Wikipedia, authority and the free rider problem

I am a selfish Wikipedian. By which I mean, that while I am very happy to use Wikipedia, I have not been very serious about contributing to it. There are a small handful of pages for which I keep the further reading (reasonably) up to date, and correct if a particularly egregious error appears.  But it is sporadic, and one of the first things to be squeezed out if life gets busy.

And I wonder whether there aren’t real gains for historians from helping Wikipedia become truly authoritative, but which are obscured by natural disincentives in the way in which our scholarly ecosystem works.

Firstly, the disincentives. One is a residual wariness of something that can be edited by ‘just anyone’. I myself have dissuaded students from citing Wikipedia as an authority in itself, as part of what I am teaching is the ability to go to the scholarly article that is cited in Wikipedia, and indeed beyond it to the primary source. But my experience is that, in matters of fact, Wikipedia is very reliable unless it concerns a highly charged topic (the significance of Margaret Thatcher, say). And even the making of that judgement is an important part of learning to think critically about what it is we read.

Perhaps more significant is the fact that Wikipedia appears to be edited by no-one in particular. One of the contradictions of modern academic life is that most scholars would, I think, assert the existence of a common good, the pursuit of knowledge, towards which we work in some abstract sense. At the same time, the ways in which we are habituated to achieve that end are fundamentally about competition between scholars for scarce resources: attention, leading to esteem, leading to career advancement.

We write books and articles, which help us get and then keep a job. A smaller but growing number write blogs like this one, and tweet about those blogs. Part of this is about ‘impact’ (that is to say, increasing our share of those scarce quanta of public attention). And all of it depends on being identified as the creator of an item of intellectual property: tweet, blog post, article, book, media interview. Few, even at the wildest edges of the Open Access movement, propose licensing of scholarly outputs without attribution, even if a work may be licensed for the most radical of remixing. All depends on being known.

But Wikipedia doesn’t credit its authors, or at least not in a prominent and easily reportable way. And so the question arises: even though contributing to Wikipedia is to the common good, what is in it for me ?

The answer may depend on a more speculative and more risky model of collaborative work, but one which holds out the prospect of a genuinely authoritative resource, made by authorities. And that in turn should reward the best published work, in the good old-fashioned and citable way, by channelling readers to it. (It would be even better for works available Open Access.)

But it depends on everyone jumping together. As long as some contribute, but others only consume, there remains a classic economist’s ‘free rider’ problem. When people use a resource without ‘paying’ (in the form of their own time, and their own particular expertise) then the cost of production is unevenly spread, and the quality of the product denuded. But if editing Wikipedia became a genuinely widespread enterprise amongst scholars, then even if my contribution is not recognised with each and every edit, my ‘main’ work (if it is any good) will be cited and integrated into the fabric of Wikipedia by others. And we might get a more informed public debate about each and every matter, which looks like impact to me. Perhaps I should get more serious about this now.

Cosmo Lang. Archbishop in war and crisis – a review

I recently reviewed Robert Beaken’s study of Cosmo Gordon Lang, archbishop of Canterbury, published by I.B. Tauris in 2012. The full review in Reviews in History shows that I think it an ‘important reassessment’ which ‘goes a long way towards superseding [the work of J.G.] Lockhart and presenting Lang afresh’. Robert very effectively rescues Lang from his reputation as ‘a figure caught in the headlights, reactive rather than in the lead, a puritan and a snob.’

The book has three primary concerns: with Lang’s relationship with the monarchy; with the disputed process of liturgical reform within the Church of England; and with the Second World War. Chapter 7 deals with the war; Chapter 6 with the stalemate in relation to liturgical revision that Lang inherited after the Prayer Book Crisis of 1927-8. Chapters 4 and 5 deal with Lang’s relationship with the monarchy in general, and the abdication crisis in particular, and are very clearly the centrepiece of the book.

The review did make some substantive criticisms, which I reproduce at length here. The first is of one of interpretation:

Beaken rightly emphasises that in the period between the wars the office of archbishop still mattered in English public life. The opinion of Canterbury was sought and listened to on matters of moment; and the archbishop’s correspondence clearly shows that many of the general public expected something of ‘their archbishop’, even if those expectations were inchoately expressed and neither compatible nor realistic. All this is right, and worth emphasising; but it is difficult to recognise the ‘simple narrative of secularisation’ against which Beaken sets himself as one now held by very many historians. The work variously of Callum Brown, Grace Davie, Hugh McLeod and many others have all deepened and complicated our understandings of what secularisation is and how it occurs; and so Beaken is pushing at, if not an open door, one which has been unlocked and left ajar.

