An Introduction Overview Be aware of DH research possibilities Be able to define key DH terms and methodologies Be familiar with a range of DH projects Know some ways to get started What Is Digital Humanities ID: 795565
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Slide1
Digital Medieval Studies
An Introduction
Slide2Overview
Be aware of DH research possibilities
Be able to define key DH terms and methodologies
Be familiar with a range of DH projects
Know some ways to get started
Slide3What Is Digital Humanities?
DH = “Humanities research with computer technologies”
Slide4DH centres in major universities worldwide.
Stats &
infographic
: Melissa
Terras
, “Quantifying the Digital Humanities,” UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, 2011.
Slide5Wider acceptance for DH
approaches, projects, and scholarly
publications:
Stats &
infographic
: Melissa
Terras
, “Quantifying the Digital Humanities,” UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, 2011.
Slide6Funding for projects with DH components:
Digging into Data (2009)
Slide7Growing infrastructure of digital archives, tools, publications:
Switzerland’s Virtual Manuscript Library (e-codices) allows scholars to view, analyze, and annotate medieval and early modern manuscripts online.
Slide8Why DH?
Growing infrastructure for DH:
Slide9Why DH?
Jobs + Tools + Infrastructure = Opportunity.
Slide10Digital Humanities:
A Brief History
Slide11Digital Humanities:
A Brief History
“Digital Humanities” is no newfangled discipline.
Medievalists at U of T were “doing DH” in the 1970s. Medieval corpora first went digital in the 1950s.
Slide12Father Roberto
Busa
, S. J. (1913-2011)
Index
Thomisticus
(1950s – 1980s; 2005 online)
11 million words of medieval Latin
30+ years of editing and analysis
8000+ hours of computer processing stacks of punch cards
1500 + km of magnetic tape
Father Roberto Busa with an IBM machine. (Stephen Ramsay, “
Fr. Roberto Busa, S.J. (1913–2011),” s
tephenramsay.us/2011/08/11/father-roberto-busa/.
Slide13Father
Busa
and the
Index
Thomisticus
Slide14Father
Busa
and the
Index
Thomisticus
“The use of computers in the humanities […] can help us to be more humanistic than before.”
(
Busa
, Roberto. “Foreword: Perspectives on the Digital Humanities.” In
A Companion to Digital Humanities
.)
Slide15DH History
1949 to early 1980s:
focus on textual data: electronic texts, concordances,
stylometrics
Major U of T DH projects: DOE (1970), DEEDS (1975)
Slide16DH History
1980s to 1990s
Rise of personal computers
Listservs
, text analysis programs
TEI P1:
Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange
(conversation starts 1987, guidelines first published 1994)
At U of T: RPO, an electronic anthology of English poetry for general readers (1994)
Slide17DH History
Late 1990s to present day:
Rise of personal computing & the internet
An explosive variety of DH activities (digital editions, digital archives, GIS mapping, visualizations, blogs,
listservs
, online journals…)
At U of T: DOE Corpus online; LEME; REED’s Patrons and Performances and prototype digital edition
Transition from “computing in the humanities” to “digital humanities”
Slide18From “Computing in the Humanities” to “Digital Humanities”
Google
Ngram
Viewer tracks and visualizes frequencies of n-word expressions (“n-grams”) over time in a variety of digital corpora.
Slide19DH Now
Textual encoding and analysis
Digital editions and archives
Dictionaries
GIS Mapping
Scholarly
blogs & journals
Visualization tools
Slide20Textual Encoding and Analysis
TEI P5: Text Encoding Initiative
A standard for marking up texts to describe their content (intellectual content, physical description
)
Enables computational uses of texts: text interchange, interoperability, querying, etc.
TEI
P5 Chapter 10: manuscripts
To learn more: teibyexample.org
Slide21Textual Encoding and Analysis
Examples from
TEI By Example
(“
Introduction to Text Encoding and the
TEI
,” teibyexample.org).
Slide22Digital Editions of Medieval Texts and Manuscripts
A printed edition of a medieval text often distances you from the manuscript itself. Editors make choices about the text: Is it a diplomatic edition, “warts and all”? Or a reading edition, presenting a far more manicured text? Plus, what about illuminations? What about marginalia? What about multiple witnesses (different
mss.
of the same text) kept in different libraries around the world?
A digital edition lets you do cross-manuscript comparisons. You can view the text in multiple modes (e.g. transcription, translation, facsimile, even recorded performance!), across multiple variants or manuscripts, with far greater flexibility than printed facsimiles allow.
Slide23The Cathedral and the Cloister: Oxford, St. John’s College MS. 17
A single-manuscript online edition that integrates a facsimile, transcription, commentaries, background essays. (McGill University + Oxford Digital Library + St. John’s College Library + Digital Collections Program at McGill)
Slide24Slide25Roman de la Rose Digital Library
A searchable online library of all manuscripts containing the Roman de la Rose. So far 130+ manuscripts. Collaboration between JHU, Walters Art Museum, Bodleian Library, Morgan Library & Museum, J. Paul Getty Museum.
Slide26Digitization of Manuscripts
Slide27Roman de la Rose
Two features to highlight:
You can search, view, bookmark, and annotate manuscripts.
