Review of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts Maps

Over the past few days, medievalists have been abuzz about a new resource for manuscript study in the digital age: the folks at Sexy Codicology (a team made up of Giulio Menna and Marjolein de Vos) launched the Digitized Medieval Manuscripts Maps website. I have been personally eager for this launch for several weeks now, since versions of some maps already appeared on Twitter (Giulio Menna first conceived of the maps in July 2013), as teasers for the main launch this week. If the emergence of digitized manuscripts has caused a major sea-change the field of medieval studies, Digitized Medieval Manuscripts Maps is a rising star to help with navigation.

What are the Digitized Medieval Manuscripts Maps? Most simply, they present interactive visualizations of thousands of digitized medieval manuscripts in hundreds of libraries geographically plotted on world maps. The maps and data are presented in four basic forms. On the "Standard" map (built on GoogleMaps), each point represents a library, which can be clicked on for more information about the institution, its digitized holdings, and a link. The Heatmap (also based on GoogleMaps) presents a visualization of the concentration of digitized manuscripts across geography--the more manuscripts in a location, the more concentrated the visualization; the heatmap is currently presented as a series of static images, with promises of future developments. The "Fancy" map (built on MapBox) is the most fully developed, an improvement on the "standard" map and heatmap. While it is still in development, the "fancy" map is fully usable and fully interactive, and the creators promise future capabilities that will encompass those of the other maps on a single platform. Finally, the creators give full, open access to the original data used to construct the maps--a complete list of libraries that have put digitized manuscripts online.

Little needs to be said about the quality of these maps, since users can see for themselves that the maps are a useful addition to the field. Instead, I want to focus on three foundational characteristics of the project that make this project excellent. First, although this launch presents some already great resources, the project is not complete but in a state of development. While this may seem to be a drawback for those focused on long-term sustainability and other related issues, for this project it suggests much potential for future improvements. In relation to sustainability and quality, my second assessment relates to the use of already well-established tools. The site itself is built on the all-purpose WordPress platform, while the maps are built on GoogleMaps and Mapbox--all apt choices that have been tested and well met in digital humanities work. Third, the entire project is fully open, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. The project creators' laudable openness and willingness to share is already evidenced by the posting of complete data sets, as well as the use of other software devoted to open access (notably, WordPress and Mapbox). It is hoped that other projects associated with digitized manuscripts will follow this same path.

If there is any drawback to the project--a review must have its quibbles, and mine are both minor and hopefully remedied in the future--it is the lack of stable funding. Unfortunately, this does affect the "fancy" map, since the creators are only able to use the free version of Mapbox to create it, and are limited in the amount of space for the maps. Thus, the "fancy" map is limited in numbers of monthly views (currently at 3,000) as well as functionality for zooming in and out on the map. Moreover, the lack of stable funding hinders the overall progress; although the creators seek to improve the "fancy" map, they admit that their efforts at this point must go toward the "standard" map and heatmap. (If you do want to help defray costs, the creators suggest checking out the Sexy Codicology store.) With these concessions, however, it should be acknowledged that the project team has already achieved extraordinary feats without formal financial support. This fact in itself should speak to the potential for still greater accomplishments.

There is no doubt that the launch of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts Maps is already a success. Yesterday the project blog reported that "In just 48 hours, the website was visited around 3,000 times." With such positive response, and still more to come from the Sexy Codicology team, the future of medieval manuscripts online seems a bright one indeed.

“Lost Children” Texts: Returning to the Archive in the “Google Books Era”

[Cross-posted from my personal blog.]

I've been reading Matthew L. Jockers's recent book, Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History (Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 2013), and I find much of it compelling. One thing that Jockers mentioned--and my reaction to it--has been on my mind for the last few days: the massive availability of texts in our own digital culture. But I want to put pressure on this notion, especially in relation to medieval texts.

My thinking about this issue began to percolate when I read this:

In this Google Books era, we can take for granted that some digital version of the text we need will be available somewhere online, but we have not yet fully articulated or explored the ways in which these massive corpora offer new avenues for research and new ways of thinking about our literary subject. (17)

Jockers' point is, of course, generally taken to be true, and the massive digitization of texts has certainly changed research across the humanities (he addresses copyright issues in his final chapter, "Orphans"). There is no denying the major benefits to scholarship that have come from initiatives such as Google Books, HathiTrust, and Project Gutenberg.

