Where have all the birds gone?

It’s frustrating when you can’t find things. I’m presenting at a conference in February, called Becoming Animal with the Victorians. I’m getting slightly worried. I was planning to use data I collected on wood engravings depicting birds for content analysis. Birds is a subtopic of the largest category in the encyclopaedias, vertebrates, and I was keen to see if the anaylsis could tell me anything, for example, the maps category told me that by the second edition, W&R Chambers was predominently using electrotypes and stereotypes to create images, and those images fell into a certain range of standard sizes. So far, however, I’ve found over 120 blocks in the NMS collections depicting birds for the first edition, but only 5 blocks depicting birds for the second edition. That is not a dataset that allows significant sampling between the two editions. Therefore, I’ll have to expand categories to include mammals. I’m going to be in Edinburgh again next week week but only for two days. So I’ll have two days to collect all the data I can on woodblocks depicting mammals since I won’t be back in Edinburgh again before the conference. No pressure.

I’m a bit bummed out as well because there is a staff leaving party for someone in my department at the museum, one of the curators who was covering someone’s maternity leave. When I was up in Edinburgh last week, I was thinking how lonely it was working by myself in the NMS off-site store for my first two days, and that it was nice when other people were around (even if it was only for a few hours) my last two days. Unfortunately as the leaving party is over lunch, and I won’t be able to take an hour and a half in the middle of my day since the offsite location at the edge of Edinburgh where I’m working in is very far from the museum on Chambers Street in the centre. I had to miss the department’s staff Christmas party as well. They say that PhD students in their second year experience the blues because the beginning of the research and the enthusiasm that goes with it seems far away, and the end of the research project also seems far away. I don’t think that’s the case for me. I feel a bit worried that I don’t have enough time to finish everything I want to, so the end is not actually far enough away. But there is an element of the whole working in isolation thing, on this a project. The dark cold January weather doesn’t help raise one’s spirits either, especially when you go far north as Scotland.

My big question is where did all the bird blocks go for the second edition? A few may have been reused from the first edition, but as you can see from the images below, many new bird images were commissioned using a different process for creating them.

Above: Images from second edition of Chambers's Encyclopaedia. Note: "wood engraving" on right, actually created by a photomechanical process where the image is exposed on a plate. Below: Images from the first edition. Note: wood block in this case is actually made from wood.