Also on matters of interpretation:

For Beaken, Lang’s radio broadcast of December 1936 […] was ‘an unusually unwise and unreflective action’, in that Lang allowed himself to reflect unfavourably on the mores of the social circle around the former king. However, the receipt of many letters and a ‘torrent of abuse’ in the popular press does not necessarily prove that an archbishop is not doing his job, but only that he has expressed an unpopular but arguably necessary view. Despite Lang’s evident enjoyment of the quiet entwining of archbishop and establishment, he was able to see where lines should be drawn.

The other criticisms were about the shape of the book, and its style:

At the broadest scale, the book is strangely shaped, such that it appears not as a rounded study of an archbishop at a time of crisis, but as three substantial studies of particular issues, hedged around with some rather desultory supporting materials. The three themes of the royal connection, the war and the Prayer Book crisis between them occupy two-thirds of the book, with the royal material alone forming nearly a third. This leads Beaken to neglect other issues that merited greater treatment. Lang’s path from bishop of Stepney (1901) to his arrival at Canterbury in 1928 are dealt with in five breathless pages; a time that included the controversy over Lang’s public comments on the First World War, which cried out for a fuller treatment. Similarly, Beaken’s account of a pivotal time in ecumenical relations at home and abroad is perfunctory. Lang’s time in office saw acute economic hardship and the Jarrow March, as well as the rise of home-grown Fascism and pitched violence on the streets to counter it. None of these receive the slightest treatment, in a study entitled ‘Archbishop in War and Crisis.’ […]

By contrast, significant space is instead given over to a discussion of Lang’s sexuality. Beaken is largely successful in showing that Lang was probably not a repressed homosexual, but a lonely figure who found it difficult to form close personal relationships of any kind. To this reviewer, however, it is not clear that those making the case for Lang’s homosexuality ever established why the matter should be all that important, and neither is Beaken convincing as to why it is important that Lang was not.

Robert’s response is at the foot of the review.

Open Access and open licensing

Much of the recent concern about Open Access in the UK, at least for the humanities, has not been about the general principle, but rather about the means.

In my hearing, however, perhaps at least as much consternation was in reaction to the prospect of subsequently licensing those outputs for re-use using one or other of the Creative Commons suite of licences. CC allows various degrees of redistribution, and re-use, without further recourse to the author, but with credit given. Commercial use can be restricted (or not); the making of derivative works can be provided for (or not). You can Meet the Licenses here.

As an advocate of greater Open Access in the humanities, I suspect that Research Councils UK made a tactical error in suggesting that it intended to enforce the most liberal of these licenses. CC-BY ‘lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation.’ Here’s why I think the focus on CC-BY has been a mistake, at this point.

Personally, I have never quite been convinced that ‘full’ or ‘real’ OA was dependent on maximally open licensing. I see free availability of the content for reading and citation as quite distinct from the subsequent reuse of that content in other ways. Both are desirable, but can be decoupled without damage. A move to any form of OA represents a major cultural change, albeit one that is necessary. Given this I would rather see an OA article with all rights reserved (as a staging post) than to not see that article at all. And to couple the two too closely risks the first goal by too strong an insistence on the second. Over time, cultures can and do change; but we ought to practice the art of the possible.

More generally, it isn’t yet clear to me what re-use of a traditional history article looks like. Quotation (with a reference) is a mode historians understand; so is citation as an authority in paraphrase. Both are possible from an article with all rights reserved. Compilation of readers and anthologies would be made easier by CC, but doesn’t require CC-BY. It also isn’t clear what ‘remixing’ of traditional historical writing looks like if it doesn’t involve quotation. Historians are also well used to acknowledging a seminal work in a footnote (or even once only in foreword or acknowledgments) without quoting it directly, but is this all that giving ‘credit’ for ‘remixing’ an idea really means ? If so, there is little to fear; but I’m not sure we know, yet.

Over time, there will be possibilities for data-mining in corpora of scholarly articles, but we ought to think on about whether this can be accommodated without full CC-BY. Much turns on the question of what counts as a derivative work in the context of an aggregated database, and what the output to the user is; and whether an insistence on  non-commercial re-use shuts down important future possibilities that we can’t yet foresee.

