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December 17, 2025
Research Data Management Forum: Third meeting – 28/03/2017
Harkening back to a bygone era of libraries, when books were printed on paper and research data management meant not accidentally burning your notes with your candle, the third meeting of the university RDM forum was held in the impressively aged Old Library in Geography’s Old Infirmary building at the end of March.
As a regular participant, I find the RDM forum is a very useful platform for everyone who has an interest in supporting research data management. It is an opportunity for me to update myself on the support and services that the university has in place in this area, to ask the daft questions but get a sensible answer and more generally, to meet the others in the university who are working in the same area as myself and face the same issues and challenges.
This edition of the RDM forum was no different. After a quick introduction of the participants, Cuna, leading the forum, took us through the following agenda:
- Cuna Ekmekcioglu – RDM update
- Dominic Tate – DataVault update
- Pauline Ward – DataShare new features
- Cuna Ekmekcioglu – development of Data Safe Haven
The session began with the RDM update which went into detail about the RDM Sharepoint site and some of the tools and documents that have been uploaded to the site. There are some useful threads looking to collect information about the different types of data that we have, as well as some guidance on recording datasets in PURE, RDM journey flowchart and sample Data Management Plans amongst other things. The Sharepoint site can be accessed by request, and can be found here: https://uoe.sharepoint.com/sites/rdmforum (access is only for UoE staff and students).
We had updates on the existing services such as DataShare and details about the development of both DataVault and the future Data Safe Haven, a system which will allow the storage and analysis of very sensitive data. There were some discussions around the new systems and practical issues such as cost and training/guidance for the new services.
It was a very worthwhile event and I shall be looking forward to the next forum.
Michelle O’Hara
Research Data & Information Officer
School of Social and Political Science
Finding my way around the map and atlas collection
We catch up with Helen, our Projects Conservator at the University Collections Facility (UCF), in this week’s blog…
As the Rationalisation Projects Conservator my role is to make sure that the risk of damage to the objects which are housed at the UCF is minimised during the project. It is my job to make sure that the objects can be safely handled by the cataloguing team and any readers who come to visit. I am currently working on a collection of maps and atlases which date from around 1840. Many of these objects are beautifully illustrated and are an excellent example of the craftsmanship of the time.
Celtic Knot – Wikipedia Language Conference
Registration is now open for the Celtic Knot – Wikipedia Language Conference that will be taking place on Thursday 6th July 2017 in the Edinburgh Business School. Read More
New books in the Library for History, Classics and Archaeology
Thanks to recommendations from members of staff and requests via RAB from students the Library is continually adding new books to its collections both online and in print. Here are just a (very) small number of the books that have been added to the Library’s collections in semester two, 2016/17 for the School of History, Classics and Archaeology and these demonstrate the wide range of subjects being taught, studied and researched within School.
Mesopotamia: ancient art and architecture by Zainab Bahrani (shelfmark: Folio N5370 Bah.)
JFK and the masculine mystique: sex and power on the New Frontier by Steven Watts (shelfmark: HQ1090.3 Wat.)
A social history of tea: tea’s influence on commerce, culture & community by Jane Pettigrew and Bruce Richardson (shelfmark: GT2907.G7 Pet.)
The culture of clothing: dress and fashion in the ‘ancien régime’ by Daniel Roche ; translated by Jean Birrell (shelfmark: GT857 Roc.)
Sicily: culture and conquest by Dirk Booms and Peter Higgs (shelfmark: DG865 Boo.) Read More
The perils of Christian mission : writing from the New World
Guest curator Suzi Higton writes about her current display in the Funk Reading Room case
In their quest to spread the Word of God, missionaries have for centuries traversed continents to reach some of the most isolated and hostile places on earth. Currently on display at New College Library is a mere handful of the wealth of literature written by those who risked their lives to introduce Christianity to nations only recently acquainted with Western influence.
Dating from the mid-1850s to the turn of the nineteenth century, these titles are notable not only for their vivid Victorian book bindings, but for the captivating stories of enduring hardship and inherent peril of which they tell.
The daughters of Syria : a narrative of efforts by Mrs. Bowen Thompson for the evangelization of the Syrian females; Bishop Hannington : the life and adventures of a missionary hero; A thousand miles of miracle in China; . From New College Library
A Thousand Miles of Miracle in China first published in 1904, recounts the personal experience of Archibald D. E. Glover, a missionary who witnessed first-hand the brutality of the Boxer Uprising of June 1900, an unrelenting attack on Western missionaries and Chinese Christian converts. Glover recalls half of the missionaries in the Shan-si region were murdered and that he and his family were lucky to escape with their lives.
