Bridging the Gap: Managing a Digital Medieval Initiative Across Disciplines and Institutions (original) (raw)
Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures, 2013
This essay offers an insight into the way digital editions of medieval texts can be employed to replicate the medieval reading experience. Awareness of the characteristic features of medieval textuality, exemplified through select late medieval texts, can help in developing increasingly flexible editorial models, which are more consistent with medieval reading practices than current editions. Editions, transformed from single textual occurrences into fluid, communal, and unfolding processes, can uncover a complex notion of medieval hypertextuality by linking texts, images, and tunes. They can then even trace the reception of a given text. As readers are empowered to zoom in and out specific textual components, of manuscript witnesses, of families and printed editions, digital editions can present individual witnesses alongside editorial apparatuses and thus bridge the gap between the Old and the New Philology.
Old Light on New Media: Medieval Practices in the Digital Age
This essay offers an insight into the way digital editions of medieval texts can be employed to replicate the medieval reading experience. Awareness of the characteristic features of medieval textuality, exemplified through select late medieval texts, can help in developing increasingly flexible editorial models, which are more consistent with medieval reading practices than current editions. Editions, transformed from single textual occurrences into fluid, communal, and unfolding processes, can uncover a complex notion of medieval hypertextuality by linking texts, images, and tunes. They can then even trace the reception of a given text. As readers are empowered to “zoom” in and out specific textual components, of manuscript witnesses, of families and printed editions, digital editions can present individual witnesses alongside editorial apparatuses and thus bridge the gap between the Old and the New Philology.
Past, Present, and Future of Digital Medievalism
Literature Compass, 2012
In this article, the author looks back at over 30 years of experience with ''Digital Humanities'' and argues that while our media for research, delivery, have changed, our methodologies have not. That fact poses a significant challenge for Digital Medievalists because the author believes and advocates for a significant change not just in our delivery systems, but that the digital tools we now have should be changing the way we think and do research, teach, and advertise Medieval Studies as a whole. At once a personal story of experience in the field and an analysis of current practices, this article critiques practices frequently touted as innovative and the wave of the future as nothing more than the same old packages using a new delivery system that may or may not be as effective as the previous delivery system. This critique in the author's view applies to our teaching as well as to our research. Finally, the author offers some suggestions for both research and teaching that attempt to break out of the old molds and methods and use the digital tools we have in innovative ways that do change the way medievalists research and teach and take fuller advantage of what working digitally offers the field.
Meeting the Medieval in a Digital World
Meeting the Medieval in a Digital World, 2018
This book looks at the intersection between medieval studies and digital humanities, confronting how medievalists negotiate the 'virtual divide' between the cultural artefacts that they study and the digital means by which they address those artefacts. The essays come from medievalists who have created digital resources or applied digital tools and methodologies in their scholarship. Text encoding and analysis, data modeling and provenance, and 3D design are all discussed as they apply to western European medieval literature, history, art history, and architecture.