You can browse Rose manuscripts by an index of narrative episodes and view the same narrative section across several manuscripts.
Slide28Dictionary of Old English
Slide29Dictionary of Old English
Compared to print dictionaries, electronic dictionaries allow richer data and more interesting context
Dictionary of Old English: founded 1970, born-digital.
Interoperable with MED and OED: Through DOE, users can view a word’s entire documented history
Multimedia: manuscript snippets of cruxes or contested passages.
Slide30Scholarly blogs; more broadly, social media communities
Slide31Visualizations
Stanford University: Mapping the Republic of Letters
(visualizing networks of correspondence among Enlightenment-era writers and intellectuals)
Slide32Visualizations
A.
Bolintineanu
, “Beyond the Sun’s Setting: Declarations of Unknowing in Old English.” (Network visualizations of Old English declarations of unknowing.)
Slide33(GIS) Mapping
GIS = Geographical Information System (from Google Maps to urban planning software)
Mapping visualizes an issue’s spatial dimension:
spatial distribution of population density, income, social class
the trajectory of an acting company
the progress of epidemic disease
regional changes in pronunciation or dialect
settings of a novel
Slide34Mapping Medieval Chester
Goal: making a digital map of medieval Chester by combining post-medieval maps with archaeological and historical evidence
Digital advantage: interactive, layered, & transparent
Slide35The Paradise Project
“
Beyonde
the
iles
of the
lond
of Prester John and his lordship of wyldernesse, to goo right est men shall nat
fynde
but hylles, great roches, and other myrke londe where no man may see on day ne on nyght, as men of the countré say. And this wyldernes and myrke londe lasteth to Paradyse Terrestre where Adam and Eve were sette, but they were there but a lytell whyle. And that is towarde the est at begynnynge of the erthe […] Of Paradyse can I nat speke propirly for I have nat be there.” (The Book of John Mandeville.)
Slide36Where is Paradise in Middle English?
In the uttermost East of the world
Accessible through a hole in the ground, in Ireland
Just past Hell and Purgatory
Just beyond Ireland
In Faerie
In sleep
An interrupted breath away
Slide37The Paradise Project
Examine representations of Paradise in Middle English
Build a virtual space that mimics the spatial poetics of medieval marvellous spaces
Space defined by narrative, not vice versa
Permeable boundaries
Flexible spaces in many more than two dimensions
Spatial indeterminacy
Slide38What is Project Paradise?
A comparison between two medieval “texts”—map and travel narrative: the Hereford
mappa
mundi and the Book of John Mandeville
A conversation between two imaginary geographies
Slide39Project Paradise
The Book of John Mandeville (as it appears in BL MS Royal 17
C.xxxviii
Hereford
Mappa
Mundi (c. 1300), Hereford Cathedral
Slide40Virtual Spaces: Mappae
Mundi (World Maps)
Medieval world maps create a spatial framework for:
Salvation history
Secular history
“Natural” “history”
Marvellous nations
Hereford
Mappa
Mundi (c. 1300), Hereford Cathedral
Slide41Virtual Spaces: Geotemporal
Digital Exhibits
Scholars’ Lab, University of Virginia Library
Intersection of archives, artifacts, timelines, and maps
Tell stories by plotting documents on maps and underpinning your visual exhibit with a narrative
Slide42Four days after the battle of Fredericksburg (1862), Civil War cartographer
Jedediah
Hotchkiss writes to his daughter, Nelly, telling her a story of the battle and even sketching out a map. This exhibit links map, story, place, and historical context.
Slide43Project Paradise in
Neatline
: demo
Slide44Hereford vs. Mandeville
Hereford: Paradise is an enclosed space in the uttermost East of the world
Mandeville: Paradise is both inaccessible to the world and inextricably linked to the world: scattered, broken fragments infiltrating the world’s geography and history
Slide45From “Computing in the Humanities” to “Digital Humanities”
Discussion:
Why “Digital Humanities” but not “Digital Sciences”?
Drawbacks of DH? Advantages of DH?
What can DH bring to Medieval Studies? What can Medieval Studies bring to DH?
Slide46“Quiz”
Slide47How to Get Started
Start reading and thinking.
Lisa Spiro, “Getting Started in the Digital Humanities,”
http://digitalscholarship.wordpress.com/2011/10/14/getting-started-in-the-digital-humanities/
(a FABULOUS intro to DH)
Blogs & social media, esp. In the Middle (http://inthemedievalmiddle.com)
Digital Medievalist Journal (
http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/
)
Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures
(http://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/digital_philology/)For more resources, see digitalmedievalstudies.wordpress.com.
Slide48How to Get Started
Start playing with tools and ideas:
An overview of basic DH approaches:
Stanford’s
Tooling Up for Digital Humanities
A sampling of DH projects and the tools used to create them:
Miriam Posner,
How did they make that?
An exhaustive tool directory, organized by task:
Bamboo DIRT
Slide49Learning Goals
Be aware of DH history and research possibilities
Be able to define key DH terms and methodologies (TEI
,
visualizations, mapping…)
Be familiar with a range of DH
projects
and initiatives (e-codices, Digging into Data, Roman de la Rose)Have a series of starting points at your fingertips