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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 historians, Dr Mark Hailwood (Bristol) and Mark Ponte (Alle Amsterdamser Akten, Stadsarchief Amsterdam).

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?

Events planned for 2018

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'

Other communications

• 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). CLICK HERE FOR FINAL AGENDA, TIMETABLE AND PARTICIPANTS

Kaggle Research Competition

• We are organising a Kaggle Research Competition to run from November 2018 to mid-January 2019 to develop a Proof of Concept for algorithmic identification of markes, initials and signatures. This will draw on our previous work on 'Pattern recognition of signatures and markes in historical manuscripts as a basis for sub-population identification'.