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Signs of Literacy is a community for collaborative research into historical literacy.

The community has been initiated by the social venture Chronoscopic Education, the MarineLives project and by social historian, Dr Mark Hailwood (Bristol).

Questions we are addressing include:

Who in the late C16th, C17th and early C18th could read and write?
How did they become literate?
How did literacy vary between occupation and location?
By age cohort?
By country?
Were there adult learners?
How did oral facility with multiple languages map (or not) to the literacy of reading and writing?

Conference presentations

IIIF Conference, Monday, May 21st - Friday, May 25th, 2018, Washington D.C.: Colin Greenstreet (MarineLives), 'Creating an IIIF/Transkribus/Recogito Enabled Manuscript Community to Explore C17th Literacy'
DH Benelux, Amsterdam, Wednesday, June 6th - Friday, June 8th, 2018: Nga Bellis-Phan (Paris 2 Pantheon-Assas) and Colin Greenstreet (MarineLives), 'MarineLives corpus of 17th century legal records. An example of cross-disciplinary reuse of structured & semi-structured text corpora'
Digital Humanities Congress, University of Sheffield, September 6th-8th, 2018: Mark Hailwood (Bristol) and Colin Greenstreet (MarineLives), 'Revisiting Historical Literacy: the Potential of Digital Humanities Approaches'

IIIF Community Call, Wednesday, April 25th, 2018: Analyzing markes, initials & signatures using IIIF images

Workshop

Stadsarchief Amsterdam, Tuesday, June 5th, 2018, 13.00-17.00, The Italian Room: 'Technology Tools to Explore Historical Literacy', hosted by Mark Ponte of the Alle Amsterdamse Akten project (Amsterdam notarial archives)

Scoping session

Alan Turing Institute, London, Friday, April 27th, 2018: Working on revised proposal for five day Digital Study Group to be held later this year: 'Pattern recognition of signatures and markes in historical manuscripts as a basis for sub-population identification'

Teams