With a mass digitisation programme underway and the addition of non-print legal deposit and web archive collections, the National Library of Scotland is now both producing and collecting data at an unprecedented rate, with over 5PB of storage in the Library’s data centres. As well as the opportunities to support large scale analysis of the collections, this also presents new challenges around data management, storage, rights, formats, skills and access. Furthermore, by assuming the role of both creators and (...) collectors, libraries face broader questions about the concepts of ‘collections' and ‘heritage', and the ethical implications of collecting practices. While the ‘collections as data’ movement has encouraged cultural heritage organisations to present collections in machine-readable formats, new services, processes and tools also need to be established to enable these emerging forms of research, and new modes of working need to be established to take into account an increasing need for transparency around the creation and presentation of digital collections. This commentary explores the National Library of Scotland's new digital scholarship service, the implications of this new activity and the obstacles that libraries encounter when navigating a world of Big Data. (shrink)

Kehinde Wiley became a household name and widely recognized as one of the most important living American artists with the 2018 unveiling of his official Smithso.

(1996). Geography, science and national identity in early modern Britain: The case of Scotland and the work of Sir Robert Sibbald (1641–1722) Annals of Science: Vol. 53, No. 1, pp. 29-73.

The Augustan Age in Scotland was the half-century between the publication of Hume's Treatise on Human Nature and the death of Robert Burns in 1796. In this period Edinburgh was at her height as a cultural centre. This is a 1956 study of eminent Scot Adam Smith - author of The Wealth of Nations - and the Scotland in which he lived and wrote. It also examines the contribution which he and his fellow-countrymen made to the accomplishment of (...) the eighteenth century in many fields. Dr Fay begins with a brief account of Smith's life, and goes on to describe the eighteenth-century Kirkcaldy where he spent his youth, the Glasgow where he matured, and the Edinburgh which gave him fulfilment. We are told of the part Smith played in the development of Political Economy as a science, and the book closes with an account of his relationships with such men as Townshend, Gibbon and Benjamin Franklin. (shrink)

Many ethical issues are posed by public health interventions. Although abstract theorizing about these issues can be useful, it is the application of ethical theory to real cases which will ultimately be of benefit in decision-making. To this end, this paper will analyse the ethical issues involved in Childsmile, a national oral health demonstration programme in Scotland that aims to improve the oral health of the nation's children and reduce dental inequalities through a combination of targeted and universal (...) interventions. With Scotland's level of dental caries among the worst in Europe, Childsmile represents one of the largest programmes of work aimed at combating oral health inequalities in the UK. The areas of ethical interest include several contrasting themes: reducing health inequalities and improving health; universal and targeted interventions; political values and evidence base; prevention and treatment; and underlying all of these, justice and utility. (shrink)

Scotland and South Korea are experiencing novel challenges in educating for and about migrant populations. Through a critical discourse analysis of these nations’ national curricula, we consider the guidance educators are offered in teaching about issues related to migration in increasingly diverse classrooms. Framed by theories of critical global citizenship, our analysis suggests that both curricula use ambiguous approaches to global citizenship education. These curricula acknowledge the presence of migrants without disturbing stable visions of Korean and Scottish (...) class='Hi'>national identities. Such approaches are reflective of the challenges of integrating migrants into the civic life of South Korea and Scotland. (shrink)

A review of Peter Steele’s: The Whispering Gallery: Art into Poetry, in which Steele writes poems on and to paintings and the sculpture Black Sun (By Inge King) in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia. Each work on which there is a poem is reproduced. In this book Steele writes more to the ‘contour’ of the topic-work than he did in Plenty. His poems – as ever sidenoted – are tensed between the topicality of the work of art (...) in question, and Kant’s aesthetic which involves ‘the free play of the cognitive faculties’. In ths tension lies the particular pleasure of Steele’s poetry. (shrink)

