people – Page 2 – Early Modern Graphic Literacies

The Early Modern Graphic Literacies team is looking for a researcher interested in collaborating with us through the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme (host institution: University of Turku, supervisor: project PI Matti Peikola). The candidates are evaluated by the supervisor in collaboration with the University’s Research Funding unit, and help is available for the MSCA application process for the selected candidate.

The University Hill (photo: Mari-Liisa Varila).

We are looking for an MSCA Postdoctoral Fellow in English studies with a specialisation in historical linguistics, book studies or textual scholarship to join EModGraL for two years to investigate early modern English graphic literacies and practices with us. The research to be undertaken by the MSCA Fellow may address any of the three main research objectives of EModGraL (or combine them in a meaningful way):

1) to map the distribution of different types of graphic devices in different kinds of books and to develop a new framework for their classification

2) to determine how target audience and topic influence the use of graphic devices; and

3) to establish how linguistic information and graphic devices work together in the context of the page and the whole book, for example through captions and reader instruction.

We particularly encourage postdoctoral projects that address texts in the domains of early modern science or mathematics and projects that focus on practical guidebooks or manuals in any field or domain. The dataset collected by the EModGraL project will be made available to the MSCA Fellow for the duration of the fellowship. The applicant’s precise research topic will be formulated in collaboration with the supervisor.

The deadline for expressions of interest is 23 March 2022. Please see the University website for the eligibility criteria and instructions on how to apply. Details concerning the EModGraL project specifically can be found on the same website under Social Sciences and Humanities > Early Modern Graphic Literacies (pdf). More information on the project can also be found in this project blog.

Matti Peikola is Professor of English at the Department of English, University of Turku. He is also the PI of Early Modern Graphic Literacies. In today’s blog post, Matti tells us more about the background and aims of the project.

A yellow two-storey building with autumnal trees in the background. — Team members currently work in the Rosetta and Signum buildings of the campus (built in 1899). Photo: Mari-Liisa Varila.

How did you first become interested in graphic literacies?

In the mid-2000s, I was working on Middle English tables of lections that are found in many manuscripts of the Wycliffite Bible. Although I was at that point primarily focusing on the textual transmission of these tables, my interest was piqued by the long opening rubrics (canons) of some of the tables that inform and instruct the reader about how information is structured and visually presented in them. In some of the tables, however, no such rubrics occur, which made me wonder about possible ‘graphic literacy’ -related reasons for their inclusion/omission.

Whose graphic literacies will the project investigate?

In practice, the project investigates early modern book producers’ and writers’ ideas about graphic literacies of their vernacular audiences and readers. In the project, we assume that these ideas are conveyed by book producers’ and writers’ adoption of different kinds of graphic devices in their books and their discussion of such devices in text and paratext.

What is, in your opinion, the most challenging aspect of the project?

It will be challenging to arrive at a classification of the early modern graphic devices that is not anachronistic and too reliant on modern typologies. We should approach the devices from their historical context(s) and take into account technological factors that constrain their use in early modern printed books. The classification also needs to be amenable to quantitative data analysis.

What kinds of material will the project explore?

We examine digital facsimiles of all books published in English in twelve sample years from 1521 to 1796 (at 25-year intervals). The materials are primarily accessed via the EEBO (Early English Books Online) and ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online) databases. The purpose is to record all books published in these years that contain graphic devices like tables and diagrams, and then investigate this dataset and its subsets quantitatively and qualitatively in various ways.

Why is studying early graphic literacies important?

Early modern graphic devices have so far been largely examined in Latin scientific writing by historians of science. In this project we examine texts of multiple domains and genres and focus on how graphic devices were accommodated to different kinds of vernacular audiences. The linguistic and philological dimension of this historical process is particularly important for us, and it has not been systematically addressed before. We are essentially looking for traces of different kinds of early multimodal literacies and how they were communicated by book producers and writers.

Mari-Liisa Varila | Twitter: @mlvarila

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