/) (Document Metadata Exchange Organizer), a web application that allows users to annotate webpages, share their annotations, and mine annotations for data. The latter was discussed in relation to **multimedia libraries**, **metadata**, and **new academic coursework** training students to present their work via new media. **Philip Desenne** contextualized our modern annotation concerns within a history of annotation that is millennia old. Petroglyphs were perhaps the first annotations; annotations are also present in some of the earliest texts surviving from antiquity. Two particularly useful concepts for the history of annotation are “[**scholion**](http://euripidesscholia.org/)” and “[**hypomnena**](http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0057:entry=#108803&redirect=true).” In the Middle Ages, interlinear glossing was common practice among the learned. An uncommon exemplum is this [**Latin Psalter with Old English gloss**](http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/bodley/about/exhibitions/online/crossing-borders/learning-hebrew-in-thirteenth-century-england). In the present day, as the number of distinct media types (text, video, audio, image, etc.) we might annotate has grown, the complications of annotating practices and programs have also grown. **Marty Schreiner** discussed a variety of current projects to incorporate new media into research and teaching. With the rise of the digital, many libraries are employing new means to accomplish their mission, and a number have made new technology the heart of their physical buildings. Some examples are the [**Taylor Digital Library**](http://tfdl.ucalgary.ca/faqs) and the [**Mansueto Library**](http://mansueto.lib.uchicago.edu/). Some university curricula are also embracing new media in student work. One example at Harvard is Professor Shigehisa Kuriyama’s courses, which often require students to submit video projects to the [**Harvard Shorts Film Festival**](http://shorts.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do), supported by Lamont Library’s Media Lab. Connecting library resources with each other and researchers via catalog record is one of the points of connection to the conference topic; the metadata that underlie electronic catalog records are a type of annotation and the management and manipulation of metadata are challenges for the modern library. Another important point of contact at Harvard is the development of new services in providing access to Harvard’s digital repository, which relates to the development of a new annotation framework, discussed below. **Paolo Ciccarese** introduced the audience to **Domeo**, an online annotation tool that has been of particular use in the sciences. [**Domeo**](http://vimeo.com/33057828) allows users to make notes on web material of all sorts, and it also allows for automated annotation, a particular concern when the secondary literature of a field is unwieldy. Domeo has been developed in parallel to [**Annotation Ontology**](http://www.jbiomedsem.com/content/2/S2/S4), a vocabulary for sharing annotation in Resource Description Framework (RDF) format. Notes generated in Domeo can be shared and mined and although its source is in biomedicine, its possibilities for use extend beyond the sciences. Domeo will soon support the Open Annotation Model that is the work in progress of the [**W3C Open Annotation Community Group**](http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation), which Ciccarese co-chairs. The purpose of this group is to work towards a common, RDF-based, specification for annotation digital resources. In summing up the session, Desenne highlighted the major problem confronting digital annotations today: there is no single and uniform digital annotation framework. The usefulness for scholarship of such a framework would be great, as it would allow users to store, search, discover, share and analyze scholarly annotations across digital media. So Desenne and colleagues are proposing to create just such an interoperable and public framework built with an annotation, tagging and citation application programming interface (**API**) and conforming to the **Open Annotation Model** of the W3C Open Annotation Community Group. The framework will also rely on persistently digitally archived resources such as the ones currently available through the new Harvard Library Digital Repository Service (DRS 1 and 2). **General issues suggested by the session** 1. How important or useful is it to be able to specify the precise moment in a video where an annotator wishes to comment without recourse to description? Why? (ie What are the implications of the differences between writing “at 5:30 in this video” versus being able to comment directly at 5:30 in the video?) 2. How similar are the concerns of annotation management and metadata management? 3. As space becomes less of a problem (cp. interlinear glosses) and time more of a problem (Ciccarese’s example of attempting to read the 150-200 articles published a week on a sub-field) what are the implications for annotations? ### **Pervasive, Transferable Annotation for Science Content on the Web (Site Visit, MIND Informatics Group)** Sun, 2012-12-02 19:38 -- ... Presenters: **Tim Clark**, Harvard Medical School; **Paolo Ciccarese**, Harvard Medical School Write-up by Elyse Graham (English, Yale) The MIND Informatics site visit offered a glimpse of the trends and concerns that are shaping new models of note-taking in the sciences. The project on display was a digital annotation application called Domeo, which aims to reinvent annotation for the era of big data. The group’s principal investigator is Tim Clark, a computer scientist at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital; the project’s chief software architect is Paolo Ciccarese. The idea for Domeo dates back to the early 2000’s, when Clark’s team, which works on Alzheimer’s, began work on creating a “knowledge base” of competing models of the pathogenesis of the