“Sometimes not everyone speaks the same language, and so a lot of the work that I do is really understanding what the argument is, what the content is, what materials are essential to the project.”

About this Episode

Recorded 4 May 2024. Edited by Julia Pelosi-Thorpe and Sebastian Dows-Miller.

After a hiatus, Coding Codices is back with a new series!

In this first episode, Julia Pelosi-Thorpe and Suzette van Haaren speak to Cosette Bruhns Alonso about digital editing and publishing, and visual art and media.

Since the recording of this episode in May 2024, Cosette Bruhns Alonso has been appointed Assistant Editor of Brown University Digital Publications. In this role, she guides the creation of born-digital scholarship that presents research in ways not achievable in conventional print format, intended for publication with university presses.

Cosette has published several articles and lectured widely on born-digital publishing, and has significant teaching, curatorial, and digital humanities experience. She received her Ph.D. in Italian Studies from the University of Chicago, and served as BUDP’s inaugural Diversity in Digital Publishing Postdoctoral Research Associate. She previously held the position of Contemporary Publishing Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Press and Penn Libraries, and as Assistant Editor of Book and Style Publications at the Modern Language Association. She is the Managing Editor of Dante Studies, the annual journal of the Dante Society of America.

Credits

Music:

• Intro/outro music by TeknoAXE, “Chiptune Nobility” (CC BY 4.0).

Graphics:

• Featured Image: Paris, BnF fr. 24432, fol. 86r, image and text ed. by Sebastian Dows-Miller.

“Years ago, I thought books of hours were fancy pants books for art historians. And then I started really looking at them. And now I can’t shut up about them, because I think they’re just the neatest thing.”

About this Episode

Recorded 21 November 2022. Edited by Aylin Malcolm.

Content: In this episode, Aylin and Caitlin speak with Dot Porter on book structures, manuscript studies, and transformative works in fandom. Dot Porter is Curator of Digital Research Services at the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies. Dot holds Master’s degrees in Medieval Studies and Library Science and started her career working on image-based digital editions of medieval manuscripts.

Resources and Further Reading

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Viscoll (Collation Visualization) and VCEditor
• Ben Withers, The Illustrated Old English Hexateuch, Cotton Claudius B.iv.: The Frontier of Seeing and Reading in Anglo-Saxon England (2007)
• Viscodex, University of Toronto
• Biblioteca Philadelphiensis (BiblioPhilly)
• Lisa Fagin Davis, Reconstructing the Beauvais Missal
• Kathryn Rudy, “Dirty Books: Quantifying Patterns of Use in Medieval Manuscripts Using a Densitometer” (2010)
• Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies (2008)
• Kevin Kiernan and Emil Iacob, Electronic Beowulf
• Piers Plowman Electronic Archive
• Canterbury Tales Project
• Dot Porter, Inside My Favorite Manuscript
• Dot Porter and Brandon Hawk, Sacred Texts: Codices Far, Far Away
• UPenn Tumblr
• Dot Porter, “The Uncanny Valley and the Ghost in the Machine: a discussion of analogies for thinking about digitized medieval manuscripts” (2018)
• Dot Porter, “Zombie Manuscripts: Digital Facsimiles in the Uncanny Valley” (2018)
• Anna Wilson, “Reading with Love: The Role of Affect in Fan Fiction” (2016)
• Dot Porter, “Reading and Writing Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania LJS 101, c. 850–1100” (2018)

Transcript

Automated transcription by <https://otter.ai>, manually corrected by Caitlin Postal. Click here to access a PDF version of the transcript.

[Music Fade In]

Aylin Malcolm  0:15  

Welcome to Coding Codices, now in our third season. We’re here with a veritable rockstar of the manuscripts and social media outreach world, Dot Porter, who is many things, among them a curator at the Kislak Center at the University of Pennsylvania. And I’m here with Caitlin Postal; I’m Aylin Malcolm; and we are members of the Digital Medievalist Postgraduate Committee.

Caitlin Postal  0:38  

Welcome to our podcast.

Dot Porter  0:40  

Thank you. I’m really pleased to be here. And I’m excited to talk to both of you. 

Caitlin Postal  0:45  

Well, we’re so glad to have you. I know that you have done so many things with your time as a scholar, and your work is just so compelling. But we’re gonna start, I think, with VisColl, which is one of your older projects. We’d love to know a little bit like, how did you come up with the idea for it? What are some ways that it can be applied for listeners who might want to use this great tool? Maybe you could explain the tool too, because I sure didn’t.

Dot Porter  1:12  

Yeah, so VisColl is a project that–I guess we probably started it in 2013, or 2014, because it was pretty soon after I came to Penn. So I came to Penn in 2013. But VisColl is a project that’s around modeling and visualizing the physical collation of manuscripts. And I’m talking specifically about manuscripts. Printed books also have collation, but it’s slightly different because with printed books you tend to have larger sheets of paper that are folded multiple times and then cut. Most manuscripts are what are called folio manuscripts, which is you have sheets, sheets of paper or parchment, that are sort of layered, and then folded once to make little booklets that are called quires. The quires are sewn together. And that’s how you make your book. So you might have a book where every quire was made by layering four sheets, and then you fold it, which gives you eight leaves, and then you sew them together. And so then you can count out, if there are 64 leaves, then there’s eight quires of eight, right, because eight times eight is 64. But what tends to happen in practice, is you’ll have quires: some quires, maybe were made with three sheets, and some are made of two, and some are made of six, and some are made of eight. Leaves get added and leaves get taken away, quires get taken apart, and then put back together again. And so before I came to Penn, I had been working in digital humanities doing what we used to call image based electronic editions, which are now just sort of digital editions. But with the image focus, so getting digital images of manuscripts and building projects around them.

And so it’s kind of funny, because I sort of started although I trained as a medievalist, so I have an MA in medieval studies. I also have an MS in library science, so I was always very interested in the book. I got my start doing text editions, like I did a lot of TEI and this kind of thing. But as I got sort of more into it, I got more interested in the book as an object. And even at that point, I was sort of interested in how what I was doing with this book on a computer was different from what the book was like in its physical life. And at that point, I didn’t have a lot of experience working with physical manuscripts. So I read books about them. And one book that turned out to be sort of really important for this was a book by Ben Withers about the illustrated Old English Hexateuch, which is Cotton Claudius B.iv at the British Library. And it is an Old English translation or version of the Pentateuch, or the Hexateuch, which is like the first eight books of the Bible. And it’s illustrated, so almost every page of this manuscript has an illustration on it, but not all of them are complete. And so he wrote this whole book about the creation of this manuscript, and how, by looking at which quires have more or less completed illustrations, you can sort of tell about how the book was made. And I was so fascinated by this, but I had a lot of trouble sort of visualizing it, because I didn’t have, obviously didn’t have the book in front of me, I’d never seen this book in my life in person. The book did come with a CD. So I could like take my CD ROM and I could see the images, but I had a real trouble sort of visualizing in my head how the structure worked. And I thought to myself at that time, wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to visually realize this and to be able to connect all of this data? And he does, he really does a great job in this book, in terms of like, there are tables and things to sort of show it. But I wanted something all together.

So I came here and one of the first things that I did when I, you know, talking to Will Noel was the director of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, which was the group that I sort of came to work with, was like, Oh, this is what I want to do. And he was so funny. I remember him saying to me, I don’t know why anybody would want to do that. And he was like, but I hired you. So because I thought you’d do good work. So I guess I’ll let you do it, then we’ll see what happens.

And then now here we are, like 10 years later, we’ve got you know, we’ve got this great software. I worked with Doug Emery here, who did a lot of the early development. We also had a couple of other developers who worked with him. Dennis Mullen, who has since retired, but he did, he worked with me really closely about like, how do we visualize the way that the output is going to look? You know, the version of the software that we have now, which is called VCEditor, actually was built on a tool called VisCodex, which was built at the University of Toronto. We were working hard here on the Biblioteca Philadelphiensis project. So we got this money from CLIR to digitize manuscripts in Philadelphia. And so we’re– there’s this period between 2016 and 2019, when we were very heavily trying to get all these manuscripts digitized. And so we weren’t really thinking about VisColl. And around that time, Alex Gillespie at the Old Books, New Science lab at the University of Toronto got funding from the Mellon Foundation. And her group actually developed this tool called Viscodex, which looks very, very similar to VCEditor. And they were using the VisColl data model to do this. And then when we were ready to sort of get back to it, they gave us the code and let us use the code. And so, and now we’ve got VCEditor. So now anybody who wants to, can go to the VCEditor website and you can input your data about how your manuscripts are put together. You can add the contents, you can add, you know, if there are miniatures or anything like that, you can sort of map them in there. And then you can create the visualization.

Caitlin Postal  7:26  

I think one thing that’s interesting to me is the way that you talked about how you moved into this type of work, right, I think that’s kind of familiar to a lot of us. We start working on textual editions, and then we get really interested in the book object, and then we want to work with those book objects. That’s not the question that I have, though, I just wanted to remark that like, that’s a really familiar path. I’m wondering if you know of, or have thought about any exciting implementations of the VCEditor tool that might not be traditional in the sense of thinking about the structure of a manuscript book object?

Dot Porter  8:08  

My initial response is like, well, no, like, because the whole thing is about the strip, like the whole thing of VCEditor and it is about the structure. But there are, I think, creative ways to use it. And I have some examples of that. It’s still about the manuscript structure. But for example, Lisa Fagin Davis, who is I think pretty well known, I think we know who she is. 

Aylin Malcolm  8:34  

She’s in episode two of Coding Codices!

Dot Porter  8:38  

She’s great. And she has a long term project that she’s been working on, I think, for many, many years of reconstructing the Beauvais Missal, which was a missal that was taken apart. It was just in the news recently, there was somebody from Maine, I think, who bought a leaf for like, $75, at a garage sale or something. And it turned out it was one of the leaves of the missal. And so as part of her reconstruction project, she is also reconstructing the collation of it. And she uses VCEditor as the way to sort of reconstruct the collation of this book that once existed, but never exists, you know, doesn’t exist anymore. But I’ve also, so I’ve been thinking about books of hours. You know, in the 15th century, when you wanted a book of hours, you would not go to the book of hours store and like buy one off the shelf like you’d go to a bookstore today, right? Like, you’d be like, I want a book of hours. And so you go to a scriptorium of some sort. And you would say I would like a book of hours, please. And they and they would say Okay, so it’s a modular, they probably won’t use that word. They say what would you like in your book of hours? And so you sort of pick, you have the hours of the Virgin because that’s what you’ve always have in a book of hours and you have a calendar. And then the other things you could sort of, you know–

Caitlin Postal  9:58  

Your bespoke book. 

Dot Porter  10:00  

Your bespoke book, and then you get to pick how much gold you want, and how much decoration and what script you use and all of this stuff. Years ago, I did, not like, I thought books of hours were like fancy pants books for art historians. And then I started really looking at them. And now I like can’t shut up about them. Because I think they’re just the neatest thing. 

Caitlin Postal  10:20  

There’s a ubiquity to them, right? Like, so many people in the Middle Ages would have access to or have their own in a way that other books of the time were just not as readily available. Makes them interesting.

Dot Porter  10:33  

Yeah, they are interesting and that they’re all different. And that they were personalized, like Kate Rudy has done, just incredible work, looking at how books of hours, how they were made, so the modular part of it. But also how they were personalized, both during that process, and also after, and how they were used. So she’s done dirt on books, so you could see which pages have been opened the most. And like kissing, like, if there’s like a picture of Jesus and his face is all messed up, because somebody was kissing it. Like these kinds of things, which are just an incredible sign of use. And I know later, we’re going to be talking about fandom stuff. But this is, this is already getting into that because this is that like, sort of–

Aylin Malcolm  11:19  

Jesus fandom.

Dot Porter  11:19  

–Jesus fandom, right, like the love and how it’s shown on this physical object, like books of hours are like, great for that. So there’s that. And then there’s also this tendency to, for people, both in the Middle Ages and after, you know, the way that they used books: taking them apart, and then putting them back together in various ways. You might have three books, and you take the pieces that you want, and put them together to make a new book. And maybe you throw out the other ones, or you cut the pages and you put them in, you know, put them in bindings or whatever. This all got in my head.

And I was like, Well, what if I made my own book of hours, using bits and pieces, from books of hours from these libraries in Philadelphia, where we digitize these manuscripts from? And because I’m all about the physical coalition: what if I did it as though I had the books in front of me and I was cutting the pieces out. So I like actually following the quire structure of these. So if there’s a set of prayers that I want from a book of hours, and it’s from the first three leaves in a quire, I have to account for all of the other leaves that I’m not taking, like I’m like, literally like cutting it out. So I did it in VCEditor and I basically picked these. I just went in and I was like, Oh, that looks pretty. And I’m like, Oh, that’s nice, you know. So then I had my little book of hours. It took me a couple of hours to do that. I got everything printed. Thank you Staples in Springfield, Pennsylvania, who got my order, and it just was great.

Aylin Malcolm  12:59  

I’m sure you’re listening.

Caitlin Postal  13:03  

We should send it to them: Staples.

Dot Porter  13:05  

You can @ them when you post it. So now I have I bought a–I’ve never made a book before. I am not an artist, I am not a bookbinder, I am nothing like this. But I got a book thing. And I watched YouTube tutorials. And I made my text blocks. So I have this. It’s really weird, right? Because it’s all of the quires are different sizes. But it’s there. And then I’m working with the folks over in our MakerSpace. We’re going to 3D print boards. And we’re going to have this 3d printed boards attached. And probably I think I want to do some kind of leather cover. So which again, is like just combination of like, digital/physical/medieval, but not really, you know,

Caitlin Postal  13:58  

I think this would make for a really interesting pedagogical application, right? So if you were teaching a class like a manuscript studies class, and you wanted to have students use VCEditor to kind of put together their own miscellany or their own book of hours and think about what are the pieces that you would want from existing ones that that like that, by itself would be like one cool assignment. And then you also get into the making portion if you’re doing any kind of hands on work or if you’re, if people are really interested in curatorial work, and they’re like, okay, and now now that I’ve put it together, now I want to do exactly what you’re describing, or maybe even like a like a Penn DREAM Lab version of that as a course would be so cool just for that. I don’t know the medieval-meets-modern, I’m just really into.

Dot Porter  14:48  

Yeah, but uh, maybe a shorter answer to your question is I do. I think that there is a lot of potential in VCEditor for this kind of exercise. Like I love the idea of a classroom exercise where it’s like, “Okay, pretend that you are a scholar in you know, 1490, and you have access to these books, and you want to compile your own miscellany with the things that you’re interested in. Taking the physical, you know, the physicality into account, how would you do that and use VCEditor to do that? I think there’s a lot of potential there. Although, recently, I’ve just been using it to make models of the manuscripts from Penn’s collection. Because another thing that I really want to do is make this sort of visualization ubiquitous. For records, it is, you know, best practice or common practice to include collation formulas in catalog records. And collation formulas, even if you know what they are and how they work, they’re not real easy to read. Unless you have the book in front of you, it doesn’t actually tell you a whole lot. And there’s just stuff that you cannot just you can’t put in a formula, they just don’t work like that. And so having a way to make a visualization available in a catalog, I think that would be amazing if that became a thing that, okay, we have a formula, but we also have this.

And I’m gonna go on a little tangent, because anybody who works in a library, like in a catalog department, is immediately going to be like, “Well, okay, so how do you show that in the catalog?” So the way that we’re doing that at Penn, I do a screen print of the diagram from VCEditor. So I open VCEditor, I do a screen print, and then I save that both as a PDF and as a PNG image, along with other data. I’m making records in our institutional repository, which at Penn is called Scholarly Commons. Then I’m working with the cataloguer, who puts a link in the record to Scholarly Commons. And I don’t know how many people are really going to want to see it. But I love knowing that it’s there if people want to.

Aylin Malcolm  17:08  

I think, I mean, every time I look at a book, I pull up the records to sort of see how it’s put together. So I can see that being really useful for scholars.

Dot Porter  17:16  

I hope so.

Caitlin Postal  17:17  

People won’t know that they want it until it’s an option. And then when they realize that they have it, they’ll be like, “why doesn’t everybody do this?”

[Music Interlude]

Aylin Malcolm  17:41  

We can definitely talk about all of your projects until end of day. And I hope we do get to come back to that toward the end of this interview. But I was wondering if we could zoom out for a minute and talk about your personal journey toward your current work. You mentioned before that you hadn’t worked with a lot of manuscripts in person earlier on. And we tend to ask these kinds of questions, because a lot of our listeners are grad students and sort of thinking about how they might place themselves within the field going forward.

Dot Porter  18:07  

Right? I hadn’t worked with manuscripts very much before I came to Penn. So I started out, I actually started out studying church music, which now seems really weird. Like why did I ever think I was going to be a church musician? But I changed, I changed my mind about halfway through my sophomore year, I was like, this is not this is not for me. And then I majored in medieval studies as an undergrad. And I still had no idea. My whole career has, my whole life has been just me not having an idea what I wanted to do. Until recently, like, now I know what I want.

Aylin Malcolm  18:41  

That’s good to hear. 

Dot Porter  18:42  

Yeah.

Caitlin Postal  18:43  

It’s books of hours now.

Dot Porter  18:44  

And then I went to Western Michigan University, and I did my Master’s in medieval studies. And that’s when I started getting into books. I worked in the Special Collections Library with Tom Amos. That was when Tim Graham was there. So I took paleography and codicology. And then I went to library school, and I really thought I was like, I’m going to be an archivist. I’m going to be a rare books librarian. I’m going to be, you know, a manuscripts curator maybe, if I’m really lucky. But even in–I was doing archives track when I came in. And even then, like, my first semester was like: you’re gonna learn HTML, and you’re gonna learn about metadata, and you’re gonna learn about… and I was just like, totally, “wow!” Like, I knew that there was digital stuff because there had been the Electronic Beowulf came out when I was, I think, right as I was graduating college, so it was there my first years, you know, in grad school. So there was Electronic Beowulf, the Canterbury Tales Project, there was Piers Plowman Archive. And I was just like: I can make that. Maybe you can tell like having the conversation that we’ve had so far, I have a lot of creative energy and, and that it really appealed to that creative energy part of me. And so when I finished my degree, when I graduated from library school, I applied to a whole bunch of different jobs. But I ended up going to work with Kevin Kiernan, at the University of Kentucky, working on one of these sort of dream projects. And I got to, I got to see actually the Beowulf manuscript which was pretty cool. When I was–

Aylin Malcolm  20:24  

Without glass?

Dot Porter  20:26  

 Without glass. Yeah, it was–

Caitlin Postal  20:27  

Wow!

Dot Porter  20:28  

I was doing some more, doing some–we were in the in London at the same time, and he was doing some more–

Aylin Malcolm  20:34  

What does it smell like?

Dot Porter  20:36  

I didn’t get that close. It was in a–it was like under a camera.

Aylin Malcolm  20:40  

Burnt!

Caitlin Postal  20:42  

They didn’t let you lick it?

Dot Porter  20:44  

No, they didn’t let me lick it. Very sad. but I did get–I was in the room with it. I was like, Oh, look, there it is. So and I actually remember thinking “that’s small.” Like everything was me and like, these books is like how the camera lies about the size of it. So I worked with him and then he retired, and then I worked with Ross Scaife, who was a Classicist. But I always thought I always considered myself a medievalist, you know, and then, and then I went to Ireland, and I was in Ireland for a little over a year. And I did metadata on a lot of different projects, including a couple of medieval projects. And then I came back and I was at the Indiana University Bloomington. And that was when I sort of made a pivot from digital humanities to digital libraries. So I went from being in a DH situation, where I was working on projects that were about topics and themes, to being responsible for collections in a place. But when I got the chance to come to Penn, to work in the Special Collections Department, I absolutely was like, wow, that would be amazing because I still get to do all of that digital stuff that I love. Plus, I get access to the physical collection. 

Aylin Malcolm  22:07  

So yeah, how does that work on a sort of day to day basis? What’s your daily life at the Schoenberg Institute or at the Kislak Center been like?

Dot Porter  22:14  

So it’s changed over time. So I have been here 10 years, and it’s changed, especially with COVID changed a lot of stuff. But before, you know, it sort of goes in goes in sort of thing. So when I first came, it was very much, there’s a lot of work on the actually VisColl. I started the program to make video orientations, which you have actually made a couple of videos–

Aylin Malcolm  22:45  

–That’s correct: a couple of astronomy manuscripts.

Dot Porter  22:47  

A couple of astronomy manuscripts, because this is great. So these are like, you know, two or three minute videos short sort of just the camera and the hands and talking about the book. And there are, there are also like the actually the VCEditor models, the collations models, they are put in the Scholarly Commons repository and then attached to our records. And the reason that I wanted to do that it’s all this is all about, like my big plan to get the physical aspects of the manuscript as part of the record. During my first week on the job, I had been looking at in the collection, there is a pretty early 11th century I think, glossed Psalter. And I had been looking at it online, I thought this is the most interesting thing. So glossed Psalter, you’ve got the Psalter text in the middle of the page. And you have these glosses written all around it. And I was like, that looks really cool. I want that to be the first book that I see when I arrive. And I could like it was amazing, like I filled in this thing. And they’re like, brought it to my office. And I’m like putting in my office, you know. And, but the thing that I remember being the most, like, impressed with about the book was how small it was. It’s like tiny, it’s like the size of a postcard. Maybe not quite that small. But it’s very, very small. Right. And what it means is that the writing that looks small, when you look at the digital image is like, tiny. And I was like somebody wrote this, it was like one scribe, like, how did you do that? So it was all of these things. It was like how the camera lies, the humanity of the person who wrote it, and then all of the people who used it. And you get that sense much more from the sort of physical object. And I’m still making these videos. I stopped for a while for a few years, I think because of the BiblioPhilly project–that was the next thing is we got this big grant. And then it was like BiblioPhilly all the time. And then COVID hit. There were months where I was working from home and I couldn’t have access to the physical collection. And that was really hard. And I sort of did what I could. But I swear like–

Caitlin Postal  25:05  

You weren’t going to like slip a manuscript in the bag and surreptitiously scoot your way out.

Dot Porter  25:11  

I didn’t even think about it.

Caitlin Postal  25:14  

So all the listeners, I’m not recommending that you do this, nor would I suggest that you try it.

Dot Porter  25:20  

No, no, it would be very bad. But I missed it. But I missed–I missed the collection a lot. And so it was March of 2020, when they sent us home. And then in January of 2021, they said, you can come back once a week. So that was when I was like, well, if they’re gonna let me in once a week, I’m gonna make it worth my while and I’m gonna make it worth everybody’s while. Because at that point, everybody was like, “I miss being with the books.” And I’m like, Well, I’m going to show you a book once a week. So that’s when I started doing my 30 minute show and tell. And actually, that was really where, whereas before COVID, I did work with the collections, it wasn’t something that I did every day. I didn’t have my hands on books every day. But then coming back and doing that once a week, it was like, it was like I can I have something to look forward to. Like Mondays, I would be like, yeah, I get to go in and I get to touch a book. And it’s great. That again, like things shifted, and we had had student workers who were doing actually doing an amazing job with the social media. But then it was really it was made clear that you know, so this sort of post COVID coming back, we weren’t going to be able to hire students to do the social media. So I was like, I will do the social media, because it seems to fall under my remit as Curator of Digital Research Services. And I started making more of the video orientations. So today, I have a big book here next to me. I have two other little books and there were three books that I had in earlier that I made video orientations of that I’ll eventually put on social media.

[Music Interlude]

Aylin Malcolm  27:15  

The video orientation, stay tuned for those. And also you have recently started your own podcast.

Dot Porter  27:21  

I did. I did. I did start a podcast. It’s called Inside My Favorite Manuscript. And it’s me and my best friend whose name is Lindsey. And Lindsey is not a manuscripts “manuscripts” person. But she’s mostly the way I think of it is it’s like she’s the every, every person. And so she asks questions of the people that we interview that I would not think to ask. And it’s really a lot of fun. And if anyone listening would like to come and talk about your favorite manuscript, let me know. And either of you, be very welcome to come on and, and also talk about the manuscript you love. And it does not have to be a manuscript that you know very well.

Caitlin Postal  28:06  

What if you don’t have a current favorite manuscript? Can you be like inside my current manuscript hyperfixation?

Dot Porter  28:13  

Yes, absolutely. Hyper fixations are more than welcome. And even the first, Allie Alvis was our first episode and she talked about two manuscripts that sort of a contrasting. And Lisa Fagin Davis is our second episode, and she talked about three. So I’m trying to sort of limit that but you can, if you want to, honestly, like you can talk about whatever you want. You know, if it’s not real, it’s a book in a video game? Okay, we can talk about a book and video game.

Aylin Malcolm  28:42  

That leads into I think, some of the questions that Caitlin and I had about fan culture.

Caitlin Postal  28:47  

Yeah, so we’re thinking about, you know, you work with manuscripts, you work with a lot of traditional manuscript studies, but you make a lot of–there are so many ways to make connections between traditional manuscript studies and pop culture, or manuscripts presence in pop culture, or the ways that different forms of pop culture will represent things that are adjacent to manuscripts or manuscript studies. And I guess we’re just sort of interested in how you think about that, how you make those connections, and then, as well, how you’re about balancing, sort of yourself as a scholar, and then also yourself as a fan. And I’m thinking particularly of the Jedi manuscripts project that you did with Brandon Hawk as one of those “there’s connections here, and there’s a balance here… Of the force.”

Dot Porter  29:33  

Yes. and the balance of the Force. I’ve been involved in like Star Wars fandom for a number of years. So I was sort of doing these things in parallel. So I was I was interested in getting all the manuscript stuff and then I’m doing my Star Wars stuff. I’m, you know, fanfic and fanart and all this stuff. I actually started a Tumblr account for the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies. pretty early on, like 2014 2015, I was already on Tumblr, because I had my MCU Tumblr. And so when it’s like, let’s get on social media, I’m like, I’ll do a Twitter, and I’ll do a Tumblr. Because Tumblr is really like a fandom kind of space. And I was already in this fandom space. I thought of it as like manuscripts fandom. Like, why are we here? Why are people following this account? Because they think manuscripts are cool. And then I got more heavily into fandom with Star Wars. And then it wasn’t until The Last Jedi came out. And, you know, I remember sitting in the theater and like thinking, like, “Oh, my God, there’s like these manuscripts like,” you probably have the same reaction.

Aylin Malcolm  30:47

There were astronomical diagrams! You know, what’s on them?

Dot Porter  30:51

Yeah. Like, exactly. It was like, wow, that’s great. And so I remember I started tweeting about it and then I saw that this guy, Brandon Hawk, who (I didn’t know Brandon Hawk), uh, was also tweeting about it. And then we’re like, oh no. And then we ended up.

Being at Kalamazoo, which is Kalamazoo is the big, the International Congress on Medieval Studies: ICMS.

Aylin Malcolm  31:09

Yes. 3000 person strong party in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Dot Porter  31:14

And I remember we met for lunch and we were both like, we wanna know what are these manuscripts? How do they relate to Star Wars? But also how do they relate to manuscripts that, that we know? And so I was like, why don’t you come to Penn for a day? And we will, we’ll make videos where we like compare what we see in Star Wars and then in the art book to the manuscripts in our collection. You know, we, we obviously, we like did a lot of work before. We figured out what we were gonna look at. And then we spent the day in a studio on the, I think it’s on the third floor, and we had a green screen behind it. And so we were able to put in, I think if you, if you go to YouTube, the videos are all there. Um, and we’ve got like Tattoine behind us. It was great and it was really fun to cross those streams, right? To be like, I love Star Wars and I love manuscripts. And, it turns out, I also love Brandon Hawk. Like he’s just fantastic. And I’m, I’m very fond and we still, we’ve actually done more work with this, like we’ve presented a couple more times, um, expanding the work. Like there was another manuscript that showed up in the, um, the Rise of Skywalker, so I think we’re gonna keep going with this.

The other, you know, the other project that I’ve been working on that sort of is in the same space is in fact my books of hours, uh, work. So I have a couple of pieces I’ve done on books of hours as transformative works. And that actually came from a completely different place where I was looking at digitized images through a bunch of different frames. So that’s where I get my uncanny valley, um, thing and my like zombie thing. And so I was looking at all of these and I was like, well, what about transformative works as a frame for digitized objects? Cuz you’re literally transforming them. I should go back to that because I never actually went very far that way. 

Caitlin Postal  33:05

Oh, you should go back to that.

Dot Porter  33:07

I think that would be, I think that would be interesting, but instead I sort of got caught on this thing. But what about manuscripts themselves as transformative works? We were talking about, at the beginning of this, about how people personalize manuscripts and thinking about what a transformative work is. Especially in not only the transformation, but like a fan work, which is you are doing a thing explicitly because you love it because you care about it. Like that’s what fan, the fan part is. Um, and I always cite, there’s this, uh, article by Anna Wilson about affection as a part of that. And so actually the first manuscript that I tried this with was one from our collection, which is LJS 101, which is a, um, 9th and 11th century Carolingian manuscript that is sort of–part of its ninth century, part of its 11th century. And there were changes made and, but I was missing this, this sort of affection. I actually presented on this at Leeds, and at the end I was like, I can’t say that this is like a fandom transformative work because I can’t say, with any kind of certainty, that the people who did these things did it because they had affection of any kind.

And then I was, I think I was, um, watching Will Noel give a lecture about books of hours and it, I had this like, epiphany. I was like, what is the genre of books that I can point to from the Middle Ages that I can say with any kind of certainty that the people who had them made and used them had affection of some sort as their sort of central thing of it? And it’s like, well, it’s books of hours because there, I mean, it’s religious affection, right? Because it’s really centered about like, “I love Jesus and I love Mary, and so I’m having this book.” And I was like, well that’s really great. And so then I’ve sort of done more of this looking at books as transformative works, um, books of hours of transformative works.

Aylin Malcolm  35:15

Can I just ask what a transformative work is?

Dot Porter  35:17

I should look at the official definition, but it’s basically a work that takes a work from a canon. Let’s say Star Wars. I’m gonna say, I’m gonna take Han Solo and I’m gonna take Luke and Leia. So I’m gonna write a story about what happened to them after Return of the Jedi: they go on an adventure. That is a transformative work because I’m taking these characters and the world that they live in, and I am making my own story. Um, it would also be if. I write a story where, um, Darth Vader doesn’t die at the end.

Aylin Malcolm 35:50

So medieval like Sir Orfeo kind of thing?

Dot Porter  35:52

Yeah.

