The principal objective of ‘The snows of yesteryear: narrating extreme weather’ is to reveal and relate past experiences, both historical and more recent, as ways of understanding and coping with phenomena increasingly regarded as markers of climate change. It will explore ways that these events are remembered and mythologised, and interpret what is ultimately learned from them as both warning and opportunity. The project builds on the work developed by the AHRC “Historic Weather” Network, by continuing to scope and assess arts and humanities documentary and narrative primary source materials and demonstrate their value for research of historic weather and climate. It draws into collaboration the Network Co-I Prof Lorna Hughes (now University of Wales) and Prof Mike Pearson (Aberystwyth University) as award holder in the ‘Landscape and Environment’ programme. The project will focus on archival collections in the National Library of Wales (NLW), a legal deposit library. The project’s aims are: • To research accounts of extreme weather events, specifically regional and national experiences of harsh winters, as they are recorded in journals, dairies and literary and art works including narratives, poetry, novels, paintings and other visualisations, especially accounts related to extreme events, for example the 1703 “Great Storm”; and as they are described from living memory, via interviews and web input. It focuses upon experiences in relation to particular sets of historical, social, cultural and environmental circumstance and tradition: of rural communities in Wales and their records – from medieval Welsh poetry to contemporary regional broadcast news. • To research, devise and encourage creative approaches to the exposition of such data from a variety of sources to provide an historical context and understanding of ways that communities have experienced, responded to and survived extreme events through resilience and adaptability. Through this it will draw upon and inform perceptions and discourse, and may inform policy decisions with regard to resilience and adaptability in face of extreme weather in rural contexts. The project involves two strands of enquiry: • scholarly research to identify and prepare potential material for exposition: from library and other archival sources, in collaboration with the NLW, climate scientists from the International ACRE (Atmospheric Reconstructions of the Earth) project at the Met Office, and historic weather researchers. Archival reserach will explore the ways in which extreme winters have been represented and depicted in a wide range of cultural texts and media. This will be augmented by web-based community fieldwork including interviews with local people, historians, geographers and meteorologists, to gather experiences, memories and emotions. • practice-led research to devise appropriate modes of public exposition to engage audiences: as live performance and through on-line platforms. We will use digital arts and humanities methods and approaches for selection and digital representation of material collected by the project. The ordering and exposition of material will also follow principles of dramaturgical organization of content, highlighting ‘performative’ aspects of the content. This will also demonstrate the impact of “thinking digitally” on performance development and narrative. It will result in: • the creation of a live performance to be presented locally and nationally, with a premiere in the National Library of Wales in early 2013. This will evoke past events and immediate responses to them: of both trauma and resilience. • the creation of a sustainable website: with a record of research materials; as the further creative exposition of assembled materials; as an interactive facility for the deposit of experiences of extreme weather, encouraging public engagement • a summative workshop and other academic outputs to ensure the dissemination of academic and public benefits

The aim of this interdisciplinary and collaborative project is to uncover and evaluate hitherto unstudied travel accounts written by European travellers to Wales from 1750 to 2010. This important area of study has been neglected, but is central to our understanding of European intercultural relations, the development of Welsh identity and the establishment of the tourist industry in Wales. The proposed study will serve as a case study to help further understand issues relating to hegemonic / minority and/or periphery / periphery relations. Within the vibrant field of travel writing, Wales has often suffered neglect. Even where there is interest in travel to 'Celtic' nations, Wales has often been overlooked in both the artistic and critical imaginations in favour of Scotland and Ireland. From the mid-eighteenth century, which saw the emergence of the travel narrative as a popular source of information and entertainment, writing about Wales has often been embedded in accounts of travel to 'England'. The current project seeks to redefine perceptions of Wales by problematising the notion of 'invisibility' often ascribed to the Welsh context and by broadening perspectives outwards to encompass European perceptions. This will realign the current debate which has centred primarily on English travellers to Wales. The project will challenge the way in which travel writing studies conceives of 'minority cultures' by analysing relations between smaller nations (Wales / Brittany). The study will examine European perceptions of Wales from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, and seek to identify their impact on developing Welsh cultural identity. The project will focus primarily on texts by French- and German-speaking travellers, as these constitute the majority. However, narratives from other parts of Europe and across the globe will also be considered. The project will analyse travelogues, travel guides, almanacs, encyclopaedias, private correspondences, diaries, creative works and periodical contributions which have Wales or Welsh culture as their focus. The definition of the traveller encompasses those travelling for the purpose of leisure, scholarship or commerce as well as those who remain in Wales on a more permanent basis, such as exiles and refugees. Central is the role of Anglophone culture as a mediator between Wales and the European traveller. While most studies of travel literature are one-directional, this study explores a three-way relationship, looking outward from Britain to the continent, then considering how Europe reflects back the perception of Wales and how that perception is then received in Wales itself. The project will result in a number of outputs of interest to a wide range of beneficiaries. Tully, Jones and Williams will produce a jointly-authored book. Focusing on travellers from French and German-speaking cultures, the study concentrates on historical flashpoints (political exile, revolution, war, and Romanticism) when Wales and its culture have attracted the attention of European travellers. Further European perspectives on Wales and views from other parts of the world will be considered via a special issue of the journal Studies in Travel Writing and the end-of-project conference. The Research Assistant and the two PhD theses are central to the project, extending the range of material to be studied to literary responses (both creative and critical), philological works and guidebooks. The broader findings of the project will be showcased to the academic community and the general public by means of a searchable online database and a website. An exhibition (both physical and virtual) will be staged, and a range of educational materials for schools will also be developed concurrently. A briefing paper for Visit Wales will outline what travellers and tourists want or expect from Wales.

