Although this new structure could be perceived of as a favourable departure from the chaos rendered by the palimpsest, it would certainly lack the charm of its predecessor, which through its fluidity, endorses the reveries of the carnival and its lack of order. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before. Synecdoche is a literary device in which a part of something represents the whole, or it may use a whole to represent a part. The Playfair Library stands in memorial to the famous professor and exceptional figures like Scott and Oliphant are remembered by many, but as Byrde’s article reminds us (and as the thousands of accounts, memoirs and descriptions of Edinburgh that we have for our project also make readily apparent) it takes multitudes to create the particular atmosphere of a city. The competition deadline is midnight on Friday 30th January 2015. Big A described how to dissect a cube into 14 pieces, and asked how many different arrangements were possible (spoiler alert: there are 17,152 possible combinations). In terms of evolution, it was important for us to remember where we found food last time, or what was a safe spot for us to sleep. Scholars interested in emergent trans-geographical literary formations readily reach for Hamid’s work to illustrate their models: Paul Jay discusses Moth Smoke (2002) in his study of the transnational turn in literary scholarship (Jay 2010); Leerom Medovoi presents The Reluctant Fundamentalist as an exemplar of “world system literature” (645); Rebecca Walkovitz counts The … “Time Perspectives, Palimpsests and the Archaeology of Time.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 26:2 (June 2007): 198-223, Barthes, Roland. Palimpsest is an AHRC-funded project, which involves a collaboration between literary scholars, computer scientists working on text mining, and information visualisation scholars. Entries received after the deadline (given in UK time) will not be considered. Lit Long is the work of the Palimpsest project, which began 15 months ago with generous funding of the AHRC. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. It has a tremendous potential to open up new areas of inquiry that come from both the sciences and the arts. Judges will not have entrants’ names during the reading and judging processes. Freud’s mystic writing pad is metaphor for the palimpsest and for the functioning of memory. I am not one of the machines! And after a short break for drinks and snacks, we are returning for the second half of our evening…. Perhaps this is why visitors to Edinburgh seem to have been struck by the people of the city as much as by the its architecture and geography. Then we’ll take a wee break for drinks and nibbles. The emergence of the disunified, spectralized subject mirrors the unruly and fractious nature of the palimpsest, which eventually leads to a descent into the utopian realm of the carnival. Space, place and mapping have become key concepts in literary and cultural studies. Then we will return with what this is really all about, which is writers who will share their sense of place. They are also surprisingly learned: mistaken for a Salvation Army singer in the Cowgate, she finds herself surrounded by children demanding a song. Writing in the late Nineteenth Century, the soon-to-be novelist Margaretta Byrde found herself intrigued and touched by the city’s waifs and strays. The app contains over 47,000 extracts from 550 books across 1,600 locations in the city – so you are never going to be far from a relevant and interesting literary extract in Edinburgh! Here was a competing notion of Scottish modernity, focused on the experience of the urban labouring classes, a demographic hitherto absent from Scotland’s representations of itself. Beowulf fights the dragon with the sword Nægling. Lit Long: Edinburgh features a range of maps and accessible visualisations, which enable users to interact with Edinburgh’s literature in a variety of ways, exploring the spatial relations of the literary city at particular times in its history, in the works of particular authors, or across different eras, genres and writers. Short-listed entrants will be notified by email or telephone before the end of February 2015, and asked to confirm attendance at the event. On a single webpage, it is not uncommon to find several hyperlinks contesting with each other, much like the texts on a parchment of vellum. And I think that Palimpsest is really taking us into the future – and it is really wonderful that you are starting with a competition and encouraging people to write as part of the project. The Modernist Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid valorised the homogenous, incorporated society of Montrose and other north-east towns like it, as much as he did the language in which they spoke.