Aylin Malcolm  35:53

Orpheus actually comes back with his wife and everything’s okay.

Dot Porter  35:56

And everything’s okay. Right. So that, that’s a–

Caitlin Postal 35:58

John Lydgate shows up on the pilgrim’s ride home from Canterbury.

Dot Porter  36:04

So that’s, or even like, um, he went to hell, he followed Virgil to hell.

Caitlin Postal  36:08

Dante.

Dot Porter  36:09

Dante! Wait, like Dante’s Inferno, like, yeah.

Aylin Malcolm  36:12

What is Dante’s Divine Comedy, if not fanfic?

Dot Porter  36:15

It’s fan. It’s fan fiction. It’s a transformative work. And, oh, and actually it’s interesting with the books, the books of hours as a transformative work. When I first got this idea, I, I talked it over with Nick Herman, who is our, uh, the SIMS curator of Manuscripts. He’s done a lot of work on books of hours, right. Cuz he is an or historian in the Middle Ages. And so there’s a lot of, um, books of hours. And so I actually sat down with him when I first had this idea just to make sure I wasn’t like, totally off my rocker because I’m, I have constant fear that I’m like totally off my rocker. And he listened to me and he was like, you know, Books of hours. It’s not like they sprouted up all on their own. They were actually based on, um, like the, so I’ve got this breviary here next to me.

Aylin Malcolm  37:02

Tapping this huge book.

Dot Porter  37:03

I’m just tapping this huge book.

Caitlin Postal  37:05

Yeah, I can’t see it, but I’m picturing it.

Aylin Malcolm  37:08

Can you hear the book?

Caitlin Postal  37:09

I can hear it. Yeah.

Dot Porter  37:10

So the Breviary is the books that the monks and nuns would use to, um, do their hours of the day. So they have prayers that they do at different hours over the course of the day and then overnight. And that’s what books of hours are based on. It was a way for secular people to incorporate this part of worship into their daily lives, and so it was sort of the slow thing of coming out from, from the religious secular, and that is a transformation.

Caitlin Postal 37:38

Well, I’ve got a, I’ve got a season two of Inside My Favorite Manuscript idea for you where you, that’s gonna put all the pieces together. You have people use VCEditor to build their own manuscripts and then discuss them with you on Inside My Favorite Manuscript, but it’s like inside my manuscript, right? Like inside mine that I created.

[Music Interlude]

Caitlin Postal  38:03

Thanks for listening to Coding Codices, a podcast from the Digital Medievalist Postgraduate Committee. Thank you so much to Dot for joining Aylin and I in this just fantastic and so fun conversation. You can find Dot in various places on the internet @leoba and also via Penn. Who knows which places those will be one week from now? 

You can catch up on Coding Codices at our website: podcast.digitalmedievalist.org. Or get in touch with us at [email protected].

[Music Fade]

Credits

Music:

• Intro: TeknoAXE, “Chiptune Nobility” (CC BY 4.0).
• Interludes: Aaron Kenny, “Yonder Hill and Dale” (CC0).

Graphics:

• Featured Image: UPenn LJS 101, fol. 37v, ed. by Tessa Gengnagel.

“There’s quite a lot that other fields can learn from the way that digital tools are being used in medieval studies…things that we all take for granted and we see as these hurdles that we have to overcome every day.”

About this Episode

Recorded 12 December 2022. Edited by Aylin Malcolm.

Content: In this episode, Aylin, Hannah, James, and Seb discuss a recent article by Emily C. Francomano and Heather Bamford and the questions it raises about the accessibility of digital resources for medieval studies.

Resources and Further Reading

• Emily C. Francomano and Heather Bamford, “Whose digital Middle Ages? Accessibility in digital medieval manuscript culture,” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 14.1 (2022): 15–27.
• Matthew Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (MIT Press, 2007)
• Dot Porter, “Is This Your Book? What we call digitized manuscripts and why it matters“
• Kathryn M. Rudy, “Dirty Books: Quantifying Patterns of Use in Medieval Manuscripts Using a Densitometer,” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 2:1-2 (2010).
• IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework)
• TEI (Text Encoding Initiative)

Related Episodes

• Episode 8: Material Manuscripts in a Digital World (Johanna Green)
• Episode 7: Facsimile Narratives (Mateusz Fafinski)
• Episode 6: Digital Archive & Materiality (Matthew Kirschenbaum and Eric Ensley)

Transcript

Automated transcription by <https://otter.ai>, manually corrected by Aylin Malcolm.

[Music Fade In]

Aylin Malcolm 0:14
Hello and welcome back to Coding Codices. I’m Aylin Malcolm, and I’m a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. And today I’m joined by several other members of the Digital Medievalist Postgraduate Committee.

James Harr 0:27
My name is James Harr, and I am an Assistant Professor of Literature and Languages at Christian Brothers University in Memphis, Tennessee.

Hannah Busch 0:36
Hi, I’m Hannah Busch, and I’m a PhD candidate at the Huygens Institute for the History and Culture of the Netherlands and Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Seb Dows-Miller 0:45
And I’m Seb Dows-Miller. I’m new to the committee, and I’m a D.Phil. candidate at the University of Oxford.

Aylin Malcolm 0:52
Welcome, everyone—Seb, we’re so excited to have you as part of the committee. So today, we’re going to be talking about an article that was recently published in the Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies titled “Whose digital Middle Ages? Accessibility in digital medieval manuscript culture.” The authors are Emily Francomano and Heather Bamford. And Jamie’s going to read the abstract.

James Harr 0:51
Absolutely. So, the abstract states: “This essay examines why online availability should not be conflated with accessibility in discussions of the digital humanities and medieval studies. Expert-oriented projects and discussions of the digital humanities in medieval Iberian studies tend to get lost in collation. These projects lose sight of the promises of democratization and accessibility that the digital humanities community values in favor of the traditional demands of philology.”

Aylin Malcolm 1:44
So I think we all had a lot of thoughts and excited feelings about this article. So maybe just to start off, did anyone have a point that they wanted to raise sort of in regard to the article as a whole, or its uses, or its general audience?

James Harr 2:00
I think the overall idea of accessibility and availability is a thread that kind of goes through not just the paper, but the way that we think about digital projects and publicly available manuscripts, digital text, that sort of thing. I think there is this assumption that as long as it’s available online, it is accessible. And what I really liked about this article is it brings up these other points that we might not be considering.

Hannah Busch 2:28
Yeah, I like about the article that they’re touching also, the discussion about how experts can access the material and non-experts and how digitization makes material, of course, accessible to more people, because you’re not dependent on funding and on context to see the original material. But due to the architecture of most digitized collections, it’s still only accessible to some sort of expert. So the students need their teachers to understand how to work with the material. But it also touches the point of accessibility for people that have disabilities. And how this is often not thought through in the design of digitized collections and portals. And yeah, I like that this article is so yeah, overall, and also to an audience that is not purely scientific or technical.

Seb Dows-Miller 3:27
And I think this is something that the pandemic has made us realize, I suppose a little bit more as well, that as people working in the field prior to the pandemic, we would have expected access to the kind of materials that are being digitized. And I suppose losing access to those during the pandemic has made even experts within the field realize what it means to not have access to these particular resources, I think and is making us think a little bit more about the groups of people to whom we think actually the access should be widened. And that the things that we’re doing, I suppose to develop access for students and for early career researchers as well should actually be progressed a little bit further outside the academy.

James Harr 4:16
Just to piggyback on what Seb was saying that, you know, there’s, in addition to the access that we needed during the pandemic, I think there were also moments where we realized that the people behind the scenes are often kind of ignored in terms of their role during the pandemic. And I immediately go to the letter that the American Historical Association sent to the National Archives, pretty much demanding archivists to be in there so that they could do their research. And three days later, four days later, they rescinded and apologized realizing that it was absolutely just offensive, the letter that they sent and the tone that they took with librarians and archivists. This article doesn’t really get into that, per se, but once we start thinking about some of these ideas, you know, you can’t help but look under the hood and think about the other individuals.

Aylin Malcolm 5:09
Yeah, that actually speaks to another thread that I saw running through the article, which is the question of interpretation. And the authors caution against reproducing a divide that they see in their own fields between empirical and interpretative branches of scholarship. This is really interesting to talk about with digital tools and what the authors often call “digital surrogates”—which I know, Seb, you found an interesting term as well, and maybe we can unpack that in a bit. But in making medieval or premodern texts accessible to a broader audience—this always requires some interpretation, because you can’t simply throw up a gothic Latin manuscript on the internet and expect everyone to care about it. There is always this level of mediation that’s involved as well, which is a critical enterprise; every time that you edit a text that is obviously an act of scholarship. But I think it’s important to sort of remain cognizant of that interpretation that’s going on often behind the scenes and think about how it affects how we perceive these objects.

Seb Dows-Miller 6:18
And I think as well as considering the interpretation that’s going on in the creation of these surrogates, which as you say is a term I think we should unpack, but also in the in the choice of what gets digitized in the first place. That obviously, so often, as I know is the case at the Bodleian, what gets digitized is very often a question of, well, what can be funded? And so often, the manuscript digitization processes are based on what the funder thinks is worthwhile and interesting. And if we’re thinking in terms of accessibility, I suppose the the main question is, well, accessibility to what? What are we making accessible? And why have we chosen to make those things accessible?

Hannah Busch 6:59
So I know that in digitization, there has been a shift from one object that has value to smaller collections or bigger collections. So you’re—in general, it’s not that you digitize one important manuscript, but you try to digitize an entire group. And also, usually you don’t redo manuscripts in the first place that are already available on microfilm, or something similar. And when we think about the big studies about palaeography, that are often placed or ended up in a catalogue of dated manuscripts, on those plates, on those photos, many of those manuscripts are not digitized, or there is no project where they digitize an entire existing catalogue of dated manuscripts. Because we already have somehow pictures of those to study and they’re already accessible for students. So I mean, in the type of research that I’m doing on trying to analyze digitized images of manuscripts, I miss those manuscripts that are clearly dated, because they are important ground truth for other studies. But there is no entire collection of those completely digitized. And I think that’s kind of interesting—I think there is a shift. Also, because maybe of the pandemic that we could only rely on what is there digitally, that some teachers or some students couldn’t continue studying the manuscript they have been studying for years to teach palaeography and codicology. But they have to use collections that are online, digitally.

Seb Dows-Miller 8:40
This is something I’ve thought about a lot, I suppose in terms of to what extent we should prioritize quantity over quality. And this is something I think that the the authors talk about in their discussion of the, just the effort that goes into producing some kind of digital surrogates. Because I’ve often thought, is it better potentially just to send somebody through the archives with a phone to just take photos of every single page? Or do we take the time and do it properly? Or is there some kind of intermediate approach that we can take?

Aylin Malcolm 9:11
Or do we do both, because maybe the phone photos are revealing something that the high-res, highly polished ones are not? Johanna Green talked about that in her episode with us.

Hannah Busch 9:22
That was—yeah, I wanted to jump in there and say, we always have to think about something the authors are touching in the article of the findability and accessibility and if everyone takes photos with their phone, how will they end up with the end user? So if we think of portals where potentially everyone could upload pictures, and of course, this would be possible with the triple IF (IIIF) technologies and so on. Considering the FAIR approach of FAIR data, then there needs to be some sort of structure and…because otherwise, we can have millions of phone pictures but they’re not—that are even less accessible to the broad audience.

James Harr 10:04
But another thing to think about is, you know, how sustainable is the technology? If we do go through and there is funding to digitize everything with a phone or with a high-resolution camera, will that technology necessarily stand the test of time? I think about the, all the historical documents that the UK National Archives put together on the Discovery platform. And they are, they’re scans of microfilm and very grainy black-and-white photos that at the time were fantastic. And you know, they do allow us to see a great deal. But there’s still a lot of noise, there’s still a lot of graininess, there’s still a lot of distortion in the images, that from a palaeographical point of view, it makes it very difficult to read them. So do we have to go through this conversation every 20 years? Looking back when those were done probably in the 80s so oh, gosh, now, like nearly 40 years? Do we have to do this every so often? And is there a way that we can maybe anticipate the way technology moves forward?

Aylin Malcolm 11:03
This kind of speaks to the perennial question of when a digital project is done, the answer to which is often: not yet. I have this question about accessibility generally: with limitations in human resources, budgetary concerns, when is it better to just throw something up on the internet, even if it’s temporary, versus the project not existing at all?

Hannah Busch 11:26
Yeah, I think digital projects are basically never done also, because technology is advancing and technology gets outdated. But I’m also thinking about in this matter of should we prioritize the interface or the data? Because what, yeah, what has a longer life? And of course, for usability and accessibility, I think we have to put more focus on interfaces. But at the same time, we kind of have to keep the data in a shape and in a format, that it remains accessible beyond the interface and beyond the user experience. And I see there that is a big issue in all digital humanities projects: that the humanities scholar needs the the interface, while the more technology-focused scholar or the computer scientist is all about the data and the API.

Seb Dows-Miller 12:27
I suppose this is one of the big benefits of something like the IIIF where you’re separating your data from your interface. And I think that’s, that’s really important, because as you say, we probably should put a little bit more emphasis on interface, but so often, particularly in kind of static-state projects, the interface is built in to the data, isn’t it, it’s kind of, it’s part of the data in a way that’s inextricable. And by having the data separate from the interface, I suppose that allows us to come back and reapply certain new principles to the interface should that be relevant. And I suppose it also allows us to treat the data, the same data in lots of different ways, doesn’t it—to simultaneously perhaps have an interface that is slightly more scholarly, that is slightly more focused on presentation of material in a way that, say, philologists might be interested in. But on the other hand, it maybe allows you to have a slightly more public-facing interface or maybe an interface that’s got functionality built in for visually impaired people, for example. And I think IIIF, again, is really interesting for that, because of this ability for annotation and for, to some extent, crowdsourced annotation as well—that where communities can build up the annotation over time and can build up this ability and this accessibility, I suppose. And the authors talk, don’t they, about how so much of examination of medieval manuscripts and similar things is so keenly wrapped up in, for example, color and mise-en-page and things like that, which is so difficult to access for people who have limited vision. And I suppose that’s a part—that actually we think, well, it’s an image framework, how could IIIF possibly actually be helpful here? But actually, in terms of the annotation that allows people to give access to other people who may not necessarily be able to see that there’s a certain color—but if there is the ability for, say, screen readers to interact with IIIF annotation, to be able to be told that there is a rubric on this particular part of the page, for example.

Hannah Busch 14:37
Yeah, I think IIIF is an excellent example because it definitely separates the data from the interface. So you don’t have to focus to have the perfect experience for the user as long as you have good data. And then you can have specific pages, specific viewers, for scholars and people with specific needs and you can just transport the images and the metadata into other environments. So the idea behind that is really, really great. But there, I would say that we still need to focus a lot more on how we present the data in order to make it reusable in that way, because IIIF, still, there’s the risk of losing information and also of losing the connection to the original collection. So if we only have API for for the images, and for very basic metadata—and there are a lot of collections that are not curating their IIF metadata in a proper way and forget to link to additional metadata files—we will lose the connection to the original collection. And then I think the data gets, yeah, not really reusable, not really interpretable. But yeah, I think IIIF is a very good example how we can get that…bridge the gap, to more accessibility for more user groups and also to implement it in exhibitions, scholarly use, and so on.

[Music interlude]

Aylin Malcolm 16:26
Regarding the question of interface versus data—which I think you’re totally right to be focusing on, Hannah—I was wondering what those of you who work more with markup languages thought about the authors’ critique of, particularly, the TEI.

James Harr 16:43
I think it brings up a really—they bring up some really valuable points, that the TEI is English-based primarily. And while there are individuals who are working to expand it to a more globally accessible markup language, it’s a lot of work. And to be honest, I just looked at it as a computer language. And it’s a really valid point that it is completely based in English.

Seb Dows-Miller 17:11
And not only based in English, I suppose, but also in the Roman alphabet in a way that kind of often goes counter to questions of accessibility. So thinking about TEI and accessibility, I immediately think of Ellen Forget in, [they’re] at the University of Toronto, who’s been working on a project trying to encode braille into TEI, who’s come across all sorts of problems with the way that TEI is just not really set up for that kind of task. But I think on this question, I suppose of even straightforward things, like, for example, that the tags are in the Roman alphabet, and are in primarily English, to what extent is that a computer science problem?

Hannah Busch 17:55
Well, I think that the TEI is a huge rabbit hole. And when you start to try to translate it to different languages—and I’m just speaking of, here, European, Central European languages—it gets even less interoperable, because of course, we have collections in different countries. But of course, that’s, I think, a general problem of of digital humanities—that it’s mostly, and because most coding is in English.

Seb Dows-Miller 18:25
I have this image of some alingual coding language that wouldn’t be in any language or would somehow be wholly universal. But I’m, I feel like I’m not the person to design that. And I don’t know who would be but yeah, it’s a very difficult thing, isn’t it? How can we create something that would be so completely accessible and equally accessible, as opposed to everybody using it in a way that it just isn’t currently? And I think it’s unequally complicated, isn’t it, as well, in that…speakers of Western European languages, it’s harder if you don’t speak English, I suppose, but at least the characters are going in the right direction. If the language that you’re encoding is Hebrew, or Arabic, or anything else that goes in a direction other than left to right, it suddenly becomes so complicated. And I think that’s just something that going forward— maybe that’s not something that’s now achievable with the TEI, but I suppose as we go forwards, and as people develop new tools and new systems, it’s something that has to be taken into account. As I suppose the authors are saying, aren’t they? I think they make it very clear that they’re not criticizing projects that have already been completed and things that have already been done. It’s more of a suggestion, I suppose to those of us who are coming with new ideas and new projects that actually there are different and better ways that we can look forwards.

[Music interlude]

Seb Dows-Miller 20:09
The authors talk about how these online digitizations of medieval manuscripts are usually reasonably effective at presenting that evidence of readers’ physical interaction with the book in ways that actually has been claimed it doesn’t do very well previously. So for example, marginalia is very visible, at least for most audiences within a digitized version of a manuscript online. But when we interact with a manuscript physically, obviously in our very unintentional and minimal way, we do still leave a trace, don’t we, on the manuscripts—we leave oils from our skin, we leave cells, we leave the odd hair on a page, in a way that perhaps we can’t do with a digitization. So do we make our mark on a digital edition when we read it? Or are there ways that perhaps would be worth introducing to enable us to do that?

James Harr 21:03
I think this is a really interesting topic that I don’t know if there’s an answer. But immediately my mind went to Matthew Kirschenbaum’s Mechanisms, “every contact leaves a trace,” and I’m wondering like, do we leave a trace when we open up a digital document or whether we interact with code, without having to create a signature for ourselves in the, either in the finding aid or in the code itself?

Hannah Busch 21:26
I mean, the first thing I was thinking about was the good old sheets in books that lists all the people that that looked at the book, or that lent it out. And earlier this year, I was digitizing medieval manuscripts, and in some of those manuscripts, there was still the sheet. And I could exactly see who consulted the book. And of course, they also left invisible traces in the book. And we also had in some books, tiny, tiny papers that were left from an exhibition, with some explanation about the page. And I think already with digital loan systems and libraries, we lose that information. And now that we are consulting manuscripts that are freely available online, we are leaving even less trace, so maybe the library gets our IP address. And of course, if there’s a interface with IIIF, there is the possibility to maybe leave annotations, or we can implement the manuscripts in our own research, do webblogs, web pages about it, about them, we can tweet about them, put them on Instagram. But these unconscious traces, yeah, I think they are lost, so that we don’t leave them on the digital surrogate.

James Harr 22:45
I think the IP address would probably be the closest thing, you know, to this, like you said, unconscious remainders of ourselves. But I don’t know how often that is stored, or you know, whether that’s something that people are even interested in.

Aylin Malcolm 23:06
I’m actually pretty sure that the ability to look up who has consulted an object is specific to different contexts. I don’t think you can legally do that in a lot of American libraries. And of course, with IP addresses, there would be all kinds of privacy issues as well.

Hannah Busch 23:27
Well you could probably trace maybe places from where people accessed and maybe also the day time. So it could be very interesting to see what times of days people consult manuscripts and also—

Aylin Malcolm 23:41
What time, like, wake up in the morning, like, time to go look at something from the Bod—

Hannah Busch 23:47
Six o’clock in the morning coffee manuscripts! Also thinking about the studies of Kate Rudy, who did research on traces on manuscripts, and then, of course, figured out that the pages with illuminations have many more traces than pages without, but how can we do that with the digital? I mean, of course, probably we can see which pages are looked at most, the longest, and have kind of timestamps and usage stamps. But how can we make them visible? And how can we, yeah, maybe access them, because of course, there are privacy issues.

Seb Dows-Miller 24:25
And I think—privacy would obviously have to play a really important role in this, and people would have to very definitely agree in advance for this kind of data to be shared—but there is some interesting work going on, I think, on questions of eye tracking and things like that. So I suppose the digital surrogate allows us maybe to have even more data and even more information about the kinds of things that people choose to look at that maybe it’s…we’re not so much saying oh, well this page is clearly really popular because it’s been quite badly damaged, it’s been quite badly worn—we could even point to the specific parts of the page that people are looking at. And I suppose eye tracking is one way to do that, but also in a slightly less invasive way, I suppose, mouse movements and things like that, where people are focused, where they tend to zoom in. And I don’t know whether this is currently possible with the IIIF, but I suspect it would be without too much difficulty…for the servers to return some kind of statistics on which parts of the image get looked at most frequently, and which—even which images get looked at most frequently.

Aylin Malcolm 25:32
And of course, there would be potential labor and budgetary concerns involved in archiving all of that data as well. So once again, I suppose we get into the question of how do we make decisions about which data to preserve?

Hannah Busch 25:44
And also getting getting back to, I mean, we talked a lot about expertises, and different ways of accessing and leaving traces in manuscripts. But if we now think about the digitization project of the future, what would be the priorities concerning who’s developing the projects? What kind of expertise do we need? On the one hand, we need the manuscript scholar, probably we need technicians…should we involve more students as well? Should we also—because money usually comes from public funding pots—is it necessary also to have more public outreach and to involve the public, the general public more, to get their interest, but also to learn how we can make the collections more accessible for them?

Aylin Malcolm 26:39
Well, as you probably know, I became interested in digital approaches because I was interested in the public humanities. So that was sort of my trajectory, this desire to do outreach beyond the academy. And I thought that the article’s take on the public humanities was really interesting, and the way that they conclude in particular. They mention that we would need to change how we value collaborative scholarship, we would need to change how we value digital projects that are doing public outreach over traditional monographs. And then they conclude very interestingly, “it is uncertain as to whether it would be damaging to scholarship and the missions of universities.” So I wanted to throw that out there and see what all of you think about that? Is there a possibility that this would actually be damaging to scholarship to focus more on digitization work or interpretation to wider audiences? Or is this actually something that can benefit scholarship by encouraging us to reframe our research in ways that are clear and comprehensible to a variety of audiences?

James Harr 27:47
I feel like the underlying thought there is the…”if we’re all special, then no one’s special.” And it seems like there’s this pushback on…if we share our scholarship, which is totally contrary to what digital humanities is becoming, or has become—if we don’t share our data and our information, then we’ll be experts. And if we do share it, then everyone’s an expert, and no one’s special. And I think that’s a surefire way to make our discipline extinct. By holding it close to our chest, and dying with our, you know, our data and our manuscripts and saying, “We did it, we were special, and we were experts, and now no one else can be.” I think that is absolutely..I’ll just say selfish, a selfish approach to scholarship.

Hannah Busch 28:33
Yeah, I think what do we have to lose at this point? I mean, we are fighting for funding. If we get more dramatic, there’s like, almost no tenure positions. I mean, there’s like, not a lot of hope. So why? What can we lose if we make our data and our scholarship more public?

Seb Dows-Miller 28:51
And I think there’s also quite a lot of scholarly value, I suppose, in making things accessible and making things comprehensible, that it forces us to engage that bit more with what it is we’re actually looking at. I think we probably all have examples in mind of that book or that article that we have fought our way through, but nevertheless seems to have been designed to be solely comprehensible to the person who wrote it. Which ultimately is bad scholarship, right? Because that means then that people don’t interact with it in the way that they perhaps should and there’s no movement forwards within the academy. I think that by working in the public sphere a little bit more as academics, I think there’s so much value to be had actually on our research as well, that we will gain such a greater understanding from it—not necessarily from the way that that public engagement ends up working, but the thoughts that we have to have in order to create that public engagement, I think is so important.

Hannah Busch 29:53
And also from my own experience, I think the most I’ve learned about manuscripts in particular was when I had the chance to look at manuscripts with other people that knew a lot about the content and could just share that enthusiasm, or that knew a lot about the codicology or palaeography. And I think that were the moments that I still keep in my heart the most and that make me more excited about what is now my discipline of scholarship. And I also think that this could be the power to engage more with the public and to get more understanding why we maybe need funding, why we should make the collections accessible. And that does not only mean to look at pretty images, but also to get the data behind it in order.

James Harr 30:11
I think we have an opportunity as medievalists to show that a lot of these skills are transferable to other projects that preserve historical documents. And that, and yes, that public engagement with this information, with this technology, in addition to hopefully getting us some funding, also shows, you know, local governments, state governments, you know, that we’re not just looking, it’s not just 1000-year-old, 1500-year-old books, it is stuff that we can use to preserve, you know, local histories, even, you know, I think that the transferability of what we do is is really, really important to stress. And like I said, you know, getting more people involved, especially non-experts, will help kind of disseminate that truth. And at the same time, you know, we can talk about accessibility, and you know, inclusivity, all we want, but if we only have medievalists looking at this stuff, there’s gonna be limitations to how much we’re considering.

Aylin Malcolm 31:12
Jamie, I take your point about framing our skills as valuable in the wider world. But I also wonder if emphasizing transferability can go too far, if it can sort of make our field into a kind of instrument—oh, we have critical thinking skills, we have critical writing skills—rather than emphasizing what I think is also true, which is that some things are just worth studying because they’re interesting and good and valuable in their own right. You know, when I talk to my neighbors in the street here in Philadelphia, they’re always deeply interested in my work. I always feel like I might have to justify it, but actually, there’s a lot of excitement about, oh, you get to work with old books, oh, I didn’t know books survived from that period. Tell me more about it.

James Harr 31:59
You’re absolutely right. And I don’t mean to undermine the work that we do and the value of our work. You know, I also to go back to Hannah’s point of tenure-track jobs and positions for medievalists disappearing, you know, I also see, certainly in the United States, having to reframe our roles, and even digital humanities, in order to get funding within universities, you have to throw in—go back, go retro and say humanities computing, because computer makes sense. Humanities and digital are like, no, no, that’s not very STEM of you. And, and you know, we almost have to validate our existence in some respects, it’s unfair. Having said that, you’re absolutely right. The things that we do, the texts we interact with the, you know, the topics that we, that are evolving in our field are amazing. And I love the work that we do. So we’re, it’s unfortunately, it’s rock and a hard place situation where, you know, we need to show that we can do all this technical stuff, but at the same time, maintain the fact that we are valuable scholars, and that our work is really, really important.

Hannah Busch 33:10
Yeah, and I must also say that I really like the experimental approach of our field. I mean, that we can dare to have a look at the old document, at the old books from a different perspective, and maybe learn new things from them. And I mean, I’m working with artificial intelligence. And by trying to apply it to study medieval manuscripts, I also learn a lot about the shortcomings of those methods that are taking more and more space in our everyday life. Like, yeah, how how unprecise it still is for specific fields, how biased it is. And so these old fields of study and these old documents can also teach us a lot about the modern technology. Yeah, it’s also a way to use new technologies to get the interest of the public. So that’s maybe similar to Aylin’s experience talking to the neighbors. Every time I mentioned medieval manuscripts and artificial intelligence, I get basically the attention of everyone, even people that are not into AI or medieval manuscripts.

James Harr 34:23
I just love the idea of Aylin walking down the street in Philadelphia, like, just whistling, and the grocer’s outside sweeping, saying, “How’s the parchment today Aylin?” “All right, Mr. Johnson.” It just, like that’s where we all want to be, just in our neighborhoods, just walking around talking about our stuff.

Seb Dows-Miller 34:38
And I think to bring this back to accessibility a little bit, projects like Hannah’s, as well as developing accessible ways of presenting scholarship, I think can also teach people in other fields about how certain elements of technology may not actually be as accessible as perhaps they could be. So an example that I might think of is AI working with variable spelling in the medieval period, which is obviously something that we deal with every day. But actually somebody developing an AI tool based on usually perfectly-spelt, consistent, usually English… wouldn’t we all love that. But in reality, that’s not what text looks like. I think there’s quite a lot that actually, other fields can learn from the way that digital tools are being used in medieval studies and things that we all take for granted and we see as these hurdles that we have to overcome every day, which actually, others I don’t think have thought about in the same way.

[Music interlude]

Seb Dows-Miller 35:59
So yeah, the the authors, don’t they, talk about digitizations of medieval objects as digital surrogates. Obviously, there are lots of different terms that get used for this, “digital edition” being just one of the types, I suppose, of the surrogates that they talk about. But I wonder what you all think of that as a term? Do we think that they are surrogates in that they are somehow, I suppose, lesser than the original object? Or are they perhaps objects in themselves?

Hannah Busch 36:24
I think there may be both at the same time. So I like the term of “digital facsimile.” But I think the authors are right when they’re saying that, like, the digital object needs its own curation. Because we need to keep it accessible and findable and reusable, just like the original book. It’s different in terms of, of course, we have the one original book manuscript that is unique, that has a lot of history, that has seen a lot of things probably. And then we have the digital, the digitized object, that needs to be treated in a different way, but also needs a lot of attention to have a long life just as the original.

James Harr 37:07
I feel like Dot Porter talked about this once, either at Penn or at Kalamazoo, where she kind of pushed back on the term “surrogate,” because it it implies that it’s a substitute. And so to think of it as a substitute, and not as its own text can be problematic for the labor and the work that went into the digitized version. Yes, it fills a place in terms of accessing the the the material text in a different form, but it’s not really a substitute. It’s like its own thing. And I guess that’s where “surrogate” kind of frustrates me.

Hannah Busch 37:43
And also to maybe add another point, people consult the digital facsimile, but still cite or refer to the original object. And I think that’s something that a lot of people still have to learn, that we have to also to acknowledge the the labor that goes into digitization and data curation, that one should always cite and refer to the digital facsimile if they consult it. And I think still a lot of users of digitized manuscripts think they use the lesser good version, ignoring, a bit, all the potentials of digitized images, digital images, because it’s what we work with most of the time. And also, because they give us a lot of guidance and help before we go to the original object, but also because of all the labor that goes into digitizing.