This project will increase public engagement with digital fiction and provide empirically substantiated analyses to show how readers interact with digital fiction. Digital Fiction is fiction that is written for and read from a computer and can be Web- or app-based (for tablets and smartphones) or accessed via CD-ROMs. Digital fictions are different to e-books, however. Rather than existing as a digital version of a print novel, digital fictions are what are known as "born digital" - that is, they would lose something of their aesthetic and/or structural form and meaning if they were removed from the digital medium. For example, they may contain hyperlinks, moving images, mini-games or sound effects. Further, unlike e-books in which the reader moves from one page to another in a linear fashion, in many digital fictions, the reader has a role in constructing the narrative, either by selecting hyperlinks or by controlling a character's journey through the storyworld. Digital fictions therefore require that the reader interacts with the narrative throughout the reading experience. With the increasing availability and popularity of e-readers, such as the Kindle and associated iPad applications, e-books are increasingly being advertised, discussed and produced. Their cultural, social and economic significance is growing with print publishers now focussing much of their marketing effort in this area. As commercial products, e-readers are only available to those that can afford to buy them, but much digital fiction is available for free. While the move to e-publishing might suggest increased digital fluency and amplified general interest in digital textuality, public awareness of and engagement with born digital fiction remains relatively low. The project aims to raise public awareness of and engagement with digital fiction in order to permit a more inclusive engagement with these texts and, in a related step, increase digital literacies more broadly. In a series of public engagement activities in Sheffield, Bangor and Aberystwyth, readers will learn about born digital fiction. Their engagement with the texts will enhance digital literacies and encourage a more explicit understanding of narrative form and structure in general as well as awareness of how digital texts are different from print. This includes: how to identify and respond to different types of plot and narration in digital environments; how to read texts that utilise images, sound and interactive navigational elements; how to combine reading and gaming; how to use digital technologies critically. The project also aims to empirically test the researchers' analyses of digital fiction. Primarily the researchers will consider how readers process the multimodal aspects of digital fiction - that is, the combination of different modes such as sound, images and text. The researchers will also consider the relationship between what readers expect to happen in the narrative as a consequence of their actions and what they actually find. Finally the researchers will investigate whether different forms of narration affect the relationship between the reader of digital fiction and the fictional world that it describes. Using a range of data collection strategies including questionnaires, focus groups and interviews, reader response data will be gathered from workshop participants as well as more established readers of digital fiction who belong to established reading communities (e.g. members of the Electronic Literature Organisation) and incorporated into the researchers' analyses. The result will be a more robust and, crucially, empirically based understanding of how readers interact with digital fiction. This part of the project will also inform wider cognitive-linguistic theories of literature by providing a replicable methodology for testing reader engagement with digital texts and well as a deeper understanding of how readers interact with fictional narratives in general.