My knee-jerk reaction to Jockers' observation, however, was this comment:*

Though what about pre-modern, unedited texts? Jockers points to his own idealism & problems such as copyright, but there are also other problems of access: e.g., some of these texts have never (or almost never, or not properly) freed from the archive.

Of course, medievalists benefit greatly from free, open access to many texts, particularly those printed before and even into the early twentieth century. In the USA, copyrights up to 1923 have now generally expired--through there are exceptions, such as when estates continue to hold rights--putting all works printed before then in the public domain. It's worth noting that many resources and editions of medieval texts still consulted (such as those published by the Early English Text Society) were printed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There's no doubt that digitization of these texts are game-changers.

Yet, if Jockers is concerned in his final chapter about copyright and "orphan" texts--instances in which ownership and copyright are unclear--I'm concerned about what we might think of as "lost children" texts (though the two types aren't mutually exclusive) that have yet to be brought out of the archive and made accessible to scholars.

Many examples come to mind. One instance that I've encountered and worked on is a Hiberno-Latin commentary on Colossians that survives in St. Gall, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 1395, which has been mentioned in various scholarship but remained unedited and, subsequently, largely unexamined (see now my transcription and analysis in Sacris Erudiri 2012). This text is just one representative of many Hiberno-Latin texts available only by directly examining the manuscripts; in fact, this issue is the reason for the initiative behind the Corpus Christianorum Scriptores Celtigenae series (published by Brepols). Other examples abound in J.-P. Migne's monumental nineteenth-century Patrologia Latina (PL), some volumes of which are digitally available, while the whole text corpus and searchable database remains locked behind a hefty commercial paywall maintained by Chadwyck-Healey, despite the texts being theoretically available to the public domain. Again, the Corpus Christianorum is relevant here, since the Series Latina seeks to supplant Migne with a new line of critical editions. Like the PL database, however, the Brepols counterpart--the Corpus Christianorum Library of Latin Texts (CCLT)--remains available only to users (or institutions) paying the steep subscription price.

So how do we confront the problem of "lost children" texts if we want to pursue macroanalysis?

Presumably, we need to turn back to the archive, to construct corpora or add unprinted materials to our already existing corpora even before we can begin our macroanalysis. (On a small scale, this has been my intent with my project on "Studying Judith in Anglo-Saxon England".) In both his first and final chapters, Jockers quotes an article by Rosanne Potter from 1988: "Until everything has been encoded... the everyday critic will probably not consider computer treatment of texts" (qtd. 4 and 127).** Jockers follows this up, "It is a great shame that today, twenty-four years later, everything has been digitized, and still the everyday critic cannot consider computer treatments of texts" because of copyright (175). He does offer a caveat in a footnote, remarking, "No, not everything, but compared to 1988, yes, everything imaginable." In our age of big data, it's easy to meet this assumption and accept it; but compared to 1988, much from the medieval period remains in the archive, not even transcribed, edited, or printed, let alone digitized. While some of us are working on computer treatment of texts, there is still much to do in the archives before some of it can be done.

* None of my discussion is meant to denigrate Jockers's work: he makes an excellent case for literary "macroanalysis" and offers a series of superb analyses throughout his book. Furthermore, related to my concerns tangentially, his comments about copyright in the final chapter are salient. The fact that he does not address the same issues that I raise here is not to be seen as a mark against his work, but perhaps indicative of one difference that exists between digital humanities work on 19th-century texts (Jockers's own field) and medieval texts (my own field).

** See Rosanne Potter, "Literary Criticism and Literary Computing: The Difficulties of a Synthesis," Computers in the Humanities 22 (1988), 91-7.

Challenging Crisis Discourses

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about the genre of "crisis discourse" in relation to scribal, print, and digital media in both past and contemporary cultures. Many readers familiar with the early modern emergence of print will doubtless be familiar with similar laments and discourses in that period. (Of course, there is also the problem of teleological accounts that praise printing, another related issue.) Since contemporary rhetoric about the crisis of books in the face of digital media is so prevalent, there is no need to enumerate the instances--but lamentations abound. In terms of contemporary relationships between various media, this is obviously a hot topic, not only among academics (especially in digital humanities) but also in wider popular culture.