It may be that CC-BY is the right default option; my feeling is that it probably will be. But I think we should probably take more time to document some of these use cases, in order to plan a movement towards licensing for historical writing that is neither more restrictive nor more liberal than it need be, and allows scholars to dip in their toes without plunging in up to the neck. For now, there are horses we should avoid scaring, lest they bolt.

Just how important is the monograph for history ?

Back in January I posted about the visibility or otherwise of collections of edited essays, suggesting that whilst this form of publication may be as good as invisible in the sciences, we need to view the humanities (or at least history) differently.

In reply Dorothy Bishop (@deevybee) gave some intriguing numbers from an analysis of her citation patterns. In a recent review article in neuropsychology, she had cited 84 journal articles, 3 chapters, and one book. What’s more, she finds herself now very reluctant to cite anything that isn’t available online (which includes most books and edited collections.)

By way of a counter-example, I here extend the analysis of my own citation patterns that I began in that post. (For details of the data, read it here.) Here I’m interested in the balance between journal articles, books, and edited collections.

There has been much debate about finding a viable business model for Open Access monograph publishing in the humanities. Anecdotal evidence abounds, which chimes with my experience, that the ‘big book’ remains the Gold Standard for senior scholars; the once-in-a-decade intervention that changes the game. Lower down the food chain, the perception still rules that it is impossible for a young scholar to secure the vital first academic job without the book-of-the-thesis.

So much, so familiar. But there remains a real lack of data to back up this near-universal intuition, and to establish whether readers think as highly of the monograph as authors, publishers and research assessors think they do. And so, I looked at my own citation behaviour over the last few years, to answer the questions: how much do I cite monographs, as opposed to journal articles or papers in edited collections, and how old are those books when I cite them ?

The answer to the first of these even I found surprising. Here are the numbers:

Category	Proportion of citations (%)
Books	59.4
Edited collections (and individual articles therein)	23.4
Journal articles	11.7
Theses	2.0
Other	3.5

I had expected the monograph to loom large, but not to the extent revealed in these figures. I was also very surprised that I cited more chapters in edited collections than articles in journals, which were an amazingly low proportion of the total.

It’s also interesting just how old some of these monographs I cite are. The mean age of a monograph (at the time I cited it) was 17.5 years, with a median of 14.5. Some, in specialist areas, are still current after 40 years. This would suggest that any embargo-based scheme of Green OA for monographs would have to include very long embargoes indeed to satisfy publishers, which suggests that Gold would seem the way to go.

On the interstitial scholar

Part of the concern  in the humanities about author-pays open access concerns the impact on the ‘independent scholar’ – those individuals who produce academic writing of the highest standard whilst independent of the universities. It is a baggy classification, defined only by a negative; and it encompasses all sorts, from recently minted post-doctoral people looking for a job, to established figures who earn a living by their writing as journalists, critics or novelists, but who happen also to produce work that is recognisably ‘within the fold’. It also includes a host of retired academics, who may yet  have in them the crowning summation of a lifetime’s work. And the objection is raised that, if publication costs are to be covered by the author or their employer, then few of these figures will be able to publish at all.

Whilst there is collateral damage that needs to be avoided here, I see it as a problem to be overcome, rather than just another reason why the current system cannot change. But my concern here is wider, and is with the notion of the ‘interstitial scholar’ and the intrinsic value there might be in the fact that not all scholarship is produced from within a research-and-teaching institution. What of any importance would actually be lost from our scholarly ecology if the interstitial scholar was allowed to die out ?

I need to be clear about whom I am not talking. I am not concerned with the author of historical works who is purely a synthesist; my interstitial scholar is one whose work is clearly primary research. Neither do I mean the lone scholar who is disconnected from the ecosystem of academic publication, conference-going, peer reviewing that surrounds ‘professional’ scholarship (although I dislike the professional/amateur distinction.)

No: my concern is with the scholar who is engaged in some other profession but has maintained a lively contact both with the individuals and the published work in their field. Figures are hard to come by, but my impression is that there are many in this position; and I include myself among them.

Where are they ? They are to be found in every corner of the universities but the academic departments: in administration, or policy, or communications, or alumni relations. Universities have long mopped up some of the excess supply of able doctoral graduates, and universities provide in many ways a congenial berth. You also don’t need to dig very deep to find research-active people in the library and archives sector, as five minutes with the British Library’s Research Register will show.