Introduction: Reading practices and participation in digital and medieval media
2018
Reading practices and participation in digital and medieval media 'Where is the moralizynge?' So asked a friend of the early fifteenthcentury clerk and writer Thomas Hoccleve when shown a copy of Hoccleve's newly translated poem 'Jereslaus' Wife'. Hoccleve describes this exchange in his long poem Dialogue, in which he explains that he had 'endid' the tale a 'wike or two' before his friend visited. Taking up the work, the friend read the poem eagerly, but objected to its ending. After storming home for his copy of Hoccleve's source, the friend returned, book in hand, to regale Hoccleve with the moral. In response, Hoccleve adds it following the end of his poem. The interaction Hoccleve describes represents one of the underreported ways in which medieval readers could participate in the development of texts. Hoccleve clearly views his work in translating and composing the tale as finished and complete before his friend confronts him with an alternative view of the work that prompts Hoccleve to add the interlude and the moralizing. He then identifies the moral as an addition for which his friendly reader holds responsibility. His friend's participation alters both the text itself, through the provision of an explicit moral, and Hoccleve's own nascent role as author. This alteration enacted through participation responds to the reader's casual assumption that he possesses authority sufficient to counter Hoccleve's own authority. Neither he nor Hoccleve view the writer as the sole determinant of the work. Instead, his friend asserts authority as a reader to contribute to Hoccleve's work, and the friend's suggestions lead to its modification. This relationship Hoccleve depicts between a writer who accepts and responds to the authority of a reader occurs at a critical moment in the history of medieval English literature. From the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth centuries, expanding literacy among the upwardly mobile mercantile and professional classes
The Digital Middle Ages: An Introduction
Speculum, 2017
Our aims in this supplement of Speculum are frankly immodest. In organizing a series of sessions devoted to the digital for the Medieval Academy annual meeting in 2016, we hoped, by bringing together a diversity of projects, to showcase for the Academy membership the wide range of exciting possibilities afforded by digital humanities (DH). The papers gathered here are drawn largely from those sessions, with several additions. We want to acknowledge the contributions of Sarah Spence and William Stoneman, coorganizers of the sessions, for their inspiration and help. This supplement is the first issue of Speculum devoted to digital medieval projects, and it is offered in an online, open-access format that reinforces the openness to which the digital aspires and which it encourages.
Medieval Digital Humanities (ENG 697)
In the Spring semester of 2011 I signed up for a PhD level seminar at Northern Illinois University entitled "Paleography" taught by Dr. Nicole Clifton. The majority of the coursework consisted of learning various styles of handwriting scripts dating from 100 BCE to 1700 CE as well as transcribing, dating, and identifying the origin of a manuscript housed in the Rare Books section of the university library. It was in this class that I was first introduced to the extensive work conducted by the British Library"s Manuscript Studies division housed on their website. The BL was able to digitize a large assortment of collected texts from across their holdings, especially medieval manuscripts dating as early as the 10 th century. While I have previously involved myself in such technological discussions as Kairos and Computers and Composition, I had never spent time working with the intersection between ancient text and modern technology. The availability of ancient manuscripts and the ability to work with programs like Adobe allowed me to transition my thinking about writing from one that focused exclusively on hypertextual writing to seeing the need for writing to become more accessible, especially works that are normally housed in archives hidden away from public view. Is there a digital medieval humanities? Multimodality within the medieval community is nothing new as projects such as CANTUS database, Project Gutenberg, various linguistic tutorials for medieval Latin, Old High German, Old English, and Old French, and annotated hypertext websites covering the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Malory, and Wolfram von Eschenbach.
Media Technologies and the Digital Humanities
INTRODUCTION Media Technologies and the Digital Humanities, 2023
Do not to seek the old in the new, but find something new in the old. 1 The digital age has shaped our ways of viewing ourselves, society, and culture. Since 2000, regular use of the internet among Americans has risen from around 50% to over 90%. For people under sixty-five, regular internet usage is nearly universal. For education and industries, access to the internet is no 2 longer a convenience, it is a necessity. It has also reframed and revealed new perspectives on how medievalists engage with historical phenomena in the classroom, during the research process, and in promulgating new findings through presentations, publications, and other research products. Pervasive use of digital tools does not necessarily correlate with effective use of those tools. PowerPoint slides continue to be a common feature in the college lecture hall, only skimming the surface of the enormous diversity of media available in digital spaces for teaching and learning. Presenting medieval studies in this way does not reflect the type of work done by medieval studies in 2022 and presents a false image of the field to students and the general public. In the most basic sense, the digital age has dramatically shifted the accessibility of medieval media and the modality through which people use it. Hours upon hours previously spent in archival reading rooms have been replaced with screen time as major archival locations, such as the Bibliotheque Nationale, British Library, and Vatican Library, have endeavored upon major digitization initiatives-Gallica, Digitised Manuscripts, and DigVatLib, respectively. These efforts have made tens of thousands of manuscripts available to researchers around the world in extremely high-quality images. Similarly, the production of academic papers, books, and volumes is now developed primarily, if not exclusively, through virtual communication over digital space-where would medieval publishing houses be without access to Adobe pdfs? The myriad of societal effects due to the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of digital access, digital
