It’s a great pleasure to welcome Jana Dambrogio from MIT and Daniel Smith from King’s College London at our lab!

Abstract: Before the invention of the gummed envelope in the 1830s, almost all letters were sent using letterlocking, the practice of folding and securing a writing surface to become its own envelope. Based on 20 years research into 250,000 letters, this talk and workshop will present our main findings, including information about the letter we “virtually unfolded” in a recent
Nature Communications article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21326-w.

There will also be an opportunity to do some letterlocking yourself! Please bring some paper (printer paper is fine), scissors, some stickers or sticky tape (kids’ stickers are more fun!), and some sewing thread. You may also wish to check out letterlocking.org and our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNPZ-f_IWDLz2S1hO027hRQ.

Short Bios: Jana Dambrogio is a conservator, researcher, educator, letterlocker, and artist who specializes in developing freely accessible resources and treatment techniques to conserve the integrity of material culture and the secrets they contain. At present, she is Conservator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Curation and Preservation Services.

Dr. Daniel Smith is Lecturer in Early Modern English Literature at Kings’s College London, UK and performs award winning research which won the John Donne Society Distinguished Publication Award in 2011 and the University English Book Prize in 2016.

G.R. Davis: Professor of 3D x-ray imaging at Queen Mary, University of London, and lead for Imaging Sciences in the Centre for Oral Bioengineering, which includes electron microscopy, X-ray imaging, and facial scanning.

References
Dambrogio, Jana. "Historic Letterlocking: The Art and Security of Letter Writing." (2014).

Virtual recovery of content from x-ray micro-tomography scans of damaged historic scrolls.  Paul L. Rosin, Yu-Kun Lai, Chang Liu, Graham R. Davis, David Mills, Gary Tuson & Yuki Russell, Scientific Reports  8, 11901 (2018).

Brute force absorption contrast microtomography.  Davis GR, Mills D.  Proc SPIE 9212, 92120I1 (2014). 

Quantitative high contrast X-ray microtomography for dental research.  Davis GR, Evershed ANZ, Mills D.  J Dent 41(5): 475-482, 2013. 

Copyright 2017. Jana Dambrogio, Daniel Starza Smith, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). All rights reserved. The following copyrighted material is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.... Contact the MIT Technology Licensing Office for any other licensing inquiries.

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Music Reference: 
Damiano Baldoni - Thinking of You (Intro)
Damiano Baldoni - Poenia (Outro)