Snooping around on the message boards of livinghistory.co.uk, I found info about a conference on European Painted Cloths C14th-C21st (London, 15-16 Jun 2012).


The deadlines for the call for papers are already gone by, but the conference itself might be of interest. At the very least, it's a topic not encountered so very often, and I'm happy to see it gets looked at a bit more!

European Painted Cloths C14th-C21st
Pageantry, Ceremony, Theatre and the Domestic Interior

This two day conference will explore the use of painted cloths in religious ceremony, pageantry, domestic interiors and scenic art. It will focus on their change of context and significance from the
fourteenth to the twenty-first century exploring their different function, materials, and method of creation.

The potential for large sizes, portability, and versatility for religious objects including banners, hangings, altarpieces, and palls was the impetus for the emergence of fabrics as a painting support in Western art in the Middle Ages. The demand for elaborate altarpieces, church furnishings, and liturgical objects increased in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries due to changes to liturgical practice and an upsurge of religious fervour. The functionality of the works explains the survival of relatively few examples. Were paintings on fabric envisaged as ephemeral objects? There is evidence to the contrary. One of the most common forms of interior decoration for centuries, painted cloths have received less attention from art historians and historians than they deserve in part due to their poor survival. Often regarded as cheap substitutes for those who could not afford tapestries, their function has been oversimplified and their importance in  providing imagery as well as literary subjects has been underrated.

Scenic backcloths were once commissioned for court functions, part of an elaborate display of royal power and magnificence, such as the Field of the Cloth of Gold. The same methods and materials continued to be used for theatrical cloths. The nineteenth and twentieth century saw a
resurgence in interest in the art form, as established artists, among them Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Picasso and later Piper, Hockney and Caulfield, took up commissions for the theatre and ballet.

The conference, to be held at The Courtauld Institute of Art, will be run in collaboration with the Victoria & Albert Museum. Presentations by four keynote speakers will reflect the aim of the conference to bring together and foster interdisciplinary research between art and interiors historians, paintings and textile conservators.
Organised by Christina Young (The Courtauld Institute of Art) and
Nicola Costaras (Victoria & Albert Museum)

The Costume Society of America is holding their Western Region 2012 Symposium “Interpreting History through Costume”on March 17-18, 2012 at The William S. Hart Ranch & Museum in Santa Clarita, CA.

Their call for papers is still open until October 15. Here's the short of it:

The Western Region Symposium offers an opportunity for established Members and potential New Members to present Oral Research Papers or Research-in Progress, reports on unpublished research, new creations and/or practical experience.
Possible Topics Include: Designing costume for period theatrical or dance performances, films or television shows; Comparisons between recreated garments, or garments designed for performance, with actual historic garments; The importance of costume in the understanding of social, political & world history; How costumed docents enhance the understanding of museum collections & the visitor experience; Use of costume in non-costume exhibitions: an opportunity to provide context; Pursuit of the past: the impulse to collect historic dress; Using dress to create an historic character or personage for reenactment.

They welcome about everybody - so if that sounds interesting to you, check out the full call for papers on this website.

Here's the promised textile centred backlog. I'll start you off with a conference date again:

The conference "Dyes in History and Archaeology DHA30", a joint meeting with the Royal Society of Chemistry Historical Group, will take place 12-15 October 2011 in the University of Derby Enterprise Centre, Derby (UK). For more information, please visit the conference's website. While this is one of the many conferences I will not be able to attend, a poster about the Hallstatt project that I took part in will be shown there.

Since it came up again on MEDTC, for those of you lusting after a view of the textiles in the V&A in London: They will be available for study again probably in summer 2013, since the collection is moving to a new location. It's not a progress report, but at least some info: Clothworker's centre.

And now the juiciest bit for today. Beatrix Nutz who researches the textiles from Schloß Lengberg (medieval bras, anyone?) has been busy again, and her article about the very early needle lace from the finds is online. You can find the article here; it includes pics, schematic drawings of lace structures, and you can all understand it - just scroll down for the English text. Enjoy!

I really should not go check work emails before writing the blog, or it leads to severe late-blogging.

While I was away, a ton of mails (a small ton, anyways) came over the MEDTC-list. For example, this link that leads to a list of dissertations since 1994, with quite a few textile-related titles among it. I'm not going to re-post all the interesting bits from the list - if you did not join it in 2009 when I first wrote about it, or when you found out about it, you can join now by going to this old post, reading up on it and doing what you need to do.