This article examines the discursive construction of Scottish and British- English national identities in the printed press within the context of the planned Scottish independence referendum. Using Critical Discourse Analysis and informed by sociological and anthropological research, the study uses a Corpus Linguistics approach to analyse newspaper texts from the Scottish and British printed media to define the strategies used in the construction and disarticulation of these identities and the ideologies behind them. The results of the analysis will show (...) that the Scottish broadsheets use a staunchly Scottish rhetoric with frequent examples of nation flagging, showing the palpable struggle for power and a certain sense of inferiority. Inadvertently or otherwise, these newspapers engender a sense of separateness by employing techniques of positive in-group identification. The Scottish editions of UK broadsheets, on the contrary, hold a more Anglocentric perspective and their treatment of the referendum is more political than ideological, frequently attributing negative evaluations to the independence issue and engaging in the practice of “tartanisation”. To conclude, the UK broadsheets tend to provide a more balanced and objective point of view, thus being at the political centre of the social debate enacted by the referendum and the subsequent possible independence of Scotland. (shrink)

A review of Peter Steele’s: The Whispering Gallery: Art into Poetry, in which Steele writes poems on and to paintings and the sculpture Black Sun (By Inge King) in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia. Each work on which there is a poem is reproduced. In this book Steele writes more to the ‘contour’ of the topic-work than he did in Plenty. His poems – as ever sidenoted – are tensed between the topicality of the work of art (...) in question, and Kant’s aesthetic which involves ‘the free play of the cognitive faculties’. In ths tension lies the particular pleasure of Steele’s poetry. (shrink)

In this contribution, we will discuss the opportunities and challenges arising from memory institutions' need to redefine their archival strategies for contemporary collecting in a world of big data. We will reflect on this topic by critically examining the case study of the UK Web Archive, which is made up of the six UK Legal Deposit Libraries: the British Library, National Library of Scotland, National Library of Wales, Bodleian Libraries Oxford, Cambridge University Library and Trinity College Dublin. (...) The UK Web Archive aims to archive, preserve and give access to the UK web space. This is achieved through an annual domain crawl, first undertaken in 2013, in addition to more frequent crawls of key websites and specially curated collections which date back as far as 2005. These collections reflect important aspects of British culture and events that shape society. This commentary will explore a number of questions including: what heritage is captured and what heritage is instead neglected by the UK Web archive? What heritage is created in the form of new data and what are its properties? What are the ethical issues that memory institutions face when developing these web archiving practices? What transformations are required to overcome such challenges and what institutional futures can we envisage? (shrink)

Several bioethical topics received a great deal of news coverage here in Scotland in 2009. Three important issues with transatlantic connections are the swine flu outbreak, which was handled very differently in Scotland, England and America; the US debate over healthcare reform, which drew the British NHS into the controversy; and the release to Libya of the Lockerbie bomber, which at first glance might not seem particularly bioethical, but which actually hinged on the very public discussion of the (...) prisoner’s medical records. On a national level, there have been attempts in both Scotland and England to change the law on assisted suicide, where success looks more likely than ever. This paper will discuss each of these issues, and hopefully raise awareness of how these issues were dealt with in the UK and its component countries. (shrink)

Last summer I was given the opportunity to work closely with an extensive exhibition of Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings at the National Gallery of Canada (through a class run here at the University of Alberta). I focused my research for the class on unpacking the significance of an unorthodox painting in the show entitled The Large Plane Trees (1889), which presents Jean François Millet-inspired digging figures in a markedly diminished and experimental way. Looking to the overt spirituality (...) of Van Gogh’s personal writings, Van Gogh’s curious obsession of copying Millet’s agrarian figures, the influence of Ukiyo-e Japanese woodblock prints, and nineteenth-century politics regarding the depicting of the rural and working classes, this paper gives readers a chance to understand a small portion of the pedagogy, and aims of an artist whose aspirations have been wildly misconstrued by popular and academic media. (shrink)

Canadian landscapes on gallery walls in art museums serve as a primer for understanding the nation. Visitors cannot easily escape the purposeful emptiness of rugged scenes meant to visually assure them of the nation’s right to colonial possession. Most viewers respond positively to these pretty pictures because such ways of seeing the art history of Canada has been naturalized and normalized, appearing politically neutral.Ubiquitous Canadian landscape paintings also reinforce colonial claiming of land and authorize erasure of Indigenous relations with the (...) land. Understanding the noted landscapes as something other than part of a national narrative, however, has not been widely accepted, even as a sanctioned mandate to broaden art historical narratives has resulted in displaying additional Indigenous art in galleries. In an analysis that considers ways to re-vision the privileged colonial narrative present in Canadian art museums, deeper ethical issues arise in relation to institutional structures. Here the analysis focuses on three projects in and around Canada 150, including examples such as Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience, the rehanging of Norval Morrisseau’s Artist and Shaman between Two Worlds at the National Gallery of Canada, and the Michael Belmore and A. J. Casson: Nkweshkdaadiimgak Miinwaa Bakeziibiisan/Confluences and Tributaries exhibit at the Ottawa Art Gallery. This essay explores questions regarding whether ways of seeing land differently come about simply by hanging Indigenous art on institutional walls or whether more systemic change is required. (shrink)

