JHU/UVA Medieval Manuscript Digitization Workshop

As part of my work here at Hopkins, I organized a conference at the University of Virginia that included team members from the Roman de la Rose Digital Surrogates Project, Lives of the Saints: The Medieval French Hagiography Project, and Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, JHU’s Library Digital Programs, The Institute for Advance Technology in the Humanities, and UVA library’s Digital Initiatives. The three invited projects all work with digital surrogates of medieval manuscripts, and the invited participants included librarians, computer scientists, literary scholars, editors, and textual critics. There were three main goals:

1. To initiate and facilitate communication and mutual familiarity among digital manuscript projects.

2. To explore the possibility of a federation of like projects that can address such issues as peer review of electronic projects, rights managements of digital surrogates, and transcriptional and photography protocols.

3. To learn about the possibilities of curating the digital objects that such projects generate in institutional repositories.

The diverse areas of expertise represented by the participants reflects a reality of digital humanities work: none of us can do this alone. Although scientists have had a model of collaborative research for years, this has been much rarer in humanities research (for a good post on this, as well as a couple of comments by me, see my friend and fellow CLIR fellow Wesley Raabe’s blog). And having spent two days in a room with these fine folks, I wonder who would want to work alone! A brief blow-by-blow of the presentations and topics raised:

Stepehns Nichols and I led off with a presentation on the Rose project, including our plans to build a large library of Rose manuscripts and a new site that will serve not only as an online library, but as a scholarly environment for researching the Rose and for communicating with other scholars doing the same. We were followed by Amy Ogden, whose French hagiography project seeks to bring exposure and tools for comparative study to the large body of manuscripts, saints, and narratives that are comprised in this field of study.  If memory serves me right, there are around 150 different saints represented in more than 250 different narratives, many of which survive in multiple manuscript copies – certainly such an enormous corpus is an ideal candidate for analysis and search using digital tools. We finished up with a presentation by Jerome McGann, who talked to us about the successes and challenges of NINES. Since we’re looking for ways to collaborate, provide wide access to digital surrogates of manuscripts, equip scholars with new tools, and address problems of peer review of digital projects, Professor McGann’s work on and thoughts about NINES were particularly useful to all present. McGann noted that Collex will be available, likely within the year, as a sort of template that can be adopted (and adapted) by other projects. It may very well be that we decide to form a federation of medievalists interested in such an organization. Monday evening ended with a wine and cheese reception hosted by Terry Belanger of Rare Book School. Ever the consummate host, Belanger had excellent wines and cheeses selected for us, and had brought out many pertinent RBS teaching aids, including models of medieval bindings, sample watermarked paper and scored parchment, and rolls of uncut parchment skins. Fabulous stuff!

On the second day we heard from Hoyt Duggan and Patricia Bart of the Piers archive. Professor Duggan explained the rationale of the archive as well as some of the challenges they’re currently facing. The PPEA has been publishing on CD-ROM to date for a number of good reasons – the physicality of the CD seems to help with academic promotion and attracting review in academic journals, rights management is easier on CD than on the internet, and it’s easier and faster to call up large image files (this was particularly true a few years back when fewer users had fast internet connections). Nonetheless, they are currently looking to move their publications online and working to figure out a good model for doing so. Patricia Bart presented some of her innovations in developing new means of tagging codicological features and relationships between manuscripts, including creating some extensions of TEI. Duggan and Bart were followed by John Carlson (who, like me, has also been a team member in the PPEA). Carlson edited the alliterative Morte Arthure for his dissertation and is currently co-editing the Siege of Jerusalem with me (my dissertation, a hypertext archive of the extant witnesses to this poem, is our starting point). He also showcased software he has developed, including a browser for displaying editions of medieval manuscripts and the Alliterative MetMachine, which permits semi-automated tagging of alliterative meter (we’re hoping to include the MetMachine along with transcriptions of all SJ manuscripts for metrical analysis in the first volume of The Siege of Jerusalem Electronic Archive, which will be published through SEENET and the Medieval Academy). After lunch, Daniel Pitti and Worthy Martin of IATH led us in a discussion that framed the pertinent issues that had emerged over the course of the two days. Among these, the issue of boundaries stood out to me. It seems that there are boundaries that frustrate our progress, such as those between “techies” and humanists, and those that help us. McGann gave a good example of the latter; rather than expand NINES to encompass all languages, at the outset he limited it to English. If he had not done so, he explained, he believes that the project would have been too big to get off the ground. Boundaries are an implicit pat of any collaboration (who’s in, who’s out, what are the standards for joining, what is the unifying rationale of the project, and so forth), and we need to think about which boundaries help and which threaten to defeat our cause(s). We wrapped up the conference with a presentation by Thorny Staples, one of the principal investigators and guiding lights of Fedora, who updated us on the current status of Fedora and answered questions about how our projects might benefit from using it. Staples has a great way of thinking about preservation – he pointed out that preservation isn’t simply a technological solution, an archive, e.g., where we can stick things and have them safe forever. Rather preservation is the result of usage, maintenance, and institutional commitment. Those things that are used the most, he argued, are the same ones that are migrated the most frequently, and are the least likely to become invisible and forgotten or to cease to be a priority to individuals and institutions. We need not only technical solutions, but also wide access and modeling of data in such a way that it is frequently used, migrated, and repurposed.