The Cross and the Dragon or Light in the Broad East focuses on an earlier era of missionary work in China as described by the Reverend Benjamin Couch Henry. A Princeton graduate, Henry travelled to Canton (now Guangzhou) in 1874 and describes in detail the deeply unwelcoming reception of Western missionaries. Labelled as ‘foreign devils,’ it was widely believed they had brought misfortune to the country, including drought and famine.
The story of James Hannington, who became the first bishop of East Equatorial Africa, begins on a decidedly light-hearted note but ends ultimately in tragedy. The Life and Adventures of Bishop Hannington documents in often comical detail the Anglican minister’s travels to Zanzibar and Uganda between 1883 and 1885. Accompanied by striking colour illustrations and formed in part by humorous letters written to his young nephews, Hannington’s eventual kidnap and murder by tribesmen is recorded from his own pocket journal recovered by a later expedition after his death.
A number of missionary accounts from the period are noteworthy for their inclusion of foldable maps as seen in Fiji and the Fijians. Measuring just 18cm in length, the map included in this account which spans two volumes charts the cluster of islands as they would have appeared in the mid-nineteenth century to the missionaries who first arrived there. Missions to this region however were not without risk as demonstrated by the fate of English missionary Thomas Baker who was killed and eaten by cannibals in Nabatautau, Fiji in 1867.
The Daughters of Syria recounts the tireless work of female missionary Mrs Elizabeth Bowen. Following the outbreak of civil war which resulted in the massacre of thousands of Christians, Mrs Bowen travelled alone to Lebanon in 1860. Her efforts resulted in the establishment of the British Syria Schools in Beirut, providing a lifeline to the many widows and children left destitute by the conflict.
The diversity of missions undertaken during the Victorian era is perhaps best demonstrated by Village Work in India, the account of Normal Russell of the Canada Presbyterian Church. The Reverend’s mission to Madhya Pradesh, Central India between 1890 and 1902 is accompanied by a number of photographs taken during his often perilous travels.
Today, missionaries continue to travel the world and although many still encounter great danger, the fascinating yet harrowing accounts of these first missions provide unique insights into unexplored lands and of the lives of those who lived there.
Suzi Higton, School of Divinity
Do we have access to the British Newspaper Archive?
A question I get asked quite a lot is if we have access at the Library to the British Newspaper Archive. And it is the sort of question that I would usually be able to give a yes or no answer to but in the case of the British Newspaper Archive it isn’t quite as simple.
In fact the answer I would normally give is either “Yes, BUT…” or “No, BUT…”and I’ll try to explain why.
“Drawers” (https://flic.kr/p/gaUXpW) by Luke McKernan (https://flic.kr/ps/vNbEP) is licensed under CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/).
EDINA’s ShareGeo Open content into DataShare
Many fascinating datasets can be found in our new ShareGeo Open Collection: http://datashare.is.ed.ac.uk/handle/10283/2345 .
This data represents the entire contents of EDINA’s geospatial repository, ShareGeo Open, successfully imported into DataShare. We took this step to preserve the ShareGeo Open data, after the decision was taken to end the service. Not only have we maintained the accessibility of the data but we also successfully redirected all the handle persistent identifiers so that any existing links to the data, including those included in academic journal articles, have been preserved, such as the one in this paper: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10393-016-1131-y .
Similarly, should the day ever arrive when DataShare was to be closed, we would endeavour to find a suitable repository to which we could migrate our data to ensure its preservation, as per item 13 of our Preservation policy.
We were able to copy the content of almost all metadata fields from ShareGeo to DataShare. The fact both repositories use the Dublin Core metadata standard, and both were running on DSpace, made the task a little easier. The University of Edinburgh supports the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. DataShare’s metadata schema can be found at https://www.wiki.ed.ac.uk/display/datashare/Current+metadata+schema setting out what our metadata fields are and which values are permitted in them.
Our EDINA sysadmin (and developer) George was very helpful with all our questions and discussions that took place while the team settled on the most appropriate correspondence between the two schemas. The existing documentation was a great help too. George then produced a Python script to harvest the data, using OAI-PMH to get a list of ShareGeo items, then METS for the metadata and bitstreams. He then used SWORD to deposit them all in DataShare.
The team took the opportunity to use DSpace’s batch metadata editing utility and web interface to clean up some of the metadata: adding dates to the temporal coverage field and adding placenames and country abbreviations to the spatial coverage field, to enhance the discoverability of the data.