“Medieval Manuscripts and Electronic Media: Observations on Future Possibilities” , 2001
The application of electronic media to the study of medieval manuscripts is a concept only recently considered by scholars and teachers of the Middle Ages. 1 The implications for the shape of future scholarship are both enticing and hair-raising: the visionary proclaiming that the Internet will universalize access for anyone wishing to study or view the illuminated page, the Luddite gloomily mentioning the transitory nature of the Internet and commenting on the potential loss of access to actual material by serious scholars in the rush to reproduce manuscripts for all and sundry. This essay, meant to comfort the fearful and to engage technologic neophytes in the stunning possibilities afforded by electronic resources, includes a brief, and perhaps temporal, survey of manuscript sites available on the World Wide Web. In order to point to some bene®ts (and pitfalls) of Internet research, I then will examine more closely recent publicity about the Canterbury Tales Project, and ®nally, share some observations drawn from a multimedia class on medieval and Renaissance literature that I have been teaching for six consecutive semesters with Jeanine Meyer, a colleague in Information Systems, at Pace University in New York City. While I do not think electronic media can replace the process of going to libraries and looking at primary sources, of having the direct experience of observing illumination or transcribing a text, or of holding a medieval manuscript in one's hands, the promotional, publicizing and creative possibilities of the Internet or its related form, the CD-ROM, are 53 1 For an excellent overview, see C. J. Brown and B. Valentine,`Networking in Medieval and Postmodern Cultures: Texts, Authorship, and Intellectual Property', Journal of the Early Book Society 2 (1999), 157±78, edited by Martha W. Driver. A special issue of Literary and Linguistic Computing 14.2 (1999), entitled`Teaching the Middle Ages with Technology', edited by M. W. Driver and D. McGrady, includes nine essays that report on the successful teaching of medieval texts, mainly to undergraduate students, using a variety of electronic media. The work of Larry Benson and a number of Harvard graduate students attests to the ®ne quality of medieval materials that can be found on the Internet. They are consistently cited by students in college classrooms as the best sites to support the study of Chaucer and the Middle Ages. The Harvard Chaucer site, last consulted September 1999, may be accessed at <www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/\~chaucer>. All sites discussed in this essay were accessed again in September 1999 unless otherwise noted.
Medieval texts - Contemporary media. The art and science of editing in the digital age
The essay collected in this volume began life as Workshop papers. The Workshop, which took place in Pavia in June 2008, explored the interaction between ICT systems and the philological analysis of medieval texts. Throughout the book the theoretical implications of both present and future reasearch are taken into account, and the current e-edition projects here illustrated offer an international perspective of editorial scholarship in the electronic medium, providing also original contributions in the field of digital philology.
Medieval Narrative Texts Digitalized
János M Bak; Ivan Jurković (ed.): Chronicon. Medieval Narrative Sources: A Chronological Guide with Introductory Essays. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, pp. 127-137., 2013
T his essay ofers a framework for thinking about the active mutability of form in an early modern context. My purpose is to illuminate a potential point of intervention in emerging relationships between the digital humanities and historical scholarship. As Henry Turner has recently pointed out, many of our current understandings about the materiality of form are drawn from contemporary assumptions about the limits of disciplinary practice. Turner identiies rich inluences from both contemporary historians of science and early modern poetics that work to inlect a "notion of form [that] is not a static architecture or an immanent, closed idea," but which lourishes as a "renewing, relational network" (5). I am particularly interested in following this idea as a way back into our prevailing sense of what historical work can ofer to the "digital turn" (including the new institutional hegemony of the digital humanities) and, conversely, what the digital turn can ofer to historical work. My principal contention is that we are yet to see a thoroughgoing consideration of the deeper impacts of historical methodologies on digital practices and theories. I close with a brief demonstration of how attention to "renewing, relational" networks of form, using the works of Margaret Cavendish as an example, have the potential to transform our investigations into the practical and theoretical implications of the digital.
Thanks to Maryanne Kowaleski, the Center for Medieval Studies for this invitation.