All in all, a great two days in Charlottesville!

2007 – The Year To Date

It’s been a busy start to 2007 here at Hopkins. The following is an account of some of the many things I’ve been working on during the first two months:

Mellon Meeting in NYC

After returning from the holidays, the Rose team got together to continue our planning for the new site, and I began preparing for a trip to New York City to present our work to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation at the Mellon All-Projects Meeting for Medieval Studies. Stephen Nichols and I each presented on different aspects of the project, and we heard from a number of other medievalists working on a fascinating array of projects, including medieval manuscripts, music, and architecture. The meeting was hosted in the ArtStor buildings on 61st Street. The discussions held between presentations were particularly fruitful; topics included ways that medieval projects, particularly manuscript projects, can share tasks and expertise and the need for an increased regard for digital scholarship in peer review and academic promotion. I arrived in New York a few days early and visited the Pierpont Morgan Library to write a codicological description of MS Morgan 948, a Rose manuscript currently available on our site, and to consult two other Rose manuscripts that we are hoping to add to the site in the near future. I also made it up to Columbia University for the Thirteenth Annual Book Arts Lecture, part of Bibliography Week 2007, with a reception following in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

West Coast Trip: CLIR, UCLA, and the Getty

I left NYC and headed directly to L.A., where the CLIR fellows were gathered for a meeting at UCLA. Each fellow presented his/her work to date. It was great to see the variety and depth of the projects fellows are engaged in across the country and to catch up with friends made in Bryn Mawr over the summer. I stayed for a few days after my colleagues had departed to write descriptions of two Rose manuscripts held at the Getty Center, one of which, Ludwig XV 7, is already on our site, and the other of which is on loan from a private collector and due to be photographed for inclusion on the new site. Medieval manuscripts, world class art, stunning architecture, and views of the Pacifc and surrounding mountains made this a wonderful experience. I was able to finish my work on the Getty manuscripts in time to make a quick visit to the Huntington Library as well, where I viewed yet another Rose manuscript and met with curator Mary Robertson.

Home, DC, Knoxville

After two weeks on the road, I returned home tired but inspired by the experiences, people, and books I had encountered on my trip. But I was home for less than a week before it was time to hit the road again – first a quick trip to Washington, D.C., and then on to Knoxville, Tennessee. I accompanied Sayeed Choudhury, director of the Digital Knowledge Center here at Hopkins, to a conference in D.C. organized by the Professional and Scholarly Publishing (PSP) division of the Association of American Publishers. Sayeed chaired a panel on Web 2.0 technologies, and I served as a panelist and delivered comments on the emerging role of these technologies in pedagogy, research, and the library world. I then left for Knoxville to attend the Marco Institute at the University of Tennessee, where I gave a presentation entitled ““Voices From the Edge: Marginalia and Marginalization in Roman de la Rose Manuscripts” that focused on those features of manuscripts traditionally marginalized in print editions of medieval texts, whether these are things we’d traditionally label as “marginalia” or, for example, images that were intended to be experienced with the text in an integrated fashion.

That’s it for now!

Catching up . . .

The autumn has seen me sprinting to keep up with everything, with the unfortunate result that my nascent blog has been neglected. One highlight, then, from each month . . . .

October

From October 9-13 I had the privilege of studying codicology with Albert Derolez, perhaps the greatest living codicologist. The course was offered at the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore through Rare Book School. As is typical with RBS offerings, an enormous amount of information and experience was gained in a mere five days. Perhaps the best for me was simply watching Mr. Derolez at work – seeing him leaf through a manuscript that he had never seen before and descirbe to the class everything he observes is quite an inspiration. The content learned was put to use immediately in my work on the Roman de la Rose project when I wrote a description for a Rose manuscript that had never been described aside from some brief catalog records.