Much of my thinking on this issue was sparked a few weeks ago, when I read Ted Striphas's book The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control (New York: Columbia UP, 2009) [read my review here]. Just a few days ago, I encountered further thoughts in Elaine Treharne's excellent blog post on "Restrictive 'Humanities'." The former goes a long way to challenge the rhetoric of catastrophe by thinking instead about the various modes of intermediation in our culture. The latter ranges across several important questions pertaining to digital humanities, at one point arguing that "the [early modern] dawn of print did not displace, and still has not displaced, the manuscript; indeed, the digital age itself has not done so, and, I venture, will never do so." Both scholars raise important points for considering the ongoing developments of text technologies, and both convincingly challenge assumptions that underly the misunderstanding that newer technologies eclipse previous technologies.

My own interest in these issues is especially connected to some recent work I've undertaken in terms of a handwritten prayer in an early modern book. While browsing through Early English Books Online a few months ago, I discovered that the Folger Shakespeare Library holds a copy of the first printed edition of A very frutefull and pleasant boke called the Instruction of a Christen Woman (STC 24856.5), translated by Richard Hyrde from Juan Luis Vives’s De institutione feminae Christianae, which contains a handwritten note including a prayer by a reader with the date 1637 (on page B4v; click to view, though only with institutional access). After some digging, I discovered that it has gone fairly unnoticed in scholarship. So I've undertaken a study of the prayer, which turns out to be an appropriation of biblical texts, mainly from Psalm 89 (90) [here we enter problems of medieval & early modern numbering of the Psalms].

Along with thinking about the handwritten note as a cultural artifact on its own, I also want to use it to consider relationships between scribal, print, and digital media--and how this intermediation matters to scholarship. As a model of intermediation, the associations of scribal and print practices in the handwritten note should be understood as dynamic rather than linear, since scribal and print practices intermingled in the early modern period, just as they continue to intermingle in our present culture. In a parallel fashion, the emergence of digital media does not suppress scribal and print forms but intensifies possibilities for intermedial relationships. Thus, the prayer survives through continued intermediation: for twenty-first-century readers, the most accessible means of reading this prayer, through EEBO, further augments the relationships of early modern media with a digital media interface. It is also important to note that even EEBO is a complicated instance of intermediation: this archive does not provide digital photographic reproductions of printed books but representations of the earlier technology of microfilm. Furthermore, these interconnected representations are, in turn, mediated through a web interface controlled by a gateway with a pay wall.

There's a lot here to think about, and I'm in the early stages of working out my thoughts on the issue. While doing so, I've also been wondering where other scholarship exists that similarly challenges crisis discourses and proposes new ways of thinking about shifts in text technologies. Certainly various pursuits in digital humanities contribute here, whether inherently or more explicitly (I've encountered some, but welcome suggestions). It is my hope that this little-known piece of early modern biblical appropriation will lead me to further considerations about the intermediation at work in everyday culture and intersections with how scholarship deals with it.

Reflections on "E-Medieval"

Last week, I noted the release of the most recent issue of Literature Compass, which is a collection of articles around the special theme "E-Medieval: Teaching, Research and the Net." Since last week, I've been reading through the issue and thoroughly enjoying the essays included. In my previous post, I also said that I would post again after I had read the issue, with some thoughts and a sort of review. Although all of these articles have much to offer, and allow for exploring various ways of approaching digital humanities, I will focus my responses on only a few of the essays. I should mention at the start that the following reflections represent the meanderings of my mind: I wrote these thoughts sort of like a journal of reader responses while I read and thought about the essays, both individually and collectively.

In the first essay--a type of introduction to the themes running through the issue--Larry Swain raises a host of questions about the directions in which digital humanities have moved scholarship, and where academia could move next. Above all, this critique is meant to spur scholars toward new modes of working--not only new tools, but also new questions, new methods, and new products of academia. His suggestions in the last part of the essay are compelling, especially those revolving around using digital tools for collaborative work. To the online academic venues that he singles out as particularly pursuing new avenues (e.g. The Heroic Age and Digital Medievalist), I would add a journal with which I have been involved, Hortulus: The Online Graduate Journal of Medieval Studies--which has offered a nice collaborative work-flow process for the reading and reviewing in which I have taken part. I would also add the growing collaborative capabilities for manuscript work (e.g. transcription, paleography, editing, notes, collation, etc.) at T-Pen.