Aylin Malcolm 38:47
Before or even during. Honestly, I will often pull up the digital facsimile as I’m sitting next to the object because you can’t zoom in on a manuscript.

Hannah Busch 38:57
I’ve talked to a curator last month, and she said that she actually liked how the consultation of manuscripts changed since they have high-resolution facsimiles online, because people come and they know exactly what they want to look at. So they are much more focused. It’s much more easier for them to say, “yes, of course you can come and we’ll give you what you need,” because they know that people are already prepared. And before scholars often came to just browse, because they were not really sure if they needed to consult that manuscript. So she emphasized the quality of, or how it how it helps to make also manuscript trips more effective by having the option to consult earlier and she said, it’s not, like when someone comes and says, “I have looked at the digitized, at the digital collection,” she knows that they have an intention, and that they know what they’re looking for. So there’s no need to say, “oh, no, you can’t consult it, because it’s online.”

Aylin Malcolm 38:58
Your question about surrogates reminds me of the way that I learned palaeography actually, which was not by going to look at manuscripts because I learned it in Ohio, where we had a pretty good collection of manuscripts, but we didn’t, you know, have many examples of Beneventan script in the collection. And so I learned it from photographic reproductions printed in textbooks. I don’t know, I think it’s just worth thinking about the fact that not everyone who would have been learning palaeography pre-digital humanities would have been going to the archive. A lot of them, us, would have been learning it from mediated sources.

Hannah Busch 40:40
I think this might be, we have might have learned palaeography in the dark ages of palaeography studies, because I had the same experience and I was studying it in Berlin. And there is a big collection of manuscripts. And we learned from, like, we studied photocopies and we had to transcribe them and from photocopies, from a book, so really, really bad quality. And for the more modern stuff, it was photographs, photocopied from the originals. And it was two semesters of palaeography from 400 to the 20th century. And we went to the library for one hour, in a year, final stage after the exams, to look at originals. And I totally agree with you that, yeah, we almost don’t talk about that time, we say oh, there’s the archive and the manuscript trips. And people who did their PhDs like 30 years ago still dream about their amazing PhD time when they were just traveling the world to look at manuscripts. And that nobody can do it anymore, because you won’t get the funding for it. But that is not the normal case for for most of us.

Aylin Malcolm 41:55
And your sense of the script would be sort of shaped by those photocopies. You know, my sense of Old English minuscules are shaped by the photocopies of particular manuscripts, but rendered in black and white in my textbooks.

Seb Dows-Miller 42:11
I suppose I was lucky in that things were digitized reasonably well by the time I was kind of making my first forays into palaeography. But given that that was basically at the beginning of the pandemic, that I was starting to think more seriously about palaeography, I had, I suppose a similar experience, but in different ways, that I was, for some of it at least, in a city surrounded by all of these libraries with fantastic collections of manuscripts, but couldn’t visit any of them and had to had to look at them online. And in a way, I think we kind of, we do the the digital facsimile, surrogate, whatever we want to call it down a little bit, I suppose, don’t we, but that really was a lifesaver, in that this is the reason that I’m able to be in this field, because otherwise I would have had to go and do something else. That actually, it’s had such a significant role to play over the last couple of years in a way that no one could ever have imagined.

[Music interlude]

Hannah Busch 43:17
So many things we discussed. And I think, yeah, so much input and so many good thoughts about what what we consider accessibility in our fields, and the many faces of accessibility concerning the the user, the scholar, people with different needs.

Aylin Malcolm 43:37
Maybe just to conclude—Jamie, before we started recording, you mentioned that you were planning to use this in a course. And so maybe that’s an interesting way to finish our discussion: by thinking about the accessibility of the article itself and its potential uses for students.

James Harr 43:52
Yeah, so next semester, I’m teaching Texts and Technologies. Coming from a medieval background, you know, I feel like there’s going to be, it’s going to be very text, manuscript heavy. But I think an article like this talking about, you know, digital projects that a lot of the students I anticipate will be interested in working on. And some of the stuff that we’re even doing in our tiny library at Christian Brothers, some historical documents that have been found that they’re looking to archive and create digital editions of and annotate and even do some markup. I think this is a nice, really great introduction to some of the things that they need to consider as they are digitizing documents or thinking about documents that are going to be publicly accessible. Some of the things that popped out at me is their discussion on the FAIR guiding principles of Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Retrievable, you know, keeping those in the purview of students’ minds as they’re as they’re kind of creating digital projects, I think, is really, really important. But yeah, the whole article itself, I think there are plenty of opportunities to pull the discussion out of Iberian manuscripts and into texts that they would be using on a daily basis if they’re working with this, with technologies to digitize them, so. And it also gives us a really nice Work Cited page at the end. There are some additional resources to kind of build on that. You could build a nice module for a syllabus out of this one article, which I think is great.

[Music fade in]

Aylin Malcolm 45:38
Well, I think that’s a probably a good place to wrap up. So thanks again for listening to Coding Codices. I’m Aylin, joined today by Seb, Hannah, and Jamie. You can listen to more episodes of Coding Codices on our website, podcast.digitalmedievalist.org—or codingcodices.com, we now have a domain of our own. Or get in touch with us at [email protected].

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Credits

Music:

• Intro: TeknoAXE, “Chiptune Nobility” (CC BY 4.0).
• Interludes: Random Mind, “The Bard’s Tale” (CC0).

Graphics:

• Featured Image: https://unsplash.com/photos/1K4Gfl6i63E, ed. by Tessa Gengnagel.

“Sometimes, it comes down to just a white weasel. It’s bizarre, but I love it.”

About this Episode

Recorded 12 April 2022. Edited by James Harr.

Guests: Margaret K. Smith

Content: In this episode, Dr. Margaret Smith from the IRIS Center (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville) speaks about her projects focused on bridging gaps between DH studies and the St. Louis community. Her digital medieval work, Submission Strategies, maps, the spatial and social networks captured in the Irish submissions to Richard II, using these and contemporary materials to create a rich and nuanced depiction of the alliances, hostilities, and spheres of influence that shaped the interconnected social networks of England and Ireland.

Resources and Further Reading

• The IRIS Center at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
• Submission Strategies: The Submissions to Richard II, 1395
• Smith, Margaret K. “Kinship and Kingship: Identity and Authority in the Book of Lismore,” Peritia 27 (2016): 121-140. Précis published in Eolas 9 (2016): 77-85.

Transcript

Automated transcription by <https://otter.ai>, manually corrected by James Harr.

[Music Fade In]

James Harr  0:11 Hi, and welcome to Coding Codices. My name is James Harr, and I’m a Postdoctoral Teaching Scholar in the Data Science Academy at North Carolina State University, a lecturer for the Digital Humanities Summer Minor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a postgraduate committee member for Digital Medievalist.

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For this episode of Coding Codices, I have the pleasure of talking with Dr. Margaret Smith. Dr. Smith is a Research Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities in the IRIS Center at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and a historian of medieval and early modern Ireland. She completed her PhD in medieval history at St. Louis University in 2020. Prior to joining SIU Edwardsville, she worked in digitization at the Barack Obama Presidential Library from 2019 to 2021. In addition to publications on medieval and early modern Irish history, she has written and presented on digital humanities, infrastructure and pedagogy. She currently co-directs the NEH-funded, “Expanding Access to Digital Humanities in St. Louis,” the AHA/NEH-funded “Madison County at the Migratory Crossroads,” and the SSRC-funded “Realizing Inclusive Student Engagement in the Digital Humanities.” She also provides technical and pedagogical support for projects including the NEH-funded Recovery Hub for American Women Writers, and Community-Oriented Digital Engagement Scholars, as well as the Mellon-funded Black Literary Network at the University of Kansas. Her current research project — Submission Strategies — maps, the spatial and social networks captured in the Irish submissions to Richard II, using these and contemporary materials to create a rich and nuanced depiction of the alliances, hostilities, and spheres of influence that shaped the interconnected social networks of England and Ireland.

James Harr  2:17 Thank you so much, Margaret, for joining us on Coding Codices, and we’re very excited to talk to you about your projects, especially your medieval project on mapping Irish submissions to Richard II. Maybe, if you want to, explain what the project is to our listeners who would be very interested in the work you’re doing?

Margaret Smith 2:36 Sure, just to give a little background to start. In 1395, in the midst of kind of this protracted period of conflict, Richard II came to Ireland for the first time no English king had been there since 1210. He came to Ireland and received the submissions of dozens of Irish lords. Those submissions followed a very well established formula. So the submitting parties prostrated themselves and paid homage to the king before some unnamed witnesses. They sworn oath, usually in Irish and relayed through a trusted interpreter. And then they bound themselves to financial penalties should they break their oaths. The particulars of that ritual sometimes varied, but the overall consistency of the formula produces this invaluable resource for us as historians in the accounts of those submissions. They were transcribed and translated by Edmund Curtis in 1927, which conveniently for us means that that edition has just come out of copyright this year. And those notarial instruments that he transcribed, offer us a glimpse of these informal networks that exercise a lot of influence, often invisible in the written record on the ruling classes of England and Ireland in the 14th century. However, as is the case with many datasets, especially medieval ones, that submission data is fragmentary. And it’s also highly obscured by orthographic issues and naming ambiguity. So my project then, Submission Strategies, encodes, visualizes, and analyzes that data, supplementing the documentary voids in the submission dataset with annals entries, chancery records, property deeds, and other contemporary references to create this really rich and nuanced depiction of the alliances and hostilities and spheres of influence that shaped the interconnected social networks of England and Ireland.

[Music interlude]

James Harr  4:36 What brought you to Ireland, what brought you to this specific time period in Ireland, in your personal research? 

Margaret Smith 4:43 That’s a great question. A really wonderful mentor in undergrad brought me to Ireland. I grew up abroad and came back to the states for college. And so I was really thinking about what it means to live in sort of a multicultural milieu and to deal with these sort of competing identities. And so I took a class my freshman year that was essentially a sort of medieval murder mystery where we took an actual murder that happened in medieval Ireland, and used archival research to kind of unpack it and see if we could figure out who did it. And that was actually set in this just a little bit before this period, in medieval Ireland. And so that really got me into this idea, both of history was like a puzzle as something to solve, which, of course, it turns out, this may be a little bit problematic, but exciting, but also the really complicated relationships that people have to ethnic identities, and religious identities, and political identities and all the ways folks, those can sort of overlap, and create these really nuanced self images and also understandings of others. And so that sort of drew me into medieval Ireland, and I’ve been here ever since.

James Harr  6:01 You brought up something really interesting about copyright. And I think, and maybe this is just me being, you know, dismissive about it. But I feel like many people assume that once you get to a topic like medieval studies, you just have all the data, you have all the information, there are no restrictions whatsoever. So to hear that the copyright just finally expired that allowed you to work with a lot of information. Could you talk a little bit more about that? 

Margaret Smith 6:31 Sure. Next, I tend to err on the side of caution. So with a lot of these documents, the documents themselves, of course, are, you know, 800, 1000 years old. So copyright on the text is a little fuzzy, I tend not to try to get into it. And just like I said, err on the side of caution. In this case, though, the transcriptions and translations are Curtis’ own work. And so I tried to be really respectful of that. And of course, it’s also part of this broader study that he did of Richard II in Ireland. And so while I could have sort of extracted data from that, at any point, what I would like to be able to do is to make parts of that book available within the project, because one of my big sort of priorities with this project is being really transparent about where my data is coming from. So that means both for respecting Curtis as a scholar and as an editor, and translator, but it also means ensuring that at any point, people who are using my visualizations can sort of drill down and see how I’m making my decisions about encoding, and how I’m sort of interpreting these different layers of sources and scholarship to create those visualizations.

[Music interlude]

James Harr  7:53 So what’s the future for Submission Strategies, for this project? Where do you see this going? 

Margaret Smith 8:00 Well, I guess to answer that, I have to go back a little bit to the history of it, because it started last year as just a little conference paper where I thought, oh, I’ll just do a quick little network visualization of the interpreters and see whether that’s a sort of significant relationship. And of course, as these things do it sort of spiraled. So what I’ve been doing over the last several months is going back through and really making sure that my data is sound and pulling in a lot more sources to sort of expand my networks. And so I’m going about 50 years, in either direction. So this will be 1350, to 1450. Because that really helps to see some of these sort of historic relationships that are influencing what’s happening in 1395. And then give us some more context for where it goes after that. So currently, I’m in that sort of data gathering data cleaning phase, I’m planning to have a version of the site to launch in May, where everything will be publicly available. And that will be, you know, datasets and some initial visualizations. And then from there, I plan to sort of build out a lot of this interpretive content. Because I think it’s really easy for projects like this to become sort of an encyclopedia or sort of a prosopography. And I really want to make sure that there is that interpretive element, but this is also scholarship in addition to data. And of course, creating the data set is scholarship in and of itself. But I think there’s a lot of really interesting avenues to pursue here. I also am really excited to eventually open this up to collaborators or contributors. I discovered very early on that doing this kind of project that covers not just one country, but two countries over 100 years requires a lot of depth and breadth. And that’s very hard for one person to do well. So my goal is to sort of create a framework here that then other people can bring their expertise to as well. And I can go back to my little corner in Cork, and people who work on other parts of Ireland and England and Scotland can maybe bring their expertise as well.

James Harr  10:00 Yeah, one thing I’ve admired about your work is that you’re you always seem to have this the broader scope of DH studies in mind and that you want other people not only to collaborate with what what you’re working with, but have this be transferable to other aspects of DH studies and even medieval studies. So, which moves on to some of your other work, which for those of you who don’t know, Margaret is like, I feel like you’re involved with all the things in DH, which is amazing, like all the hot topics in DH. So your work on DH peer review, which we’ve discussed several times on, on this podcast, of how DH work and digital medieval work, can transfer into the idea of what scholarship is, and kind of moving away from traditional ideas of scholarship. So you’re, you’re very, very active in this. And I’d love for you to speak a little bit about some of your perspectives on DH scholarship, again, the transferability of the work you’re doing to other aspects of academic work, academic contributions. So anyway, I’ll stop here and let you speak to that a bit more. 

Margaret Smith 11:10 Yeah, definitely. I’ve been thinking about this, as you say, for a couple of years now. And partly, of course, it’s very self-interested. Because as a junior scholar, obviously, I need my work to have that sort of legibility as scholarship and as a digital humanist in a Center for Digital Humanities, rather than a traditional department. That means that a lot of my work is not going to look like the traditional monograph or the article. And so I sort of selfishly want to have these mechanisms in place for creating that legibility. And that credibility, I also do think it’s really important for the sustainability of these projects. And for them to be able to participate in this sort of ongoing discourses, by which I mean that when you put out research in an article, or a monograph, people know where to find it, and they know how to cite it. And so you get, you know, in the footnotes, you get these conversations that are happening among different texts, and among different scholars, whereas digital projects, because there’s no central repository for them, they’re not always indexed on Google Scholar and things like that, they’re much harder to find. And even if you find them, they’re not, it’s not always clear how they sort of participate or can be drawn into these discourses. And so they sort of get siloed in the scholarship itself. And so I think about peer review as a way to explicitly form those connections, which happens on one end with the creators of the projects, but needs to happen at a lot of different points, right, with peer reviewers, with maybe sort of book reviewers. And so thinking about the sort of infrastructure pieces of DH, I think is really important. There’s a lot of really good work on this already. So for instance, Reviews in DH is sort of thinking in these terms. Laura Morreale has done some really great work with her digital documentation process. And so there’s all kinds of people thinking about it from these different directions. And so I think, kind of the next step then is to create these maybe these sort of disciplinary spaces for peer review, because what reviews and DH does really well is to think about the technical contributions of projects, and how they’re contributing to the field of digital humanities. But again, that’s like, I’m even I’m not going to go there to think about what’s happening in medieval Irish digital humanities, I would kind of like to be able to find that in spaces that are talking about medieval Irish print publications as well. And to sort of get these disciplinary conversations to include more digital projects. I’ve done a little bit of that, really, for a project on American women writers, because I work in a digital humanities center, and therefore I’m in many different projects in many different fields. And so I did design a peer review process there that builds on that Reviews in DH model, and places these projects within their disciplinary contexts. And so I would love to see more of that in medieval fields and subfields as well.

[Music interlude]

James Harr  14:23 So how does this approach to peer review inform your teaching?

Margaret Smith  14:28 That’s a really interesting question. Um, you know, my teaching is a bit weird because I’m in the center. And so I don’t teach Gen Eds I teach a very few courses on digital humanities specifically. And so in those courses, you know, we were thinking about digital humanities ethics. So about this sort of, you know, how do we cite these projects and how do we evaluate their ethical positions? Right, how are they thinking about inclusive, excuse me, inclusivity and accessibility? What contributions are they making towards project sustainability? And so I think if I had to give a sort of short answer to that question, I think that these skills of evaluating projects are really important for students in terms of teaching digital literacy, and thinking about how projects make their arguments and recognizing that projects do make arguments, right that, you know, even just a nice little visualization has a lot of argumentation embedded in it. And so thinking about being able to sort of drill into a project to see its sort of basic assumptions and its sources and how it’s using them. That’s sort of off the cuff answer. 

James Harr 15:41 No, that’s great. I’m sorry, I kind of threw that at you. And you gave a fantastic answer. So I guess one thing that another thing that we like to address in these podcasts is the idea of getting involved with this type of work or not just with with your work, because obviously you, you know, eventually want to open this up to collaboration and I’d assume there’d be students who want to get involved with that. But students who are hitting the ground from the foundation, wanting to do digital medieval studies, do digital humanities work, how would you recommend them getting involved in a project? If that’s not at the center of their scholarship at the moment? 

Margaret Smith 16:26 That’s a good question. And I have a few different kinds of answers to that. One is that my advice is always to start with a question. You know, to find the kind of work, the kind of content that interests you, and to let the questions sort of emerge from that. And then to let those questions kind of draw you into tools. I think starting with the tools can be really exciting space to sort of think about possibilities. But then you wind up letting the tools sort of lead you instead of the content. And that can be a little bit dangerous, because then you wind up shoehorning things into different technologies and that can have problematic implications for the scholarship. So I think starting with the question is really important for that reason. I also think that research is exciting, right? You want to find something that you connect with. And you want to kind of find the people and find the contexts that you like, recognize something and I guess, so I think that’s one piece of it, to kind of dismiss the technology at first and find the space that you enjoy within Medieval Studies. 

My other answer, which actually, I’m going to sort of contradict myself with, is thinking about, you know, data visualization and how to get into that, because it can be quite a technical field. And I actually think in that sense, when you’re thinking about learning a technology, that dabbling is really important, and that you want to kind of be able to dip into things and just sort of see what happens when you tinker with them. And so I actually really like platforms, like observable, or Jupyter notebooks where you can just go in and start breaking things. And you can see how the data is structured and kind of create your own datasets and, and watch things unfold in real time, and get a real sense of kind of cause and effect and sort of explore the possibilities that something like data visualization offers as a methodology. 

And I have one more answer, which is that I’m thinking about my own journey into medieval studies. Mentorship was so important finding a faculty member who invested in me as a scholar, not just a student labor, but as you know, a collaborator, potentially, as someone who had valuable ideas and had valuable perspectives. And, you know, was willing to tell me that and encouraged me to sort of find those spaces that interested me, that was really imperative. So actually, I think the biggest thing that we can do for students to get into Medieval Studies is of course, not the students at all, but the faculty, to get them to sort of form those relationships and invest in students, which of course, many faculty already do wonderfully. Yeah, there’s always more. I love that last answer.

James Harr 19:10 You know, you always hear it’s like Yelp reviews, you always hear only the really good and the really bad. But sometimes when you get into academic Twitter, for example, you only hear about the really unsupportive, terrible experiences that especially graduate students have with faculty members. And one thing that you hit on that I think is just so important with DH studies is acknowledging the labor that goes into these projects. And that that data cleaning, visualization, coding all that is scholarship, it’s not just the final pretty package at the end, it’s all the work that goes into it under the hood, that students just think oh, this is a means to an end rather than part of that, that digital humanities experience. So mentioning the labor, and I love the idea of the freedom to break things, which is something that we are really afforded in digital humanities is that failure is part of it. Some things don’t work. Some things are just prototypes that will maybe never get off the ground. But at least there’s this exploration that you don’t usually see with a lot of other disciplines. And, and you touching on that and talking about that, I think it’s just so absolutely important for students to realize that it’s fun, it’s frustrating, but there’s so much more than just the final project that goes into digital humanities studies. 

Margaret Smith 20:31 Yeah, I love talking about failure, I actually think failure, we should talk about it a lot more. I would love to see like a Journal of Null Results or something for digital humanities, because there’s so many different levels that things can fail at. And all of them are really generative, actually, for thinking about what we’re doing right and what we’re doing wrong, both individually and as a field. And I think those are the real spaces where we can kind of move the field along and find those new directions. So I love failure. 

James Harr 21:03 Yeah, a journal failure, I think I think a lot of people would have articles ready to go for submission.

[Music interlude]

James Harr  21:18 Okay, so, one question. I really love asking. So going back to your work, and it doesn’t have to be with the Irish documents and Submission Strategies. But what is one of the most surprising things you found in your research? And this can be a very general question too. 

Margaret Smith  21:36 In all of my research? My favorite story to tell about my sort of dissertation research, which is peripherally connected to Submission Strategies is thinking, again, about these sort of hybrid societies where you have a lot of people with different sets of mores, and different identities of all kinds kind of intersecting, and thinking about the ways that those different identities sort of collide and overlap in weird ways. So my dissertation looked at a particular Irish lordship, and looked at the ways in which both the individual lords and the sort of dynasty were negotiating this sort of politically fraught context and trying to sort of craft an identity and a sense of authority. Within a sometimes kind of hostile environment. But of course, they’re also interacting with neighbors and both Gaelic and Anglo-Irish. And so at one point, in the mid-15th century, approximately — we don’t have a date — we see this scenario where one of my Irish lords, it’s not entirely clear which one either by the way, because this is all just sort of antiquarian nonsense, but we’ll say it’s maybe a Donogh — there’s lots of Donogh MacCarthys — has this white weasel, and his neighbor, the Earl of Desmond, wants to borrow the weasel. And so allegedly, the Earl of Desmond is willing to essentially sort of use his castle as collateral for the safe return of this weasel. And, of course, the weasel dies, and in the Earl’s keeping, and therefore, that’s how Kilbrittain, the sort of central castle of this lordship comes into the possession of my MacCarthy Reaghs. And this is just like, it’s a very silly story on many levels. And of course, there’s no primary sources that attest to it. It all is sort of 17th century antiquarians. But I also think it’s a really interesting way to think about these sort of, not just culturally hybrid families who are all sort of interacting, you know, they’re crossing these boundaries between English politics, and Irish politics, and they’re all sort of, they all sort of have these hybrid identities, no matter what language you know, that they speak at home, or what, where their ancestors are from like, they’re all sort of in this hybrid mishmash, and negotiating their authority and their identity as best they can. And sometimes, it comes down to just, like, a white weasel. It’s bizarre, but I love it. I also have a later story. 16th century, early 17th where in fact, this is real, I do have a chance for a document that attests to it. A herd of cattle being used as collateral for an unpaid debt where he just goes and like takes the cattle. It’s a cattle raid, but then when he is brought into chancery for the stuffed and battery, he says it was just an unpaid debt I was collecting. 

James Harr 24:54 Do you see a lot of that cattle as…? 

Margaret Smith 24:58 Yeah. There’s definitely a conference paper in there somewhere.

James Harr  25:00 Yeah.

[Music interlude]

James Harr  25:10 One of the struggles with digital humanities and humanities in general is that we’re always looking for opportunities for funding and opportunities for grants, and you do a lot of that work in your pedagogical research in projects that you’re working on. Can you talk a little bit about the grant projects that you currently have underway? 

Margaret Smith 25:30 Sure. One of the weird things, one of the delightful things about being at a digital humanities center is that I’m constantly sort of dipping into other people’s fields, and working across disciplinary boundaries, which is really exciting, and generates a lot of conversations about the field of digital humanities broadly conceived. And in our center at SIUE, and the IRIS center, a lot of those conversations are centering on equity and what we can do to make digital humanities in general, a more accessible space. You know, it’s kind of widely acknowledged at this point that digital humanities is often not geared in content or design towards addressing or attracting or educating women and gender minorities and people of color. And so we’ve got a lot of projects that approach that question from different angles. So for instance, right now, we’re collaborating with Lindenwood University, which is on the other side of St. Louis in St. Charles, on a project called “Expanding Access to the Digital Humanities in St. Louis”. We’ve got a digital humanities advancement grant to create a regional network focused on DH pedagogy at the secondary and undergraduate levels. And we’re particularly focused on St. Louis, because there’s all these sort of historical and contemporary pressures in St. Louis that have produced these really stark inequalities. And these very sharp lines of economic and racial segregation, and a very deep digital divide. And so we’re thinking about all of the opportunities that DH pedagogy offers as far as building digital literacies, and career prep, and getting students engaged in the humanities in sort of deeper and broader ways. But also, we’re thinking about the ways in which those benefits of DH pedagogy are inaccessible to a very large proportion of students across the St. Louis metro area. And so we’re using this network as a way to sort of, I guess, redistribute those DH resources, and create infrastructure to support the age pedagogy at these different levels. SIUE also has a new project starting in the fall, a new Gen Ed pathway for underserved students, called “Community-Oriented Digital Engagement Scholars”. And that will have students working in small research teams with a community partner on what we call a wicked problem. So something that’s very complicated, has a lot of intersecting pieces. And that complexity makes it very difficult or impossible to solve. And so they’ll be using digital tools and methods to understand, to visualize, to analyze these problems, through interdisciplinary lenses, and then to share their work with a broader public. And so for instance, this year, there’ll be focusing on climate change and resiliency and spatial justice. So those are a couple of the programs that we’re working on these sort of big infrastructure pieces, to try and create systems that don’t just sort of, say, “Here’s digital humanities come and do it,” but really try to draw in students who are not necessarily targeted by a sort of Digital Humanities writ large, and to create a space that is both welcoming and exciting and supportive for them. 

James Harr 28:48 That’s amazing. That’s amazing. I can’t, you know, I can’t talk enough about digital humanities and the work that it affords us, but the outreach, the opportunities for outreach is just fantastic. And yeah, the work you’re doing with the community is, more people need to do this, more institutions need to follow this model, because personal projects are great, but the if we if we thrive on interdisciplinarity, and we thrive on telling stories and looking at DEI as the as the core of a lot of these projects, getting getting younger individuals, especially in the community involved is so important. So the CODES initiative is fantastic. So, well done.

Margaret Smith 29:32 I’m totally excited about it. I’m so excited to get to work closely with students too. Because you know, being a center also means I don’t get a lot of teaching opportunities. So I’m really excited to have these spaces to create these really close relationships with students and get to engage in some of that mentorship in new and exciting ways. 

James Harr 29:50 Do you get to slip any medieval studies into your interaction with them? 

Margaret Smith 29:54 Oh, definitely.

James Harr 29:57 Excellent. Okay, good. All right. Well, thank you so much to Dr. Margaret Smith for joining us today and talking about her work in digital humanities and medieval studies. We really appreciate you joining us. 

Margaret Smith 30:07 Thanks so much, Jamie. This has been a really great conversation. 

James Harr 30:10 Thank you!

[Music fade in]

James Harr 30:21 Thanks for listening to Coding Codices, a podcast by the Digital Medievalist Postgraduate Committee. I’m James Harr, and my guest on this episode was Dr. Margaret Smith from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. You can listen to more episodes of Coding Codices on our website, podcast.digitalmedievalist.org, or the podcast provider of your choice. Of course, you can also get in touch with us at [email protected].

[Music fade out]

Credits

Music:

• Intro: TeknoAXE, “Chiptune Nobility” (CC BY 4.0).
• Interludes: Random Mind, “Market Day” (CC0).

Graphics:

• Featured Image: Photo from Unplash, ed. by Tessa Gengnagel.

“I did not expect to see a King riding an ostrich on a mountain in North Africa.”

About this Episode

Recorded August 2, 2021. Produced and edited by Hannah Busch.

Guests: Katie Albers-Morris, Dr. Helen Davies, Alex Zawacki

Content: In this episode Katie Albers-Morris, Helen Davies, and Alex Zawacki talk about recovering palimpsests and erased texts with multispectral imaging. All three are, or have been, PhD candidates at the Lazarus project at the University of Rochester, an initiative that was designed with the educational purpose of training students in the field of multispectral imaging and image processing techniques for cultural heritage objects. During the episode we discuss MSI in general, their experiences as (grad) students and program coordinators at the Lazarus project, MSI in the classroom, and the challenges of dissertation projects in the digital humanities.

Resources and Further Reading

• Lazarus project: https://lazarusprojectimaging.com/
• The Archimedes Palimpsest: http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/. And a TED talk by William Noel about the Archimedes Palimpsest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqtEppZmjfw
• Sinai Palimpsests Project: sinaipalimpsests.org/
• Hoku. Open Source Multispectral Imaging Processing Software: http://www.cis.rit.edu/~ktkpci/Hoku.html

Transcript

Automated transcription by <https://otter.ai>, manually corrected by Hannah Busch.

[Music Fade In]

Hannah Busch 0:11
Hello and welcome to Coding Codices a podcast from the Digital Medievalist Postgraduate committee. I’m Hannah Busch, your host for this episode, and I’m joined today by Dr. Helen Davies, Katie Albers-Morris and Alex Zawacki. In today’s episode, we are going to talk about multispectral imaging, and imaging and image processing technique that allows to recover contents from damaged materials.

[Music interlude]

So to get started, I would like to ask you to introduce yourself quickly to the audience.

Helen Davies 0:44
I’m Helen Davies. I’m an assistant professor of English at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, and I was hired to teach a combination of the Digital Humanities and medieval literature. So I get to combine both of those things in my classes and my work. And I am working on introducing multispectral imaging to the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. I have previously worked for six years for the Lazarus project as a project coordinator.

Katie Albers-Morris 1:17
And I’m Katie Albers-Morris. I am a PhD student at the University of Rochester, and Project Coordinator for the Lazarus project. I am working with the Lazarus project on cultural heritage imaging as we do, but my specific interests are points of cultural intersection in the Mediterranean. So where the Islamic world and the Christian Latin West kind of meet, etc, and the role of women in those spaces as well.