November

I traveled to Boston November 8-10 for the Digital Library Federation’s Fall Forum 2006. The trip was made possible through the DLF’s Forum Fellowships program, which, as DLF director David Seaman put it, is “a shameless attempt to seduce” new folks into the digital library world. The splendor of the Farimont Copley, the great food, the intellectual exchange among friendly folks, and the quality of the panels all did their part in accomplishing this. To top it off, Boston was experiencing unseasonably warm weather, meaning I didn’t even need a jacket when I hit the Freedom Trail to see some of the many great sites the city has to offer. Standouts among the many presentations (which are archived here) were those on Collex and The Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image (SCETI) and the keynote address by Anurag Acharya, founder of Google Scholar. The Boston Public Library was just across the street and was the site of the opening reception. It’s a wonderful old building as well as a vibrant 21st-century library. Stop in and see it if you’re in town.

December

To kick off December, I’m just back from the Coalition for Networked Information’s Fall 2006 Task Force Meeting, which was held December 4-5 in Washington, D.C. Elliott Shore, our CLIR mentor and guru, arranged for current CLIR fellows to attend the meeting. The quality of the panelists at this meeting was exceptional – perhaps the best for any conference I’ve attended. Two tips to pass along from sessions I attended – First, digital humanities folks will want to take note of the new digital programs being rolled out byt the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Digital Humanities Initiative. And if you haven’t yet checked out Zotero, do so – it’s terrific.

Roman de la Rose incunables at the Library of Congress

This past Friday I visited the Library of Congress, where I met with Daniel De Simone, curator of the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection. We met in the Rare Books reading room and looked at three early print editions of Roman de la Rose (LC call numbers Incun. X .R75 , Incun. X .G974, and Rosenwald PQ1527 .A1 1503) to consider them for inclusion in the Rose Digital Surrogates project. Mr. De Simone and Mark Dimunation, Chief of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division at the LC, have graciously granted permission to include these books on the site, and they are currently in the LC’s digitization queue. These will be interesting additions to our site, not only because they’re print copies and we currently have only manuscripts, but also because they show variety among printed versions of the Rose. One prints the text in verse with woodblock illustrations and another prints the text in prose format in two columns (also with woodblocks). The third (the 1493 edition) is a truly spectacular book. It is printed on vellum by Antoine Vérard, and every effort was made to make this look like a manuscript – guide lines were drawn in under the text and there is lots of hand decoration. Wonderful miniatures have been painted over the wood blocks. The only catch with this book is that it was rebound in a binding that is far too tight, and thus they won’t be able to photograph most pages, as it is impossible to open the book wide enough, or to get it flat enough, even to photograph one leaf at a time. Mr. De Simone offered to photograph the beginning of the book, however, as it opens readily, and I took him up on it since this book is a wonderful example of the transition from manuscript to print. Because of work currently scheduled for digitizing, it will probably be several months before we get the images.

Rare Book School Report

I participated in a Rare Book School course, 15th-Century Books in Print and Manuscript, the week of August 14-18. Classes were co-taught by Paul Needham and William Noel, and met daily from 8:30-5 at the Walters Art Museum. Coffee breaks, lectures, receptions, and evening cocktail hours all took place in the the neighboring Engineers Club, which is housed in the magnificent Garrett-Jacobs Mansion. I was invited to participate by Terry Belanger, who showed his customary generosity in contacting me and suggesting that I look into the course when he learned that I would be in Baltimore working on the Roman de la Rose Digital Surrogates project at Johns Hopkins University’s Eisenhower Library. In addition to attending the course as a student, I helped out by offering coverage during the days when the RBS staff were otherwise occupied back in Charlottesville.