One aspect of digital scholarship that Larry does not discuss is blogging. Here I find the most connection (for myself) with his suggestions about collaborative scholarship. Blogging is, of course, prominent in this issue, and I found that my own thoughts resonated most with this aspect of the essays. In my experience, blogging has been one of the most direct ways in which the digital and my scholarship have intersected. The footnotes to my scholarship show other ways in which my work meets the digital, but blogging is surely the most public and most evident way of seeing the intersections. My blogging experience has also proven to be one of the most collaborative aspects of my academic life. For a moment, please permit me a digression from discussing the Literature Compass essays.

Once upon a time, I had my own blog that has since gone the way of deleted internet-stuff. About a year after I closed the old blog, I began thinking about blogging again and was kindly invited to join Modern Medieval. Yet even beyond Modern Medieval, my sense of an online academic community extends further back in time and further across the internet. I attribute much of this connection to when I first started reading In the Middle (ITM), which I think was the first blog by medievalists that I encountered. In turn, the folks of ITM, as well as others like Matt Gabriel, Larry Swain, and Jonathan Jarrett (by happy coincidence, several of the very people who have contributed to the Literature Compass special issue), interacted with me through my old blog, and continue to do so through Modern Medieval. This interaction has, in the past few years, also expanded to Twitter, where I continue to have frequent conversations with many of the same people whom I first encountered through blogging. I have, then, become part of a large network of collaborative conversations that certainly affect my work.

Stephanie Trigg addresses blogging specifically in the second article of the Literature Compass special issue. She relates blogging to the behavioral concept of a "displacement activity," to reflect on blogging as an aside to formal, academic writing. Implicitly, this essay does well to challenge assumptions about the role of blogging for academics. I would push this further, to question if blogging might not (perhaps already has?) become another element in the peer-review realm of academia: an outlet that grows and survives through interaction and validation from others. While not producing scholarship along the traditional lines of a rigid peer review process (a la journals), the community of blogging medievalists with which I have interacted--and, I would argue, collaborated--has helped (at least helped me) to foster a special kind of peer review through the many interactions. Thus, my work benefits from the comments, linking, response posts, and Twitter conversations, to name only a few of the ways my peers respond.

Of course, all of this has to do with my identity, as Heide Estes indicates in her contribution to the special issue. I portray different aspects of my identity while blogging, writing formal scholarship, tweeting, and so on. Estes puts it well when she claims the suggests the concept of "a self with a multiplicity of facets, a self that can be expressed in different ways on different days" (980)--to which I would add different media, different spaces, different communities. She also comments (echoing others) that "one of the advantages of blogging, particularly over more typical academic writing with its lengthy time frame to publication and its heavily mediated boundaries, is the possibility of discussion and feedback from readers, at earlier stages in the development of an idea that is customary in academic contexts" (980). In other words, blogging allows for (though it may not always result in!) unfolding collaboration.

Jonathan Jarrett's contribution speaks to yet another aspect of my thinking, namely, the idea that blogging may be a new medium for collaboration is predicated upon audience engagement. Therein lie some of my anxieties. Jonathan does not express his essay precisely in terms of anxiety, but he does point out the tensions of writing a blog, gathering data about readers, and what it says about a potentially "silent audience." This finds an interesting connection with Heide Estes's observation that she rarely receives comments, but her readership is in the hundreds. For my ideas about collaboration--and the possibility that blogging communities could lead to a type of peer review--to work, as Jonathan observes, "the readers that one wants are those who comment, engage, affirm or critique" (994). His positive spin, about assuming readers' interest in the subject, and potential relevance, is compelling. So also are his hopes, expressed in the final lines, that point to the same thing that I hope: that "the academic blog may yet become a tool of affirmation for the Academy" (994).