Alex Zawacki 1:46
Hi, I’m Alex Zawacki. I’m a PhD candidate at the University of Rochester where I work with Katie at the Lazarus project. So my research also focuses on the Middle Ages, specifically the supernatural, ghosts or that sort of thing. And I’m an Operations Coordinator with Lazarus where I’ve helped run a couple of projects in the past, including the Museum of Holocaust in DC, in Dresden, and a couple of other places trying to recover damaged palimpsests and medieval manuscripts.

[Music interlude]

Hannah Busch 2:21
Yeah, I’m familiar with MSI. And I think I got introduced to it the first time via the Archimedes Palimpsest. But I’m not sure if all the listeners of the podcast know what MSI is. So would you would you explain it? Short and easy and understandable?

Helen Davies 2:40
Yeah, so the short and simple version is, if a document is illegible because it’s faded, because it’s damaged, because it’s been through fire, or in dramatic instances, bomb or flooding damage, then we can use multispectral imaging to recover the text. Additionally, like as you mentioned, that Archimedes Palimpsest project, it’s frequently used to recover the under-text in a palimpsest, so if a text has been erased, scraped off, etc, we can use multispectral imaging to try to recover that text. So the technology works by taking a series of images under controlled bands of light from the UV through the visible spectrum and into the infrared. And then we can combine all of these images together to create the data cube that we extract the information from. So we use various imaging software that can then recombine these images, and provide more information than any single image would be able to on its own. And it can let us read these texts that are otherwise lost to us.

Hannah Busch 3:47
And what specific tools do you need for this? You mentioned software and also, I guess the hardware?

Helen Davies 3:55
Yes. So there’s a couple of different companies that make the multispectral imaging camera systems and then there are a few, well, there’s one a recent NEH grant to create a simple and portable and inexpensive multi spectral imaging system. So a multispectral imaging system will consists of a camera, the lights, and a special type of lens. And so the lights are narrow-band LEDs that we can control, specifically what wavelengths are being emitted. Then there is a high resolution camera and a lens that doesn’t distort the light when it’s in the uv, the visible spectrum, or into the infrared. So most camera lenses, for instance, the one on your iPhone, filters out for certain bands of lights and also will distort outside of the visible spectrum. These specific camera lenses don’t do that. They are, they are designed to be sharp outside of the traditional range of light that can be captured by a commercial camera. And then as you mentioned earlier, you need special software. So there are a number of different software packages that can work with multispectral imaging, including ENVI is the one that was primarily used by the Archimedes Palimpsest guys, originally, I think, and then a lot of them also wrote their own software. So Keith Knox, who wrote, who worked on the Archimedes Palimpsest project, has recently written a new software called Hoku, which is open access, so you can use that. And then Dr. Tania Kleynhans at the Rochester Institute of Technology has also recently written an open access multispectral imaging, image processing software, as well.

[Music interlude]

Hannah Busch 6:00
You all mentioned the Lazarus project. And I looked it, like when I looked it up, I was super hooked that you actually include students and that you teach MSI, and that students are able to work with it. And I think that’s a pretty unique initiative. Can you tell me something more about the project, or?

Helen Davies 6:19
Yeah, so Dr. Gregory Heyworth started the project when we were at the University of Mississippi. And when he transferred up to the University of Rochester, he brought the project with him. I will let the two of them speak to more recent projects as they still work for them. But Greg designed the Lazarus project to be a training project. So it was designed with an educational purpose in mind. And so the Lazarus project has traditionally worked with a number of undergraduates as well as graduate students training them in different aspects of multispectral imaging. And I will say, having worked with a number of undergrads, as well, as you know, getting to work with Alex and Katie on the Lazarus project, that one of the cool things is that everybody, by bringing a bunch of different students onto the project, we get to work with a variety of people from different backgrounds that all bring some kind of new perspective and new skills to the project in a way that’s really fun and really interesting. You want to add to that, Alex?

Alex Zawacki 7:21
Yeah, just from the beginning, Greg’s goal for the projects for the Lazarus project have been that it be pedagogical, as well as focused on recovery. So it’s not strictly focused on producing product and publishing results and the like. It’s also focused on training undergraduates and graduate students, and giving people the experience to learn to work with these materials. And towards that end, unfortunately, we’re limited by the number of people who can work with the study one time because our lab can only fit so many human beings in it at once. But towards that end, we’ve had we’ve brought on a lot of undergraduates who’ve done with everything who’ve helped us with everything from writing apps and programs to doing image processing to working with manuscripts themselves, which I think has been a really good experience for us because it is constantly broadening our horizons by bringing in students from different backgrounds, and for the students by giving them the opportunity to play with these things.

Katie Albers-Morris 8:16
I would also add that I was an undergraduate who worked on the project back in Mississippi, and I have since obviously progressed to continue working with Lazarus project still learning all the time. And I’ve seen things from, you know, a student building a neural net to read medieval hands, right? All the way up to 3D Image Capture we did last semester in a class we were teaching. So it’s a really great kind of moving forward with technology kind of initiative that I think really helps students who are interested in the tech but maybe are more conventionally trained like myself, or vice versa. In the case of Helen, it really helps to bridge that gap between the digital and the humanities,I think.

Hannah Busch 9:06
That’s so great. But yeah, what is about, I was wondering about the general background of the students from which departments do they come? How did they get introduced into the project?

Alex Zawacki 9:17
Well, that’s forgetting introduced to it. I think any one of us who has taught a class or TA to class has given some kind of spiel on ourselves, which has involved talking about the Lazarus project. I know I’ve done that for the classes I’ve taught just as in the context of introducing myself, but there’s also the classes that Greg teaches, including there’s a DMS course, that focuses on the interaction between digital and physical, the ideas in of mediating the physical through the digital, which has a really broad background, which brings in students of really broad background from everyone from film students at the graduate level, English students, various students from the sciences, and that class has introduced a lot of students to the Lazarus project because a big component of the class is working with the Lazarus project. So students there will work on multispectral imaging and object. We’ll talk about other forms of imaging. They’ve done things like structured light scanning and photogrammetry. Really anything that we have the technology and the capability for them to get hands on experience with, they will do it in the course of that class. And Helen and I have both at various times TA that class and Katie, did you ta at this past year? Yeah.

Katie Albers-Morris 10:29
Yeah, I just did it this past semester in the spring.

Helen Davies 10:33
But yeah, to build on what Alex was saying. I mean, we’ve had engineering students who come and they want to design a new physical system for it. We’ve had comp science students that bring a new understanding of a new processing algorithm, as well as English and History students that were like, Yo, but like, check out how cool that manuscript is is. And this summer, I’m teaching at UCCS. I’m teaching a similar course as the DMS course that Katie TA for last semester, and that Alex was talking about, and like, I have a bunch of pre-med students, because it’s like, they’re trying to make connections with it with medical imaging, like and their understanding of it. So yeah, so you get students from all different walks of life.

[Music interlude]

Hannah Busch 11:18
The hardware you need for multispectral imaging is pretty expensive. But I remember your talk, Helen at Leeds, that you talked about this new system that is more affordable and also easier to transport. And would you would you mind to speak a bit about that?

Helen Davies 11:36
Yeah, so Dr. Tania Kleynhans and Dave Messinger at the Rochester Institute of Technology recently wrote an NEH grant to fund the development of a new super portable and affordable multispectral imaging system. And so it will be about $5,000, which is significantly more affordable for people like me, who teach at a state institution, or perhaps smaller libraries and archives. And so it also opens up and expands the types of documents that we can work with, where we’re no longer focusing on boutique imaging projects, and instead can work with things like an Ellis Island diary, or you know, letters is that may or may not have interesting information. The thing about the hardware, though, is that this new portable system has a lot of potential promise. And there’s still basically going to be a niche for both styles of systems. So the new more affordable portable system will be able to work with smaller institutions that can’t afford the larger system. But then the larger system, the more expensive system will be able to do that higher end projects for the more intensely damaged documents. Or, if there is information that the newer system might not be able to recover, then the more expensive system, we’ll be able to do that. So they kind of can fit together in really interesting ways to cover a wide range of different types of damage, different types of information that can be recovered.

[Music Interlude]

Hannah Busch 13:15
I was wondering, like Rochester, I think it’s not very famous for its medieval manuscripts. So I was just wondering, what kind of documents are you working with? I know that you also have traveled a lot, but I would be curious to hear about the kinds of objects you’re working with, on location. And in Rochester.

Alex Zawacki 13:37
So actually, one of the first things that the Lazarus project imaged at Rochester, it was actually sort of the the demo, the objects that Gregory gave when he first came to the university was a damaged manuscript fragment that’s been in the university’s cares since the 60s, I believe. And it’s in really poor shape. It was used as a, it’s a, it’s a binding fragment. So it’s got sewing holes down the middle, it’s almost all the text is worn away. It’s very badly stained mess. And that was one of the first things that Lazarus worked on recovering at the university. We ended up finding out that it’s the text of a 14th century copy of Richard FitzRalph’s Summa de Questionibus Armenorum, which is the theological text essentially about the difference between the Armenian Church and the Catholic Church, and it’s the only copy of it that exists in a non European library. And it’s also, so argues our paleographer, who’s much more knowledgeable about these things than I am probably the oldest copy of it that exists. So that was quite a fun find. So the university does have the Robbins Library, which is a medieval focused non lending library which is one of University of Rochester libraries. They do have some medieval manuscripts with the in the last couple of years there’s been more of an emphasis on acquiring new One, so they are slowly building a larger collection. But most of the work that we’ve done has been traveling for those purposes because we as you said, we don’t have a huge collection. Although we have some interesting things that we have to image in the coming days, like there’s a medieval library scroll that needs to be imaged, there seems to be some erasures on that. We’ve also done some imaging for the community. So we had a very sad, it’s somebody whose parents when her father had written a Valentine to her mother, both of whom had passed away on a chunk of linoleum from the home that they had owned together, which then burn down and most of the texts on it had been rendered illegible by the heat, it hadn’t burned directly, but it had been damaged. And we managed to recover that for them. And we’ve had some other community members bring in some more things like that. So there are some things in the university itself and then there’s always kind of an ongoing dialogue with the community to bring us things that we can help out.

Helen Davies 15:57
Alex, don’t forget the one manuscript that the Smithsonian popped in the mail to us.

Alex Zawacki 16:02
That’s right, yes, every now and then someone will FedEx us a manuscript. So we imaged a manuscript for the Smithsonian. It was, and actually, that’s an ongoing project, right now we’re working on deciphering it, they have a really interesting, very small, extremely fragile, 14th century Armenian prayer book with the original bindings. It’s very, very delicate, it was very nerve wracking to image it. And so they they sent it to us to image at the university rather than our going down to DC to image it there. And that’s, that’s we’re working on processing and deciphering that at the moment. But so every now and then someone will just ups, a priceless document to us.

Helen Davies 16:44
And that one was particularly interesting, because it did allow us to work on it in the University of Rochester in the library or in our lab, and it took several weeks. So it was quite good that it had been sent to us because that would have been quite the commitment to go down to the Smithsonian to image that consistently. The other things that I just want to mention really briefly, is that Dr. Anna Siebach-Larsen has been working on acquiring new medieval manuscripts for the Robbins Library that Alex mentioned. But she’s also focused on acquiring damaged manuscripts. Because the Lazarus project has the ability to recover them. So then it can work hand in hand with the university and the library.

[Music interlude]

Hannah Busch 17:35
Yeah, if you think of MSI, I think most people really think about palimpsests and damaged texts. But are there other options, what you can use MSI for. So I think if someone gets the option to do MSI on their collection, but maybe they don’t know if they even have something interesting. Can you give some tips or what material can you work on? And what is promising? Just to give any direction to ,yeah, to people who might be interested in doing MSI?

Helen Davies 18:05
So I’ll let Alex speak about, or Alex and Katie speak about, the medieval manuscripts that they are working on recently, the different types that allows our strategic is working on. Hannah, as you mentioned, like we were talking at Leeds about some of the weirder documents that I’ve been working on this summer. And so I have, you know, the technology was developed for the Archimedes palimpsest and is primarily been used up until this point on a lot of medieval manuscripts. Because I’ve been working with a portable system, because I’m working in a location that doesn’t have a whole ton of medieval manuscripts. I’ve been working a lot on documents that I previously had no experience working with multispectral imaging on. So I’ve been working on an 1800s Ellis Island diary, some letters from the 1800s. There was, one of the weirder things is, there’s a old mining camp in Colorado that I swear to god is called Buckskin Joe, and it’s one of the first mining camps in Colorado. And we the law code survives. And the law code is currently at the Colorado Supreme Court Law Library. However, you can’t read it anymore, because it’s pretty faded. And so one of the documents that we were imaging this summer was this Buckskin Joe Legal Code. And we’ve been able to recover that. So it doesn’t have to be just medieval manuscripts. It can be a wide range of things, including kind of more common documents that one might find in America.

Katie Albers-Morris 19:37
I was also thinking about when we were at the University of Mississippi, they found a fingerprint on one of Faulkner‘s like kind of personal copies of something. And so it became a whole long is this actually Faulkner’s fingerprint like have we found this, you know, very tangible piece of him and of course, Faulkner in Oxford, Mississippi is a big deal, his house is there, and you know, every grad student has to sit through at least one class about Faulkner, it’s just kind of the way it is. So, definitely things like that. And also, just last semester, we were working on a manuscript, a bit of sheet music that Fanny Mendelssohn wrote, and a student was able to see kind of through the paste down, where she had, you know, glued something down and changed what she wanted to write, but also where she had crossed things out, we were able to see a little more clearly the original direction and music before she changed it.

Alex Zawacki 20:39
It’s also worth mentioning real quick and in terms of addition, in addition to recovering things like erased text, or damaged images, or kind of our standard stock and trade. There’s also a lot of potential for applications and conservation of any kind of document with a medieval or modern or classical, pick an era. Because degradation tends to show up in the infrared, invisible portions of the spectrum, especially the infrared before it becomes visible to the naked eye. And so one of the things we’re exploring right now is imaging separate documents, separate paintings over long periods of time, in a full spectrum. And trying to track when that kind of degradation appears and how you can predict it, and how you can track it using MSI, prior to it showing up to the naked eye. So that you can get kind of a jumpstart on on being aware of problems with your documents. So we think there are going to be some pretty significant avenues for exploration in conservation, in addition to strictly recovery.

Hannah Busch 21:39
So I was working a lot on, or I’m still also kind of working on manuscript digitization. And I was wondering, like, it would be amazing to of course, have multispectral images for every manuscript that you digitize. But of course, that’s probably not affordable time and money wise. Do you know of any projects, except for the more famous ones like the Sinai manuscripts, where this has been discussed to include multispectral images to the digitization process, or have you thought about it to offer images to the collections.

Alex Zawacki 22:21
So I know the British Library, for example, has a multispectral imaging system run by Christina Duffy, who is wonderful. They, as far as I know, aren’t digitizing things with multispectral imaging as a matter of course, unless there’s a particular reason to do so. So, in the way that you can request images of manuscripts in their collection, I believe you can request multispectral images as well. Although they haven’t, they haven’t applied to kind of standard digitization scheme yet simply because they have so many manuscripts and one system and one person running it. So I think that might be more of a thing in the future is institutions offering kind of bespoke multispectral imaging where you can request it. I’m not aware of anybody, besides the ones you mentioned, like Sinai, who are digitizing and applying MSI as a matter of course. Helen or Katie might be able to jump in on that.

Katie Albers-Morris 23:15
I know that relatively recently someone has reached out to us about this, I don’t necessarily want to say too much, because I don’t know how far forward it’s going to go. But there definitely have been relatively recent inquiries into having a partnership with digitization and also multispectral teams. So if that does move forward, we would probably be working alongside the early manuscripts electronic library team to do the digitization and the multispectral imaging of a collection.

Helen Davies 23:49
Similarly, I know that one of the hopes with the more affordable, the RIT system, is that it can be used, especially because it won’t be for the highest end or the most challenging documents that it can be used as kind of not quite mass digitization, but in conjunction with more traditional digitization or get a wider scale. So Gregory Heyworth at the University of Rochester and I had previously discussed that one potential avenue is that if the Lazarus project is imaging a number of really damaged documents, then perhaps we could use one of the RIT systems to kind of get a broader spectrum of the rest of the medieval library that may exist in a certain location, so that you can kind of get the boutique imaging of the high end, the superstar documents, but then you can also get this wider range. And then one other thing I want to add is tha,t so, I’m super grateful for two for example, Colorado College for letting me borrow their medieval manuscripts for the summer to work on multispectral imaging when my own university doesn’t have any special collections. And so in return, then I’m going to give them all of the multispectral imaging files, as well as, you know, the pictures that we took of them so that if they want to host them, in addition to the new digitized images, they can put that all up on their website. I will say that multispectral images, the data files can be robust. And so they can take up a lot of space if you’re thinking about hosting them and alongside traditional digitized snapshots of a manuscript. So, it might be the kind of thing that as the digitization process evolves, and as our work with multispectral imaging continues to change and shift, you may be able to produce more mass kind of digitization efforts, including multispectral imaging, but hosting them might still be a bit of a bit of an issue, a bit of an effort. And so that’s just another aspect of it to consider going forward.

Hannah Busch 25:58
I know that multispectral imaging is a non-invasive technique, but, and I also have a feeling from what you tell that in your surroundings, everyone is super open and really interested in collaborating with you. But I think that that might be also collection holders that are afraid of this imaging technique. So can you tell us a bit about the invasiveness or non-invasiveness about multispectral imaging?

Helen Davies 26:25
Yeah, so I mean, again, I’m sure somebody else can jump in and add to this, but I, I know that the Lazarus project in conjunction with, I think, Roger Easton, Alex, does that sound right, did some testing on the amount of damage that comes from the modern LED systems. And at most, it was the equivalent of being exposed to just like, fluorescent white light, like out in a room for 30 seconds, does that sound right, Alex? I know that some of the older preconceived notions of the potential for damage comes from the very, very, very first generation of multispectral imaging systems that did have bright white light that was then filtered out to get the different spectrum, rather than LEDs. And as with any digitization effort, if you’re shining bright white light continuously on an object, it produces heat. And I don’t have to tell you that that’s a bit of a bummer for a medieval manuscript. And so, but since that original generation, so much work has been done to avoid that particular type of damage.

Alex Zawacki 27:37
Yeah, the big threat with the first generation wasn’t even the the actual light itself damaging the manuscript, it was the heating of the manuscript that might result because they tended to use things like halogen bulbs, because they needed to get a broad spectrum light, because as Helen said, instead of imaging and discrete wavelengths, they would bombard it with broad spectrum light, and then filter out everything except one particular section of one particular wavelength. That means that that wavelength needs to be very bright, because it means you’re going to be dropping filters in front of it. And so that means that the light you’re using has to be extremely bright, which means that you’re going to be working with something like halogens, and you’re going to have long exposure time, long periods of exposure to that light, which can result in heating of the manuscript. Fortunately, we don’t have that anymore. LED technology, as Helen mentioned, means that we can just utilize the specific wavelength that we need rather than expose its broad spectrum light and filter everything out, which both limits the illumination that the manuscript is exposed to, but also because we’re using LEDs and that halogens means that the temperature of the manuscript isn’t changing significantly or measurably during the course of a multispectral imaging session, both of which means that it’s it’s safe.

[Music interlude]

Hannah Busch 28:53
Another question that I have, and of course, people might think about what they have in their collections, and that they want to use it. What are the limitations of multispectral imaging?

Katie Albers-Morris 29:03
One of the things that we’re actively working to fix is the need for you know, a very dark room and the affordability of the systems, right, they’re not they’re not small and they’re, they’re not cheap, and you can’t have any outside light. So certainly, that’s something that you know, the teams involved are working on trying to fix making it just a little more, I guess, user friendly and even you know, smaller archive friendly. Especially because if you’re an individual person who has one thing that you need done you’re don’t necessarily have a closet that you can set up a whole camera system in. But we do do a lot of work in closets.

Helen Davies 29:47
Yeah, as Katie is saying, there has been a lot of time spent in closets. You go to these beautiful locations and you’re like cool, I saw yet another closet, it’s great. Um, but the other so if we’re thinking about the difference between the bigger systems and the smaller systems, right, the smaller system, Tania has built a portable darkroom for it. So there is like an outside casing for it, that kind of just fits over the system. But what that does is it dramatically limits the size of the document that can be imaged. Or you end up kind of working very closely with a curator to be able to manipulate the document around the system, which doesn’t fit with the document and it it can be quite cumbersome. So, you can get the small and portable side of it, but then you lose the ability to work with larger documents, whereas the larger systems can obviously handle a much more wide variety of this. types of documents by as Katie says like require more specific conditions to set up.

Alex Zawacki 30:52
And there are particular substrates and forms of documents that MSI is much better suited to than others. It’s very, we’ve tried working with things like oil paint in the past, it’s really not very good for that it doesn’t see through oil painting very well at all. For that you’d really want to use something like, X-Ray Fluorescence or XR-D, it’s much better suited.Part of the reason that we tend to work on so many medieval manuscripts is because many of us are medievalists, but also because parchment, which is the standard writing substrate for the Western Middle Ages, is very good at holding traces of erased and damaged text whereas paper really is not. So even if you have something like the thick rag paper of the 18th and 19th centuries, which obviously holds impressions and erasures much better than say disposable A4 paper now, it’s still nothing like parchment. So we have been working on William Blake’s Four Zoas manuscript, which is in the care of the British Library, again with Christina Duffy, who is fantastic. And it’s a very challenging situation because the rag paper can be erased, it can be physically scratched off so that it can be rewritten. And it just doesn’t hold the data the way that parchment does, which even if something is very carefully, chemically and physically scraped off, that’s a very good that a medieval piece of parchment is still going to retain retrievable traces of what was there before, that’s not necessarily the case with with parchment, it’s much more challenging. So anything early modern to modern on paper is going to be a challenging situation for MSI. It really has its particular home in the Middle Ages. Of course, there are wide ranges of applications outside of it, but it does have particular substrates, and in particular, materials like not oil paints that it really prefers. And to which it’s best suited.

Helen Davies 32:47
To tie what Alex is saying back to your earlier question about working with documents at the University of Rochester. One of the genuine strangest moments is: I got called down to the English department office because a package had arrived. And I went and collected it and came back to the lab and opened it up. And it was a series of medieval map fragments. Well, it turned out to be medieval map facsimiles. It turns out, it took me like a week or two to track down what on earth these were, but that Chet Van Duzer had sent to the Lazarus project for the purpose of testing how well we could see through some of these paints that were used before deciding that we would try and image a particular map, which could not be removed from its backing. So yeah, yeah, sometimes it doesn’t work and sometimes you get little mini mysteries sent to you. Sorry, continue, Alex.

Alex Zawacki 33:49
Specifically, it was lead white pigment, which is why the facsimiles had to be made in Portugal and shipped to the US because there were various legal restrictions on playing with lead white pigment in the United States. But the original map has lead light on it and we wanted to try and see if we could see through it before we made the whole trip over to play with it in person. And so yeah, so it was lead white exploiting legal loopholes shipped to us from Europe.

Hannah Busch 34:16
That’s an amazing story. Um, I mean, you all three are from like, have ahumanities background. And you work during your PhD at the Lazarus project. So, I I would be really interested to hear how you incorporate MSI into your dissertations.

Helen Davies 34:39
So yeah, so, I think Alex and I took her fairly different approach for including multispectral imaging into our dissertation. And I know Katie is currently experimenting with the format of what her dissertation will look like. But for me, so my main research focuses on medieval mappa mundi. And the particular document which my dissertation is on is on the Vercelli Mappa mundi, which has been illegible since at least the 1970s. We do know that in the 1920s, there was an Egyptian Prince Youssouf Kamal, who took a series of photographs of the map at that time, and it still was legible. However, the map wasn’t rediscovered until 1908. So anyway, there was a brief period of time where this document was legible. And since that time period, nobody has been able to read it. So one of the things that I have done is I, the Lazarus project imaged the Vercelli map in 2013 and 2014. And then I, as part of my dissertation, processed the images and then used those images to form the large dataset, which I then used for my dissertation and kind of as a jumping off point. And then, just as a little side note, Dr. Heather Wacha. and I will be finally completing a digital edition of the Vercelli Mappa mundi for Digital Mappa hopefully within the next year, and that can then be freely accessible to anyone. However, the dissertation has three traditional kind of literary historical analysis, kind of tied into the document, but not based solely on that particular document that uses that document as a jumping off point for larger discussions of medieval cartography. And in one particular chapter, a very strange image of the King of France riding an ostrich on top of a mountain in North Africa. And then I have a further chapter that is just talking about the technical process of imaging the map, and recovering the map and then what I plan to do with it in the future. And then I had to create a rough draft of a digital edition that I hope to God nobody else ever sees, of the map as part of my dissertation. And so there was kind of, there was a traditional component of it, there was a digital write up, or there was a write up about the digital process, and then there was a digital project for it. Correct me if I’m wrong, Alex, but yours is going to resemble a much more traditional English department dissertation?

Alex Zawacki 37:16
Yes, I’m actually primarily incorporating Lazarus into my dissertation by not doing so at all. For me, Lazarus, Lazarus work has been primarily book chapters and articles. But ultimately, I didn’t end up finding a way to work it into what I wanted my dissertation to be on. In part, because the pandemic, there were some manuscripts I would have liked to take a shot at imaging that just didn’t manifest and won’t have time to do before my dissertation has to be done. And so my dissertation, yes, is going to look much more like a standard traditional dissertation. Oh, yeah, I pass it to Katie.

Katie Albers-Morris 37:49
Yeah, I’m still, I haven’t turned in my prospectus or anything yet. So I’m still kind of early in the dissertation stages. But I am anticipating that mine will be much more technical, mostly because I’m pretty strongly considering all tech jobs are going into, you know, technical industry kind of things. So I’ve been thinking a lot about the uses of MSI, but also 3D to kind of create, like virtual reality experiences of archives and things like that. So that’s kind of the direction that my dissertation is going in at the moment. They may not, you know, and depth that way. But having the Lazarus project available to me means I have the opportunity to pursue that. And since I’m kind of doing it from the beginning, hopefully, it’ll work out as soon as I can travel and actually get my hands on some objects.

Hannah Busch 38:44
I would say, one last question. I know you’ve already mentioned a lot of very interesting projects. But if you can all like pick one favorite or most curious finding you had, so what you could reveal with multispectral imaging,

Helen Davies 38:58
I go first because I’m going to geek out about a very predictable topic and the Vercelli Mappa mundi is my baby, and I love it and it’s incredible, and which is like maybe a weird way to talk about medieval manuscripts. But I think it’s really really, really cool to be able to see a lost mappa mundi kind of emerge from, you know, a faded document, a damaged document. The first time I saw this map, I was given the RGB files for it and told to try and kind of read through and transcribe some of it. I was like, you can’t read anything. And then after some multispectral imaging, a lot of it pops out fairly quickly and fairly clearly, some of it takes a heck of a lot of work, but some of it kind of you can read fairly quickly. And it’s just so cool to see kind of the, you know, to use a slightly overly grandiose phrase, a bit like a, like, a mosaic of information and visual Encyclopedia of the medieval understanding of the world just appear before you. And it was just it’s very cool. And, and I’m sure Alex and Katie have radically different opinions about what is the best project they’ve worked on. But that’s mine.

Alex Zawacki 40:12
So I actually have to think because the first two that come to mind, I’m not allowed to tell anyone about. So I have to think about the coolest one that I’m allowed to talk about, which will take me a moment.

Katie Albers-Morris 40:17
Honestly, one of the coolest ones that I can think of is what Helen was talking about, like the Vercelli Mappa mundi. I did not expect to see, you know, a King riding an ostrich on a mountain in North Africa. And, you know, I was mostly living vicariously through her at that point in my education, but definitely, in my top like favorite things that have come out of nowhere.

Helen Davies 40:44
Actually, you know, to kind of jump on what Alex was saying earlier about the particular Smithsonian manuscript that was sent to us, it was actually really cool, because the imaging was so challenging. I mean, I can’t read any of the languages this manuscript is written in. But it was really cool to see the results of that particular imaging project. Because not all of the pages were visibly palimpsested, the imaging had been so challenging. And then Alex did the, Alex did all of the processing for that I was gonna say the bulk of the processing, but I think Alex did all of it. And he got incredible results. And so it was really cool to see this like before and after, where you’re like, looking at some pages, and you’re like, I don’t know, maybe there’s something there. And then Alex reveals an entire page full of text. And so it’s just like the most recent example of like, the stark before and after. And I think Alex did all of that processing in Hoku, as well. So it was kind of cool, not only to see Alex’s dramatic before and after, but also it was the first time I’d seen Hoku used to that kind of dramatic potential as well, which was awesome.

Alex Zawacki 41:51
Yeah, that was really my Crash Course and Hoku because there were so many leaves in that manuscript, that processing each one individually in ENVI would have been an impossibly long task. I mean, it was a very long task in Hoku, but an ENVI it would have taken ten times as long. So yeah, I processed the entire thing in Hoku. I did take some pages that I couldn’t get excellent results out of in Hoku and I reprocess them in ENVI, but 90% of the work was done in Hoku, which, like I said, really forced me to learn how to use Hoku very well. And yeah, that had some really dramatic results from the before and after from text that was barely visible or not at all visible in the original images to the under-text to being totally clear with the over-text vanishing completely was a very cool pop.

[Music fade in]

Hannah Busch 43:02
And with that we are the end of the episode, thanks for listening to Coding Codices a podcast by the digital medievalist postgrad committee. And thank you so much, Kate, Helen and Alex for joining us in this conversation about multispectral imaging and manuscript studies. If you want to know more, and if you’re looking for links to things mentioned in this episode, feel free to visit our website at podcast [dot] digitalmedievalist [dot] org where you can also find more episodes of Coding Codices. You can also get in touch with us by emailing to dmpostgrads [at] gmail [dot] com.

[Music fade out]

Credits

Music:

• Intro: TeknoAXE, “Chiptune Nobility” (CC BY 4.0).
• Interludes: Random Mind, “King’s Feast” (CC0).

Graphics:

• Featured Image: Helen Davies and Alex Zawacki, ed. by Tessa Gengnagel.

“We have all the intellectual tools we need in traditional codicology to do the work of digital codicology, but we weren’t doing it.”

About this Episode

Recorded October 21, 2021. Produced and edited by Caitlin Postal.

Guest: Bridget Whearty

Content: Caitlin Postal and Bridget Whearty discuss labor ethics in digital medieval studies, manuscript digitization processes, and Bridget’s forthcoming book, Digital Codicology.

