Textuality and Cultures of Documentation

The group has active research interests in both historical and contemporary notions of textuality and how these are activated in social and theoretical contexts. Differing interpretations of "text," "archive," "documentation" and "dissemination" are at the heart of a number of the endeavours of the group.

Robert Mayhew works on the historical geographies of print culture in early modern Europe with particular interests in the history of geography as a discourse and in geography’s intersections with print culture. He has also written extensively on editing and its impact on the geographical tradition and on historiographical questions concerning the meaning of print.

JD Dewsbury’s work on post-structural philosophy looks at the textualities, as the mix of the semiotic and the material, used to document live events (political, artistic & everyday). In particular, he has written on the ways in which such textualities evidence the world in different ways and make intelligible absence (the past, the corporeal & the spiritual).

In a forthcoming paper, and framed by the ‘practical turn’ within the historiography of science, Merle Patchett recovers the development and practice of taxidermy as a scientific craft through close comparative study of its ‘how-to-do’ manuals.  In the paper Merle demonstrates how period taxidermy manuals offer rich resource for exploring not only how taxidermy was being formalised as a ‘thing to do’ in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, but also how and where it was practiced and by whom.