The coming weeks will see a series of posts from project team members working on different components of Mill’s Marginalia. Carissa Schreiber, former Research Assistant to Professor Pionke at the University of Alabama, will start us off with a series of posts about her work gathering data and establishing appropriate descriptive terms to capture Mill’s nonverbal marginalia.
We will also be hearing from Professor Pionke about the project’s Advisory Board, and as he, Anne Manuel, and Hazel Tubman, newly-appointed Research Assistant at Somerville College, will all be in Oxford in July, we may hear some updates of their in-person work, too. On all fronts, from metadata to digitization to the latest from Mill’s sharpest marginal judgements, we will keep you posted! Please keep checking in on the blog for our latest work.
– Emma Annette Wilson, Digital Scholarship Librarian, University of Alabama.
Somerville College is proud to possess the library of John Stuart Mill and his father, James Mill. Whilst the collection has been at Somerville since 1905 when Helen Taylor, Mill’s step-daughter, gave the books to the college for its newly-formed library, it is only in recent years that a major campaign has been launched to promote, preserve and research the books and the marginalia contained therein.
Displaying commemorating the gift of Mill’s library to Somerville College.
On May 20th 2016, the 210th anniversary of John Stuart Mill’s birth, Somerville College marked the occasion with an evening of lectures, networking and conviviality and the launch of its newest venture, Friends of the John Stuart Mill library.
Professor Alan Ryan. Picture courtesy of Anne Manuel.
The renowned Mill scholar Professor Alan Ryan delivered his talk on “Drudges, Blue-Stockings, and Fallen Women: John Stuart Mill on Sex, Suffrage and Education”, whilst historian Dr Frank Prochaska talked about Mill and American Democracy which featured his fascinating findings from the marginalia in De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, one of the treasures of Somerville’s collection.
Professor Frank Prochaska. Picture courtesy of Anne Manuel.
With more than one hundred in the audience there were plenty of questions, including those on Mill’s feminism and his varied and various attitudes to women and the validity of Mill’s views on a country (US) that he had never visited. As ever, Mill’s thinking and writing seemed particularly relevant no more so than now in the run-up to the US Presidential election. The multi-disciplinary, multi-sector audience had plenty of opportunities for catching up over drinks both before and after the lecture and the Friends group had swelled in numbers by the end of the evening!
The lectures will be available to members of the Friends group through its annual newsletter to be published in the summer. All enquiries about the collection, the Friends group or the project to preserve, promote and research the library should be addressed to anne.manuel@some.ox.ac.uk, College Librarian and Archivist.
— Anne Manuel, Somerville College Librarian and Archivist.
I am pleased to declare the Mill Marginalia blog open for business. Fuller descriptions of the Mill Marginalia Online project, its scope, goals, sources, and contributors, are available on the static pages of this site. This more dynamic space will be dedicated to providing updates and in-process explanations. The first of these will come from Carissa Schreiber, whose early work with Mill’s marginalia helped to establish the project’s metadata schema, to populate that schema with copious amounts of hyper-efficiently transcribed data, and to edit the initial set of photos of Mill’s handwritten marks and annotations into a coherently labeled and visually pleasing set of page images. We also anticipate upcoming messages from Anne Manuel, Somerville College librarian and a most felicitous institutional collaborator, as well as ongoing research and presentation reports from Albert Pionke and Emma Wilson.