For example “GB Postcode Areas” can be found using the original handle persistent identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10672/51 as well as the new DOI which DataShare has given it – DOI: 10.7488/ds/1755. Each of the 255 items migrated to our ShareGeo Open Collection contains a file called metadata.xml which contains all the metadata exactly as it was when exported from ShareGeo itself. I have manually added placenames in the spatial coverage field (which was used differently in ShareGeo, with a bounding box i.e. “northlimit=60.7837;eastlimit=2.7043;southlimit=49.8176;westlimit=-7.4856;”). Many of these datasets cover Great Britain, so they don’t include Northern Ireland but do include Scotland, England and Wales. In this case I’ve added the words “Scotland”, “England” and “Wales” in Spatial Coverage (‘dc.coverage.spatial’), even though these are already implicit in the “Great Britain” value in the same field, because I believe doing so:
- enhanced the accessibility of the data (by making the geographical extent clearer for users unfamiliar with Great Britain) and…
- enhanced the discoverability of the data (users searching Google for “Wales” now have a chance of seeing this dataset among the hits).
James Crone who compiled this “GB Postcode Areas” data is part of EDINA’s highly renowned geospatial services team.
Part of James’ work for EDINA involves producing census geography data for the UK DataService. He has recently added updated boundary data for use with the latest anonymised census microdata (that’s from the 2011 census): see the Boundary Data Selector at https://census.ukdataservice.ac.uk/get-data/boundary-data .
Pauline Ward is a Research Data Service Assistant for the University of Edinburgh, based at EDINA.
Detail from GB Postcode Areas data, viewed using QGIS.
NEW! Rhizomata: a journal for ancient philosophy & science
We now have full access from volume 1 to this De Gruyter title, first published in 2013. Read More
Several Theses in One Binding
In this week’s blog post, Projects Conservator Nicole, gives us an update on the work she is carrying out for the Thesis Digitisation Project…
I am currently working on a collection of theses ranging in date from 1838 – 1850. They consist of theses of all different sizes that have been bound in large book cloth bindings. Some bindings contain up to 9 individual theses, which has made the spine more than 10cm in width. With such large bindings and different sized pages, surface dirt has accumulated in between the individual theses, and the bottom of the spines have become distorted and narrowed.
Theses before conservation treatment
‘BLAST’ – a journal that will ‘try and brave the waves of blood, for the serious mission it has on the other side of World-War’
‘…THIS PUCE-COLOURED COCKLESHELL […] HAS TO SPRING UP AGAIN WITH NEW QUESTIONS AND BEAUTIES WHEN EUROPE HAS DISPOSED OF ITS DIFFICULTIES…’
Detail from the ‘puce-coloured’ front cover of ‘Blast’, issue 2, July 1915, in the A.H. Campbell Collection.
These were the words of Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), editor of Blast, in his editorial piece published in the July 1915 issue (only the second issue) of the journal. About that issue, he said that it ‘finds itself surrounded by a multitude of other Blasts of all sizes and descriptions’.
Detail from the front cover of ‘Blast’, showing month of publication of issue 2… being July 1915… in the A.H. Campbell Collection.
Blast was the literary magazine of the Vorticist movement in Britain and it only survived two issues. The first issue came out only weeks before the beginning of the War, and the second came out a year later in 1915. It featured a woodcut by Lewis on the cover.
Detail from the front cover of ‘Blast’, issue 2, a woodcut by Wyndham Lewis, in the A.H. Campbell Collection.
The vorticists were an avant-garde group formed in London in 1914 – with Wyndham Lewis as its founder – aiming towards an art that expressed the dynamism of the modern world. Vorticism was launched with the journal Blast which, within its content included manifestos ‘blasting’ the effeteness of British art and culture and proclaiming the vorticist aesthetic.
Detail from the title page of ‘Blast’ issue 2, July 1915, in the A.H.Campbell Collection.
Vorticist painting combined Cubist fragmentation of reality with an imagery derived from the machine and the urban environment. In its embrace of dynamism, the machine age and all things modern, it is more closely related to Futurism.
‘The Engine’ by one of the signatories to the Vorticist manifesto Jessica Dismorr (1885-1939). Her illustrations show a sharing of the involvement with the dynamism of the machine-age city. In ‘Blast’, issue 2, July 1915, in the A. H. Campbell Collection.
Blast, issue 2, included designs by painter and illustrator Jessica Dismorr (1885-1939), artist and architect Frederick Etchells (1886-1973), artist and sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891-1915), painter Jacob Kramer (1892-1962), and by figure and landscape painter, etcher and lithographer, Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson (1889-1946).
‘On the way to the trenches’ by Nevinson, in ‘Blast’ issue 2, July 1915, in the A. H. Campbell Collection.