But why bother ? What makes people continue with the slow and painstaking task of academic research if they can and do put bread on the table in other ways ? I should love to know what others think; but can only speak for myself. It is partly because I still feel that there are  more important matters than the few the state can support scholars to study. I also continue to write history because I find it hard to imagine not doing so. Before starting my doctorate, my soon-to-be supervisor laid out just how difficult it can be to sustain three years of relatively solitary work without ‘an itch that you can’t scratch’ – a burning desire to know the answer to some question or other; and fifteen years on, I’m still scratching that itch.

But isn’t it an indulgence, to hold back the development of a new kind of scholarly communication for a handful of hobbyists doing obscure work in dark corners ? In a time of austerity, perhaps it is. But I would argue that these scholars represent something that is not spontaneously generated in the normal course of university-based research.Their very location in-between the functions of universities, libraries and archives  allows them to bring important alternative perspectives. My own research has been influenced in many subtle ways by having worked in and around digital provision for research; and I’m sure that archivists and curators bring a distinctive and important perspective to the interpretation of the material in their care. I would want particularly to read a history of universities written by a university administrator; or a history of scholarly publishing by a historian working in publishing; or legal history by a barrister. They would have of course have their blind spots; but they would be different blind spots.

Interstitial scholars are also able to pursue different topics as a result of their situation. When I go to conferences, I sometimes detect just a hint of envy if I mention that I am in no hurry to write this or that article because I have no REF deadline to meet. In the interstices, one has a freedom from any kind of external direction in one’s research; and so I have had over the years the freedom to follow my nose. And I suspect that, had I been ‘REF-able’ these last few years, some of my work wouldn’t have been written, or at least not in the same way; and other things would have got written instead. And so the interstitial scholar can pursue the unfashionable topic, without any regard to ‘impact’. These scholars can act as important connecting strands in the web of knowledge, and we brush them away at our cost.

Implementing Google Authorship

Some time ago I read this useful post from IonLeap about an impending shift in the method Google uses to rank pages. Put briefly, it involves a move from ranking content by the number of links that point to it, to a system based on the author.

How do Google propose to do that ? Well, it’s based around forming connections between an author’s content, and their Google+ profile if they have one. As well as having potentially very significant impacts on where authors choose to maintain their ‘hub’ – the profile around which everything else revolves – it promises to help authors tie together their work, and to give it greater exposure in Google search.

How is it done ? Very simply – and the post above gives some simple instructions, also available here. Once you have a G+ profile, one simple line of code within your blog template does the job; in my case, in the link to the G+ profile over on the right. Leave it for a couple of weeks, and this begins to happen.

Not only does this post score highly on a very general search, it shows the photo from my G+ profile (if the user is logged into Google), and links to it. [See note 1 below]

I’ve yet to see whether this will lead to increased traffic to the blog; it’s early days. But it strikes me as a quick and easy thing to implement for bloggers, and I don’t see an obvious cost or much risk.

[Note 1. As @j_w_baker rightly points out, how the ranking works may be influenced by the 'filter bubble', and I didn't test these results before implementing the change. But they seem roughly comparable between machines so far. I'd be very interested to hear any before-and-after findings from others.]

On passing the General Reader Test

Once a week I stay away from home with two very good (and perhaps long-suffering) friends. They have looked after me this way for over three years; and over that sort of time it is hard to avoid the topic of one’s research in general conversation. And so, in a moment of weakness late at night, one of my friends expressed an interest in reading a draft article that we had talked about a little. It helped that the paper is about the recent history of a part of British Christianity of which both they and I have lived experience. And so, after some hesitation, I sent them a copy.

Slightly to my surprise, not just one but both took time to read it. And the best part is that, when we later fell to talking about it, they had understood it. Granted, much of the detail passed them by. But the argument they repeated back to me over a glass of wine was the one I hoped I had written. They had also been struck by some of the broader parallels with more recent events, which were implicit in it. It made my day.

Should this have been a surprise ? After all, writing is meant to be read, is it not ? But I wouldn’t be the first to note that not all academic writing is easy to read, even for specialists, let along the ‘general reader’. Indeed, some have suggested that there are perverse incentives for academics to be intentionally opaque.

I don’t tell this story in order to suggest that my writing is particularly clear; I’ve turned out my fair share of clunky writing built on muddled thinking. But it does suggest that a ‘General Reader Test’ might be one worth applying to more of our writing, particularly if you expect any non-specialist readers to stumble across it once it is released into the wild. I shall be doing so; although I might spare these particular friends too much of it, as I want them to keep them as friends.