There's the (annual) international conference „Experimental Archaeology in Europe 2011“ that will take place from 13.-16.10.2011 in Schleswig/Germany. It is organised by EXAR and the Archaeological Service and Museum of Schleswig-Holstein in castle Gottorf near Schleswig. Though termed "international", the conference is almost purely in German language. If you do not mind that, though, there will be a presentation about the Hallstatt textile reproduction that I was also involved in, and two other textile-focused papers. Unfortunately, I will miss the conference due to a date clash. If you think about going, you can find more info on the website www.exar.org.


And on the other side of Earth (more or less), there's a roundtable discussion about experimental archaeology:


Teaching Experimental Archaeology in an Academic Setting: A Roundtable Discussion

Increasingly, many archaeologists acknowledge the value of experimental archaeology and incorporate an experimental component into their research designs.   Simultaneously, numerous anthropology departments throughout the world are expose their students to the field by adding experimental archaeology courses to their departmental offerings or at least by including experimental components to more traditional archaeology classes.  The professors offering these courses come from various backgrounds and approach the material in very different ways.  Accordingly, we all have a great deal to offer one another.

In an effort to encourage dialogue between the instructors of these courses, a roundtable discussion focused on teaching experimental archaeology in an academic setting has been organized and is planned to take place during this year's Reconstructive and Experimental Archaeology Conference (REARC).  This conference will take place between October 14 and 16 at the Schiele Museum located in Gastonia, North Carolina (see: www.rearc.us).  If you: 1) currently teach or are planning on teaching an experimental archaeology course, 2) currently teach or are planning on teaching a course that includes an experimental archaeology component, or 3) are interested in how experimental archaeology is taught in an academic setting, please consider participating in this roundtable.  In addition to a lively discussion, I would like to also assemble a packet of hard copy and digital materials such as syllabi, reading lists, class activities, etc. that can be shared amongst the participants and interested conference attendees.  Please consider sharing these materials whether or not you plan on attending the conference.  If you are planning on participating in any capacity please respond to Bill Schindler (Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist vor Spambots geschützt! Zur Anzeige muss JavaScript eingeschaltet sein.) by September 15, 2011.


More of the backlog, but with a more textile nature, tomorrow.

This blog post was prompted by a praise of Powerpoint over at the Naked Philologist - and rather than crowding the comments there, I'm doing my own blog post. With a great amount of "never ever" in it.

Having studied archaeology, I am totally used to papers with visual aides - and I had the transition time from photo/picture slides to Powerpoint during my time at university, so I know what you can do with slides, and I know how much better you can do with Powerpoint.

I rely heavily on Powerpoint, and I don't do a paper or a lecture without it. I need the visual stuff for my audience - you just can't talk about archaeology things without showing picture documentation of trenches and finds and architecture - and I also like to sneak in some visual jokes (one of my favourites is the lady beating her husband with a distaff). But totally apart from that, I speak without a fully written paper text and often even without any notes for my papers, and I mostly rely on the Powerpoint slides in front of me, on the computer, to keep track of what I want to say and what comes next. That is why I have slides with keywords or key phrases, original texts (plus citation for the text and translation), photos and drawings and reconstructions and pictures all mixed together into one paper. Take away my powerpoint... and I will not know what to say when, since you have just taken away all my memory aids and all my visual aids and all the other stuff I wanted to show.

I've also been known to bring along stuff like spindles, garments, cloth, deer antlers or whatever else is connected to my paper - either to brandish it or to demonstrate a process or, if the audience is small enough, to have it handed round for a proper feel of the thing. (The latter can be dangerous, though - since handling something and passing it on can be greatly distracting. I thus prefer nowadays to offer handling of the item(s) in question after the actual speaking part.)

