Conference Report: Isidore of Seville: Transforming Knowledge from Scriptorium to Cyberspace (original) (raw)
Related papers
Networks and Neighbours, 2013
CYBERSPACE Isidore of Seville (d. 636 AD) is a crucial figure in the selection, preservation and propagation of Classical and Patristic learning. He put such learning to varied use in his own day, in the process ensuring that it could be made useful for future generations. Because of the depth of what he preserved and the breadth of its diffusion, Pope John Paul II proclaimed Isidore the patron saint of the Internet in 1997. This one-day symposium was held at the Spanish cultural centre, the Instituto Cervantes (http://manchester.cervantes.es/en/default.shtm) on Deansgate in Manchester, UK on Thursday 18 th April 2013. We'd been working on the social, cultural and religious history of late antique Spain for the past few years and had been thinking about putting on a symposium on Isidore for a couple of years. Last year we started to think about this a bit more seriously and realised that 96 MICHAEL KELLY, JAMIE WOOD & ANDREW FEAR Networks and Neighbours
Applying the Canonical Text Services Model to the Coptic SCRIPTORIUM
2016
Coptic SCRIPTORIUM is a platform for interdisciplinary and computational research in Coptic texts and linguistics. The purpose of this project was to research and implement a system of stable identification for the texts and linguistic data objects in Coptic SCRIPTORIUM to facilitate their citation and reuse. We began the project with a preferred solution, the Canonical Text Services URN model, which we validated for suitability for the corpus and compared it to other approaches, including HTTP URLs and Handles. The process of applying the CTS model to Coptic SCRIPTORIUM required an in-depth analysis that took into account the domain-specific scholarly research and citation practices, the structure of the textual data, and the data management workflow. Overview Coptic SCRIPTORIUM (SCRIPTORIUM) is a platform for interdisciplinary and computational research in Cop-tic linguistics, literature, and history. The goal of this research project was to investigate, decide upon and implement a system of stable identification for the texts and research objects in SCRIPTORIUM in order facilitate their citation and reuse. SCRIPTORIUM began when two scholars from different disciplines (Amir Zeldes in Linguistics and Caroline T. Schroeder in Religious Studies) identified a shared need for digitized corpora of Coptic texts. The Coptic language was the last phase of the ancient Egyptian language family, in use from late antique to Byzantine periods of Egyptian history. Due to Egypt's dry climate, Coptic sources important to a number of academic disciplines have survived. Linguists conducting computational and statistical research into language as well as historians, religious studies scholars, and philologists seeking to query and investigate topics and terminology across large sets of primary sources would find a digital corpus annotated consistently according to recognized standards useful. Through SCRIPTORIUM, Zeldes and Schroeder began digitizing primarily Coptic literary texts (such as formal letters, sermons, gnomic sayings, and monastic rules) composed primarily by monks of the fourth through sixth centuries and copied by later scribes through approximately the twelfth century. In addition, SCRIPTORIUM has developed tools and standards for annotating Coptic literature for linguistic, paleographical, and historical information, as well as an online digital environment for reading and querying the texts, translations, and annotations. Identifiers for texts, annotations, and other features are necessary. Our basic requirements for the SCRIPTORIUM data identifiers were that they be stable, location and technology independent, and globally unique. We wanted an identifier scheme that would outlast any particular delivery mechanism, such as the web, but also required that the identifiers be resolvable in the context of the systems that do exist today. In particular, the SCRIPTORIUM data must be able to be cited as linked data on the web according to the principles of " 5 Star Linked Data. " (Berners-Lee, 2006) Our analysis took into account the specifics of the SCRIPTORIUM data resources and its current data production and management practices as well as the domain-specific scholarly practices of citation of the texts in the SCRIPTORIUM corpus.
The current digital turn in studying and analyzing historical documents results in both having machine actionable cultural data and providing software able to process them. However, these data and services often lack in integration strategies among them in order to be reused in other contexts different from the original ones. As pointed out by Franz Fischer in a worthy of note article: “There is no out-of-the-box software available for creating truly critical and truly digital editions at the same time” [1]. Likewise, Monica Berti stated that is now important to "build a model for representing quotations and text reuses of lost works in a digital environment” [2]. In this vision Bridget Almas is in charge of developing an integrated platform for collaboratively transcribing, editing, and translating historical documents and texts. She claimed that through this platform, called Perseids, students and scholars are able to create open source digital scholarly editions [3]. A numbe...
2018
Fabio Cusimano A 'cloud' full of digitized manuscripts. The Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana, from the Custos Catalogi to the Data Curator. Keywords (ENG.): Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana, digital library, digitization, cooperation, free access, 'cloud', data curation, International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF). Abstract (ENG.): Digital libraries and digitization projects have developed from their inception as a temporary phenomenon to become a real opportunity. Today the dissemination of knowledge can make use of new web-based technologies, while also benefiting from the improved quality of digital objects, more mature metadata standards, more capable retrieval technologies, etc. But the roots of libraries are older than the so-called digital revolution, as can be seen from the case of the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. Since the first years of the 17th century, this prestigious conservation library has managed and curated a special and unique collection of precious manuscripts, and, now as then, it makes those masterpieces freely available for users from all over the world, both at its reading room and, today, through its new digital initiative. Many librarians (also known as custodes catalogi) have succeeded each other over the centuries, always pursuing preservation and conservation targets, and always enriching and curating the catalogs. Today we are still inspired by those masters of the past, but we are also engaged in making these precious sources available for an ever-increasing audience thanks to our new freely accessible digital library.
Information Technologies for Medieval Studies: Some Recent Experiences in Italy
Reti Medievali Rivista, 20/1, 2019
[En] The article highlights the relations between Italian medieval studies and digital humanities, starting from researches conducted on Vatican documents and other ecclesiastical sources since the 1980s; then it goes on to discuss some more recent projects, based on various types of sources. A multi-faceted debate emerges, in which the experiences of historians and editors of medieval sources are intertwined with those of archivists and librarians, to face the incessant transformation of Information Technology, from the first “Read-Only” Web to the Web 2.0, from the Semantic Web to the challenges posed to historians by research data and Linked Open Data technologies. [IT] L’articolo ricostruisce i rapporti degli studi medievistici italiani con le digital humanities, muovendo dalle ricerche condotte sulla documentazione vaticana e su altre fonti ecclesiastiche a partire dagli anni Ottanta del secolo scorso, per passare poi a discutere di alcuni progetti più recenti, basati su diverse tipologie di fonti. Emerge un dibattito a più voci, in cui le esperienze degli storici e degli editori di fonti medievali si intrecciano a quelle maturate nel mondo degli archivi e delle biblioteche, per affrontare le incessanti trasformazioni della Information Technology, dai primi siti in rete al Web 2.0, dal Web semantico alle recenti sfide lanciate agli storici dai dati della ricerca e dalle tecnologie dei Linked Open Data.
God's Librarian: Isidore of Seville and His Literary Agenda
A Companion to Isidore of Seville, 2020
Here I offer a series of impressionistic semblanzas of what I understand to be the essential elements of Isidore of Seville's context, personality, and literary agenda. When viewed through the lens of the Visigothic slate texts and their evidence for a continuous history of Latin literacy in the Iberian Peninsula, he comes newly into focus as operating still very much in a late Roman world. If we read his letters with care, we recognise too that Isidore was altogether less worldly than we have made him out to be; his priorities lay elsewhere, his thought and energy were spent in constant revision of both ancient knowledge and Patristic exegesis, memorialised in the complex transmission of his opera. And by attending in particular to his prefaces to those works, we perceive an anxious determination to render the universal manageable – and on his own terms.