On the invisibility of edited collections

Dorothy Bishop (@deevybee) last year argued that (at least in neuropsychology) ‘if you write a chapter for an edited book, you might as well write the paper and then bury it in a hole in the ground’. The issue is accessibility: (to paraphrase a little) most books aren’t available online as journals are, and no-one goes to libraries any more. (Read the post on Bishop Blog or as republished in the LSE Impact blog.)

Bishop admitted that things might be different in the humanities and social sciences, and something about her argument didn’t quite ring true with my own experience in history. Opinion on Twitter and amongst colleagues was divided: one eminent colleague had reached the point of refusing to contribute to edited volumes, so fast did they disappear from view; another thought that publishers were in collective flight from a format that had previously been fundamental. Others thought history one of the exceptions to an otherwise useful rule.

We are rather short of useful data on this. But my impression is that the format works in a different way to the (mostly online) journal. Granted, few of them are available digitally, and so no-one will find them by search. However, for as long as at least one article in the volume remains current, then readers will be picking the volume from a shelf; and so the other articles in theory at least remain visible – more so than in a journal issue. I’ve heard it often said that if a piece of work isn’t online, it may as well not exist at all; I think historians do still spend a good deal of time in libraries, picking books off shelves. I certainly do.

And then, as @tjowens pointed out, a coherent volume stands a good chance after a few years of becoming in effect a textbook, standing as a recent summary of the state of a particular field. I can certainly remember such volumes as an undergraduate; and my memory is that I read more of these than the weighty monographs listed alongside them. And although it isn’t properly recognised and rewarded, editing a text that influences a whole generation of younger minds should be an important part of what scholars do.

“But they’re not peer-reviewed!” Well, yes, if one accepts only one mode of peer review as legitimate – blind peer review, brokered by a journal. I would argue that some edited collections go through a different process, that is at least as creative of better work than the traditional system. Two years ago I was an invited plenary speaker at a tightly themed conference, leading to an edited volume. I responded to the theme as proposed; the paper was discussed at the conference, not least with one of the protagonists who happened to be living in retirement not far from the conference venue (the joys of contemporary history). A revised draft then went through two series of revisions with the two editors who organised the conference, influenced by an exchange of drafts between the contributors. It is now inproved far more than as a result of two or three vague paragraphs from a journal review. Does such a system place too much power in the hands of the editors ? Possibly; but it is at least open and transparent.

But so far these were only my impressions; and so I decided to create some data of my own. I looked at all the works that I myself have cited in the past six years: data from ten article-length pieces published since 2006, including two unpublished items at the copy edit stage. The field is the recent religious history of Britain, including writings on the sociology of religion, musicology and the history of the plastic arts and drama. (I’d be happy to expand on methodology if anyone is interested.)

Three interesting patterns came from the data.
(i) Citations of chapters in edited volumes formed a (to me) surprisingly high proportion of the whole, some 23%. (More later in another post on the humanities monograph and the invisibility of the journal article.)

(ii) These papers have a decent longevity. I looked at the time elapsed between the date of publication and the date at which I was making the final revisions to my own paper (ie. when I was actually citing it). Far from it being the case that a two or three year old paper is outdated, the median time was ten years.

(iii) I looked at the overall age profile of the volumes, the mean average of which was 14.9 years (to 2013); and there were few that I would not cite again if I were writing today.

All this would suggest that the edited volume continues to play a role for history, or at least for the kind of history that I write; and that Bishop’s observation doesn’t hold true. I should admit that my field is thinly documented –  several of my own pieces broke almost completely virgin soil – and so it may be that for scholarship on areas such as (say) Nazi Germany that are rather more densely overlaid with written work, the picture may be different.

Finally, what of the future ? The timescale of the data didn’t allow me to see whether we are indeed seeing the beginnings of a flight by authors from edited collections. Without data from publishers on the number of approaches they receive, that would be hard to establish empirically. However, data like mine would start to show that effect in a few years’ time. For now, rumours of the demise of the edited collection seem a little premature.

Humanities publishing and the Finch report

[The text below appeared in the Annual Review of my former employer, the School of Advanced Study, just before Christmas. Since I finished writing it, the debate about Gold open access in the humanities had continued, with no little sound and fury concerning the statement from the editors of some twenty prominent historical journals, most interestingly from Cameron Neylon. Re-reading my piece now, it strikes a more conservative note than I intended, since I spent some three years preaching the benefits of OA, green and gold, in a HSS institution, and have been delighted to see what was a rather marginal issue move to centre stage. There are issues to be addressed, but HSS scholars and journal editors do need to join the debate, robustly but openly and constructively, since if heads become buried in sand we shall have a model suited to the natural sciences imposed on us whether we like it or not. The goal of maximal open access is (I think) clear; let's make it happen.]

