Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Statistical Analysis and the Boundaries of the Genre of Old English Prayer
- 2 If (not “Quantize, Click, and Conclude”) {Digital Methods in Medieval Studies}
- 3 Project Paradise: A Geo-Temporal Exhibit of the Hereford Map and The Book of John Mandeville
- 4 Ghastly Vignettes: Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede, the Ghost of Shakespeare’s Blackfriars, and the Future of the Digital Past
- 5 Content is not Context: Radical Transparency and the Acknowledgement of Informational Palimpsests in Online Display
- 6 Encoding and Decoding Machaut
- 7 Of Dinosaurs and Dwarves: Moving on from Mouvance in Digital Editions
- 8 Adam Scriveyn in Cyberspace: Loss, Labour, Ideology, and Infrastructure in Interoperable Reuse of Digital Manuscript Metadata
- 9 Digital Representations of the Provenance of Medieval Manuscripts
- 10 Bridging the Gap: Managing a Digital Medieval Initiative Across Disciplines and Institutions
- Index
8 - Adam Scriveyn in Cyberspace: Loss, Labour, Ideology, and Infrastructure in Interoperable Reuse of Digital Manuscript Metadata
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Statistical Analysis and the Boundaries of the Genre of Old English Prayer
- 2 If (not “Quantize, Click, and Conclude”) {Digital Methods in Medieval Studies}
- 3 Project Paradise: A Geo-Temporal Exhibit of the Hereford Map and The Book of John Mandeville
- 4 Ghastly Vignettes: Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede, the Ghost of Shakespeare’s Blackfriars, and the Future of the Digital Past
- 5 Content is not Context: Radical Transparency and the Acknowledgement of Informational Palimpsests in Online Display
- 6 Encoding and Decoding Machaut
- 7 Of Dinosaurs and Dwarves: Moving on from Mouvance in Digital Editions
- 8 Adam Scriveyn in Cyberspace: Loss, Labour, Ideology, and Infrastructure in Interoperable Reuse of Digital Manuscript Metadata
- 9 Digital Representations of the Provenance of Medieval Manuscripts
- 10 Bridging the Gap: Managing a Digital Medieval Initiative Across Disciplines and Institutions
- Index
Summary
And for ther is so gret diversite
In Englissh and in writyng of oure tonge,
So prey I God that non myswrite the,
Ne the mysmetre for defaute of tonge;
And red wherso thow be, or elles songe,
That thow be understonde, God I biseche!
But yet to purpos of my rather speche
—Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and CriseydeOnce you start to aggregate these resources and combine them in a new context and for a new purpose, you find out, in practical terms, what it means to say that that their creators really only envisioned them being processed in their original context…. It's as though the data has suddenly found itself in Union Station in its pajamas: it is not properly dressed for its new environment.
—John Unsworth, “Digital Humanities Centers as Cyberinfrastructure”In recent years, the digitization of medieval manuscripts has grown from a few intrepid trickles to a global flood. Driven by twin commitments to preservation and access, major digitization efforts dedicated to medieval books have arisen across the planet. This tide has also given rise to important warnings that digitization is fundamentally transforming scholarly work upon medieval books.5Although “the physical” and “the digital” are frequently presented in opposition, beneath significant disagreements all sides share core convictions. Namely, that medieval books matter, that they must be cared for, preserved, read, and maintained, that these objects’ physical forms—their words, miniatures, margins, fore-edges and bindings—are vitally important to uncovering complex textual meanings, and to recovering the identities, concerns, and desires of the people who made and read these books centuries before us.
Atop these core convictions, there are significant differences between the work that can be done on physical, analogue codices and that which can be done using digital medieval manuscripts. In photographs, much of the sensual experience of the codex goes missing: one cannot touch it, hear it, smell the book; one cannot see the particular movement of these specific leaves as they respond to the exact humidity of the weather on the day of the reader's visit.
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- Meeting the Medieval in a Digital World , pp. 157 - 202Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2018