Bridget Whearty is an Assistant Professor at Binghamton University. She received her BA in English Literature and Creative Writing in 2003 from the University of Montana and her PhD in English from Stanford University in 2013. She was a CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Medieval Studies at Stanford University, prior to joining the faculty of Binghamton University in 2015. Her research and teaching interests are wide-ranging: late medieval death culture and the legacy of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer; medieval manuscripts, media history, and digitization; pedagogy and information literacy instruction; and queer and trans medieval literatures. She is the creator of the Caswell Test, named after and inspired by the work of Michelle Caswell (#CaswellTest) and co-editor for the special issue of Archive Journal dedicated to Digital Medieval Manuscript Cultures. Her first book Digital Codicology: Medieval Books and Modern Labor is forthcoming from Stanford University Press’s Text Technologies series.

Resources and Further Reading

If you’re interested in reading one of Bridget’s articles but do not have institutional access, please reach out to Bridget by email and she would be glad to share a copy.

• Caswell Test (single slide and full script)
• Bridget Whearty, “Making a digital medieval manuscript” (on working with Astrid J. Smith)
• Bridget Whearty, “Adam Scriveyn in Cyberspace: Loss, Labour, Ideology, and Infrastructure in Interoperable Reuse of Digital Manuscript Metadata” in Meeting the Medieval in a Digital World
• Astrid J. Smith, “Teachable Features 14: Working with Digital Objects: Digitization as a Teachable Feature, or “How did Those Images Get There?!?!”
• Information on the Digital Medieval Manuscript Expert Meeting
• Debates in Digital Humanities

Transcript

Automated transcription by <https://otter.ai>, manually corrected by Caitlin Postal. Click here to open a .pdf of the transcript.

[Music Fade In]

Caitlin  0:09  

Hello and welcome to Coding Codices, a podcast from the digital medievalist postgraduate committee. I’m Caitlin Postal, your host for this episode, and I’m joined today by Dr. Bridget Whearty. Bridget is an assistant professor of English and Medieval Studies at Binghamton University in the State University of New York system, and a former CLIR fellow in data curation for Medieval Studies at Stanford University. She developed the Caswell Test: a three step test inviting humanities researchers to center the labor of librarians and archivists in scholarship on the archive, inspired by and named after Michelle Caswell. Bridget’s first book, Digital Codicology: Medieval Books and Modern Labor, is forthcoming from Stanford University Press with the Text Technologies series. 

[Music Interlude]

Caitlin  00:58

Our conversation today focuses on labor ethics and digital labor. To start that, I’d love to hear what first interested you in digital medieval studies.

Bridget  1:07

Two things really come to mind. One has everything to do with the pragmatics of the job market, and the other has everything to do with me getting really angry at a conference. I became interested in digital medieval studies as part of that simple fact of what job I got. My first year on the academic job market, I did really badly. At the very, very end of the season–like late May, early June–I interviewed for and did get the CLIR postdoctoral fellowship in data curation for medieval studies at Stanford. That was part of a cohort of five postdocs at five institutions that the Mellon Foundation was funding for all of us to work together in data curation for medieval studies. So the first part is because it’s what I was hired to do.

Caitlin  2:01 

I love that the Mellon Foundation was supporting a cross institutional postdoc series. That’s really cool.

Bridget  2:07 

It was great actually! I had the most wonderful fellow fellows. And Don Waters at Mellon was the sort of thinker behind this. And I remember him saying that they had realized that they accidentally been incentivizing competition, and not working together by having people compete. 

Caitlin  2:29  

Yeah, that makes sense. 

Bridget  2:31  

And they really felt that the– right yeah. But they realize or they knew that the future of interoperability, of a dynamic kind of global digital medieval studies, had to be collaboration. And they’ve done multiple cohorts in various focus points since this but we were kind of a first experiment. And my colleagues–Tamsyn, AJ, Alexandra, and Matt–and I joked that we started out as a political marriage, but we very rapidly became a love match. They’re the most wonderful people to get to work with.

Caitlin  3:09  

It’s great to hear. You said that there was a second piece.

Bridget  3:11

Yeah, um, so I had this postdoc, and I was attending the combined meeting of Medieval Academy of America and Medieval Association of the Pacific at UCLA in 2014. You know, those conversations you would get in casually in live conferences?

Caitlin  3:32

Mhm, I miss them.

Bridget  3:34  

I do too! I got to chatting with someone walking up the stairs. I don’t remember their name. I don’t remember any distinguishing characteristics, which is good actually. Because we were doing that back and forth: “What do you work on?” “Oh, I work on whatever it was,” I don’t even remember that. And then I was asked, and I said, “Oh, I work on digital medieval manuscripts.” And this person looked at me, with this sort of horrified and dismayed face, and said “digital medieval manuscripts. Why don’t you work on the real thing?” And then they proceeded to kind of go on this mini rant about digital imaging specialists. 

Caitlin  4:22

Yikes. 

Bridget  4:22 

Yeah, and how they don’t know what they’re copying and they don’t understand manuscripts, and that could be a physics textbook for all they care. And I just was so flabbergasted wordlessly furious at this.

Caitlin  4:43  

If this person, if you’re listening at home, which I don’t know why you would be, we’re very frustrated.

Bridget  4:50  

I mean, I’m actually grateful. It’s like the best kind of frustrating conference experience. Because it was this, I couldn’t stop thinking about this conversation. Well, how would you even know? 

Caitlin  5:05 

Yeah, I think everyone at some point has that experience of someone says something that is at odds with the way that you conduct your research. And that’s what sticks with you when you’re working. For me, it was someone had said that the markup labor in the digital edition is just grunt work and I was like, “Excuse me, let’s have a conversation,” and by a conversation, I mean this is my first dissertation chapter.

Bridget  5:31  

Exactly, exactly. I didn’t even have the wherewithal to say, let’s have a conversation. I just sort of smiled uncomfortably and went fuming on my way. But that was really the seed for six, seven years of work. Why don’t medievalists talk to digitization specialists? What would we learn if we could and did? What could we offer that would be helpful to these amazingly skilled people who are somewhere between our collaborators and the people upon whom our research depends.

Caitlin  6:07  

Right. I think that this is so deeply woven into your work, including your book project that’s forthcoming, as well as the talk that you recently gave at the Digital Manuscript Experts meeting. It was a great talk, I deeply enjoyed it. 

Bridget  6:21

Thank you.

Caitlin  6:22  

I’m wondering if thinking about this conversation that you had and the and the work that you’ve done in the interim, if you would be willing to reflect a little bit on how your experience with digital projects like for instance, the DMS Index that you did during your postdoc, how these varied conversations and these different kinds of experience with different projects lead you toward these arguments that you’re making about the labor that supports digital projects, and especially, like imaging specialists with digital manuscripts.

Bridget  6:57 

Yeah, I’d love to. So Digital Codicology, the book project, kind of grew from that moment on the stairs. But a really key part for me for thinking about labor came when I had been working with large sets of metadata produced by different institutions for different projects, different digitization projects, and it was my job to try to bring them together into a single metadata standard. And I was doing this work, and I just had this profound sense that I was missing something. And by something I meant, I would really like to know what it takes to make one of these. I’m working with them in the thousands. So I went to one of my postdoc supervisors, Benjamin Albritton, who was really focused on leading me in the libraries projects I was part of, and I asked him what strings can be pulled or permissions can be begged for me to get to go into the digitization studio and see one book get digitized? And he had various artful and political discussions, probably far beyond what I actually understand (speaking of unseen labor), and eventually I got permission to join the digitization of a single 15th century manuscript, not just as an observer but as a participant. I was one of the photographer’s assistants involved in the project. 

Caitlin  8:24  

So cool!

Bridget  8:25  

It was so cool! It was in November 2014. So spring 2014, angry conversation; November 2014, trying my hand digitization. Really the least skilled aspects of it, following a highly skilled, highly experienced digital imaging specialist, whose name by the way is Astrid J. Smith, and she’s amazing, and she’s still working at Stanford University Libraries in this capacity. And I was just stunned by the amount of thought, work, that went into everything from the benchmarking processes that you don’t even see in the final product to the endlessly focused attention she and I had to have to create a book that was coherent unto itself across different imaging sections. Like the exact same lighting, the exact same color balance. I was stunned by how much I hurt, like by the physical labor of it. And, because in my other life I’m a literary historian of the 15th century, of course, I had Thomas Hoccleve in my head.

Caitlin  9:41  

I was about to mention Hoccleve.

Bridget  9:44  

Yes, yes, You know where I’m going! The sections in the Regiment of Princes where he’s talking about how hard it is to be a scribe and how they can’t sing or have fun, they have to pay attention–

Caitlin  9:58  

–my eyes hurt, my hands hurt, my back hurts.

Bridget  10:01  

Exactly. And so that was running through my head, while I was lifting and lowering and doing support work and not blinking my eyes at the right time. So totally getting the flash in my face. Bending and my back hurt, and my feet hurt. And my. And it was just this like, amazing “aha!” moment. And it was also amazing to me then seeing all of the skilled, really expert people who were involved at all of the stages from collaborations: with the curator at the start with the digital imaging specialists all the way through with post production with metadata, with the long term care and feeding of the digital repository in which these images live. Like there was just so much work that was happening.

Caitlin  10:51  

There’s, I think, for us as medieval literary scholars, there’s a disconnect between the kind of work that we frequently do and understanding different forms of skilled labor that is connected to the work that we might do. 

Bridget  11:09  

I think we’re in the stage of, you know, I guess, going back to my Mellon theme point here, of competition, like maybe my work is only valuable if it’s harder than someone else’s.

Caitlin  11:23  

I just I just don’t think that that’s true.

Bridget  11:27

I agree. Clearly I agree. This is like, even in my traditional literary studies, my arguments tend to be about care and community. And the labor…

Caitlin  11:38  

As it turns out, as it turns out, so do mine! 

Bridget  11:41  

Yay!

Caitlin  11:42  

That’s one of the frameworks that supports my dissertation project. Like, from your work gave me a foundation to make some of the arguments I’m interested in making. 

Bridget  11:54  

That is the nicest thing I think a piece of scholarship can have said about it, is that it went on and was useful and helped someone else build something more. So that’s really amazing. Thank you.

[Music Interlude]

Caitlin  12:22  

I wanted to think a little bit you’ve, you’ve alluded to your work with 15th century literature, I hoped you might share with me and with listeners, how you trace the continuities between 15th century literature–what I know has centered on late medieval death culture–and labor and care in digital humanities projects.

Bridget  12:46  

Sure. I came into this amazing digital medieval postdoc by way of having finished a thoroughly mediocre dissertation on Hoccleve and Lydgate and poets after Chaucer and death culture and legacy and stuff. But I think the most interesting takeaway I had from that project was thinking about how writers like Hoccleve and Lydgate were mapping out the conflicting obligations of bookmaking. By which I mean, I started seeing their work as the sort of set of endless compromises. Thinking about–

Caitlin  13:27 

So too are digital projects. 

Bridget  13:29  

Exactly. Yeah. So they were thinking about, you know, am I making this book to serve the living or the dead? If I’m serving the dead, what compromises do I have to make to serve the living or vice versa? Am I making this book to serve writers like me, or readers; if readers, then like noble readers or common readers? And ultimately thinking about is bookmaking a service to the past, or to the present and future? I’m not actually sure if that holds as an argument, but it’s what was in my head when I went into the studio.

Caitlin  14:03  

I find it an interesting and compelling argument.

Bridget  14:06 

Thank you. And so then exactly, I went into the digital library systems and services division of Stanford University Libraries, and I was working in data curation. I was trying to learn about metadata. I was having lunch with digital imaging specialists. And I kept feeling like I was hearing the same conversation: are we building these digital manuscripts to meticulously reconstruct the physical form they had in the past? Even if that form doesn’t serve the future very well? Are we doing imaging to serve like a few elite researchers or a larger, more diverse group of end users? That was the continuity moment for me. In addition to thinking, “oh my god, I hurt just like Hoccleve.”

Caitlin  14:58  

Yeah, I find it so interesting that you’re bringing up the audience focus of digital manuscript preservation, digitization, curation. Because I think the answer changes depending on who you ask, depending on what the project is, depending on where in time we are, as well as what kind of funding is attached to the digitization process, that answer is going to change. One of the episodes of Coding Codices that will be out by the time people are listening to this one is a conversation we had with Johanna Green, where she was talking about the Lindisfarne Gospels and their digitization process being so locally important to the people who lived in the area where they were produced. And I think we can often forget about who gets access to what materials. And that’s both in terms of who gets access for experiencing and enjoying them, and who gets access to the process of working with them. Not just working with them as a literary scholar or as a historian, but working with them as an imaging specialist, working with them as a preservation specialist.

Bridget  16:10  

You’re exactly right. That kind of breadth of understanding all of the different kinds of labor and laborers who connect with us and having end users like me see ourselves as part of a larger continuum  than we tend to think of ourselves. 

[Music Interlude]

Bridget 16:39

You asked about continuities. One of the discontinuities that I kept seeing–that I still see a little bit but that fascinates and bothers me–is that we have all the intellectual tools we need in traditional codicology to do the work of digital codicology, but we weren’t doing it. We know how to look at a medieval book and say, When was this made? Where was this made? Who made it, what tools that they use? For what patron to serve what ends, and we just didn’t ask that for a really long time about digital manuscripts, but it’s all the same questions. It’s all the same things. So I saw or felt those continuities, but that’s the continuity I want to establish.

Caitlin  17:26  

I agree. I’m really interested in this. It came up in the conversation that Jamie, Eric, Matt and I had around digital archival materiality a few episodes back in Coding Codices, where we were thinking about metadata provenance. Which I don’t know if that’s a term other people use, I have been using it. I would like more people to use it if you’re listening, where we are thinking about what Bridget has just offered: the provenance of the metadata curation for the objects that we care about, that we’re interested in.

Bridget  17:59  

I think that that was something I wasn’t I wasn’t particularly good at even when I was a node in that metadata provenance network. I didn’t, or it was something I sort of struggled with, like, how much of this is me changing how much of this is me adding how much of this is me simply recreating what I have been given? As I’ve continued to sort of process and research and re-understand the work I did as a postdoc, and learn more about the experts who are working in metadata provenance–and I think you absolutely get to use that word. You know, more broadly, this is also labor that has long supported medieval manuscript studies, but that we are not in the habit of seeing. And that’s the immense work that goes into making and maintaining and updating descriptive catalogues.

Caitlin  18:51  

I almost finished your sentence. I knew where it was going. I was so here for it.

Bridget  18:58  

Well, to be fair, and give credit where it’s due, although I cannot name a name here because I don’t know it. The first reviewer of my book, my anonymous reviewer one has been really helpful in guiding me to think more vigorously about this. So thank you so much for that.

Caitlin  19:11  

Thank you, reviewer one. 

[Music Interlude]

Caitlin   19:27 

Speaking of thinking about varied labor and the sort of elision of credit for that labor, I know that you talked about the labor of those who don’t want to be named in digital manuscript work at the Digital Manuscript Experts meeting not that long ago. I was wondering if you would share for podcast listeners who may have missed your talk, how we can think about making visible the labor of those who may not want named credit, individually?

Bridget  20:00  

Yes. Yes. So the talk was really sort of wrestling with a later stage in book production for me, which is how do I give credit to imaging specialists and digitization studios and all of that network of labor in my image captions? And kind of going over the conversations I’ve had and how different digitization studios and programs will have different answers to that question that I asked them, and sometimes their answers will change. And at one period, they’ll have one preferred citation method, and later it will change. So sometimes a place will say, “Yes, here’s the name of the digital imaging specialists and here’s the date it was done.” And some places will say, “We don’t want you to use the digital imaging specialist name, because there are so many people who do this work. We want you to credit the entire studio.” And some people will say, “I feel like you’re asking these questions is weirdly invasive, and I don’t know if I want to trust you with this person’s name until I know you’re going to do right by them,” which got me into thinking about like the right to be forgotten and how being made public is often, especially in various online cultures, not a good thing at all. So the way that I’ve worked towards it in my book is: I will name whoever wants to be named, I will not name anyone who doesn’t want to be, I will cite however I am told to cite by studio preference (this is part of centering labor is when people say “do it this way,” it’s my job to say, “Okay, thank you, I will”), but then also by trying to foreground anonymity, where I can, by not just saying such and such manuscripts, quick description of the image copyrights, such and such institution, but this particular manuscript number, a little description of what I want people to pay attention to, based on this source media made at such and such time period, digitized by unknown people working at such and such time. My captions are enormous. But, in each of them, it’s trying to highlight that the work has happened, even if we don’t have a name to hang it on.

Caitlin  22:23  

Well, and I think what’s important about a caption is that it’s directing a reader, it’s drawing attention to something that is important to you and important to your argument, whether or not they have been thinking about it themselves.

Bridget  22:36  

Yeah. My anonymous reviewer two was really good at pointing out where my captions were not performing the kind of visible credit of labor that I was arguing for, and gave me a chance to fix that in one of my rounds of revisions.

Caitlin  22:53  

Thank you, reviewer two.

Bridget  22:55  

Indeed, I have no idea who any of them were but I had such good reviewers. Another way of answering your question is again, in like the opposite form, what not to do. And here, I really need to foreground that I’m getting this a lot from Astrid J. Smith, who’s the digitizer I worked with. And Astrid and I have a co-written book chapter that’s coming out in the next Debates in Digital Humanities. But this is really her part, her insights, which is how not to credit it: Don’t credit it by magic. Don’t credit by the miracle of 21st century technology. Don’t credit yourself “I had x digitized,” or God forbid “I digitized X,” unless you are the person doing it, don’t do that. Find some way to gesture towards the people who have done and are continuing to do this work, however they want that done. Be aware of how rhetorical flourishes, as fun as they can be, enact a kind of erasure and resist that.

[Music Interlude]

Caitlin  24:20

I was thinking about, you have mentioned something about sort of the right to be forgotten and, and living documents and sort of the digitization studios preferences will change. I just wanted to add that I think that that can–not to be too anachronistic–but that happens with our medieval manuscripts as well. And we know how to ask those questions and look at them, like you had said earlier, and think about what happens with scribal authority. What happens when a scribe changes? What happens if a name has been scraped up? How we’re looking at paratextual evidence of use–

Bridget  24:56  

Yes.

Caitlin  24:57  

–that may not necessarily be contemporary with the moment at which it was recorded, at which the primary text of a manuscript was recorded.

Bridget  25:08  

Besides being angry, and being curious, one of the other things that really drove my dedication to this project is how little of it is written down. I’m a medievalist, I don’t deal with living people! But so much of this project involves me needing to go interview people. Not just Astrid but also Astrid, for chapter three, which is sort of tracing the rise of digitization through four different digitization projects involving manuscripts of The Fall of Princes by John Lydgate, I had to do so much checking in with living people with people who have done these projects. Like, what was the project history? How did this happen? Who did what? Oh, I need to go talk to someone else, because he knows that but we don’t know this other thing. So much of our recent history in digital manuscripts is dependent on brilliant people’s brains. And I wanted this history to be written in whatever way I could so that when we move forward, we’ll remember who we owe, and what they’ve given us.

Caitlin  26:20  

This tracks really well with the first chapter of my dissertation, which is about interpretive labor in digital editing projects and thinking about how that information gets recorded or not recorded. Both in the framing materials for a project as well as just the line by line markup, how different projects might think about recording labor, or not. So I’ve not been thinking about the codicological aspect of it. I’ve been thinking about the editing, textual editing aspect.

Bridget  26:53  

I would also say in terms of recording the labor that goes into it, and I’m really indebted to Dot Porter here for this. Time that goes into recording information about a project is not time that can then be spent making a new digital manuscript. Even as I have this, like, “Oh, record all of the things” drive, I’m aware, and I would want all of us to be aware, that if something isn’t written down, it’s probably for a very good, well thought out reason. We should ask. We should be curious. We shouldn’t, if we see a gap, assume it’s because a digital imaging specialist, a curator, and archivist librarian didn’t think of it. We should find out and kind of understand the economic pressures under which anything is being built. I think that every time possible, we should record and credit where we can, depending on what people are comfortable with in terms of visibility, but I also know that it’s kind like the map of the world that is so big that it becomes the world. Compromises will inevitably have to be made. I’m just hoping that we can be aware of the ethical implications of those compromises.

Caitlin  28:12

I think you’re exactly right. And that’s one of the important features in recording project framing, either in a robust and well documented way, or, but even in a brief or perfunctory way, is to offer why choices are made. Because choices are made in every digital project. And I think the more that we who work in digital humanities, and especially with digital medieval studies where it’s this cross temporal experience working with objects of the past, I think the more that we are talking about what our choices are and why, the more that will be the foundation of work with digital manuscript materials.

Bridget  28:57

Yes. I agree completely. And it also reminds me of just good software practices, right? Like everything needs a good ReadMe document. If we’re gonna make changes, we should say somewhere kind of what they are and why. Even if we can’t record the change, we can record the fact of the change. So we don’t need to reinvent them. We just need to read widely enough and generously enough that we can use all of the wheels that people have been inventing.

Caitlin  29:23

And this is where everyone should familiarize themselves with the Caswell Test.

Bridget  29:29

Yes. Yes, please.

Caitlin  29:31

Speaking of the Caswell Test, we sort of briefly touched on it in your introduction and I would love to invite you to share a little bit for listeners who may not yet have seen your wonderful work, inspired by the work of Michelle Caswell who also is just fantastic.

Bridget  29:47

She’s really brilliant. Yes. So in 2018, I was invited to be on a roundtable about medieval and medievalist archivists and librarians. And I thought, “I am such an imposter. I am not an archivist. I am not a librarian. I don’t think I belong here.” But then I decided that it was a really great opportunity for me to go on record confessing how much I don’t understand and kind of hate the phrase “the archive.” At its core, the Caswell Test is a like seven minute rant from me about who are historians and literary scholars and end users erasing when we say “the archive.” Like which archive, where, who works there, how is it funded? These are all of my favorite questions. And because I love the works of Alison Bechdel, who’s a graphic artist, it somehow made sense to me to make a test modeled on Alison Bechdel’s Bechdel Test for media representation. So it’s a three step test, that ultimately is named after Michelle Caswell, that asks [and] challenges anybody who wants to write about “the archive” to think about: okay, am I citing any archivists? No, I should do that. Am I only citing archivists in my thank you notes? That’s great, but I should cite them as my scholars. Always make sure that you’re actually conversing with and listening to and learning from the real experts when you’re doing transdisciplinary work. We just, somehow for some reason, need to be reminded to do that more with archivists and librarians. And then it became a hashtag and then I had to write to Michelle Caswell and say, “Hi, you’ve never heard of me. I’m a big fan of your work. I accidentally invented a test named after you. And it’s a thing now. I hope that’s okay.” Which I hear was probably really strange for her to try to explain for tenure, but it’s one of the things that’s gone on to have a weird life of its own and I’m really proud of it. I’m really pleased that it– building on Michelle Caswell, building on Eira Tansey, building on Myron Groover, building on a lot of brilliant archivists and librarians–can be a useful thing.

Caitlin  32:02

One thing that was coming to mind for me when you were speaking was the ways that scholarship becomes possible through–I don’t even know how to describe it–it’s the ways that we are in community with each other. And my scholarship is possible because of your scholarship. Your scholarship is possible because of Michelle’s scholarship. And the different folks who you’ve been mentioning in our conversation are all people who are in my mind and a lot of them are in my bibliographies. And I just love thinking about the kind of generative network that we have just by asking these kinds of questions.

Bridget  32:40

This is the thing that I’m trying to teach my students about citation.

Caitlin  32:44

Well, citation is a conversation. And it’s, for me, citation becomes a form of collaboration with people that I might not get to have a conversation with the way that you and I are conversing now.

Bridget  32:57

Yeah. I remember when I was first reading Lydgate as a graduate student, he has this tic that I am obsessed with and have written about, about saying, you know, “Oh, well, I’m gonna tell you this story, but Chaucer already has and his version’s better. I can’t believe I’m even daring to write this. You should just go read his.” And the tradition that you and I inherit is that this is this, like, this is like this performative false humility, modesty topos thing. And this probably just reveals way too much about my state of mind as a grad student. But I remember reading it and being like, “Oh man, I feel that. I too am writing in this shadow of people who have already said this and said it better. And you should probably just go read them. And I don’t even know why I’m bothering.” But then Lydgate goes on and and bothers, and, and we do too. And the value isn’t one poet trying to replace another. But in thinking about the conversations you can have with someone who died 30 years ago, as well as the conversations that you and I get to have together today.

Caitlin  34:05

Beautifully put. And probably, probably I should call us to a close because I think you and I could just talk forever.

Bridget  34:13

I should be so lucky.

Caitlin  34:15

And especially about Lydgate who has become fond to me in a way I didn’t anticipate. And part of that is the inherited scholarly conversation has made me want to love him more because so many people have not.

Bridget  34:32

Yes.

Caitlin  34:32

Which is weird.

Bridget  34:35

Okay, so here it is: if listeners of this podcast want to be true medievalist hipsters, they have to love Lydgate so they can say they loved Lydgate before Lydgate was cool to love.

[Music Interlude]

Caitlin  35:00

Thanks for listening to Coding Codices, a podcast by the Digital Medievalist Postgraduate Committee. And thank you so much to Bridget for joining us in this wonderful conversation that we’ve had today. You can find Bridget on Twitter @BridgetWhearty. And if you don’t know how to spell that, I would encourage you to check out the show notes. You can also catch up on Coding Codices on our website, podcast.digitalmedievalist.org,  or get in touch with us at dmpostgrads[at]gmail[dot]com.

[Music Fade Out]

Credits

Music:

• Intro: TeknoAXE, “Chiptune Nobility” (CC BY 4.0).
• Interludes: Curran Son, “The Red Fox Tavern“.

Graphics:

• Featured Image: Rosenbach MS 439/16 fol 146v; ed. by Tessa Gengnagel.

“Things spilled on it from people touching it, mice running across it, insects, dust…all this stuff lands in the books.”

About this Episode

Recorded September 17, 2021. Produced and edited by James Harr.

Guests: Sarah Fiddyment and Timothy Stinson

Content: James and Aylin talk to Sarah Fiddyment and Timothy Stinson about their work in the emerging field of biocodicology, the study of the biomolecular information found in manuscripts.

Sarah Fiddyment received her BSc in Biochemistry from the University of Zaragoza in 2006. Her MSc and PhD (awarded in 2011) were both completed at the same university, working in the field of proteomics in cardiovascular research. She moved to the University of York in 2012 after being awarded a Marie Curie postdoctoral research fellowship to focus on the protein analysis of parchments throughout history. During this time she developed a non-invasive sampling technique that has enabled her to establish the emerging field of biocodicology. She was subsequently awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, and in 2019, Sarah joined the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at Cambridge as part of the ERC funded Beasts to Craft project.

Timothy Stinson is Associate Professor of English at North Carolina State University. He received his PhD in English Language and Literature in 2006 from the University of Virginia and was a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University for two years prior to joining the NC State faculty in 2008. He is co-founder and co-director of the Medieval Electronic Scholarly Alliance, director of the Society for Early English and Norse Electronic Texts (SEENET), co-director of the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, associate director of the Advanced Research Consortium (ARC), and editor of the Siege of Jerusalem Electronic Archive. He has also collaborated with colleagues in the biological sciences to analyze the DNA found in medieval parchment manuscripts.

Resources and Further Reading

• Fiddyment et al., “Girding the Loins? Direct Evidence of the Use of a Medieval Parchment Birthing Girdle from Biomolecular Analysis” (2020)
• Fiddyment et al., “So You Want to Do Biocodicology? A Field Guide to the Biological Analysis of Parchment” (2019)
• Hickinbotham et al., “How to Get your Goat: Automated Identification of Species from MALDI-ToF Spectra” (2020)
• Stinson, “Knowledge of the Flesh: Using DNA Analysis to Unlock Bibliographical Secrets of Medieval Parchment” (2009)

Transcript

Automated transcription by <https://otter.ai>, manually corrected by James Harr.

[Music: TeknoAXE, “Chiptune Nobility,” CC BY 4.0]

Aylin Malcolm 00:10

Hello and welcome to Coding Codices. I’m Aylin Malcolm, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the Digital Medievalist postgraduate committee. 

James Harr  00:19

And my name is James Harr. I’m a postdoctoral teaching scholar in the Data Science Academy at North Carolina State University. And I’m also a postgraduate committee member for Digital Medievalist.

Aylin Malcolm 00:40

We’re very fortunate to have two scholars joining us today, Sarah Fiddyment and Tim Stinson. Dr. Sarah Fiddyment holds a PhD from the University of Zaragoza, which she earned while working in proteomics in cardiovascular research. In 2012, she was awarded a Marie Curie postdoctoral research fellowship, to focus on the protein analysis of parchments and moved to the University of York. She was then awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship and in 2019, she joined the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research as an associate on the Beasts to Craft project. Her numerous accomplishments include a noninvasive sampling technique that permits researchers to extract proteins and DNA from parchment surfaces without damaging them largely by using PVC erasers. This technique has been crucial in establishing the field of biocodicology, or the study of the biomolecular information found in manuscripts. Recently, she was the lead author of a study of a 15th-century burning girdle strip of parchment that as Sarah and her collaborators argue, was probably actively used during childbirth, but I’m sure we’ll hear more about that in a few minutes. 

James Harr  01:51

And Tim Stinson is an associate professor of English and a university faculty scholar at North Carolina State University. He is a member of the program faculty for the Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media program, and an affiliate faculty of the Jewish Studies program both at NC State and he is currently a fellow at the National Humanities Center. Tim received his PhD in English language and literature from the University of Virginia, and his research interests include Middle English poetry, codicology, history of the book, and digital humanities. He is a leader in the application of digital technologies to medieval studies. He is a cofounder and codirector of the Medieval Electronic Scholarly Alliance, director of the Society for Early English and Norse Electronic Texts, co director of the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, Associate Director of the Advanced Research Consortium, and editor of the Siege of Jerusalem Electronic Archive. Tim is the recipient of an NIH digital humanities fellowship, and planning and implementation grants from the Mellon Foundation for his digital humanities work. Tim’s work collaborating with colleagues in the biological sciences to analyze the DNA found in medieval parchment manuscripts has garnered international press coverage in outlets such as the BBC, The World Today, National Geographic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Science. So welcome to you both. And thank you for joining us today. 

Timothy Stinson  03:09

Thank you. 