disease. The team designed a database and, with the help of scientists at an online Alzheimer’s forum who combed through a small mountain of publications, catalogued some 120 distinct models of the pathological process. The database connected these models with the sets of evidence used to support them—that is, with points and excerpts from published papers. While carrying out this work, however, Clark’s team found some problems with the general undertaking. For one thing, the process of connecting claims with specific papers was often bothersome. (This was one of the main points the scientists brought up as feedback: “Some said, sure, they knew what paper a claim was coming from, but it was hard to go back and find it.”) More importantly, it became clear that the work of maintaining the site—that is, organizing facts and interpretations—couldn’t be left to a third party, like a site curator, since even organizing facts performs an act of judgment. Even picking out evidence stirred disputes. As Clark said, “What is the meaning of that piece of evidence versus this, of that model versus this?” The team concluded that what they really needed was a knowledge base of interpretations or claims (including conflicting ones) that scientists themselves could curate essentially as a note-taking activity. But they also wanted the same kind of clear and synchronized interface they had envisioned for the original project. The claims should be able to “map over” the literature with distinctness and clarity, like overlapping slide transparencies. For the past three years, Clark has been leading a group focused on building such a tool. They began by building a new model using a standard web ontology language, OWL, that tracks the provenance and locations in text of annotations a user can make. This enables users working independently to make annotations that relate to each other in a common model, binding together many other pre-existing vocabularies in biology. “There are hundreds of existing vocabularies and terminologies in biology,” Clark said. “Web technology lets you formulate terminologies using description logics. This lets you characterize what you’re talking about—if I’m talking about a class of organisms and someone else is talking about a species, the computer can figure out they’re related.” Digital culture has also influenced how readers appear as potential users. The Internet has made newly visible the sheer variety of interest groups who make up the readers of a particular publication, and these groups are learning to communicate their needs to the designers of new tools for reading. “The players have different motivations and different kinds of rewards,” Clark said. “Writing, reviewing, editing, curating, researchers trying to develop new drug targets and lead compounds, data miners—all of these have different angles and incentives. If you want to be friends with a cat, you give it cat food, not fish food. We tried to figure out what each group needs and give it to them.” He added, “We’re trying to build the system’s new capabilities into the whole ecosystem of scientific communication taking place on the web.” The project has attracted a good deal of interest. Some 120 people are on the waiting list for Domeo Version 2, which is expected to come out in December 2012. (Version 1 has been available since 2011.) Their funding comes both from industry, which is eager to conquer the world of big data, and from NIH. Teams working with the current version include an NIH-funded project at UC San Diego that is creating a registry of 100 million antibodies found in neuroscience literature; and a pharmaceutical company that hopes to organize discussions and data on the biological pathways it wants to intervene in with drugs. But there is nothing to prevent future readers, professional or otherwise, from using the application to curate individual knowledge bases. “Seventeen, nineteen years ago, we started moving scientific publications onto the web,” he said. “But my colleagues still walk into their offices and have big stacks of paper with sticky notes and highlights all over them. It’s easy to do that kind of thing with paper, but people want to do it online, so they have all their information in one place.” ### **Exploring new representations of dimensionality (Site Visit, metaLAB)** Sun, 2012-12-02 10:16 -- ... Presenters: **Jeffrey Schnapp**, Director, metaLAB, and Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature; **Matthew Battles**, Senior Researcher, metaLAB; **Yanni Loukissas**, Senior Researcher, metaLAB; **Ben Brady**, Harvard GSD '12. Write-up by Tim Clark (Harvard Medical School) Jeffrey Schnapp, Matthew Battles and Yanni Loukissas led the metaLAB site visit for attendees of Harvard’s Take Note Conference. After some opening remarks, their presentation substantively began with a Bialetti espresso maker. Using the object’s catalog record from the Museum of Modern Art, Battles invited the audience to consider what information was missing. This question leads to one of the central premises of metaLAB’s presentation: how can we see, conceptually and visually, an object as a node for the relation of additional information. The process of representing and seeing the “social relations of objects” is still in an exploratory phase. But Battles and Loukissas showed a few examples of how these relations might be modeled. For the espresso maker, they displayed a three-dimensional rendering from which information on dimensions, graphics, materials, and historical uses (among others) protrude when the object is manipulated on screen. As a second, more historically rarified example, Battles and Loukissas take the instance of an *ostrakon*, a pottery shard used for the inscription of text, from a collection in Houghton Library. These pieces of pottery were employed for a variety of disposable textual purposes, such as voting, in the ancient eastern Mediterranean. As such they represent something of a curatorial quandary, generally