Many of these themes appear in the final contribution, the four-part essay by ITM bloggers Karl Steel, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Mary Kate Hurley, and Eileen A. Joy. Between the four authors, they end up expressing many of the same ideas I have been reflecting upon as I read the previous contributions. Reading their essay, I even wondered if it all nullified my own thoughts, but I continued anyway--and I am still posting my own reflections as parallel and echoic. Thus, agreeing with Karl, I am glad to have put myself openly and publicly on the internet by blogging; with Jeffrey, I wonder about the negatives of blogging, but ultimately set them aside for the benefits; with Mary Kate, I ponder the process of thinking, blogging, and developing my scholarship; and, with Eileen, I revel in working in community. All of these reflections are worth reading, and the collective essay offers a useful closing to the Literature Compass special issue.

Literature Compass Special Issue on "E-Medieval"

Today I learned (thanks to Elaine Treharne, via Twitter) about the most recent publication of the journal Literature Compass (December 2012): a special issue on "E-Medieval: Teaching, Research, and the Net." Within the issue appear several articles by contributors and friends of our blog, and all of the essays look to offer great reading.

The full contents include:

Larry Swain, "Past, Present, and Future of Digital Medievalism"
Stephanie Trigg, "Blogging, Time and Displacement"
Asa Mittman, "Inverting the Panopticon: Google Earth, Wonder and Earthly Delights"
Matthew Fisher, "Authority, Interoperability, and Digital Medieval Scholarship"
Stephen Kelly, "Vain and Superstitious Habits: On Books and their Future in the University after Books"
Heide Estes, "Blogging and Academic Identity"
Murray McGillivray, "Online Teaching of Old English: Wave of the Future or Wave Goodbye?"
Jonathan Jarrett, "Views, Comments and Statistics: Gauging and Engaging the Audience of Medievalist Blogging"
Stuart D. Lee, "Anglo-Saxon Studies and Digital Technologies: Past, Present, and Future"
Kathryn A. Lowe, "From Quill to T-Pen: Palaeography, Editing and their E-Futures"
Wendy Marie Hoofnagle, "Technology in the University and the Death of Socrates"
Karl Steel, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Mary Kate Hurley, and Eileen Joy, "Why We Blog: An Essay in Four Movements"

I have already begun reading, and want to read through the whole issue soon. I also plan to report back with some thoughts in response. Hopefully others will respond, too, to create a fruitful dialogue about this.

Editions, Manuscripts, and Digital Spelunking

When I began researching and writing about the use of apocryphal Acts for Old English sermons (for two chapters of my dissertation), it quickly became clear that I would to need to address a widely circulated collection known as the Virtutes apostolorum (sometimes erroneously connected with the name [Pseudo-] Abdias). More particularly, it became clear that the lack of modern critical editions might pose some problems. The last edition of this collection is Johann Albert Fabricius, Codex Apocryphus Novi Testamenti, 2nd ed., 3 vols. in 2 (Hamburg: Benjamin Schiller, 1719), II, 402-742; yet even this edition is only a reprint from an earlier edition by Wolfgang Lazius (1552).

Fortunately, over the summer, I received a Lynne Grundy Memorial Trust Award for Scholars in Old English Studies, as well as the Fred A. Cazel, Jr. Fellowship in Medieval Studies from the Medieval Studies Program at the University of Connecticut (it's great to publicly acknowledge this help from both the Trust and UConn Medieval Studies), both of which helped me to attend the First Summer School on Christian Apocryphal Literature at the Université de Strasbourg in June--which focused almost exclusively on the Virtutes apostolorum. There, I worked with a team of scholars (led by Els Rose, the leading scholar on the Virtutes) to examine various aspects of the editions, manuscripts, sources, texts, and receptions of the Virtutes. It was a thrilling experience, and it helped me to face head on some of the issues I had feared. I've also returned to the materials from this seminar often, and they continue to help me with my project.

I've recently returned to some of these issues, and again I've been working very closely with the texts of the Virtutes--and worrying about Fabricius's edition. But, again, I was fortunate. This time, I am most grateful for digital repositories online, which have opened opportunities for reading these Acts in the manuscripts: Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, clm. 12641; Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, clm. 22020; St. Gall, Stiftsbibliothek 561; and Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, Weissenburg 48. While none of these digitized manuscripts on its own solves the problems of lacking a modern critical edition, together they do allow me to do a kind of archival work without which my scholarship would surely suffer in ability as well as quality. It's been a great experience, seeking out these digitized manuscripts, reading them, playing with them, and incorporating them into my project. I like to think of this work as digital spelunking. This is still not a complete solution--but that could only be had (lacking a critical edition, still years in the making) if all of the repositories holding manuscripts of the Virtutes apostolorum would digitize them and make them freely and openly available.