Sarah Fiddyment  03:10

Thank you.

Aylin Malcolm  03:11

So as your biography suggests, you’ve come to this research from quite different backgrounds. I’m curious to know what drew you to biocodicology and how you started working in this emerging field. 

Timothy Stinson  03:22

Well, I can start there. So my background as Jamie just told you is really in medieval English poetry. So I did a PhD, and English language and literature. And during my studies, I got interested in editing. And the way this usually works, as many of your audience probably know, is for medieval studies, you tend to have for those poems that survived more than one copy, you tend to have very different versions of the poem, and none of these versions are identical. In fact, many of them are very different. So you go around looking at all the extant copies, and you start to record differences between them and try to work your way back. So well, you know, what’s the what’s the likely original reading that the author wrote for any given part of the poem. So I set sail, not literally, but figuratively, for England. Made the beautiful triangle that medievalists get to do where you go to the British Library, Oxford, Cambridge, a few other spots and looking at manuscripts. And these are some of my earliest encounters with actually getting medieval manuscripts in my hands. And I went there to look at the text. That’s why I was trained to study. That’s why I was interested. And as soon as I touched those books, I just thought, wow, you know, I want to know something about the book. Why does no one talk about the book, of course, I learned pretty quickly a lot of people do talk about the book. But I was very struck by these things, as physical objects, as you know, in many cases, 600-year-old physical objects that that evidently have a complex a biography of their own. And I was struck in most cases by the animal nature of these books. You know, here you have hide glue, parchment, numerous animals and their leather bindings. And I thought, wow, these, these things are fantastic. I really want to know more about them as objects. And as medievalists, we’re trained to figure out when and where something is from based on clues such as dialect, because as everyone knows, dialect changes, both in time and place. If we, if we listen to, you know, someone from Brooklyn and someone from Scotland isn’t from Jamaica speaking English, we would be able to pick out right away where they’re from. And it changes the course over time. And so does handwriting, you know. If you see a document from the 15^th, 16^th, 17^th, 18^th, 19^th, 20^th century, there’s a good chance you could put them in order without specialist training. So medieval, so trained to use these sorts of clues and say, roughly when and where something is from, but this is often is not all that satisfactory, you might get something like, Midlands, mid-14th century, right? Which is, which is not not all that specific. So, I was there trying to figure out such things about these manuscripts. And I just said, “Wait a minute,” you know, these are these are on animal skin. If you go across campus, you ask a scientist, when and where’s this book from, they’re not going to, you know, get out the magnifying glass and check out the shape of the letter G or say, Well, look, there’s a long A retained from, from Old English. So, this indicates this slow disappearance of this heading to the north. So, we can we can figure this out. Not to make light of those. Those are in their own right fastening disciplines. But there there are different ways to answer that. And I thought I really thought we should ask someone else the same set of questions. And so the first thing I thought of, of course, was DNA. And I set about looking for folks to collaborate with on that.

James Harr  06:47

Thank you, Tim. And Sarah, what brought you to biocodicology. 

Sarah Fiddyment  06:51

I’m a biochemist by training. And I was doing my PhD in a hospital working on cardiovascular research. I was doing proteomics and protein analysis. But I’ve always had an interest in history and archeology, although I trained in the sciences, there’s always something that I’d always loved. And just through sheer chance, I had attended a course that they were offering on scientific techniques applied to cultural heritage, which is something that I thought sounded great. And through going to that I met various people, and I said, you know, I’ve got this background in proteins, but I’d really love to work in this field. Do you think it’s possible? And they all told me, you should contact Matthew Collins in the University of York who is a specialist in proteins, and he works on ancient archaeological artifacts, etc. So yeah, I contacted Matthew. And I basically said, like, Oh, do you think I can like even move into this field? Because you know, I’m just a trained like, protein scientist. And he’s like, No, this is great. Like, you can definitely come into the field of archaeology, which I think is one of the benefits of archaeology is quite a mixed discipline. And he basically just talked over some of the projects that were that were possible that he was currently working on. And one of the things he mentioned was at the University of York, they have the Borthwick Archive, which is a huge archive that has 1000s of documents, many of them written on parchment, and he recently been there, they just recently renovated and he was telling me about, you know, all these all these documents are effectively animal skins. Like that’s how we see it as sort of biologist it was, like less about the book, unfortunately, but more about the potential of these animals that are dated and located which for us is an incredible resource. And that really sparked my interest. And I love the idea of actually being able to work with something like medieval manuscripts, which otherwise was for someone, my background would be completely inaccessible. So yeah, and I got a Marie Curie to go to York to work on that. And initially, our project was, it was a small project, it was like two years. And we were going to target these parchment documents from Borthwick and our initial plan was to take very, very small destructive samples to be able to analyze you know, what animals for the archive, etc. But basically, when I got there, it’s like my grant almost didn’t happen because we had a meeting with the conservators there and they’re like, no, no, you cannot take disruptive samples from our parchments, which I completely understand now. So we had to pretty quickly come with a new idea to work around this, because we knew we were going to be using proteomics techniques. So using mass spectrometry, which is incredibly sensitive, only very small amounts. We actually talked about the idea of using just like, you know, waste if they like cleaning or scraping. And yeah, by working with the conservators, we use some of their cleaning techniques and found that this noninvasive eraser seemed to work perfectly. So it just spiraled from there. Once we had a noninvasive technique, the libraries just opened up to us. They were a lot happier about us being able to analyze their sample.

James Harr  10:00

I just find it fascinating that two very different research tracks from two very different scholars have converged into this line of research, but I think it speaks very highly of the interdisciplinarity of medieval studies today.

[Music: Random Mind, “Rejoicing“]

James Harr  10:25

So I guess the follow up question that we want to ask is, so what are you working on now? What are your current projects in biocodicology? 

Timothy Stinson  10:32

Well, I’ve been fortunate enough to be part of a new team here at North Carolina State University, with some colleagues in the College of Veterinary Medicine. And you know, we’ve been in touch with Sarah and Matthew Collins in the UK, I did some work with Sarah and Matthew, a few years back. And what we’re looking at we are now testing 100 manuscripts here at Duke University. And we are we’re doing a couple things, we are doing some comparison between the PVC eraser technique and another technique we developed here in house that uses cytology brushes. And Sarah knows about this, I was asking her about this a few years back and sent her some … we did some of the same thing with Sarah, I sent her a few brushes to say how do these compare. So we’re still looking somewhat this is early days enough that we’re still refining techniques and looking at techniques, what’s the best way to get this stuff out, non destructively, because that really was an impediment, as Sarah says, in the early days, I was going around to dealers at markets, you know, buying my leaves and taking little slices off of them. Because early on, there’s no other way to do it. So we’re still refining technique. We’re also looking across a wide geographical time and space. We’re doing a small number of samples from a lot of manuscripts, and then some deep dives on a few individual manuscripts. And we’re interested to see how results might compare across centuries. And then if there are geographical differences.

James Harr  12:02

So, for example, what would you look for?

Timothy Stinson  12:05

If you look at parchment and Middle Eastern context, you know, if you’re looking at Hebrew manuscripts or Syrian manuscripts or Ethiopic codices, does the does the substrate that is the parchment, the preparation methods differ historically, or in different places in a way that would affect the viability of the data? That’s something we’re interested in? And then this question of sexing, which is to say, you know, are we going to have more male or female animals, when we look at which animals furnish the skins that became the parchment? Logically, you would, you would think that there would be more males and females, but we’re, we’re always surprised. That’s one great thing about this work is every every time we do anything, we know, it’s very early days, still, but the results seem to surprise us. So we’re waiting to see what comes with that.

Sarah Fiddyment  13:00

So I’m currently working on the Beast to Craft project, which is an ERC funded, it’s big European project. And we’re basically it’s an interdisciplinary project where we’re looking at parchment from different aspects. So from a craft perspective, from a conservation perspective, myself, looking at protein analysis, there’s also genetic analysis. So really just looking at parchment as a medium, as aa biological reservoir for animals of genetics, but also the craft and production that goes into producing parchment for bindings for books, etc. So it’s coming from many different perspectives. And I’m obviously focusing mainly on the proteins. So again, looking from different geographic locations, different forms of production of parchment, and how we can maybe tell by our biochemical analysis, how the parchment is being produced. And then the one area that I’m focusing more on, which I’m more interested in at the moment, is related to birth girdle. Or looking at stains on parchment. So starting to look apart from the obvious information we can get about the animal. What other things can we find on the surface of these parchment that can give us an idea about the use and the history of the subject?

James Harr  14:15

Just a follow up question. Sarah I know you work with noninvasive peptide fingerprinting, and that’s with the erasers that are used. Is that correct?

Sarah Fiddyment  14:23

Yes. Yes.

James Harr:  14:25

Could you could you speak a little set just slightly about the process of the the erasers versus the cytology brushes, just to make it a little clearer what they do what the process is.

Sarah Fiddyment  14:36

Sure, I can Yeah, I’ll talk about the erasers and then Tim, he can talk about the cytology brushes which he developed. In the case of the erasers. So, like I said, I was working in the Borthwick Archive with the conservation staff, and we were looking at methods of cleaning parchment that were used by the conservator. So these were accepted methods that they allowed to use on their parchment. So I tried various things, smoke sponges and some different types of gums. And one of the things that they use, although not routinely, but they are accepted to use are PVC erasers. And all we do with these erasers is we take a new fragment of eraser, a small fragment, and we very gently wipe it on the surface of parchment. So we’re not rubbing, it’s very, very gentle wiping. And what we’re doing is we’re collecting all the little crumbs that are generated. So like when you use an eraser normally to rub out your your mistakes, all those little crumbs that you normally blow away, those are the little crumbs that we collect. And we need a really, really tiny amount. We basically say to people, if you can see crumbs, that’s enough, like as long as you can see one or two, that’s it. So we collect these little fragments, and then that’s taken to our lab. And they’re very stable, like you don’t need to like they can, you can collect crumbs and keep them in a drawer for months, or it just they really don’t degrade in any way. And in the lab, we use a very simple protocol to extract the proteins. So it’s just a saline solution, and we heat it up, and that pulls off the collagen, which is the main protein that we’re looking at. It pulls off the collagen molecule in solution. We then use another enzyme called trypsin, which is another protein that basically cuts up collagen, because collagen is a very, very long molecule. And it’s too long for us to read intact. So we have to cut up on small fragments. And then we use a mass spectrometer, in our case, a MALDI TOF, to be able to discriminate this peptide. So basically, it’s called time of flight, what it’s going to do is mesh measure the mass of these little fragments, these little peptides. And it gives a characteristic fingerprint for each of the different collagens of the different animals. So by matching up these unique print fingerprints, you can identify the animal that it’s come from.

Timothy Stinson  16:51

So for the cytology brushes, these brushes they’re designed to collect cells without damaging skin. So probably the most well-known application of medically is, you know, pap smear brushes, these are basically exactly what we’re using. But also sometimes, you know, perhaps those little brushes, you’ve seen that people scrape inside their cheeks or something like that these things grabbed cells. But of course, they don’t really injure. That’s the idea behind them. And so we found that rubbing those on the parchment picks up enough cells for analysis, but doesn’t damage even if you look at it under a microscope, which the conservation scientists at Duke did when they were checking out this technique. You don’t see any marks leftover on the parchment. And we just cut the heads off the brushes, they go into these little tubes, and they’re incubated with what’s called extraction buffer. So the solution kind of gets the cells off of the teeth of the brushes. This is I’m not a scientist, but as I understand it’s purified for PCR extraction. And then there’s an assay kit that goes with that. And that measures essentially quantities. And depending on the questions we’re trying to answer, there are different other techniques. So for example, there’s digital droplet PCR, which is useful for species and sex determination. And I mentioned that this has been done in the lab of Kelly Meiklejohn, one of my colleagues here at NC State in the Veterinary School, working with Melissa Scheible, and they both have a background in forensic science. So indeed, Kelly came here from the FBI, which I thought was super cool. You know, when I met her, I was like, wow, someone from the FBI working on these manuscripts. But something I hadn’t realized I hadn’t really thought about before I met them is that when you when you don’t the medieval manuscript, you’re dealing with highly degraded DNA. And if you think about this sort of classic double helix, the one thing everyone knows about DNA, with all these base pairs on it. And in a forensic context, which indeed a medieval manuscript is a forensic context, what you’re dealing with are really fragmented parts of this. So if you imagine these 1000s of base pairs in this neat row, which you would get if you got a blood sample from a living person, right, a complete a complete set. That’s not what you find in forensic environments. You find two things. One is that these base pairs are all broken up. So you might get this piece down here and this one up here, this one up here. And if you take multiple samples, you might get different base pairs. So forensic scientists are trained to as it were, rebuild those, those base pairs in the proper order and figure out what this is we’re looking at. But the other thing you get Sarah referred to is this kind of environment. And these basically a microbiome she mentioned stains but there’s all sorts of things you know, acne from human beings like the bacteria and human acne is one of the grosser things we’ve encountered. You know, things spilled on it from people touching it, mice running across it, insects, dust, which is often human skin cells. All this stuff lands in the books. And so we’re also interested here in thinking about that as a as a sort of microbiome. Right that there’s, I initially conceived this as the DNA I want to get and all the contamination on top of the DNA I want to get. But you know, in working with these teams, I’ve come to see that there’s actually a lot of interest in here. And one DNA is indeed the animal scan, which we’re able to get, it seems like we’re able to get pretty reliably both of these techniques, but there’s a lot of other stuff there that’s of interest that we can capture using these techniques.

[Music: Random Mind, “Rejoicing“]

Aylin Malcolm  20:56  

I love that process through which the contaminant becomes the object of interest. I think that’s so fabulous. So, as digital medievalists, we think a lot about collaboration, even this podcast is the result of continuous collaboration within our committee. So Jamie and I wanted to ask you about interdisciplinary collaboration, both the benefits and challenges of working with such a diverse group of experts. You know, you have various scientists, archaeologists, specialists in different literary cultures, conservators. Tim, I’m sure that this has only increased with your current work across different geographic regions. So how have you built your teams? How have you communicated findings in one field to researchers in another? And then as a related question, I’m also interested in the reception of your work across disciplines and whether you’ve met with any resistance. I know that in some cases, your findings have confirmed codicological findings. So perhaps that’s a sign of the productive relationships that this work might encourage. 

Timothy Stinson  21:57  

Well, I think, to talk about the good side of this first, I think that’s mainly what this podcast is, is addressing. And we’ve been talking about all the potential so I’ll just say briefly, one of the benefits that we haven’t touched upon yet is simply how eye opening it is. The very thing I just mentioned, I thought about these books in one way. Right? I thought about them as repositories of textual information. And then I had this kind of awakening moment where I thought, A-ha, there’s a lot more here. But even so I was initially thinking of science as an avenue to answer humanities questions. And when I began to talk to scientists, they start to say, oh, you know, by the way, there maybe there’s some record of environmental change here. By the way, do you realize what absolutely, nonpareil final evidence is? We’ve been looking around in muddy pits hoping for, you know, a slaughter site from the Roman army encampment or something like that. Here it is, year by year with the date and time in many cases written on it, not time, but rather location. And so I had this ever expanding horizon from the interaction with other people from other disciplines of the sorts of questions, we could pose a potentially answer, it was way bigger than anything I’d hoped for. Yes, my questions and concerns were in the mix, but there’s so much more there. So there are, though quite a few challenges. And, you know, this, this, we both alluded to the fact Sarah and I of early roadblocks, where librarians looked at us and said, You’ve got to be kidding me, you know, you can’t come in here and, and mess up our manuscripts. And of course, that’s not what we want it to do, we were just hoping for some little sliver. And, you know, maybe when they were just binding, we could get a little bits or something like that. But we really had to figure out, it took years to figure out some way to get this, this information that didn’t damage the manuscript. And that’s, that’s, we think of that as an obvious thing as humanists, of course, you can’t go in and cut the manuscripts. But in fact, that’s also a cultural value. If you go to natural history collections, you can just you know, drill a nice little piece out of the dinosaur bone or you know, clip a little piece of squirrels toe off or whatnot, you know, if you need to for doing research. So this is this was a both a technological and cultural challenge to come against that. So from the start, we ran and things like that. A lot of problems though, because this is such a brand new field, persist and we’re still struggling with. One of those is funding how to go about who wants to fund this. I remember doing a call around to all the agencies here, in the US all the federal agencies, the program officers I’ve talked to seem genuinely interested, maybe they’re just good professionally and seeming generally interested. But my take was they really thought this was fascinating. And they would all say, but we don’t have a program that would cover that you maybe you should try the next agency down the block. And it’s tricky because it’s so new, it doesn’t fit into any of the established calls for funding. And, you know, in the humanities, there’s not a lot of money available, why would they fund scientific research? In the scientific context, it can be difficult sometimes if before you’re doing looks to humanistic, and there tend to be established programs that it doesn’t neatly fit into, then from the point of view of humanist, trying to find collaborators is very tricky. Because there’s a tremendous pressure on scientists, for their labs to be productive in terms of, you know, getting funding that funds, the lab funds, their graduate students and postdocs produces research. So when you’re doing something new and speculative, and the outcome might be something that’s going to be published in a journal of medieval studies that that’s not going to fly, you have to think of a way that works for this team for everyone to get some sort of professional credit. Similarly, from the point of view of humanists, there’s a problem of joint publication where there are a lot of authors in science journals, you know, if that’s your outcome, what good is that going to be on your CV? Everyone’s excited about it, but now aren’t quite sure what to do with it. You know what? Well, this is, this is fantastic. Look, this English professor’s out doing DNA work, how cool, but how does it count?

Sarah Fiddyment  26:27

Yeah, I think I will echo everything Tim just said, because he’s completely right. What I would say is, I have been very lucky, and I’ve had an incredibly positive experience working since I started working in manuscripts, because people have been really open to, to listen to us to talk with us. And it’s not just been a question of, you know, we’re the scientists, we come in with this technique, and then we just give you an answer and go away, and then you just do. It’s very, very much been a back and forth. So we work closely with conservation, we work closely with, with curators, and people, you know, they give us a question. And we look at it from our perspective and said, Well, have you thought about this. And that’s the only way we can really move forward. Because if it’s, if it keeps being isolated of just what we have this technique, and we just run it as a service, and then people don’t engage with the science enough, and they just want the results for their for their studies. It really has to be this like, conversation, teamwork between everybody. And we’ve had a really good experience of that. And we’ve had people really come in from all the three – conservation, humanities and science – and really work together as a team. And that’s been, I think, one of our huge strengths. Yeah, I echo about the sampling, like I said at the beginning, but probably quite naively coming from the sciences, we expected to be able to have samples to use or be very small ones. And we were looked on with faces of horror. Like no, you cannot touch our books, which now obviously, having worked a long time with manuscripts now I also see it in that way. But yeah, there is a place to find a happy medium, but we were in a way it was good for us because it forced us to reevaluate how sophisticated our technique was and what we could use to forward our research. And we ended up developing this noninvasive technique, which then changed the way we could access. So it’s very much back and forth between the disciplines, but in a very collaborative sense. Working in the archaeology department, which, funnily enough, although not strictly speaking very close to manuscripts, it’s actually quite an interdisciplinary department. So we do have people both from sciences and both from more historical side. But it’s much it’s much more common to have this like integration of the humanities and the sciences. We are very used to using destructive samples. So in archaeology, there isn’t so much question about being given samples although we try and minimize you will go into drill a bone and you know, we might even be the bone of a famous king. And that’s not a problem. But taking a tiny sliver of a book, there was a lot more, I think, yeah, cultural importance are given some of these manuscripts. So that was certainly a challenge. But, but like I said, yeah, the more the bit techniques get better, we’re getting past that. And I think the more the conservation community is, is involved, and the more curatorial and the actual scholars see what we’re doing, it then becomes a more natural process. And people see that, oh, actually, we’re not doing anything that’s done that damaging, but we can get a lot of information out of it. And from our perspective, obviously, we start off seeing the, the parchment as a skins as a biological resource. So if we come from a very different angle, but you then start to appreciate, you know, the construction of the book, and why are they using particular animals in a particular sequence, which is something we didn’t expect or mixing up animals? And how does the production of the parchment actually affect the quality of the book, how it feels, but how also chemically, it looks to us? So it’s opened up a whole series of questions that initially we went into just thinking, you know, look at the animal, but there is more to that. And, in our case, for example, as Tim said, like the having a resource of an animal that basically has a time stamp on it, like the date and location for us is incredible. Like, we’re used to digging up things from the ground that have, you know, roughly a century’s worth of dating, maybe, give or take. So it’s an incredible resource that I think people move from the more biological sciences have not thought about. And when we’re talking about looking at, you know, rare breeds and, you know, domestication different the way animals have evolved, we have a really incredible resource there that can potentially be used. And we, yeah, I think we need to bring that highlight the importance of, of this incredible biomolecular reservoir that initially probably people have completely overlooked.

James Harr   31:00

It seems like in terms of potential contributions this this area of study can make, it’s still so undefined, that not really sure how it fits into these larger, more traditional areas of study, a conversation that often comes up in these podcasts is how labor is acknowledged and how scholarship is acknowledged. And to get back to what Tim was talking about, where does this study fall? In a scientific journal? Into a medieval studies journal? And but if you want to speak to that for a bit, that’d be fantastic.

Sarah Fiddyment  31:29

That was a bit of a learning curve for us as well. As Tim alluded to, we are very used to like all our publications are multi-authored, co-authored, you would not you would not publish on your own. And this is very accepted. And this is this is how we are graded for our you know, for our grant proposals, etc, you need to have these multi-authored publications. But obviously, when we talk to our colleagues in, in humanities, it was very different for them. And it was quite hard for some of them to actually put their name in these like, multi-authored papers, some really welcomed in love there. But others were a bit more apprehensive, understandably, because it’s a completely different way of publishing. And as Tim was talking about, the funding is exactly the same. Currently, we kind of fall between the cracks and a bit, because if we go for Humanities funding, the kind of work we need to do in the lab, we just don’t have the, like the humanities don’t have the resources for the amount of funding. Yeah, it’s not sufficient for some of the more sophisticated techniques that we need. However, if we go for pure hard science funding, you are competing against people who are doing cancer research, for example, and you know, you’re not going to be as high in the, in the order of grants. So it’s a it’s a hard one there. I mean, there are calls out there, and there is a lot starting to become like there were a lot of calls it start to require this interdisciplinary approach. And those are the ones we target and social sciences, archaeology, like I said, I know I’ve said it before, but it is that cross section and it has often been helpful to be able to secure funding. But yeah, it’s definitely a bit of a learning curve. And with our work, for example, although we primarily published in scientific journals, because of course, that’s what’s required of us. We are constantly thinking about how we can make our work accessible also to people more in purely manuscript studies and who may not have come across our work because, of course, we might be going to different conferences or, or etc. So it’s trying to be able to, to cater for different audiences, and make sure that everybody knows that everybody is equally welcome to join. And we need that, like, if we get siloed into these different disciplines, it doesn’t work. It needs to have the input from all the different angles at the same time to make it functional. And I think up until now we’ve been really lucky and it has, it has really worked.

Timothy Stinson  33:52

Yeah, my hope, Jamie is that this becomes what already is a field or a brand new field, but my hope is that it really continues to gain traction so that we have some sense of people understand biotechnology is a field is deeply interdisciplinary, that maybe even one day in the future, we have our own journals, we can publish it and that sort of thing. At the moment, it’s remains tricky territory, the thing that we we have a couple of advantages. One is, as Sarah pointed out, so far, this has been an amazing community in terms of mutual support, enthusiasm, but we’ve also had a lot of enthusiasm from, it seems to me all fronts, folks in the sciences, folks in libraries are have been very welcoming. We, I mean, we mentioned their reticence, rightly enough, I would be reticent, if I were them to, to have a slice into things. But also, librarians have been tremendously helpful and knowledgeable in helping us think through this from a conservation science point of view, and how we might handle this new type of data we’re getting from these types of things. So that’s been a big advantage. And folks in the humanities also seem very excited by this. I think at the moment, this probably would be the most difficult for someone who’s early-career, pre-tenure. You know, I was lucky enough — this came out I guess last year, I actually co-published with Sarah, and I think there were what four of us, Sarah? In that article in Bioinformatics. And I was totally thrilled. Wow, look at me, there’s my name in a science journal. You know, I only wrote two paragraphs and didn’t understand much of the rest of it. But nonetheless, I said, aha, look at me, you know, I, here I am, alongside Sarah and Matthew Collins, and this is fabulous, you know, I’ve arrived. But I don’t need to really worry about how much that counts, post tenure, someone, you know, pre-tenure would really have to think, well, how much time isn’t this? Is it going to count? Maybe have to make an argument for it. So I think this is probably a trickier question for people who are early career, this idea of counting the issue of funding and things remain a little bit thornier at the moment.

[Music: Random Mind, “Rejoicing“]

Aylin Malcolm  36:24  

Do you have anything else that you would like to share with us anything that you’re excited about in the future?

James Harr  36:29

Can we ask the surprise question?

Aylin Malcolm  36:30

Yeah, yeah, let’s do the surprise question.

James Harr  36:33

Okay.

Aylin Malcolm  36:34

What have been your favorite surprises that you’ve uncovered in the process of doing this research?

Timothy Stinson 36:39

Well, I think Sarah has answered this, because my favorite surprise, Sarah, I think is the one who found it out, which was Sarah, the interleaving of the cattle and sheep in that last St. Luke. That blew my mind, honestly. You know, I showed just this week that graphic to someone, no, you’re not gonna believe I’m still like running around years later to people like you’re not gonna believe this, you know.

Sarah Fiddyment  37:03

This is actually a really good example of where you really need a cross disciplinary team, because we were given access to a twelfth-century glossed Gospel of St. Luke, and it’s in its original bindings. And originally this was very early on in our project. So we originally targeted a couple of the folia to get species ID. So you know, I took two random samples that came back as sheep and I was like, yes, fine. It’s sheep parchment and a colleague of ours, a conservator came along and have a look. And he just looked at the folia and he’s like, no, these are different. Like, you can see that there is definitely calf in here. So we were like, oh, okay, so we thought, okay, let’s do a systematic analysis of this book. Let’s target every bifolia, target bindings, and just see what’s in there. And one book ended up containing at least five species of animal so we had calf parchments, we had sheep parchment, and we had this goat parchment that was tucked away in the middle which no one expected. And we had two types of deer on the binding. So the covers were made of roe deer, and then the strap held it together was a fallow or red deer. So from what I did initially, very like naively said, like, oh, yeah, it’s just a sheep, you know, document turns out to have been this incredible like book with five different species and an incredibly it was there was a very fixed pattern of how the parchment was distributed. It wasn’t just, you know, a bit here a bit there. They had like pattern of interleaving the calf with the sheep. And then like the quires at the end, they only have sheep and this coincided where the scribe was changed to a different scribe. It turned out to be a worse scribe. So these all these questions that I talked to come out of this, what yo would thought was just gonna be like, you know, the analysis. And it just threw up all this other information. And it really got us thinking about how these books are produced, you know, is it to do with like, why are they using these different animals? Is it to do with, you know, availability of the of the livestock? Is it a personal choice that the scribes like one material versus another? It was really fascinating. And yeah, the goat the half goat as we’ve we’ve managed to discover because it’s only half a goat in there. Because Jiří Vnouček, who is the conservator who was actually looking at this, he works in the Royal Library and also is part of our Beast to Craft project. He’s able to often piece together these bifolia, to make the complete skins of the animal. And we were able to do that in this book. So he actually was able to put together you know, a few of the complete calfskin sheep, and goat is the back back half of the goat I think so. Where’s it coming from? Why is it used? We don’t know. It’s something we have to go back. We’re actually looking to go back and do more about this book. But it was an incredible it’s an incredible book. And yeah, just incredible find. Yeah, five, five species in one book.

Aylin Malcolm  40:04

Especially because goat is so rarely…the way that we think about it, we think of goat as coming from Italy or Spain, usually, but rarely in Britain.

Sarah Fiddyment  40:11

Yeah, well, yeah, obviously, in Italy is what we find most of it but actually having done many 1000s of parchments through the project, it’s not so unusual in England anymore, we are coming up with the goat. But it’s an incredibly interesting story. Because we don’t have the archaeological record for goat that we would hope to see tie in with these skins, we don’t have the same number of bones that we find for sheep and calf. So a question has always been like, where’s this goat coming from? So yeah, that’s definitely that’s on our agenda: Where’s the goat?

James Harr  40:44

I have to say, my favorite part about this manuscript is this example of the Gospel of St. Luke is the location of the goatskin in the manuscript itself.

Timothy Stinson  40:56  

That was my little contribution to the article we published which is, there is exactly one mention of goats and the Gospel of Luke. And it comes immediately after that goat skin. Well it comes immediately before the goat skin so the goat skin appears right after, which is you know, the story of the Prodigal Son. When prodigal son comes back is welcomed by the father, there’s all this celebration, and he kills the fatted calf to celebrate the return, whereas the good son who’s been there, toiling away for all the years to you know, you never gave me a single kid and a single goat to celebrate. So, I was pointing out to when I saw this goatskin, I was pointing out to them, Well, you know, it comes, that’s right, about the same moment in the book as if, as if it’s an inside joke like, hey kid, here’s your kid you want it, you know, I’m not willing to assert that. I was just saying, Look, this is this is interesting that it is right there. And it’s just that that book, the big surprise. It’s not only the number of animals in it, but the that that interleaving at the beginning is so strange. It’s you know, a sheepskin inside of a goats. Sorry, a sheepskin inside of a calfskin and inside of a sheepskin inside of a calfskin, you know, it’s like the, the Taco Bell entree of you know of codicology, right? Everything neatly stacked and like different all these different items. And so I thought, This is so strange that it suggested describe who’s going I don’t go to the store room somewhere pulling out leaves of parchment is in thinking about species, which just blew my mind and a lot of other people’s minds. And as Sarah pointed out, when we get to the second scribe, it’s all sheep, right that that goes away and we don’t it just begs for some sort of narrative but all we can do is guess and then on top of that this goat thing, you know, this weird goat thing right about the time it mentions goat. There’s at least a suggestion that there’s scribes aren’t just, you know, thinking about parchment as a substrate. Well, I just look for a decent looking sheet and I get busy copying. I’m sure some of them worked that way. But that book, at least it looks like something intentional. And this, Sarah, to your knowledge, is this the first book where someone actually went through and mapped out all the species in that way.

