Episode 21. “Learning How to Look”
January 18, 2025 in Announcements, Manuscript Studies, Research Group Speaks (The Series)
“The Research Group Speaks”
Episode 21
“Learning How to Look”
A Roundtable
Saturday 24 May 2025
1:00–2:30 pm EST (GMT-5) by Zoom
[Posted on 17 January 2025]
As the series wherein “The Research Group Speaks,” we respond to suggestions and requests as the series unfolds. For information about the series, please see:
London, British Library, Yates Thompson MS 5, fol. 12r. Book of Hours, 15th century, France, perhaps Tours. Saint Matthew, Evangelist, with book, spectacles, and lion attribute. Image via https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2019/02/medieval-spectacles.html
The Plan
For this Episode, by request, a group of experts, scholars, students, and interested observers will compare notes and share experiences. We examine the painstaking yet rewarding quest to learn how to look at objects or materials.
Cases in point will come from the detailed study of manuscripts and printed books, photographs, human anatomy, numismatics, prints and drawings, textual transmission, the natural world, and other spheres. From personal experience, our speakers may report on how they learned how to look, at various stages in their lives and studies, and what tips or methods they find helpful in the process.
We might provide some references as guides or handbooks for this instruction, whether self-taught, mentored, or a combination. For example, to what extent does the process of learning carefully how to look at one body of material transfer to another, that is, to another body of material or to another observer?
Related to this quest for learning how to look more fully at objects and original sources, so as better to understand them, is the need to consider how to describe what it is that we see. Describing can develop understanding the nature of the object more clearly. Putting that recognition into words with precision calls upon accuracy of terminology or nomenclature.
That complex subject might itself call for another Episode of its own. Let us see how this Episode take shape, and where it might lead.
Speakers include (in alphabetical order):
Nan Anantharaman, Mildred Budny, Michael Allman Conrad, David W. Sorenson, and others.
Private Collection, Vitae Patrum, Folio 5A. Photography by Mildred Budny.
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London, British Library, Yates Thompson MS 5, fol. 12r. Book of Hours, 15th century, France, perhaps Tours. Saint Matthew, Evangelist, with book, spectacles, and lion attribute. Image via https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2019/02/medieval-spectacles.html