So I find myself recalling some of the conversations currently being had about digital humanities, especially about digitized manuscripts. A few weeks ago, I was elated to find out that the British Library had freed its manuscript images to the public domain. Of course, William Noel has been calling on institutions to do this for months (e.g., see here and here). But it's great to see things moving forward like this, to see more and more digitiemerging, and to be able to benefit from these developments. To be honest, my work would be less for it.

What Is the Role of Enumerative Bibliography in the Digital Age?

I think it is obvious from my posts on this blog, or if you follow my Twitter account, that I have been spending a lot of time the last several months considering digital humanities and my role in it. As I have been reflecting on how I fit in, I realized the other day that my role in relation to digital media has been so far largely bibliographic--in the sense that for months (years, in some cases) I have been collecting lists of references, annotations, and general information for digital media that struck me as significant. Scholarly habits of such enumerative bibliography are, of course, long standing in humanities research, especially in medieval studies. The field of medieval studies is certainly full of bibliographic endeavors, too many even to begin to enumerate.

Yet I wonder how this task fits into the digital world.

Here are a few examples of what I have compiled:

1) A select bibliography about digital humanities (in Evernote, which goes wherever I do, synced between internet, laptop, and phone), with special reference to medieval studies. This one probably is already hopelessly behind, out of date, etc., as there are always new materials I could add. But I do add to it, and I have found it useful, as have others.
2) A select list of digital materials (again, in Evernote) I plan to incorporate into teaching medieval subjects, many related to manuscripts.
3) The resource pages on the UConn Medieval Studies Program website, the most up-to-date and comprehensive of which is the page on manuscripts.

I have other lists, too, inhabiting various technological spaces, such as my internet bookmarks and other notes to myself. Much of this depicts my own fascination with the ever-growing amount of information and resources on digital medieval manuscripts, another facet of the general field of bibliographic study.

In any case, reflecting on my compulsion to create these lists of reference data, I began to wonder about the role of enumerative bibliography in the digital age. This likely reflects my own (traditionalist) training and tendencies. It is also no secret that I am a big fan of traditionally-oriented bibliographic projects in my own field--such as the collaborative sister projects of Fontes Anglo-Saxonici and Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture (both of which I just quickly accessed in my long list of web bookmarks). I've even worked on entries for the latter. But I am also sure that there needs to be more to such bibliography beyond collecting references.

So is there room for bibliography in the digital age? I am sure there is. In reconceptualizing the idea of bibliography, D. F. McKenzie argues for defining the field as "the discipline that studies texts as recorded forms, and the processes of their transmission, including their production and reception" (see his discussion here, p. 12). In expanding to the digital, there is much room for this task, especially if we further expand the notion of "texts" to "media." Indeed, I would argue that, in the world of digital media, there is much room not only for production of further media and tools (much of the focus of digital humanities in funded projects) but also for bibliography, in whatever new forms the task may take. Perhaps the next, bigger, question is how bibliography will adapt to address new media in fresh ways.

A Reflection on Digital Bibles

Title page of 1765 edition of the
Bibliorum sacrorum, Volumen IV,
taken by Brandon W. Hawk (owner)

This past May, I wrote and submitted an essay for the annual ArtStor Travel Awards on the value of digital images to scholarship and teaching. Since the essay wasn't among those selected for the award (the winning essays may be accessed through the above link), I wanted to share it here. Below is a slightly revised version. I view this essay mainly as a reflection on several inter-related issues that I see in my own work, and that I hope to incorporate into my scholarship and teaching in the future. Unfortunately, the ArtStor image group is unavailable outside of my institution, but hopefully these reflections work without them--though I have supplied a few similar images as replacements.* No doubt readers will find resonances in it of things I've discussed in my previous posts.