Last summer I was given the opportunity to work closely with an extensive exhibition of Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings at the National Gallery of Canada. I focused my research for the class on unpacking the significance of an unorthodox painting in the show entitled The Large Plane Trees, which presents Jean François Millet-inspired digging figures in a markedly diminished and experimental way. Looking to the overt spirituality of Van Gogh’s personal writings, Van Gogh’s curious obsession of copying (...) Millet’s agrarian figures, the influence of Ukiyo-e Japanese woodblock prints, and nineteenth-century politics regarding the depicting of the rural and working classes, this paper gives readers a chance to understand a small portion of the pedagogy, and aims of an artist whose aspirations have been wildly misconstrued by popular and academic media. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Roots of RomanticismJames SchmidtIsaiah Berlin. The Roots of Romanticism. The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts. The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Bollingen Series XXXV:45. Edited by Henry Hardy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Pp. xvi + 171. Cloth. $19.95.Originally delivered in the spring of 1965 and subsequently broadcast several times over the BBC, Berlin's lectures on romanticism have long been esteemed by (...) his admirers. Berlin nevertheless resisted their publication, hoping one day to write a book on romanticism. His literary executor Henry Hardy reports, however, "not so much as a sentence of the intended work was ever written" (x). Thus Hardy's edition of these lectures constitutes Berlin's most extended reflection on a theme that loomed large in his understanding of the modern world: the romantic critique of the Enlightenment.Surprisingly few romantics actually appear in these pages. Those who do arrive late, linger briefly, and are usually German. Fichte enters on page 88, followed by Schelling (97) and the Schlegel brothers (104), with brief appearances by E. T. A. Hoffman and Johann Ludwig Tieck (114-6). Only in his closing ruminations on the impact of romanticism does Berlin cast a glance at Byron, Chateaubriand, and Sir Walter Scott. Most of the book explores what Berlin takes to be romanticism's "roots," which he locates in a few eighteenth-century German writers who, when romanticism finally burst upon the scene, were either disgusted by it (Jacobi, Schiller, and Goethe) or dead (Hamann). A few years later Berlin made these proto-romantics the charter members of the movement he dubbed "the Counter-Enlightenment"—a concept that would have a considerable career of its own. Berlin's concern is thus less with romanticism per se than "with the revolution of which romanticism, at any rate in some of its guises, is the strongest expression and symptom" (xiii).As Berlin saw it, this revolution involved a rejection of the idea that 1) "all [End Page 451] genuine questions can be answered," 2) "all these answers are knowable," and 3) "all these answers must be compatible with one another" (21-2). Upon these three principles, he insists, "the whole Western tradition rested" (21), and their rejection constitutes "the greatest single shift in the consciousness of the West" (1). Berlin holds that the Enlightenment left these principles unshaken. It was the romantics who questioned the "ruinous" belief that "there is one single solution to all human ills" (which carries the insidious corollary that "you must impose this solution no matter what cost") and thus laid the foundations for "liberalism, toleration, decency and the appreciation of the imperfections of life" (146-7), causes which are usually associated (wrongly, according to Berlin) with the Enlightenment.These arguments will not be unfamiliar to those who know Berlin's works. Reading him is a bit like listening to Vivaldi: taken individually, his essays are clever, vigorously argued, and elegantly crafted; but reading them in sequence soon leads to a nagging sense of having heard it all before. Berlin's work was animated by an awareness of the diversity of plausible answers that could be given to the question of how life should be lived and by an impassioned defense of this plurality of possibilities against the illusion of an ultimate solution. One can admire the defense of liberalism that Berlin drew from these convictions and yet have reservations about the historical accuracy of his account of the relationship between romanticism and the Enlightenment. It is hard to see Hamann as a supporter of pluralism and harder still to see the philosophes—who rejected the dogmatic esprit de systèm in favor of an experimentalist esprit systématique—as oblivious to the multiplicity of ways in which good lives could be lived. Lessing's views on religious questions were a good deal more skeptical and open-ended than Jacobi's. Fichte and Schelling sought to bring a greater systematic coherence to Kant's philosophy, not to dismantle it. Once one moves from general claims about "romanticism" and "the Enlightenment" to assess specific thinkers, the picture becomes a good deal messier than Berlin lets on. Early romantics... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume 29, Number 2, November 2003, pp. 223-266 A Diplomatic Transcription of Hume's "volunteer pamphlet" for Archibald Stewart: Political Whigs, Religious Whigs, and Jacobites M. A. BOX, DAVID HARVEY, AND MICHAEL SILVERTHORNE Many scholars interested in David Hume will have encountered his defense of the beleaguered Archibald Stewart as it appears in an appendix in John Valdimir Price's The Ironic Hume (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965). (...) Additionally they might know of Price's discussion for The Biblioteck of 1973 of a copy with manuscript markings. A reason for revisiting this pamphlet is that the National Library of Scotland has graciously given permission to reproduce a copy (shelfmark NE.10.e.4) featuring a preface and significant markings in manuscript not in the copy that Price reproduced in his book. As Hume assumes considerable familiarity with the events to which he alludes, we have annotated the text to make it fully intelligible to readers two and half centuries after its composition. The rudimentary bibliographic facts and mysteries are as follows. Two editions survive to us, an octavo (in fours) and a rare duodecimo. Although there is no reason to regard the duodecimo as a second edition correcting or augmenting a first edition, it probably was manufactured after, and was textually derivative from, the octavo. We know nothing of the publishing of M. A. Box is Associate Professor of English, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, PO Box 755720, Fairbanks, AK 99775-5720, USA. David Harvey is at the Classics Department, University of Exeter, Queen's Building, Queen's Drive, Exeter EX4 4QH, UK. Michael Silverthorne is Associate Professor of History, McGiIl University, Stephen Leacock Building, 855 Sherbrooke St. West, Montreal H3A 2T7, Canada, e-mail: [email protected] 224 M. A. Box, David Harvey, and Michael Silverthorne the duodecimo, and doubtless that is as its producers intended. Its title page indicates, like that of the octavo, that the printing was done "for M. Cooper" in 1748, but William Strahan's ledgers register the printing in December 1747 of only the octavo in an edition of 1000 copies.1 The job is listed under bookseller Andrew Millar's account, not Mary Cooper's, probably for the reason that Cooper was a front whose role was to screen the true producers. It is possible that Millar hired someone other than Strahan to print the duodecimo, but it is also possible that someone other than Millar had it printed to mimic the octavo and take the opportunity it offered for concealment.2 A different editorial judgment is evinced in the duodecimo in that cosmetic measures are taken in it to obscure the identities of two military men ridiculed. For example, "Fowke" is rendered as "F—" and "John Cope" as "J-C-----." A digression on Mary Cooper is in order. This remarkable woman (died 1761) took over her husband Thomas's business upon his death 9 February 1743. That business had a history of "publishing" pamphlets and therefore made a plausible front for Millar, who in at least thirty-six other instances, none requiring courage, was willing to have his name appear on a title page with "M. Cooper." (This figure derives from a search by imprints using the English Short-Title Catalogue.) Until Thomas Cooper died, his name appeared on editions of John Armstrong's The Oeconomy of Love (1736 and thereafter) though only Millar's name is listed in the Stationers' Register (Foxon, English Verse A303-A311), and Mary's name is on the title page of the 1753 edition for which Strahan charged Millar (Strahan Papers, Add. MS 48800, s.v. August 1753). It was perhaps in this pattern that the second edition of Hume's heterodox Philosophical Essays (1750) would be reissued in 1751 with a new title page replacing Millar's name with Cooper's. That book was made temporarily a more alarming property by the superstitious panic of the London populace following the winter earthquakes in 1750, presaged by a bloody cloud. Within that year Bishop Thomas Sherlock caused a stir with a pastoral letter (A Letter from the Lord Bishop of London) blaming the earthquakes on several iniquities, "particularly heretical books" (Walpole, Correspondence 20... (shrink)