Watching the SHARP 2023 conference on catchup

I’m a book historian, with a PhD in historic Scottish reading habits. For many years I have been a member of SHARP, the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing. I have also attended numerous SHARP academic conferences in person, since 2005, presenting papers at a number of them. Though now attendance in person isn’t feasible any more for me, given my progressive neurological disease.

During the Covid pandemic era some of the SHARP conference content has been available to view online, though this has been varied by year in terms of number of online events. However this year, 2023, the conference was run completely online, organised by the University of Otago in New Zealand, but streaming worldwide, both to watch live and on catchup. This way speakers and attendees from all over the world could participate.

I was too ill to offer a talk this year, and also too ill in late June to watch the conference live. However I’ve just enjoyed watching it on catchup. Talks as originally streamed via Zoom were available for paid attendees to watch on catchup through August, using a web browser Zoom interface (which my laptop browser was a bit flaky over, but we got there!). I had also printed out the programme, and noted which talks were of most interest to me to watch, given my limited time. Here are the panels I watched over the last couple of months:

• Readers on Bookstagram
• Eighteenth-century Libraries Online: An Introduction and Showcase
• Special Collections’ Pedagogies as Immersive Encounters
• Dickens as Author and Publisher
• Networks of Support
• ‘They Are Books to Me’ (Until they Aren’t): Reader Experiences of the Realness of Electronic Books.
• Traces of Readers
• Black Voices in North American Colonial Print
• Counterculture and Collections
• Censorship in Spain and Mexico
• Reading Together and On Screen
• Digital Platforms and New Opportunities in Book History

Most of these panels had a couple of speakers plus a chair. I must thank all the speakers and chairs I saw, for what was a very efficiently run series of talks. Plus thanks to the people taking part after in the Q&A sessions for each panel, even if as a catchup viewer I was not able to take part in the live Q&As myself. And enormous thanks to the technical team keeping things running smoothly, and to the organisers of the conference. Though I was surprised there was no directly provided chat facility to assist networking and communications between attendees. For example a Discord facility could have helped here.

My own book history research focuses on reading habits, primarily in seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century Scotland. However I have wider book history interests, both in time and space, and also theme. So I was delighted to watch many talks from this conference. Every single talk I watched inspired me in some way or another, whether it be research questions, interesting areas new to me to follow up, or methodology or presentation. I was constantly taking screen shots of interesting things for later followup.

A particular highlight for me was Laura Dietz’s keynote on electronic books. Due to my progressive neurological disease I have struggled increasingly with print books since the late 1990s, including throughout my PhD. I am a passionate advocate of ebooks as a valid form of reading, and angry that this can be dismissed too readily by some readers and also some academic book historians. If I’d given a talk to SHARP this year it was going to be a very personal one about my own experiences as a disabled reader who is both academic book historian and enthusiastic reader, and relies on ebooks for accessibility reasons. Laura’s talk touched on this, discussing results from a survey researching in this reader. And some of the people who had responded echoed my views. So I felt represented.

I am also an enthusiastic member of online book groups, so talks about Bookstagram and communal book club reading appealed. Likewise learning about Black book history topics was enlightening. And of course familiar areas to me, such as the Liverpool Eighteenth-Century Libraries Online group presenting a demo of their database plus initial findings.

I know that there is a push back towards face to face conferences, including in SHARP. But I hope that online streaming – and some form of hybrid – will continue to allow access to the conference for people who cannot be there in person, whether for economic reasons, disability or health risks, family or caring commitments, or aspects of geography. SHARP 2023 has been a delight for me, even on catchup. I hope that SHARP 2024 will be too.

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Review of “Index, A History of the” by Dennis Duncan

I recently read this new book, exploring the history of book indexes over time. This obviously appealed to me as a book historian and bibliophile. But especially so because a couple of decades ago I retrained as a book indexer, qualifying with the Society of Indexers in the UK. I hoped that it would be work I could manage alongside my progressive neurological illness. Sadly after qualifying I found I was already too ill to work reliably as an indexer. But I maintain a great interest in and appreciation for the form.

The book ranges broadly and deeply over what is very much an abstract concept, often difficult to grasp in some of its more theoretical elements. Yet the book explains these well. I particularly enjoyed the early sections on the medieval origins of the index, and the different approaches of the distinctiones (more subject based indexes) and concordances (more like modern web search indexes), and how these ultimately merged in a way to create the modern book index.

As a book historian the discussion of the transition into the printed book era was fascinating, including the establishment of page numbers. I hadn’t known of the practical difficulties early printers faced trying to print these. The book here included helpful illustrations to show how early books were printed and numbered. Indeed the whole book was illustrated well throughout, often showing example indexes from printed books.

Another highlight section for me was the chapter looking at the especially eighteenth century phenomenon of mock book indexes. Despite in my academic historian guise being an eighteenth-century specialist as well as an historian of reading I was quite unaware of these published works. I appreciated how soundly the discussion of the battles conducted to and fro through published indexes was grounded in the world of eighteenth-century publishing.

Moving closer to the present day the book looks at the establishment of indexing societies in the nineteenth century and some of their loftier goals. Surprisingly comparable to a modern Google-type search index, but rather something that was aimed to be built through the medium of traditional subject indexes. Indeed the role of printed book indexes alongside Internet-type search engines in the present day is a topic that the book returned to time and again.

I was most pleased to see the final chapter of the book cover in depth the working methods of modern professional book indexers. So often people assume that this work can now be done automatically by computer. But to produce a good and effective subject index still requires a human book indexer. This was further demonstrated by the book including part of an index to itself that had been generated by automated computer software. The limitations of the resulting index were clear, especially when viewed alongside the also included subject index compiled by a modern professional – and human! – book historian.

Overall this is a thoroughly enjoyable work, and an example of exemplary scholarship. Recommended of course to any bibliophile or book historian, or indeed to anyone who has found a book index helpful in the past and wants to know more. Thank you Dennis Duncan.

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