Humphrey Llwyd of Denbighshire (1527-68) ranks among the leading figures of the Welsh Renaissance. His maps and treatises on Welsh and British geography were admired and printed by the great Dutch atlas-maker Abraham Ortelius. Author of the first book on the history and topography of the entire island of Britain, Llwyd coined the fateful phrase "the British empire"; his work provided the cornerstone for an emerging vision of a unified, expansive, British state. His remarkable book collection still lies at the heart of one of Britain's central institutions, the British Library. In the decades after his death, Llwyd's literary influence in both England and Wales was remarkable. His vision of a unified Britain, in advance of the union of the crowns, influenced English writers including William Camden, Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton, and John Dee. His distinctive map of Wales, Cambriae Typus, remained in print well into the eighteenth century. Providing the basis for David Powel's Historie of Cambria (1584), Llwyd's history of medieval Wales remained the standard version for over two hundred years. There is as yet no edition of Llwyd's collected works, and the majority of his writings have never been the subject of a scholarly edition. In this post-devolution and post-referendum era, when the identity of the British state and relationships among its constituent nations remain under urgent review, Llwyd's works can provide a unique insight into the origins of our present dilemmas. New approaches to Llwyd and his legacy will be greatly aided by a scholarly yet accessible edition of his writings and his maps. This project aims to use a new edition as a vehicle to resituate Llwyd and his vision of Britain within multiple national cultures. The project's foundation is the scholarly work required to produce that new edition. Although Llwyd's corpus is not immense (six works totalling c. 105,000 words, and two maps), it includes works in English, Latin and Welsh in both print and manuscript sources, and numerous printed variants of the maps; in addition to the tasks of transcription, collation, and translation, the editorial team will focus on furnishing Llwyd's works with the textual apparatus and commentary they require. The project aims further to generate scholarly work on Llwyd and his legacy through a symposium at the British Library and a volume of essays. The project also aims to reach a wider audience beyond the academy. It posits that Llwyd's vision, embodied above all in his maps, is potentially accessible and engaging for members of the British public, with further specific relevance and interest for inhabitants of Wales. The project's outputs will include publicly accessible and interactive digital versions of Llwyd's maps, housed on the website of the National Library of Wales, which already employs Cambriae Typus in its outreach and educational activities. Collaborating with the Education Centre at the NLW, the project will engage school pupils and other community organizations with Llwyd's vision of Wales, using his maps and texts as a springboard to imagine the shape of Wales in the present and future. A public exhibition accompanied by public lectures at the NLW will further assist in highlighting the relevance of Llwyd's works for the present day. The PI is a Renaissance literary scholar with an established record of work on Llwyd and his contemporaries; the two CIs have respective expertise in Welsh historiography and medieval/ early modern cartography (including digital approaches).The proposed PDRA 1, who will be responsible for the transcription, Welsh-English translation, and initial annotation of Llwyd's textual works, is an experienced scholar and editor of sixteenth-century Welsh texts. The proposed PDRA 2, with responsibility for GIS-based analysis of Llwyd's maps, is the recent recipient of a PhD in Geography with experience in the application of digital approaches to pre-modern maps.

The French Revolution of 1789 was the defining event of the Romantic period in Europe. It unsettled not only the ordering of society but language and thought itself: its effects were profound and long-lasting. Over the last twenty years, scholarship in this area has radically changed our understanding of the impact of the Revolution and its aftermath on British and European culture. In literature, as critical attention has shifted from a handful of major poets to the non-canonical 'edges', we can now see how the works of women writers, self-educated writers, radical pamphleteers, religious enthusiasts and loyalist propagandists both shaped and were shaped by the language and ideas of the period. Yet surprising gaps remain. Even recent studies of the 'British' reaction to the Revolution are under-informed about responses from the regions, and Wales is particularly poorly served. The reasons for this are complex, but it is clear that many researchers working in this period are simply unaware of the kinds of sources available for comparative study. \n\nAt the time of the 1801 census the vast majority of people living in Wales spoke no English: eighteenth-century Wales, in other words, retained a markedly distinct cultural and linguistic identity. How, then, did the events in Europe and the British reaction to them come to be known and felt throughout the different levels of Welsh society? In what ways did Welsh responses differ from those in Scotland, Ireland or London? This project will explore these questions through a wide-ranging series of edited texts, chosen to reflect the dramatic increase in diversity and abundance of Welsh literature during the period 1790-1815. The volumes will be organized principally by genre (poetry, sermons, letters, and so on) and each volume will provide an in-depth critical introduction situating the material in its historical and literary context. An additional collection of essays, both literary and historical, by experts from inside and outside Wales will further explore the subject across a wide range of genres and themes (e.g. the presence of America, the role of translation, the London-Welsh networks). The on-going work of the project will be presented to the wider academic community by means of an international conference, and to the general public through a dedicated website.\n\nThe research team will be led by an investigator with ten years' experience in the field of European Romanticism; she has recently headed a five-year project on the Welsh Romantic forger and radical, Iolo Morganwg. Her co-investigator is an eminent historian of Wales, who has, over three decades, published widely on the period. A strong advisory panel will include scholars with expertise in Welsh history and literature and leading writers on British Romanticism from outside Wales. Towards the end of the project a technical consultant will assist the team in presenting the results of their work in web form.\n\nFrom ballads and pamphlets to personal letters and prize-winning poems, essays, journals, sermons and satires, the range of texts covered by our project will make it a stimulating reflection of the complexity of the period. The Wales we expect to emerge from this study will be neither purely radical nor purely loyalist; neither exclusively Welsh nor yet wholly British. The implications of this work, moreover, go well beyond the immediate 'Four Nations' context of the British response to the Revolution. Our findings will provide further much-needed material for ongoing international research into the subtle interactions of regional, national and international constructions of identity during this extraordinarily formative period of European history. \n