requiring epistemic classification as an anthropological object (leading to a museum collection) or a text (leading to a library collection). metaLAB’s approach seeks to unify these representations of the object. A special tool that the researches have developed is a rotating series of cameras that helps construct three-dimensional images of the objects. Simple videos that show the *ostrakon* being handled give the viewer a greater sense of its materiality. To these, metaLAB attaches a series of notes indicating the history of the *ostrakon*’s relations (like similar objects or relevant scholarship) through time. These representations are clearly useful to scholars as analytic tools to aggregate information pertinent to the objects they study. But Battles and Loukissas stressed the pedagogical value of these projects. They are central to metaLAB’s “Teaching with Things” initiative, challenging students and researchers to come up with their own conceptions of how to display the materiality of objects. This process encourages scholars to reflect on the limitations and possibilities inherent in institutionally normative schemes of representation, like a museum’s catalog record. This awareness can allow us to explore and transgress new horizons in the materiality of objects. ### **Tour of the Weissman Preservation Center (Site Visit, Weissman Preservation Center)** Sun, 2012-12-02 19:57 -- ... Site Leader: Brenda Bernier, Head of the Weissman Preservation Center Write-up by Stella Wang (English, Harvard) and Andrew Bellisari (History, Harvard) The highly secure preservation studio atop 90 Mount Auburn Street, with its gleaming metal fixtures, slanting skylights, and rough concrete accents could provide the perfect backdrop for a cheap techno-thriller; the kind in which rakish professors and sassy femme fatales race against time – not to mention a secret cabal of enemies – to decode an ancient cipher cleverly hidden within the pages of a centuries-old manuscript. Arguably, the work done on the fourth floor of the Weissman laboratory is considerably less dramatic, but a race against time does take place here every day. It is a race to conserve Harvard’s massive collection of rare books, manuscripts, photographs, and private papers. Twenty-three specialized technicians and conservators spend hundreds of hours to maintain the special collections of Harvard’s seventy-three libraries, which include everything from fifteenth-century illuminated manuscripts to nineteenth-century theatrical playbills. Incredible care is devoted to artifacts during their stay at the Weissman. Conservators patch worm-eaten vellum, restore weathered covers of soft red morocco, remove stains on line drawings left by time and water, use UV light to read the traces of ink long since faded beyond identification, and mend thin papers with slivers of Japanese paper no thicker than a strand of hair. These processes are often exceedingly delicate. One smudge of the finger, for example, will irreparably damage the ghostly portrait frosted on daguerreotype plate. At each step, history could be effaced. The awareness of the fragility of the artifacts gives greater urgency for digitization. Sometimes staff will recommend that particularly fragile objects be put away in cases after digital copies are made, and to restrict handling. In a strange way, emphasizing the value of the material object itself necessitates the loss of its aura -- its physical presence and visibility. Much of the work at Weissman is driven by digitization, and stabilizing material to be photographed or scanned consumes a large portion of the hours dedicated to conservation. Requests come from both public institutions and private patrons. Once scanned, the digital image can be placed into reference databases, preserving the object in the most idealized state the conservators can bring it. Although a digital daguerreotype cannot replicate the ephemeral experience of looking at one in person (so sensitive to conditions of light and angle at which it is viewed), it nonetheless will have a greater chance of an afterlife. Viewers from across the world can access such images without damage and decay that inevitably happens from handling the real thing. One of the more significant digitization projects underway is a 500-year old manuscript from the late Renaissance: the *Livre de la Chasse* (Book of the Hunt) from Houghton Library. This illuminated manuscript, dating from 1485, is being stabilized for photography on behalf of a patron to produce a high-quality digital facsimile. The stabilization process will take around 300 man-hours to accomplish. As part of this process, a conservator reviews each individual illuminated panel under a high-powered microscope to determine whether a repair is necessary to the pigment. If it is, a gelatin solution is applied to larger pigment particles using a very fine brush. Powdery pigments are stabilized using a nebulizer – a device more commonly used to vaporize medication for inhalation – that atomizes the gelatin into an adhesive mist. This mist soaks the pigment reinforcing its bond to the surface of the manuscript without causing the original colored powder to congeal. Because of the mental and physical stress of staring through the microscope and applying a wispy brush with painstaking precision, the conservators take shifts of several hours apiece. Very apropos to our 'Take Note' theme, the conservators have to take notes to track and show each other what aspects of the manuscripts they have worked on. They have an old-fashioned binder with print outs of the images, which they mark up with pencil in the margins. They also have a sophisticated digital 'map' of the images with brightly colored areas demarcating the exact locations of the painted specks that they have repaired. While there are no immediate plans to put such notes up on any database, Weissman is nonetheless keeping these notes for posterity—just in case they might come in handy in the future.