It is now ten years since the seminal Budapest declaration on Open Access, and eight years since parliamentarians first endorsed the general principle that publicly funded research ought to be available free at the point of use. And whilst the natural sciences have embraced Open Access very fully, the situation in the arts and humanities is very different. As I argued in Research Fortnight this summer (25th July), for all the talk of Open Access coming of age, the humanities are in danger of being left behind.

However, since the publication of the Finch report in the summer, the issue has moved to centre stage. The UK government has strongly supported the report, and so after a decade of debate, the general thrust of its proposals seem set actually to be implemented. Yet grave reservations have been expressed, not least in the two recent statements from the American Historical Association and, in the UK, from the Royal Historical Society.

One main source of concern (which matches my own) is its support for the ‘Gold’ route to open access, based on the ‘author pays’ principle. Instead of the publisher’s costs being covered by payment from the reader (or their library), the publisher charges a fee to the author, but access to the work is free at the point of use. The model has an appealing simplicity, and in theory should make a work available to anyone who might be interested in it, rather than simply to those with access to a research library. It is already well established in areas of the natural sciences, and in small pockets of the humanities, notably in the history of medicine. However, there are significant issues in its implementation, the most significant of which is the impact on those who cannot pay.

The Gold model works best when research is funded by direct grant, with a small additional sum to cover publication fees. But a vanishingly small proportion of humanities research is funded on this basis, and so those fees must be met by some other means. The government has pledged extra funds to cover this, but only to a number of research-intensive universities, which sends a clear and unwelcome signal about the prospects for research produced in other HEIs; to say nothing of early career researchers in (and out of) short-term positions and the army of independent scholars producing first class work outside the universities. Looking back at my own publications, I cannot imagine how any of them could have been funded in this way; and so they would not now exist.

There is still room, however, for dissenting voices to be heard; and there is an opportunity for the School and its Institutes to take the lead in creating the spaces in which those conversations may take place. Through SAS-Space, the establishment of SAS Open Journals, and associated events, the School has taken part in these debates over the last few years; may it continue to do so.

Melanie Barber MBE (1943-2012)

In November I was privileged to be among the many family, friends and former colleagues who gathered at Lambeth Palace to remember Melanie Barber, former Deputy Librarian and Archivist of Lambeth Palace Library, who passed away in June. Melanie was on the staff of the Library for more than thirty years, retiring in 2002.

Until the service, I had not quite registered that Melanie must just have retired when she and I first met, in the reading room at Lambeth. I was making my first trip to the Library, whilst in the midst of what was to become a permanent migration in academic interest from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. It was the papers of George Bell I had come to see, and Melanie, having prepared the catalogue, took time and some obvious pleasure in pointing me towards the volumes on Bell’s artistic patronage. I often saw Melanie at Lambeth over the following years, and it was she who took me aside to look at an exchange of letters between William Temple and Dorothy L. Sayers, in which Temple offered Sayers the honorary Lambeth degree of Doctor of Divinity. Melanie had an abiding interest in the history of the Lambeth degrees, one of which she herself received, and she left behind the seeds of a fascinating study of the subject which it would be splendid to see someone nurture. My interest in the letters was piqued by the light they shed on the relationship between the church and the arts; and the resulting edition now forms part of the Church of England Record Society miscellany volume to which Melanie gave form and direction, even if it fell to Stephen Taylor and Gabriel Sewell to complete it in her last years of illness.

Melanie was also one of the leading lights and a Trustee of the George Bell Institute, of which in more recent years I myself have become a Fellow. At Melanie’s funeral earlier in the year I learned of her longstanding voluntary efforts in fostering the work of young scholars of Quakerism. These two things together, added to her own published historical work, point up that which I shall most remember Melanie for: a modelling of an important but neglected interconnection of faith, life and scholarship. Remembering Melanie, it is difficult if not impossible to see where the lines might be drawn that separated employment and vocation; service to others and a life lived towards God; the pursuit of truth for its own sake and the meaning of that pursuit in the created order. I can’t claim to have known her well, but her example was and will continue to be an inspiration. She will be sorely missed.