Sarah Fiddyment  43:27

Yeah, well, it’s the one we did first we’ve the one we published first that was the York Gospels that’s the other one we did a complete analysis and that one was a lot more with I won’t say the word boring but it was a lot more consistent. It was all calf with only sheep for like later editions. But yeah, this is the one we targeted first and it hasn’t been like fully published. And I was gonna say what’s interesting about the goat as well is that it’s not particularly good quality goat parchment normally goat is quite good. This actually has like It’s like has holes in it and it’s not particularly nice piece of goat so why are you actively chose to put that in? It’s really interesting story.

James Harr  44:09

Well, we would love to keep talking about biocodicology, but unfortunately, we are out of time for this episode.

Aylin Malcolm  44:15

Thank you so much for your time. This has been very fun and very exciting for both of us I think.

[Music: TeknoAXE, “Chiptune Nobility”]

James Harr  44:29

Thanks for listening to Coding Codices, a podcast by the Digital Medievalist Postgraduate Committee. I’m James Harr.

Aylin Malcolm  44:35

And I’m Aylin Malcolm.

James Harr  44:37

And our guests on this episode on biocodicology were Dr. Sarah Fiddyment and Dr. Timothy Stinson. You can listen to more episodes of Coding Codices on our website, podcast dot digital medievalist dot org or the podcast provider of your choice. Of course, you can also get in touch with us at dmpostgrads at gmail dot com.

Credits

Music:

• Theme music: TeknoAXE, “Chiptune Nobility” (CC BY 4.0).
• Interludes: Random Mind, “Rejoicing” (CC0).

Graphics:

• Featured Image by Dario Brönnimann; ed. by Tessa Gengnagel.

“How do we communicate the materialities of the items in our collections to different audiences? And how do we do that digitally?”

About this Episode

Recorded November 12, 2020. Produced and edited by Aylin Malcolm.

Guest: Johanna Green

Content: Dr. Johanna Green speaks with Aylin Malcolm and Caitlin Postal about manuscript materiality, digitization projects, and increased access to physical objects. Dr. Green shares the importance of valuing the digital to make use of new technologies that allow different kinds of access to physical objects.

“Emerging trends in social media content relating to medieval written heritage invoke the presence of curatorial hands—both visible and inferred—which act as tactile and haptic intermediaries to materially disenfranchized audiences.”

Johanna Green, “Digital Manuscripts as Sites of Touch” in Archive Journal

In addition to her work on manuscript studies via social media and in light of the COVID-19 remote learning circumstances, Johanna has been thinking about how to interact with the medieval book during lockdown. In this episode of Coding Codices, she shares her experiences with sensory cues and digital manuscript studies.

Johanna is a lecturer in Information Studies at the University of Glasgow and co-director of the University of Glasgow Digital Cultural Heritage lab. Starting in 2019, Johanna was a visiting research fellow at the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Johanna has also worked on many large scale digital projects, including the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, The Production and Use of English Manuscripts 1060 to 1220, and Livingstone Online. Through the Innovate UK-funded Project Mobius: Edify, Johanna developed an education-oriented app that provides a Virtual Reality early printing press experience. She is, with Bill Endres, developing a second app with Edify on “Virtual Codicology.” Follow her on Instagram @UofGCodicologist and on Twitter at @Codicologist.

Resources and Further Reading

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Lindisfarne Gospels, Turning the Pages
• Schoenberg Institute Video Orientations
• Glasgow Incunabula Project
• Malaga Corpus of Late Scientific Prose
• Bill Endres, 3D St. Chad Gospels
• VisColl
• Burrell Collection in Glasgow
• Andrew Prescott, “New Materialities of the Book” (2016)
• Armand De Filippo, Manuscript Exhibition at University of Leicester (2018)

Transcript

Automated transcription by <https://otter.ai>, manually corrected by Caitlin Postal. Click here to open a .pdf of the transcript.

[Music: TeknoAXE, “Chiptune Nobility,” CC BY 4.0]

Aylin Malcolm  0:15  

Hello, and welcome to Coding Codices. I’m Aylin Malcolm.

Caitlin Postal  0:18  

And I’m Caitlin Postal.

Aylin Malcolm  0:20  

And we’re from the Digital Medievalist Postgraduate Subcommittee.

Caitlin Postal  0:24  

In this episode, we’ll be talking with Dr. Johanna Green. Say hello!

Johanna Green  0:28  

Hi!

Caitlin Postal  0:28  

Dr. Green is a lecturer in Information Studies and co-director of the Glasgow-wide Digital Cultural Heritage arts lab. Her research interests cluster around book history, digital materialities, textuality, and technology and public access to special collections. In 2019 to 2020, Johanna was a visiting research fellow at the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Aylin Malcolm  0:30  

Her recent publications have looked at the cultural impact of manuscript digitization and the potential for social media to offer new ways of interacting with manuscripts, particularly through touch. She has also worked on many large scale digital projects, including the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, The Production and Use of English Manuscripts 1060 to 1220, and Livingstone Online. We’re so excited to have you with us today, Johanna.

Johanna Green  1:19  

So lovely to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Aylin Malcolm  1:28  

Just to get us started, I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about the projects that you’re working on right now, what you’re most excited about, what’s in the works?

Johanna Green  1:36  

It’s such a big question, to be honest, because I think so much of what’s happened over the past year with the pandemic has kind of influenced what we’re doing at the moment. I’m kind of just into about six weeks worth of teaching at Glasgow, and, of course, we’re all working remotely right now. And a big part of this year was figuring out, way back in April, how on earth do we teach item handling, object-based learning when we’re working remotely? How do we do that? Glasgow has invested hugely in technology that allows us to do that, so over the shoulder cameras and things like this. So a big part of my work at the moment, it’s kind of crossing over from the research into the teaching and figuring out, how do we make use of this new technology for different types of access? How do I make those classes not lectures where I’m just showing them objects and telling them about it, but making it interactive? So that’s one of the main projects and it’s connected to a lot of other things that are going on, as we’re thinking about, actually, how do we teach in Special Collections? Like what kinds of things do we do in that space? How do we make use of those items within our teaching? At Glasgow, we have a four year undergraduate degree, and the students kind of specialize once they get to junior and senior honors, so the third and fourth years, and they would probably usually get access to Archives and Special Collections only in those final two years, because the numbers are just too big at level one and two, but with the technology we’ve got, we’ve kind of got an opportunity to Zoom straight into like a 500 to 700 student lecture, and make that come alive for them in a new way. So working with students to figure out new ways of teaching with that technology is starting to become really exciting. The final thing is thinking about, how do we communicate the materialities of the items in our collections to different audiences? And how do we do that digitally? What kinds of things do we want to capture? What purposes? For me, I’m really interested in different kinds of public access, thinking about how we might use virtual reality, and also how we might use perhaps more everyday technologies like social media to do that as well, to kind of open up those archives and connect folks with the items that exist in their local collections.

[Music: Shane Ivers, “The Medieval Banquet,” CC BY 4.0]

Caitlin Postal  4:00  

I was wondering if you might be able to talk to us about what kinds of new questions come up when we’re thinking about manuscript materiality from afar, when we can’t touch the object itself, in its flesh and in our flesh? What kinds of questions do digitized versions of manuscripts prompt us to ask?

Johanna Green  4:16  

It’s such a great question, Caitlin, thank you for asking it. I think before I ever really realized this was what I was going to end up doing, career-wise with my life, this idea of what happens when we access our collections, and what that looks like, has always been there I think, for me. The last major conference presentation I did was 2018. At the beginning of that, I wanted to reflect on what my first manuscript experience was like, thinking that it would obviously be something that I met during my studies. And actually, when I thought back, the first experience was digital. It was all the way back in the year 2000. And the British Library had just come out with the Lindisfarne Gospels Turning the Pages CD-ROM, and I’m originally from the northeast of England, so local community has a massive interest in that particular manuscript. And I think my mum and dad had bought it excitedly. And we all sat around, like looking at this thing on a computer, you know, and turning the pages and being like, wow, we’ve got access to this thing like in our own living room, how amazing is this? Now I look at digital manuscripts and there’s a whole conversation around it about what is it that we’re looking at when we’re looking at digital objects? But actually, for me, right back then in 2000, I was looking at the manuscript, those things were one in the same for me. And I think a lot of those conversations, or certainly the early conversations, are focused around what the digital doesn’t do that you get in the reading room. So we can’t smell it, we can’t feel the weight of it, we can’t touch it and feel the materiality of it, we can’t hear it. Unless, of course, the digital has been added with some kind of artificial noise. So there’s that kind of idea of loss, which I think is kind of fascinating, because, to me, the digital offers me lots and lots of new ways of accessing that original that I cannot do with the original. So even just very simple things. I can’t zoom in with my own eyes. I can’t physically take an item apart. I can’t draw on it, can’t chop it up and move it around and save it. So all of those very basic things, of course, the digital offers us that. A big kind of issue for me happened in 2018, I got diagnosed with bowel cancer, with stage four bowel cancer wasn’t particularly great, but one of the side effects of that treatment was my chemotherapy gave me peripheral neuropathy. So I essentially had nerve damage in my hands. My hands kind of burned and then peeled. So I lost my fingerprints, which was super weird. But it meant I couldn’t sense any texture, and I actually couldn’t really use my hands properly. I couldn’t pick up a mug, I couldn’t type, I couldn’t write. And of course, once I got back to work, the first thing that you do at work is trot up to special collections, your happy place, and I couldn’t feel anything, I couldn’t even feel the edges of the page to turn. A lot of these conversations they talk about, you can’t really understand the book unless you can handle it. But here I was with that access. And I still didn’t have actual sensory access to the item. So what is that argument really about? And I think a lot of those conversations, they’re quite elitist in who gets access to our collections and what that means. And I think for communities who are never ever going to have that physical kind of access, those digital versions, just like it was for me back in 2000, those are the real things. So I think we need to start thinking about the value of the digital in a new way.

Aylin Malcolm  7:33  

I love that so much. And that brings me to one of my favorite lines from your article “Digital Manuscripts as Sites of Touch,” where you write that on Instagram images that contain curatorial hands — the hands of curators — “act as tactile and haptic intermediaries to materially disenfranchised audiences.” So while many people never have the opportunity to touch a physical manuscript, the digital medium allows for real and imagined tactile engagement with rare books. Maybe if we could come back to that question of sound as well. Is there a role for sound in digital manuscript studies?

Johanna Green  8:08  

I absolutely think so. I’ve had to come back to it really, quite strongly this year with teaching remotely is thinking: how can I give my students access to those things that perhaps you take for granted in a reading room? So I’ve been kind of playing around with that and taking inspiration from Dot Porter’s video orientations at Schoenberg and capturing those my students so they can see items being moved in real time, but then also putting the microphone right next to the object and stripping out the audio. And they don’t know this yet but they’ll have those sounds to listen to first before they see the images, because you can get so much information from that. The sound of an enormous gradual page being turned is not the same as a very tiny book of hours page being turned. It’s really made me realize that materiality in this kind of distance scenario that we’re working on right now, it’s not something we can easily access, because it’s not necessarily what we’ve captured digitally. We’ve prioritized text for a really good reason. But we haven’t really gotten a way with capturing the materiality of an object. A lot of the places that I go to for that, it’s my own personal library of images that I’ve collected, or it’s where or the people have shared, and most of that is social media. And actually, that’s probably where collections have shared those items as well, because they’ve started to take those kind of DIY digitization images as part of their outreach and engagement. The issue with that is that we don’t really treat that like, I suppose, a research resource. We’re not adding it to catalogs. If you looked up a digitized item, there wouldn’t be this link to that post on social media or anything like that. But I’m certainly using that more as primary source material now than I’ve ever done before and I think we need to really think about that. Because, for me at the moment, Special Collections catalog it serves textual scholars, not book history scholars. I think one of the few catalogs that I’ve seen that really speak to the things that I need, apart from Schoenberg where you have the images that you can download and the videos, it’s actually one from Glasgow. It’s our Incunabula Project. So we’ve got a collection of over about 1000 incunabula, at Glasgow, and the catalog that they produced for that project has copies’ specific details, and a couple of example images. And the fact that you can search those copies’ specific details is kind of brilliant. But of course, it’s for a very specific collection. And then how do you integrate that, within other catalogs is always the question.

Aylin Malcolm  10:35  

I think that’s so interesting, in terms of this sense that you make a social media post to engage the public and to encourage them to go to the catalog and look at the manuscript a little bit more carefully. It’s very rarely in the opposite direction. It’s very rarely treating those social media posts like an archive in themselves.

Johanna Green  10:52  

Yeah. And I think we’re kind of missing a trick with this as well, in terms of the resources that we produce, because I’ve never really thought of social media as being edutainment, I think it has a proper educational value. And of course, you have projects that exist already that have started to notice this shift in image collection by researchers. So we have the DIY digitization project at Oxford a couple of years ago that encouraged researchers to upload the items that they take and of images they were researching, and particularly for items are digitized, of course, then you’ve got a whole repository of images to look up. But what do you do with that data after that? You know, how do you manage it and bring it together?

[Music: Shane Ivers, “The Medieval Banquet,” CC BY 4.0]

Thinking right back to that first manuscript that I looked at, the “Turning the Pages,” materiality was totally embedded in that. It’s not in a way we particularly enjoy now. We think we look at it and think it’s really dated, but it was turning the pages, right. It wasn’t just clicking through images. The page moved. It moved artificially, but it moved. And in 2000, I thought that was really, really cool. And actually, some of the earlier turning the page technology like that, they do include sound. It sounds like, kind of, Star Trek doors opening. Like paper moving against each other, it’s so artificial, and yet, they’ve included it for a reason. And it reminded me of a project that happened between Glasgow and Malaga 13 to 20 years ago coming up. It’s their Corpus of Late Scientific Prose. And when you go on to this project page, which now to our eyes, it looks quite dated, you could probably date it quite easily from the way that it looks. But once you go into it, the manuscripts there appear on a shelf, and you click on their spines in order to access the manuscript viewer. There was obviously a step to artificially, for sure, but to convey some sense of the materiality of a collection and an item back then, that we now don’t do. The title of it is amazing, because it’s animated, so little hand comes out and puts its quill and ink apart and writes it out. And every time it gets to a rubricated letter, it changes and goes to the red ink.

Caitlin Postal  13:03  

I think that I’ve used that site, actually.

Johanna Green  13:06  

I just love it. There’s an element of play there that I kind of like, but there is also a sense of, why wouldn’t we do this if we could? And we learn so much more, even about an individual item, for being able to see it with its whole materiality. That’s certainly true for collection.

Caitlin Postal  13:23  

I think, to that point, maybe you could share with us what some of the tools or projects for digital manuscript studies are really exciting to you right now, or what types of things you’d like to see developed in the future. Hint hint, graduate students listening to this.

Johanna Green  13:37  

I think one of the most transformative things for me to see over the past couple of years is actually two projects. And my students will be absolutely sick of hearing about both of them, but I’m going to mention them again here. Bill Endres’s 3d manuscripts of the St. Chad Gospels, and Dot Porter’s VisColl, visual collation modeler. Because both of them essentially do what we can’t do in any other way in that they help us visualize the materiality of items and how pages are put together in a way that’s usable for research. Bill’s project kind of blew my mind when I first saw it, like a 3d image of a manuscript, you kidding me? One of the best things about it, when I saw him present, was that he talked about the idea of producing this image that creates almost like a 3d mesh onto which you’re overlaying this digital image. And he printed out this 3d mesh. He 3d printed out this and brought it along to the conference. I think it was the first 3d printed item I’d ever touched. One of the things you can see on it are all these kind of swirls of the mesh. It looks like topography. It looks like a map, but it tells you huge amounts of information. Because where those like circles are really tight, that gives you information about kind of the conservation of the manuscript and where pigment loss might be possible, for example, but it also makes you think about the item in a completely different way. As much as I’m all about the entire object, I don’t think even I have thought about kind of crouching down at open book level and looking at the open book from the point of view where the page is flat straight out in front of me and I can see its topography. I think with Bill, he started to drop those images into virtual reality and we were able to get him over to Glasgow in 2019. This was about two months after I’d been diagnosed and had surgeries, so it’s the first time I’d been back onto campus. But it was amazing for that moment to experience these things in 3d. And I think a big part of my soul has always essentially wanted to be part of the book, you know, to walk along the top of the letters and experience what that’s like. I essentially got to do it that day, because, you know, I zoomed in too fast and essentially face planted a manuscript and it was the best thing ever, it was great. But then you start to think about, okay, if those images are in virtual reality, what else can we do with them? And that kind of opens up huge amounts of possibility for me. So I think, again, this kind of goes back to that intersection for me between public access and teaching and research. A big thing for me, especially with my students is being able to explain to them a process in book production or book history that they don’t just learn about and read about and then regurgitate back, but they could experience in some way. So a couple of years ago, Glasgow invested in virtual reality,and got money for a project that essentially started to develop virtual reality teaching apps. There was a competition, you could bid to develop an app. So my idea was to do a virtual printing press so the students could virtually embody and live this experience. They could put pieces of type into a form, they could transfer it to the printing press, and then whatever mistakes they’ve made in terms of putting the ink on or the letters, that came out in the results, and they download that as a PDF. And we’re just at the point of testing that with our students now, which is fantastic, and delivering that testing over Zoom as well. And it relates back to the stuff with Bill as well, because you’ve got those images. Think about what you can’t do with the original object in a collection. And one of the big things for me goes back to that collation idea. How do you teach collation, that’s really tricky. And what you really want to do is to get a student to pull apart an entire book and see how it’s put together, and put it back together and move it around and see how it changes. Of course you can’t do that with an original object, I’d be absolutely thrown out. It also opens up those opportunities for different members of the public to experience these things as well. And of course, at the moment in Glasgow, the Burrell Collection, which has a huge collection of medieval objects, it’s closed for redevelopment. And a big part of that is to start to think how do we use AR and VR technologies in that space to connect younger audiences. So families and under-fives with really quite complex objects. This technology is becoming more and more familiar in those spaces. And I think there’s a lot for us to learn and to apply to Archives and Special Collections as well.

[Music: Alexander Nakarada, “Marked,” CC BY 4.0]

Aylin Malcolm  18:26  

So you have a lot of experience speaking beyond our discipline. You’re trained as a medievalist, but you now work in Information Studies, you work a lot with the library. Public engagement has been a core component of your work for a long time. I wanted to know, with us being in November 2020, a time of great turmoil around the world, why does medieval studies matter today? Why does this kind of work matter for people beyond our field?

Johanna Green  18:51  

I think in terms of our collections, it’s really important I think, to me, that our collections are accessible to the entire community because they sit within the center of our community. I think about that a lot with Glasgow, our university is in the West End, and we’ve got this amazing collection sitting on top of the library that most people don’t know about. And yet, it’s part of our shared history. It’s part of the issues with the history that we collect. Because there are obviously massive gaps in the things that we collect, and the folks that we don’t represent. To use a kind of term from museum studies, that there’s an opportunity for us to make meaning with these items. That’s really important. But we’re not always great at doing that, because we don’t have permanent exhibition spaces. So getting in to see those items is particularly complicated. And I think you mentioned before, a link to my article was talking about the use of curatorial hands. I think that’s the thing if you see curatorial hands and you’re putting your own hands on top of it, you can kind of put yourself in that situation. And the big question there is whose hands are being shown? Before I went off on sick leave two years ago, I was collecting those images on Instagram. 99.9% white hands. So the white gloves are still on. And this should surprise absolutely none of us really, but we’re replicating all those inequalities that exist in our collections in the way we do it digitally. We’re at a point where we can make our items more accessible than ever before. But we have to think really critically about what it is that we’re doing here. And who we’re giving access to, who we’re prioritizing. Who should we be prioritizing. 

Caitlin Postal  20:20  

I think that, for me, a question that comes up out of that is that balance between, does the item or object matter because it by itself is meaningful? Or then does it matter because we have experiences with it that are meaningful to us, or to our communities, or to our relationships with each other? And with the past? And I don’t quite have an answer to that. Because I think, traditionally, it’s “this object by itself is meaningful because of what it is or what it’s done or who it represents.” I don’t know that I necessarily buy that. I’m a big fan of reworking the canon or just throwing it out into Puget Sound.

Johanna Green  20:55  

And I think that’s an important point, because, you know, I’ve just recently been teaching kind of objects as evidence and material culture theory with my students. And of course, a big proponent of that is objects are completely useless if they’re not engaging with the body. That’s the point of an object, right? But that’s the problem with all our collections is that the people who get to engage with that object are really, really select. This comes back to me again, and again, I think, because I’m so interested in what happens in those exhibition spaces when we see those items is that they are completely removed from the way we’re meant to engage with them. Particularly with books, you know, you’re looking at something behind glass, it might be in a language that you don’t speak, it might be from a culture that you know nothing about, how are you meant to understand everything, the complexity of that object. And we know how complicated that is because we can research a single manuscript for an entire lifetime and still not have all the answers and still not be done. Andrew Prescott‘s talked a lot before about immersive technologies, and not just VR, but things like conductive ink, and he kind of got me into this, this is entirely his fault. Essentially, conductive ink is exactly what it sounds like: you touch it and then it produces something. Your touch completes a circuit. So you could embed it with a projection or an image or a sound or something like that. Rather than putting our items onto a kind of digital screen for people to turn the pages in front of, are there other ways we could have them engage with the materiality of our objects? I think, a couple of years ago, at Leicester, a PhD student there developed an exhibition where you actually got to taste and smell the things that went into producing a manuscript. And I think at one point, I talked about it so much that our Special Collections librarian came to me and was like, “Don’t lick the manuscripts, Johanna, okay?” Like genuinely concerned that I might just try it one day.

Caitlin Postal  22:57  

I think that this brings us back to things that you were saying earlier about social media, where we don’t have physical exhibitions right now so a lot of the exhibitions that are happening are virtual and remote and distant. But then social media curates that at all times, not simply when we’re in a pandemic. And I love your 2018 piece about the haptic experience via social media, I basically tell everybody about it. But thinking about how social networking makes space for that kind of informal curation as meaningful for both the person who is posting it, as well as the people who are following them, who are interacting, who come across it by chance in their exploration feed, where they might not otherwise find like the museum’s digital exhibition that you have to like, type in, “Oh, here’s the website to the museum, I have to know about it already, and then experience it.”

Johanna Green  23:47  

I think one of the things is that we don’t really know a lot about the communities that engage with those posts online. Individual collections perhaps might, but you know I wrote that entire article being like, “Yeah, this is totally a thing that’s really meaningful, it’s really impactful.” But we don’t actually have the data from members of the public that say it’s been impactful for them. I’m inferring that from what it’s been like for me, but I’m coming at it from a completely different point of view. So I’m really glad that you enjoyed the article, but I’m also massively aware it has its limits. And I think this is something that we can do. We can collect this data, bring it together, and actually learn what is the value of these types of posts, because actually, until we know that, we can’t really use it, and that work’s still to be done.

Aylin Malcolm  24:31  

Speaking of future work, what are your plans for your Schoenberg Institute fellowship? And how has that been going?

Johanna Green  24:37  

The point of that fellowship actually, was to collect some of that user data. So to find out what folks were feeling about the ways in which we share our items on social media and what brought them there and what they enjoyed and what they didn’t enjoy, etc. And to perhaps do some kind of co-creation in asking them well, what would you want to see that we don’t already do? And trying out different types of content, using Schoenberg’s collections based on that. So that may well still go ahead remotely. It will be demonstrably less fun for me because I wouldn’t get in to see the collection, but it could still go ahead. But of course, those issues of the pandemic continue. And I mentioned it before so I’ll mention it again, but I’m in remission from cancer. So actually, a lot of folks might listen to this and think “why are you talking about your personal life when we’re talking about manuscripts,” but you can’t separate the two things out. We are one complete person. So, for me, that has a continuing impact on what I’m able to do and how far I’m able to plan into the future. But with any luck — touch wood — at some point in the next two years, I might get out to Philly to look through their collections and do this stuff, which will be fantastic. Fingers crossed.

Caitlin Postal  25:54  

Thanks for listening to Coding Codices, a podcast by the Digital Medievalist Postgraduate Subcommittee, and thank you, Johanna, for sharing your time with Aylin and myself. You can find Joanna online at @Codicologist on Twitter and @UofGcodicologist on Instagram.

Aylin Malcolm  26:09  

You can also catch up on Coding Codices on our website and SoundCloud or get in touch at [email protected]

Credits

Music:

• Theme music: TeknoAXE, “Chiptune Nobility” (CC BY 4.0).
• Shane Ivers, “The Medieval Banquet” (CC BY 4.0)
• Alexander Nakarada, “Marked” (CC BY 4.0).

Graphics:

• Featured Image: Depiction of Matthew the Evangelist in the Lindisfarne Gospels, British Library, Cotton MS Nero D IV, f. 25v, https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/lindisfarne-gospels; ed. by Tessa Gengnagel.

“I honestly don’t think that mass digitization is the answer. It’s acknowledging the loss.”

About this Episode

Recorded 24 July 2021. Edited by Tessa Gengnagel.

Guest: Mateusz Fafinski

Content: In this episode, Mateusz Fafinski discusses his work on the theory of digital humanities, in particular his notion of facsimile narratives and the nature of historical sources in the digital sphere, as well as his work on the adaptations of the post-Roman worlds in early medieval Britain and remediations of the past in computer games. He is an assistant lecturer at Freie Universität Berlin and published his book Roman Infrastructure in Early Medieval Britain: The Adaptations of the Past in Text and Stone in March 2021.

Resources and Further Reading

Mateusz Fafinski, “Facsimile Narratives: Researching the Past in the Age of Digital Reproduction,” in: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (2021), fqab017, DOI: 10.1093/llc/fqab017.

Mateusz Fafinski, Roman Infrastructure in Early Medieval Britain: The Adaptations of the Past in Text and Stone, Amsterdam University Press, 2021, DOI: 10.5117/9789463727532.

Anita Radini et al., “Medieval Women’s Early Involvement in Manuscript Production Suggested by Lapis Lazuli Identification in Dental Calculus,” in: Science Advances 5/1 (2019), DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aau7126.

Lou Safra, Coralie Chevallier, Julie Grèzes & Nicolas Baumard, “Tracking Historical Changes in Trustworthiness Using Machine Learning Analyses of Facial Cues in Paintings,” in: Nature Communications 11/4728 (2020), DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-18566-7 [editor’s note 30 September 2020].

Jerzy Topolski, Metodologia historii, Warszawa: Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, ²1984.

Harvey Whitehouse et al., “Complex Societies Precede Moralizing Gods Throughout World History,” in: Nature 568 (2019), 226–229, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1043-4 [retracted 7 July 2021].

Transcript

automated transcription by <https://otter.ai>, manually corrected by Tessa Gengnagel

Tessa Gengnagel 0:14
Hello and welcome to Coding Codices, a podcast from the Digital Medievalist Postgraduate Subcommittee. My name is Tessa Gengnagel and I will be hosting this episode for which I am joined by Mateusz Fafinski. Mateusz Fafinski is an assistant lecturer at Freie Universität Berlin. Previously, he was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Lausanne, and a Text Technologies postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. He’s both a medievalist and a digital humanist and he works on the adaptations of the post Roman worlds, the nature of historical sources in the digital sphere, early medieval Latin manuscripts, as well as the role of urban space in early medieval societies. I should also mention that in March this year, 2021, his book, Roman Infrastructure and Early Medieval Britain: The Adaptations of the Past in Text and Stone was published with Amsterdam University Press – and I’m sure we talk about that as well. But first of all, let me welcome you to the podcast and thank you for taking the time.

Mateusz Fafinski 1:11
Well thank you for inviting me, I’m actually very excited to be here; I mean, being interviewed for a podcast is a new experience for me, and I’m really looking forward to our discussion today.

Tessa Gengnagel 1:28
What drew you to digital medieval studies in particular? So, was there any key moment that influenced you to go in that direction as well?

Mateusz Fafinski 1:37
My way is not dissimilar to a lot of scholars in our field. I was drawn to the solutions that are possible through that methodology. I had some background, non-academic background, in data analysis. And I was interested in: How can I put this into practice when it comes to history, in this case, my PhD project, which dealt with late antique and early medieval Britain? And I worked a lot with charters and I was interested in: Hey, what can we do using digital cartography to map those places? And can we in a different way then think about spheres of influence? Can we, in a different way, map things like regions? And it worked. And because it worked, I was like, there is a huge potential there, I want to do more. But I think that first experience of being drawn to a solution fast made me also think very quickly that I am actually interested in how it works theoretically and methodologically. Because this is what I was missing at the beginning. Maybe not all of those digital solutions are equal, maybe we need to think a little bit about: How does it all work? And then I discovered a huge field of scholars who are doing the same thing and this has been my way ever since.

Tessa Gengnagel 3:11
Maybe this would be a good opportunity to talk about one of your articles a bit more in depth which deals with the theoretical implications of digital humanities work – also in the context of medieval studies but not just in medieval studies; because you are concerned with digitized medieval manuscripts but that is just one example of what you call digital facsimiles. And the publication that I mean is Facsimile Narratives: Researching the Past in the Age of Digital Reproduction and it was published this year in the journal Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. I’m going to sum up a little bit of what you say and then pose a question. So in your critique of digital humanities scholarship, you argue against two concepts if I understood that correctly. The first is the concept of an inherent neutrality of databases and the second is the positivistic model of digital humanities inquiry. And as an example for this kind of unreflected, let’s say, simplistic scholarship that leads to questionable results, you cite two articles, one of which was published in Nature and the other in Nature Communications. So these are from scientists from other disciplines publishing something on historical materials and questions. And actually, when I was looking them up, I saw that the article in Nature was retracted on 7 July, so there were definitely major issues with that even from a purely methodological, statistical point of view. And the article in Nature Communications also has a note attached, stating that the editors are aware of criticisms and considering further steps. So these are clearly questionable articles. But my question is, how prevalent would you say is that kind of scholarship within the digital humanities themselves? And of course that depends on your definition of digital humanities. Does it matter not just what we are arguing against, but also: Who are we arguing against?