It also contained graphic contributions from the figure and portrait painter William Roberts (1895-1980), Helen Saunders [or Sanders] (1885-1963), Dorothy Shakespear (1886-1973) artist and wife of Ezra Pound, artist Edward Alexander Wadsworth (1889-1949), and also Wyndham Lewis.
‘The Design’ by Jessica Dismorr (1885-1939), in ‘Blast’, issue 2, July 1915, in the A. H. Campbell Collection.
Other contributions were made by Ezra Pound (1885-1972), Ford Madox Hueffer [Ford Madox Ford] (1873-1939), and T. S. Eliot (1888-1965).
The poem, ‘The old houses of Flanders’ by Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford Madox Ford) in ‘Blast’, issue 2, July 1915, p.37, in the A. H. Campbell Collection.
It had been the unfolding human drama, the unimagined industrial scale of death borne out of the machine-age, and the absolute disaster of the War – known to that generation as the Great War – that came to drain the Vorticists of their creative zeal. The real war experience of Ford Madox Ford influenced his poem ‘The old houses of Flanders’.
The poem, ‘A vision of mud’ by Helen Saunders in ‘Blast’, issue 2, July 1915, pp.73-74, in the A. H. Campbell Collection.
Ford writes of the mournful eyes of the houses watching the ways of men, and of the rain and night settled down on Flanders; how the eyes look at great, sudden red lights and the golden rods of the illuminated rain; how the old eyes that have watched the ways of men for generations close for ever, and how the gables slant drunkenly over.
‘Vortex Gaudier-Brzeska (Written from the trenches’, in ‘Blast, issue 2, July 1915, pp.33-34, in the A. H. Campbell Collection.
Unlike Ford, Helen Saunders had no first-hand knowledge of the trenches and the shell blasted Flanders but in her poem ‘A vision of mud’ she took the image of the mud of the trenches to describe a wider sense of foreboding and anxiety. She imagined what would happen to a body underground and about what it would feel like to drown in mud with eyes, nose, mouth and ears filled with it. She imagined the distortion of awareness, and how the body would swell and grow as it filled with mud. She described a muddy soup of bodies.
‘…There is mud all round […]
They fill my mouth with it. I am sick. They shovel it back again.
My eyes are full of it […]
It is pouring into me so that my body swells and grows heavier every minute […]
I have just discovered with what I think is disgust, that there are hundreds of other bodies bobbing about against me.
They also tap me underneath…’
Artwork in ‘Blast’, issue 2, July 1915, p.49, in A. H. Campbell Collection.
The trenches were also described by Frenchman Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. He wrote:
Human masses teem and move, are destroyed and crop up again.
Horses are worn out in three weeks, die by the roadside.
Dogs wander, are destroyed, and others come along.
It had been Lewis’s hope that with the end of the War – when Europe had ‘disposed of its difficulties’ – Blast and the Vorticist movement would ‘spring up again with new questions’ in order to tackle the ‘serious mission’ that it would have ‘on the other side of World-War’.
‘Design for programme cover – Kermesse’, by Wyndham Lewis, in ‘Blast’ issue 2, July 1915, p.75, in the A. H. Campbell Collection.
The War brought Vorticism to an end for the reasons already described in paragraphs above, but in 1920 Lewis did make a brief attempt to revive it with ‘Group X’, a short lived group of British artists formed to provide a continuing focus for avant-garde art in Britain.
‘Snow-scene’ by Dorothy Shakespear, in ‘Blast’ issue 2, July 1915, p.35, in A. H. Campbell Collection.
The real stories, real imagery, and real maimed victims of War – the horrors of War – had brought about a rejection of the avant-garde in favour of traditional art, and there was a ‘return to order’ and the more traditional approaches to art creation.
‘War-engine’ by Wadsworth, in ‘Blast’, issue 2, July 1915, in A. H. Campbell Collection.
Nevertheless, the typography of the Vorticists possibly places them as important forerunners of the revolution in graphic design that occurred in the 1920s and 1930s.
A copy of Blast, Issue 2, July 1915, was re-discovered in the Papers of Archibald H. Campbell, a collection which had been undergoing preliminary listing.
Dr. Graeme D. Eddie, Assistant Librarian Archives & Manuscripts, Centre for Research Collections, Edinburgh University Library
Used in the construction of this blog-post, in addition to the issue of Blast (2) 1915, were: (1) ‘ Beyond the trenches’, Dr. Kate McLoughlin, in Research & teaching, Review 2013, pp.30-31, from Birkbeck web-pages [accessed 27 July 2016]; and, (2) ‘Vorticism’ and other pages on the website of the tate.org.uk [accessed 27 July 2016].
Collections
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