The stated purpose of the course was “to encourage a way of bibliographical thinking that should prove useful in the analysis of all books, early or modern,” a goal that Needham and Noel realized admirably. The notions that the study of 15th-century books should incorporate both manuscript and print materials and that a study of one informs the other are fundamental ones; indeed one might say that these are obvious truths. Yet the opportunity to learn about books and manuscripts from the 15th century in one setting is quite rare, and the opportunity to do so with the expertise of a top-notch incunabulist (Needham) and a widely recognized expert on medieval manuscripts, and especially manuscript illumination (Noel) working in tandem may be unprecedented. Class participants learned not only from the prepared lessons given by the instructors, but also from witnessing and participating in the process of Needham and Noel learning from one another. There were many unscripted light-bulb moments as important parallels between print and manuscript materials were revealed. In addition to their expertise, both are very personable and have an obvious enthusiasm for teaching and for their fields. There was also a bit of good-natured ribbing between them, with Needham playing the paper-loving American print enthusiast to Noel’s parchment-loving British manuscript devotee. On several occasions Noel produced one of the many incredibly beautiful examples of medieval illumination held in the Walters collection, calling attention to its gold-leaf decorations and exquisitely prepared parchment, before handing over control of the class, along with a particularly plain example of printed material, to Needham!

Topics covered in the class included how print imitated manuscripts and vice versa, the development of print – particularly Gutenberg’s innovations and Needham’s well-known discovery that Gutenberg did not use movable type, how a printing shop worked, paper sizes, the influence on parchment size on paper size, the influence of manuscript codex sizes on the size of printed books (e.g. many books of hours are roughly of the same size, as are many Bibles, psalters, and so forth), and how books of both types were constructed.

There were many fringe benefits as well. The Walters is a wonderful museum, and its setting in the Mt. Vernon cultural district of Baltimore provides good opportunities for dining out, shopping for used books, or seeing the sights. In addition to food, drink, and culture, the class, along with a course on Islamic manuscripts that was running simultaneously, collected a diverse group of friendly and interesting participants, including librarians, collectors, art historians, professors, and medievalists (and of course some filled more than one of these roles).

The Bryn Mawr Experience: CLIR orientation report

The incoming class of CLIR postdoctoral fellows (minus two members who could not attend due to scheduling conflicts) met from July23-August 3 at Bryn Mawr College. The sessions were cheerfully and ably run by Elliott Shore, Constance A. Jones Director of Libraries and Professor of History at Bryn Mawr, and Christa Williford, a former CLIR postdoc who now works as a librarian at nearby Haverford College. The goal of the session was to prepare the recently-graduated PhD’s, most of whom hold degrees in humanities disciplines, for careers in libraries. Although a couple of the fellows had experience working in libraries, the majority were familiar with them primarily from having spent years using them intensely as undergraduate and graduate students. Evenings were spent reading in and writing about a variety of topics, including the history of the library, the future of the monograph, institutional repositories, the library’s role in pedagogy, challenges and opportunities presented by digital technologies, the impact of Google on libraries (and particularly the so-called “Google Five”), and the reception of the CLIR postdoctoral program itself in the library world. These topics were then discussed in detail during the following day’s seminars.

Highlights of the experience included sessions with Don Waters, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Program Officer for Scholarly Communications, and Mary Patterson McPherson, President Emeritus of Bryn Mawr College and Vice President of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and a wonderful trip to the Library of Congress. At the LOC, we had behind-the-scenes tours of the Rare Books and Special Collections Division, the African and Middle Eastern Division, the Performing Arts Division, and the Manuscript Division. We saw a wide variety of wonderful materials, including early printed materials from the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, the Bible used Lincoln swearing-in ceremony, presidential papers, Ethiopian manuscripts, and scores by Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. We concluded with a session with Deanna Marcum, Associate Librarian for Library Services.

No account of the session would be complete without mentioning the food. We began with an introductory dinner, and Elliott Shore informed us that the library world was one where eating and drinking were important. This meal was the first of many indulgences. The dining services at Bryn Mawr are of unusually high quality, and we enjoyed both the quality and the unlimited quantity that our dining hall offered. Enormous breakfasts were followed immediately by the daily baskets of local delicacies that Elliott brought to class, which included local pastries, soft pretzels that are one of the culinary trademarks of the Philadelphia area, and Tastykakes. (Be forewarned – should it ever occur to you to compare Tastykakes to Hostess cakes, DO NOT do so in a 200-mile radius of Philadelphia. These baked goods are a matter of local pride not to be sullied through association with that national conglomerate.) The Peanut Butter Kandy Kakes (despite the unexplained affinity of the Tastykake company for the letter k) is terrific.

Finally, we had a weekend during which we could tour Philadelphia, a great place to visit. I saw a Phillies game, toured the Eastern State Penitentiary, which I recommend highly, and of course saw the Liberty Bell and ate a (chicken) cheesesteak. All in all, it was an informative and enjoyable experience that left us all both inspired and exhausted.