For many students and scholars, access to the digital is often a prime gateway to approaching premodern topics, and digital resources are a growing demand. One subject that benefits from the integration of digital images is the history of the Bible in Western culture. Indeed, approaching the subject of the Bible is enriched by the digital in allowing not only access to images but also integrated ways of conveying the relevance of the subject matter for contemporary study.

The importance of the digital for the study of the Bible is demonstrated by the accompanying image set, made up of eighteen images on the subject. Of foremost concern in this image set is interdisciplinarity, as the subject encompasses disciplines of religion, art, history, and literature, to name just a few. Encompassing these concerns, this image group is generally arranged both chronologically and thematically, in order to facilitate two perspectives simultaneously. On the one hand, the group is structured upon the history of the book, both the Bible specifically and the topic more generally, from the earliest forms (scrolls and papyri) and manuscripts (e.g. the Dead Sea Scrolls and Codex Sinaiticus) into the early modern period (printed forms and translations). On the other hand, the group is structured to trace important themes such as biblical textuality (critical editing), illustration (manuscript decorations), scholarship (glossing), printing (from Gutenberg onward), and modern translation (e.g. Coverdale and Tyndale Bibles). Significantly, this image group also emphasizes how we now consider all of these topics alongside current digital media that make these images available.

One productive way of viewing the history of the Bible is through the same type of interactivity, even hyper-visuality, that we continue to face in the digital age. For example, the integration of multiple modes of reading is depicted in many of these images, especially in the integration of multiple texts, illustrations, and glosses. Intersections of the biblical and digital are brought together most powerfully in late medieval glossed pages, represented in this image group by Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Lat. 9, folios 16r and 16v [see a similar substitute, with discussion, here]. The layouts of these pages are deeply hyper-visual: they contain numerous layers of the text, decorated initials, and the proliferation of glosses.* It is further valuable to consider issues surrounding the fact that we gaze upon these pages virtually, mediated by electronic screens, rather than experiencing their materiality.

It is clear that the digital opens up relevant approaches to the Bible in our own society. How we respond to all of these themes is telling, as we wrestle with notions of transcendence from two perspectives--in both cultural venerations of the Bible as well as the transcendence of the digital in our own lives.

* According to ArtStor's terms and policies, I cannot share the image group with those outside my institution's access, nor on an unrestricted website--but the site does allow sharing with private subscribers, so please email me with details if you would like to see the image group as a slideshow.
** I recently (since first writing this essay) read a good study by Lesley Smith, The Glossa Ordinaria: The Making of a Medieval Bible Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 2009), which deals with some of these same themes; I have also ordered (through ILL) another recent book that approaches these same issues, David A. Salomon, An Introduction to the Glossa Ordinaria as Medieval Hypertext (Cardiff: U of Wales P, 2012).

Ethics and Digital Scholarship

Over the past several days, I've been thinking about the ethics of digital research. This has mainly been sparked by MLA's recent release of revisions to their "Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media"; and I've been looking at the TEI: Text Encoding Initiative, who proposes this on its main page:

The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a consortium which collectively develops and maintains a standard for the representation of texts in digital form. Its chief deliverable is a set of Guidelines which specify encoding methods for machine-readable texts, chiefly in the humanities, social sciences and linguistics.

Both of these groups, then, have sought to establish guidelines for scholarly work in digital media. While this is outwardly in response to the need for evaluation standards, there are also underlying questions of ethics involved. Of course, some of my thinking is also linked to recent US legislative attempts (previously SOPA, now CISPA) that also raise questions of ethics in an electronic age (e.g. internet privacy, censorship, etc.). There are, of course, myriad questions related to ethics (broadly defined) and digital scholarship, and scholars have much to address in this regard (see, e.g., this 2011 article). While there are surely many questions--at least, I have many--I have few (no?) answers.

Still, one question foremost in my mind is about one's personal role in the electronic age. For myself, I've recently been thinking about my interactions with utilizing and/or contributing to digital scholarship--and I find myself much more of a utilizer than a contributor. For example, I use many digital tools, which (as I discussed here) have become a part of my whole life, and central to my scholarship. True, my contributions to scholarship in general are still few, and I am only beginning to position myself within medieval studies and even within the larger fields of humanities and academia. Perhaps my posts on this blog may be considered a small contribution, although I think of them more as musings toward future contributions. I do have some projects in the back of my mind that would be best suited for producing in digital media forms, but even these are most likely a long way off.

