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!