However, Powerpoint can also go grossly wrong. So the things I would recommend for anyone thinking about using it are:
- Make sure your font is easy to read - something like Trebuchet, or Arial. Use only one font (two if you want to differentiate between original texts and modern language), and don't write too much on one slide. Never go below 20 pt font size. Never ever. Split the slide up into two slides instead.
- Powerpoint has those fancy phase-in and phase-out gadget buttons for your pics/items/slides. These I find utterly distracting - especially if they are used randomly. I prefer my pics to just appear and disappear without bells and whistles, and I have added a custom button to my Powerpoint that does exactly that to my item. Since I use several things on single slides, I use that button a lot.
Using only a simple appearance has the added benefit that if you really want to emphasise a picture, once in a very long while, a special appearance move will do that for you.
- Blinky text? Never ever. Really. Only distracts the eye of the viewer - and you don't want that Same goes for anything else that moves - just don't. (Videos are an exception to this, of course. Since they are watched, and then they are over and still again.)
- Go for good contrast between your text and the background. Don't use a background that has too much going on or any high contrast; if you want to use a pic as background, tweak its gamma, brightness and contrast until it is only a slightly coloured backdrop for your black text.
- Keep in mind that another computer and another beamer may skew your colours; yellow is especially hard to see on some beamers. Go for rather dark, clear colours if you need to show graphs or drawings; always make the lines thicker than you think they should be for easy reading, which translates to something between much thicker than necessary and ridiculously thick if viewed on your normal screen.
- Never use automatic slide change or appearance of items. Never ever. You might end up with a different programme version on the computer that your paper runs on, and that might dance to a different rhythm - letting all your slides rush by while you watch helplessly from the sidelines. I have seen a stack of pictures following each other much too fast quite a few times - and there was nothing the presenter could do to remedy this. Have each thing appear on its own, on your command, and you are safe from this.

Oh, and a final one not related to Powerpoint: If you are, say, an archaeologist and you are testing your lecture on, say, a group of physicists... do not be surprised if nobody gets your jokes. Sense of humour differs between academic disciplines, and a joke that will crack up a literary historian may leave an art historian dumbfounded. It took me a good while to find out that I wasn't as unfunny as the test audience made me feel, but they just did not get the jokes. So nowadays, I just hope that the actual audience has a sense of humour that is compatible with mine and add whatever funnies I feel would be nice and appropriate.

Via the MEDTC list, I have received this info about a conference:

INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY OF ANGLO-SAXONISTS
http://conferencing.uwex.edu/conferences/isas2011/conference.cfm
Anglo-Saxon England and the Visual Imagination
Madison, WI
31 July – 5 August 2011
PROGRAM
http://conferencing.uwex.edu/conferences/isas2011/documents/ISASProgramJuly11.pdf


The programme seems to have a light smattering of textile-related topics.



And for those of you more into experimental archaeology, there is a conference in York next January, with the call for papers still open until August 15. The conference is Friday Jan 6 (and judging from the website, Saturday Jan 7 as well), and you can find a little more info plus the contact addresses on their website. I'm thinking about going, but haven't decided yet.

Is "blogospherically" even a word? No, I didn't think so. Anyways, since I'm no native speaker (writer?), I think I get to make up a word or two now and then.

Leeds not only lured me with the promise of lots of papers, many new faces to meet, delicious English food (apart from the soft drinks) and not one, but two book fairs; it also lured me with the prospect of meeting, face-to-face, some fellow bloggers of medieval and medieval-ish stuff.

Long before the blogger meetup on Tuesday, though, I met Jonathan Jarrett, who - thanks to the picture he posted - was really easy to recognise. Even for me with my bad memory for faces. Jonathan (who posts at A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe) is every bit as friendly, bubbly and enthusiastic as his blog posts make him sound. In contrast to this my blog, he does not whine about bureaucracy and shares weird gratuitous links, but mostly blogs about seriously academic stuff - with pictures, and footnotes, and citations of papers.

The next blogger I met was Magistra (et Mater) from the similarly named blog. And then... many more on Tuesday: Another Damned Medievalist, highlyeccentric who blogs at The Naked Philologist, zcat (zcat abroad), Gillian Polack (who is not only a medievalist, but also a novelist, and whose books I now have to procure from somewhere so I can read them) who has her blog over on LJ, and finally a last person whose name/blog I jotted down as "cursor mundi" but was not yet able to locate. (Hints would be much appreciated!)

I had a wonderful time meeting all those folks, and Leeds has thus added to my blog reading list and, in some cases, has added to the interest I already had in these blogs. And it really does make a difference if you have met somebody in person - the blog posts suddenly get an extra level added on by knowing how the writer looks and speaks. So the bloger sie of me? Thoroughly happy that I got to Leeds, and that I had the opportunity to meet all these fellow bloggers. See you on the InterBloggoTubez!