But here I find a set of what I consider to be ethical questions for myself: How ethical is it to be mainly a utilizer--essentially, a consumer--of digital tools, and how can this be balanced with genuine contributions? How does one navigate the dual roles of utilization (consumption) and contribution (production)? Again, I find myself with many questions revolving around these issues, but little in the way of answers.

Thoughts on "Digital" and "Humanities" in the Everyday

Since this is my first post on this blog, I want foremost to thank Matt for inviting me to join the conversation. I look forward to seeing what comes of it. As my first post, I want to offer some thoughts on a methodological issue that has been on my mind especially in the last several weeks.

The other day, in conversation with a graduate student colleague and friend about current hot-topic trends in academia--what I, at the time, called "sexy buzzwords"--the topic of "digital humanities" came up. When I expressed my thoughts about how the topic is so prevalent at the moment (e.g. the recent MLA conference, several recent job talks in our department discussed it, etc.), my friend offered a joking but pointed response, to the effect of "I wonder if that's just a trend, and when they'll realize that it's just the way we all work now."

I acknowledge that this is a controversial question, and my thoughts on it are still forming as I read more around the topic. Of course I think that considering the pairing of digital tools and humanities is important--and there are some important conversations going on about this subject--but I do wonder to what extent the digital just presents new tools that we are becoming increasingly aware of and appropriating into our scholarship. After all, we never called our work "print [text?] humanities" when we relied on print technologies for our dominant tools of research and scholarly production. I have some genuine questions about this. Is the idea of "digital humanities" perhaps a way of drumming up new attention (and money) for humanities research with exciting and catchy appeal? Is it more than that, and if so, how and what? What are we to make of "digital" within humanities work, and how do we really define "digital humanities" as a new mode of working?

Thinking about this issue made me reflect on my own scholarship, and how much of it is entrenched in the digital, whether or not I consider myself a conscious participant in digital humanities. This has become most evident as I've thought about the process of putting together my first article publication, “Staffordshire Hoard Item Number 550, a Ward Against Evil,” Notes and Queries ns 58 (2011). So I created a list of digital aspects of the process--while probably not comprehensive, I do think it is representative--from 2009 to publication in 2011:

- Official news of the Staffordshire Hoard discovery spreading across the internet (how I learned of it in the first place), including news websites, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

- Images appearing on The Staffordshire Hoard website (http://www.staffordshirehoard.org.uk/), where I first saw the gold piece with the inscribed psalm (Item 550)

- Digital release of the official scholarship by Kevin Leahy, "The Staffordshire Hoard: Discovery and Initial Assessment," on The Staffordshire Hoard website

- Searching the Fontes Anglo-Saxonici: World Wide Web Register (http://fontes.english.ox.ac.uk) to discover uses of the inscribed psalm in Anglo-Saxon literary sources, supplemented by searching the Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus (http://www.doe.utoronto.ca/) for Latin-Old English possibilities

- Posting my initial thoughts on my former blog, where I first received feedback and encouragement to pursue the connections

- Further research as I prepared the note for publication--including use of library databases, the interlibrary loan system, and especially the use of the digitized version of Sabatier's edition of Bibliorum sacrorum Latinae versiones antiquae, seu Vetus Italica on GoogleBooks

- Electronic (email) submission of the note and editorial correspondence about review, acceptance, revisions, contract, and publication

- Electronic correspondence for page proofs and corrections (via email, based on pdfs and review features back and forth between me and journal staff)

- Publication online through Oxford Journals, both online (http://nq.oxfordjournals.org/) and in print form

Needless to say, while considering all of this, it quickly became apparent that the inscribed gold piece would have never come to my attention, and the article would have never been possible to pursue, without the prevalence of electronic media and access to digital tools at my disposal. Also curious is how much the presence of the digital was a natural part of this process for me--reflective of the more general trend in my own work to turn to electronic resources every day as I conduct my research. (Of course, there is also some implicit notion of closed-/open-access types of resources, and the commercialization and commodification of digital tools, but this is not the post to address these issues.) Yet what is most apparent to me is that none of this is uncommon; it is just the way I work.