Mateusz Fafinski 4:59
So the answer to your last question is obviously it matters. But I think there’s a number of problems here. One is digital humanities is bigger than we think. I think one of the problems that we have, we tend to think we are this field and we are fine, but sort of the access to the field is open to everybody, and it should stay that way. And the field is constantly expanding. So that’s one thing. The other thing is, the problem is not the inherent narratives that are embedded in our data and also in our methods. The problem is whether we acknowledge them or not. The digital humanists, no matter what their background is, have an obligation to work with the narrative in their data. And the way I’m trying to methodologically argue that is that the database and a corpus are essentially a genre. And to think about them as just an objective collection of data points will always, and I’m not afraid to say that, will always lead to – at some point down the line – to bad results. And those two examples I cite, I cite because there that way down the line is extremely short. But I think it’s a danger for all of us in the whole field of digital humanities. And this is where I think medieval studies and manuscript studies in particular are of great help. Essentially, what we visit on a website– there’s not only facsimiles of the medieval manuscript, it’s also a facsimile of the catalog structure. And that catalog is no longer accessible directly to us when we visit that website. So that’s an example of what I call a inexplicit narrative in the paper. And then when somebody comes to this collection, for example, somebody who wants to work with it but doesn’t have a background in manuscript studies, they’re not aware of this narrative immediately. Because how could they know that this is actually a collection structured according to a catalogue published at the end of the 19th century, which, for example, has chosen to put particular manuscripts in particular regions because this is what they thought, and the scholarship has moved 120 years since then? “Digital facsimile” is not a term that I have invented but I argue for a very substantial broadening of its definition. That it’s not only a photo, or a photographic reproduction, that is then put digital, but that digital facsimiles comprise all kinds of digitized historical data. And then when they are aggregated together to form databases of different form, they, on the one hand, take their analog narratives with them, but they also create new narratives. And I see it as a huge challenge for digital humanities in the next 5, 10 years. How are we going to face this? Because I think there will be more and more studies like the ones that I criticize that, having the best intentions to work with the newest tools and newest solutions applied to heritage data, will make mistakes because they have not faced those narratives.

Tessa Gengnagel 8:28
How does the bias relate to the narrativity? So isn’t there an issue with bias that goes beyond acknowledging that there is a bias and which disqualifies certain data, for example, for certain kinds of analysis?

Mateusz Fafinski 8:41
I definitely don’t think that the solution is just: “Hey, let’s acknowledge the narrative and then we’re fine.” We have to face the narrative. And facing it does not mean just saying: “Oh, it’s there.” It means also dealing with it. And that means also dealing with some – I’m a historian – with some nasty past in our field, and some nasty biases that are, for example, present in those old interpretations of, let’s say, late 19th, early 20th century, that then, sadly, quite often, without a reflection, get replicated in their digital form. What’s being chosen to be digitized– this is an extremely powerful decision. And it’s a decision that hugely shapes the field of digital humanities. It was very, very visible in those last 18 pandemic months. I taught manuscript studies every semester and I suddenly found myself extremely limited because I could only show my students those manuscripts that are digitized, and there is a lot of them. But there’s still a number of very important cases which are not digitized or not easily accessible. This is very visible if you try to teach global manuscript studies. You create the corpus slightly differently; different kinds of data makes it then into your teaching. So when I talk about facing the narrative, I’m also talking about additional biases that are then introduced when we work with those collections without, let’s say, acknowledging the narratives in them. But we also bring our biases and our narratives in there, so it’s sort of piles on, it layers up as it goes. That means we need to think a lot about the conclusions that we draw from the results of, for example, studies that are being done on those collections and on this kind of data.

Tessa Gengnagel 10:52
What can scholars do to counteract this aside from asking for certain objects to be digitized? Is it something, I don’t know, I’m just wondering if there’s anything…

Mateusz Fafinski 11:04
I think there are two things: One is listen to the archivists. I think this is a huge problem in our field. A lot of the work that we’re doing now, the archivists have done in the 90s. We should learn from what they say and what they said. And the second thing is, what can we do? I honestly– it’s going to sound a bit heretical, but I honestly don’t think that mass digitization is the answer. It’s acknowledging the loss. I talk a lot about the loss in the paper because loss is an inherent part of digital humanist practice and of digitization as well. Digital humanities are a very positive field, you go into thinking, it’s like, we’re going to discover new things because we’re going to gain things. But we’re also going to lose a lot. Because the process of digitization leads to loss of certain features. It’s selective, not everything can be digitized. And I think the first step is acknowledging this loss. And I cannot stress how powerful an acknowledgement is. A power of a conclusion is very different if you say at the beginning: “Hey, I am fully aware that, for example, the data I’m working with does not include this, this and this.” This is the fight against this pseudo-positivism which tends to go the direction of: “Oh, yes, this is a digital solution, so it’s amazing. It covers all the bases.” It actually doesn’t. The digital solution, or the digital analysis, is in no way fuller than the analog one, it’s just different. It allows us to see different things. So to answer your question, what can we do apart from calling for digitization of other collections or of now marginalized objects or artifacts, which we should definitely do, is to try to include in our studies and our experiments those invisible or hardly visible narratives and see what happens then. For example, when we work on spread of different manuscript technologies, let’s try to think what happens if we in our qualitative models, because they are the way of dealing with this, if we include the fact that we don’t know or don’t have in the digitized form, to the same extent, the manuscript technologies that are non-Western.

Tessa Gengnagel 13:39
You mentioned in a footnote the work of a Polish historian by the name of Topolski and his work at the intersection of cybernetics and historical studies. So another direction, but I was wondering if you could elaborate on that a little bit more, because you say that his work was groundbreaking but it’s still largely unknown in the West. And I’m personally interested in that because I also have the feeling that there’s a lot of literature from cyberneticists and also philosophers of science from that time, from the 70s, from the 80s, that would be very relevant for us now and should be more well-known, probably.

Mateusz Fafinski 14:15
This is very true. So Topolski was a Polish historian and also a methodologist. It was very much a thing in Eastern and Central Europe because of the political system. Marxism saw philosophy of history as one of the central issues. Let’s be now very frank: Because of that, a lot of really bad books were published, which tried to quote Lenin in order to solve methodological conundra. But at the same time, a lot of very good books were published in the DDR, in Czechoslovakia, in Poland and in the Soviet Union and in other countries of the East block. Topolski published his first edition of Methodology of History in 1966. And already there building on the works of Polish and Soviet cybernetics, he theorized something that we could call digital history. He didn’t have access to a computer, he was just thinking about, okay, so if we use cybernetics to an analysis of historical sources, what could happen? And in the first edition, it’s actually a very short chapter, and then there’s another one in 1984 where it’s a bit bigger. But we tend to forget all the work that was done behind the Iron Curtain when it comes to digital humanities. In the Soviet Union, in the 70s, in the 60s, there were pioneer university courses in what we would today call digital analysis of historical sources. They called it cybernetics in history. Those are fascinating endeavours that are very difficult to access, because well, they are not digitized. And they’re also written in languages that are not well-known in the West. Topolski has been translated into English but it’s not the best translation; I forgot the year it was published, I think somewhere in the 80s, and I don’t think it does justice to the book. At the same time, and this is something that has to be mentioned, especially by somebody who keeps on talking about seeing narratives, those books are also very often permeated with problematic statements that were inserted in those books very often because of the political climate in which they were written. So we have to read them a little bit against the grain. Because not every footnote to Hegel there is put there because the author actually wanted to put it, sometimes they also had to put it. But this does not invalidate the fact that we would do ourselves a huge favor if we made a push to translate more of those works into English, German, French, Italian, and read them a little bit more, because we would find that a lot of the theoretical reflection that we want to make has been made already.

Tessa Gengnagel 17:25
We haven’t really talked a lot about your book and your research from a medieval studies point of view, so I wanted to ask: Why did you write about Roman infrastructure in early medieval– well, where’s the title, I lost it…

Mateusz Fafinski 17:38
Britain. [laughs]

Tessa Gengnagel 17:38
Britain. [laughs] I didn’t want to say anything wrong because, I mean, always got to be a bit careful when you’re talking about Britain…

Mateusz Fafinski 17:46
Yes. [laughs] So, essentially, with my different scholarly hat on, although it is also, to an extent, the same scholarly hat, I’m hugely interested how societies in the past deal with what they got from the past before them. And I’ve analyzed this on the basis of, how did the societies in early medieval Britain and the polities there deal with what was left by the Romans – and I don’t like the word, actually, I’m using this as a mental shortcut, but it’s not about what’s being left because there are questions of continuity and discontinuity there. And infrastructure in my book is understood extremely broadly and this is an understanding that I bring, sort of, from the field of urban studies as well. Infrastructures can be material and immaterial and, for example, charters or manuscripts and how to produce them are also a form of infrastructure. They have a huge impact. And there are also symbolic infrastructures, there are ways of thinking that are also form of an infrastructure, and I think it’s something also with a huge contemporary resonance. So in the book, I’m interested a lot in: What happened with the urban spaces? What happened with those symbolic infrastructures? And how things that were connected with the Roman past could be used to make contemporary arguments or contemporary gains. So in other words, how could you prop up a polity in 6th and 7th century by using those Roman infrastructures. And a huge role in this is played by charters. So those forms of documents were – to simplify it a lot -: Somebody gives something to somebody else. And those could be material things. But those could be also immaterial things like privileges. Past is an extremely powerful resource and we see it today a lot in the current political discussions. And this is what this book is about: What can you do with your past?

Tessa Gengnagel 19:57
What I find so interesting about this is that it not only resonates in current political discussions, like you say, but also in pop culture. So the first thing that I actually thought of when I read your book title was, I don’t know if you’ve played it, but Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla which is set in early medieval Britain in the 9th century. And one interesting part of that is that there are a lot of Roman relics, monuments, statues. It evokes an image of Rome in decay and planted in the green British landscape among sheep, basically. They made a design choice to include those Roman remnants and actually in the settlement that you build as a player, there’s also a, let’s say, fanboy of Roman culture where you can collect several items from Roman culture and bring them to him and then you get some rewards. And, I don’t know, have you played that? Do you have any thoughts on that?

Mateusz Fafinski 20:49
I have played it. I think it’s a problematic game. One of the chief issues that I want to sort of bring to the fore in the book is that we should get rid of this easy continuity/discontinuity dichotomy which I think Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla very strongly tries to entrench. So there is this Roman past that’s planted in the idyllic Roman landscape and it’s there and it decays. And because it decays, it creates this very powerful visual image. And this is rooted in a piece of literature, actually, which is an old English poem called The Ruin which I also discuss in the book in which the author visits what probably are the ruins of Roman Bath. And they wax lyrically about how the world built by giants now stands there and decays and nothing is happening with it and how it reflects the human conditions as well. It’s a poem, it’s not a historical document. It’s a great poem. It’s one of the most powerful pieces of English literature, I would say. But it’s a poem. And I just want to remark very briefly that I don’t think computer games have to be authentic. I think they should not spread falsehoods and this is a problem, especially with the Assassin’s Creed games, because this is the question of where do we draw the line. But their job, so to speak, is not to be authentic in this sense; but there is a question to what extent they have to incorporate this. I have this saying that I keep on repeating that every news outlet and every game developer should have a resident medieval historian. It would only do them well. But back to this dichotomy between continuity and discontinuity. So one of the things that the book tries to argument for is that there was an organic evolution of those infrastructures. So yes, there were Roman ruins spread in various places. But they were used in various ways. Dismantling a Roman building, for example, is actually a very powerful act of reuse. It requires actually substantial resources to do so. And we know of cases in Britain where this happened, I’m not trying to say that there were no places in early medieval Britain where there was a Roman ruin in the middle of the field, because there are ones like that even today. But ruins are not inactive resources, they also could have played a role and in many cases those Roman infrastructures– I use the term, they adapted themselves out after Empire, those polities and those societies. So because they used those ruins and those remnants in various ways, at some point, they stopped resembling what they originally were. And we tend to think about it as decay. Because, oh, a Roman road is no longer used as a road, it’s used as a boundary marker. But it actually means that it’s still being used. It’s just used in a different function. It plays a different role. For me, the most powerful example of this comes actually not from Britain but from southern France. And if you go to the wonderful, beautiful city of Arles in Provence, you will see this amazingly preserved Roman amphitheater. And the way we see it today is a product of 19th century, early 19th century, rebuilding, if I remember correctly around 1832, because in the medieval times inside the amphitheater, there were houses built and there were three churches and there was a little town in it, in which the Roman amphitheater lived on, just as something else. And if I want one thing to be taken from my book, it’s to appreciate those medieval reuses, to think about them as a next stage in life of those monuments and those infrastructures where they’re still being used, they’re still being important for the local community. And there’s something powerful and very beautiful about it.

Tessa Gengnagel 25:16
It would be good for us to know more about how people adapted to their environments in the past, if we have to do that going forward in the future. I think that brings me to my last question, so: What are you working on at the moment? And also, is there anything you would like to explore in the future?

Mateusz Fafinski 25:32
Now I’m involved in a number of projects. One of them which hopefully soon will have an alpha release is a manuscript project with the Stanford team called Medieval Networks of Memory, where we work on 13th century mortuary rolls. It’s essentially a medieval Twitter feed, in which when somebody dies, a role is being stitched and taken by somebody called the breviator from monastery to monastery and people there write little medieval “tweets” (scare quotes) in which they say: “Oh, we pray for the soul of that deceased abbess or that deceased abbot, please pray for us.” And sometimes put other things there. So it’s a project that tries to analyze the scribes of those rolls, of two of them in the initial stage, to build an interactive map where you can explore them, and to also ask important questions – we’re back to hidden narratives or inexplicit narratives – for example: Who of those scribes were women? Because the default is very often: This was all written by men; I’m very interested in female literacy in early medieval Europe and in high medieval period. And sort of refocusing the way we analyze scribal hands and remodeling the way we think about female scribes. And there are interesting discoveries coming up and there are interesting discoveries in the last two years being made. You might have heard about the study two years ago about the tooth being found in a female skeleton with traces of lapis lazuli, which is a pigment used in medieval manuscripts. Those kinds of things, I think, stimulate that conversation. So that’s one of the projects. The second one which is more to do with late antiquity is thinking about the transformations of urban space in light of late antique monasticism, which is hopefully going to be a book which I’m writing with a dear friend, Jakob Riemenschneider. And I continue working on another now methodological article in digital humanities in which I’m interested in looking at scripts and hands and scribal activities as computational models and thinking what we can learn from sort of both sides, what we can learn from manuscript studies in that respect, and what we can learn from computational approach. I’ve mentioned that very briefly but I am hugely interested in the application of qualitative models in digital humanities. I think that the dichotomy between quantitative and qualitative is false, I think they have to play together. And we have to sort of re-up a little bit the way we think about qualitative models, and: How can we apply them and digital humanities more and better?

Tessa Gengnagel 28:30
This sounds extremely interesting and fascinating and I’m definitely looking forward to reading all of your future scholarship and work. With that I thank you for joining me. Thank you, Mateusz.

Mateusz Fafinski 28:43
Thank you very much. I’ve enjoyed it hugely. And thank you again for inviting me.

Tessa Gengnagel 28:48
I’m glad you enjoyed it. Yeah, some information for our listeners at the end. As always, you can find everything you need to know on our website, which is podcast.digitalmedievalist.org. You can also find us on Twitter as @digitalmedieval, or email us at [email protected] and I hope everyone has a nice day and stay safe and stay tuned.

Credits

Music:

• Intro: TeknoAXE, “Chiptune Nobility” (CC BY 4.0).
• Interludes: TeknoAXE, “Lowly Tavern Bard – Fall is Upon Us” (CC BY 4.0)
• Outro: Random Mind, “King’s Feast” (CC0).

Graphics:

• Featured Image: The amphitheatre of Arles in the 18th century, postcard of old engraving, scanned by Robert Schediwy, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ArlesGuibert.JPG; ed. by Tessa Gengnagel.
• Screenshots of Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla taken by Tessa Gengnagel.

“I just love it when an English professor comes to me with a certain gleam in their eye and tells me that they’re going to problematize what it is that I do.”

About this Episode

Recorded 25 March 2021. Edited by James Harr and Aylin Malcolm.

Guests: J. Eric Ensley and Matthew Kirschenbaum

Content: In this episode, Caitlin and James talk with Eric Ensley and Matthew Kirschenbaum about the archive, both digital and material. Eric Ensley is a curator of rare books and maps at the University of Iowa. He received his PhD in English from Yale University in 2021 and holds an MLS from the University of North Carolina. Among his current projects is a digital edition of a Piers Plowman manuscript held in the Beinecke library, which he is co-authoring with Ian Cornelius of Loyola-Chicago. Matthew Kirschenbaum is a professor of English and Digital Studies at the University of Maryland. He is the author of Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination and Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. His next book, Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage, will be published in the fall by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Resources and Further Reading

Fragmentarium, <https://fragmentarium.ms/>.

Michael Gavin, “How to Think about EEBO,” in: Textual Cultures 11/1–2 (2017), 70–105, <https://www.jstor.org/stable/26662793>.

Peter C. Herman, “EEBO and Me: An Autobiographical Response to Michael Gavin, ‘How to Think About EEBO’,” in: Textual Cultures 13/1 (2020), 207–216, <https://www.jstor.org/stable/26954245>.

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021 (forthcoming).

Terry Nguyen, “NFTs, The Digital Bits of Anything That Sell for Millions of Dollars, Explained,” in: Vox (11 March 2021), <https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22313936/non-fungible-tokens-crypto-explained>.

Dot Porter, “The Uncanny Valley and the Ghost in the Machine: A Discussion of Analogies for Thinking about Digitized Medieval Manuscripts,” paper presented at the University of Kansas Digital Humanities Seminar, 17 September 2018, <http://www.dotporterdigital.org/the-uncanny-valley-and-the-ghost-in-the-machine-a-discussion-of-analogies-for-thinking-about-digitized-medieval-manuscripts/>.

C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, “Trip Report: SGML ’92, Danvers, Mass.,” 30 October 1992, <http://cmsmcq.com/1992/edr2.html>.

Bridget Whearty, “Invisible in ‘The Archive’: Librarians, Archivists, and The Caswell Test,” presentation at the 53rd International Congress for Medieval Studies, 11 May 2018, <https://orb.binghamton.edu/english_fac/4>.

The William Blake Archive (1996–present), <http://www.blakearchive.org/>.

Transcript

automated transcription by <https://otter.ai>, manually corrected by James Harr and Tessa Gengnagel

James Harr  0:10
Hello and welcome to Coding Codices, a podcast from the Digital Medievalist Postgraduate Subcommittee. My name is James Harr. 

Caitlin Postal 0:13
And I’m Caitlin Postal. 

James Harr 0:15
Today, the two of us are going to be interviewing Eric Ensley and Matthew Kirschenbaum, as we discuss materiality and digitization.

[MUSIC]

Caitlin Postal  0:36  
Eric Ensley is a curator of rare books and maps at the University of Iowa. He received his PhD in English from Yale University in 2021 and holds an MLS from the University of North Carolina. Among his current projects is a digital edition of a Piers Plowman manuscript held in the Beinecke library, which he is co-authoring with Ian Cornelius of Loyola-Chicago.

James Harr  0:58  
And Matthew Kirschenbaum is a professor of English and Digital Studies at the University of Maryland. His next book, Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage, will be published in the fall by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Caitlin Postal  1:11  
So to get started, we sort of wanted to open this question about the reality of increased digitization. And this is a question for the both of you. So do you perceive that the increase in digitization projects may result in decreased physical examination of archival materials? For example, we know that certain medieval manuscripts have very limited access, for example, Cotton Nero A.x., because digitized photography is available in its stead.

Matthew Kirschenbaum  1:38  
Sure, so I’m not an archivist. I’m not a curator; I don’t have responsibility for collections. So, I can’t answer anything with any authority. But, yeah, I think my sense, my sort of common sense view is that our access is greatly expanded through digital surrogates and digital facsimiles. Certainly, many more people then, who could travel to a physical site or a physical collection, are able to utilize collections’ materials to some degree, whether that, in turn, results in a decrease in actual traffic to the repository, again, I couldn’t say. It’s interesting that in the particular area that I’m interested in — born-digital materials — where you’re working with what are essentially primary source digital objects, so something like an author’s manuscript that only exists as a Word file, often times I’ve still had to travel to the actual institution to work with that digital object on site there, it’s not just up there on the institution’s website.

James Harr  3:03  
No, that certainly does make sense. And we are going to talk about this a little bit more, because I think this is something that both Caitlin and I are interested in — whether the digital surrogate has an effect on interaction with the material. So yes, many of us will still go to the archives and still look at, engage with, the material artifact, but that is not always the case. And so that’s something that we definitely do want to think about a little bit more is whether the digital actually pushes the material away. So Eric, maybe let me kind of focus this question a little bit more for you. How might digitized materials, especially those that are in manuscript studies change the way we do scholarship now and in the future?

Eric Ensley  3:43  
I think that’s a really interesting question. And just to kind of backpedal for just a second to what Matthew said, I can speak from the sort of data that we’ve gathered here at Iowa, and also some data that we’ve seen at Yale that when people see digital objects, it doesn’t necessarily keep them from coming in. In fact, it’s quite the opposite; you end up with people seeing the digital object, and they want to see the actual object. And that happens for a variety of reasons. And I’ll come back to this eventually. But one of those is kind of the out in the ether, you know, Benjamin-ey kind of, you know, people want to see the old object if it’s a medieval manuscript, but then, you know, there’s certain things that we still have trouble capturing with digitization. So for example, you need raking light, if you want to see dry point glosses, and those are incredibly hard to get into a photo, or watermarks are still quite difficult to get photographed correctly. So there’s going to be things in digitization to actually end up driving people to the library, and I don’t think that’s a huge fear for us. I think the other thing that’s interesting, too, is the British Library, which is the kind of example manuscript that we use to start out, they’re such a unique case and they’re increasingly kind of out in left field with their digitization policy in the sense that they charge quite a bit for their images, and then also that they have what are called the special restricted manuscripts that you can’t take photos of, which is a very strange policy. Even without flash, you can’t take photos of those. And so it’s kind of this funneling project where you end up having to pay for the images they’ve made. I think, increasingly, though, libraries have seen this sort of public good of offering images and have taken on the cost to do it themselves. And I imagine we’ll come back to this towards the end with some of the questions that we’re planning to discuss how they relate to say, Digital Scriptorium or EEBO… God forbid.

James Harr  5:39  
Thank you, Eric. 

[MUSIC]

James Harr 5:48
Matthew, you’ve stated that you’re not an archivist, but you certainly work a lot with material and physical objects, and then how they relate to the digital. So the question here is, what is the purpose of distinguishing between the material physical archives and digital archive materials? Why do we need to do that?

Matthew Kirschenbaum  6:05  
So you know, the way that I increasingly think about this is that I tend not to distinguish between them in the sense I mean, certainly there are practical ways in which of course one does, but conceptually, I regard the digital object or the digital surrogate as very much a material entity. This is what I’ve really spent my career writing about — the materiality of the digital. I do think that that materiality performs and functions in some different ways, the cause of an object’s digital pedigree, but it’s not less present. And it’s even, I would go so far as to say not less palpable in its own respect. I think too that, increasingly, there is a kind of fluidity or just a kind of oscillation, a give and take, between what we might sort of commonsensically think of as the physical and the digital. So what we were just talking about a moment ago, digital surrogates for physical materials, what seems essential to me, and this is something I’ve been working on with my own students this semester, is to account for the digital surrogate, as part of the ongoing transmission and reception history for whatever that artifact actually is. So it doesn’t stand apart from the artifactual history of the material objects, it constitutes an extension or a further permutation of that. I always really like the portmanteau word that the Canadian bibliographer Randall McLeod gives us — transformission — how something is transformed as it’s transmitted. And for me the digital is just another moment another instance of transformission in the life cycle of some creative entity.

Eric Ensley  8:15  
That’s such a fantastic response Matthew just gave, and I immediately think of one of the landmark creators of TEI, Goldfarb, when he gave his famous presentation. You know, when was this? Back in 1990-something, where he said, the death of the document. And of course, that has not quite panned out in the way I think that he would have imagined it to and that same talk, he also compared it to a medieval manuscript, what he imagined, this sort of hypertext. So I agree, it enters into this ecosystem. To speak from the librarian/archivist perspective, I think that the role distinguishing between material and physical is perhaps a little different for us in that we all have limited time in the day. The ability to curate different collections takes a tremendous amount of training. And we end up getting to be rather specialized; to be a medieval curator requires a different set of skills than to be a digital curator. And we see this pop up all the time in curation that we enter into different workflows where you know, I can put something I can identify the manuscript and say, “Oh, this is one of our all-star manuscripts that should go into the digitization workflow.” But then once that becomes a TIFF file, or it becomes an XML file, my ability to curate and to preserve that data effectively, you know, I’m mildly competent, but it’s enough to be dangerous. And so really, we have to listen to other people’s expertise in the library just because of the limitations of our training.

Caitlin Postal  9:47 
This is a really great point to transition to our next question, which is in terms of preservation and conservation, and then in our archival experience, how do we think about planned obsolescence and the shifting needs of digital projects? So what can digital archivists and medieval curators currently do? Or what are they doing? What are you doing, for example, Eric, to anticipate something like technological obsolescence or bit rot, which I know, Matthew, you talk a little bit about this in your forthcoming book, Bitstreams. So I think either one of you could speak to this question about bit rot, and digital archival work, technological obsolescence. 

Eric Ensley 10:27 
My experience with bit rot is, I’ve always kind of questioned what the term means; it’s always felt like a kind of amorphous and vague term. Is it the kind of obsolescence that happens because we aren’t keeping up with platforms? Or is it the kind of literal degradation of materials that we see with you know, CD-ROMs breaking down, magnetic tapes eventually breaking down. It kind of seems to come to encompass both and how people talk about it from time to time. And I suppose those are different things. But in my experience, I do a lot of work with XML. And I think that there’s kind of a couple of different prongs here with this. With TEI, I’ve witnessed with certain digital archives, that it takes time and effort to change something, to do the transmission from P3 to P5 in TEI, for example. And you might, you know, everybody likes to think, “Oh, you know, once you get something into XML, or TEI, you know, it’s standardized.” And everybody’s kind of bought into this sort of data platform. At the same time to do those sorts of updates requires somebody with the ability to run the transformation scenarios. And that requires training, it requires time and therefore requires money. And I think the other issue is that we’re seeing less training in a lot of our programs for this sort of foundational skills. When I was in library school, it was at the tail end of the training for XML that every librarian would receive. And you’re starting to see that fall out of curriculums more and more as we go along. The reason for that being that a lot of our programs do the XML for us now. It used to be the role of archivists to write the XML data for archives. But now you have programs like Archon or ASpace, ArchiveSpace, that will do that for you. But the cost is that you have an archivist or a librarian who may not have ever seen XML before go in and be able to change the data itself. And that, for me, is a big fear that that’s going to lead to some sort of obsolescence down the road, when you know, what if God forbid, ASpace goes under at some point?

Matthew Kirschenbaum  12:26  
Yeah, and, you know, from my standpoint, again, as somebody who has the luxury of not being responsible for a collection, I tend to actually be a little bit sort of, I guess cavalier about bit rot, at least in the sense that Eric mentioned of kind of the specter of like actual physical degradation of the media, that kind of Nicholson Baker slow fire scenario where somehow our CD-ROMs on the shelf are sort of self-immolating in some way. I, you know, I have floppy diskettes that I used as a kid with my Apple II computer growing up. I still have the Apple, I still have the diskettes, and they still work fine. And I don’t do anything in particular, I still keep them in pretty much the same shoe box. And I’m sure one day they will stop working. But it hasn’t happened yet. That being said, you know, this is a big part of what I write about in the forthcoming book that you mentioned in your introduction, what I call “the bitstream.” And what I’m trying to, I guess, address or capture or articulate in the book, this goes back to the question of the materiality of the digital, it’s the really sort of weird, peculiar nature of that materiality, the strangeness of the bitstream as a kind of artifactual construct, the way in which a digital object can be both incredibly fragile and precarious. All the kinds of things that Eric was talking about, with regard to format, obsolescing and so on, but at the same time, also incredibly resilient, so that if you’re able to recreate the conditions under which the bitstream was originally accessible, there’s a sense in which it really is almost like time travel. This is the kind of magic of an emulator, I think, you know, anytime at least for me when I open an emulator on my screen, and like, I’ve got a Commodore 64 planted in the middle of my Mac OS desktop, it’s really weird, but also just incredibly sort of powerful as a kind of experience. And, you know, for me, that speaks also again to that kind of resiliency that the bitstream has, that’s part and parcel somehow, of its precarity. So that’s, you know, that’s kind of a more sort of, you know, abstract response than Eric gave you. I, you know, so here’s a particular example. One of the examples I write about in bitstreams, I was working with the Toni Morrison papers, which are at Princeton a few years ago, and partly, but only partly because she had a devastating house fire about halfway through her career, a lot of the papers were badly damaged. All access to everything in the collection is via digital surrogate. So whether it’s born-digital or not, you’re seated at a workstation, a dedicated workstation in the reading room. This, again, is one of those collections that even though the material is digital, you still have to go there and be there on site. And you’re working, essentially, with high quality digital images. And so I was able to open some of these fire-blackened damaged manuscripts, that’s incredibly sort of just moving to kind of see that. It’s certainly a testament to the resiliency of physical archival materials. But then alongside of that there are some born-digital items in the collection, too. And so I was able to open some of those, some early word processing files that were part of Beloved. And when I did, they were mostly legible, but portions of them were glitched. So I had this kind of moment on my screen, where on one window, I was looking at a really high resolution digital image of a fire-blackened type script. And you could sort of see the, you know, where the smoke had carbonized along the edges of the paper, again, very dramatic, very moving. And then in another window, there was this glitched word processing file that was mostly but not entirely legible. So again, two very different kinds of materialities and juxtaposition there. But nonetheless, two clear instances of materiality nonetheless.

Eric Ensley  17:20  
Matthew, could I jump in with a question here? When you’re talking about the emulator, I realized that earlier I mentioned Walter Benjamin and the sort of aura that attaches itself and you know, this post-industrial society to certain art objects. And it made me wonder, is there a digital aura possible with sort of emulators and things like that? I guess I hadn’t really considered that, and you seem like the prime person to ask.

Matthew Kirschenbaum  17:45  
There is for me. I mean, again, it’s precisely about just kind of the uncanniness, maybe a better word for it than sort of the magic of the emulator, but just kind of the uncanniness. I mean, a lot of people, I think, have written about this with regard to digital media. It’s the Ghost in the Machine or the undead nature of the medium. So when you kind of reanimate the bitstream with an emulator, and again, you’ve got that Commodore 64, or that Apple or whatever it is, that’s somehow co-existing with your current operating system, it’s really weird and really powerful. And for me, it does kind of conjure that same experience of aura.

Caitlin Postal  18:29  
I actually want to thank you, Matthew, for bringing up your work with Toni Morrison’s materials. That’s exactly what I was thinking about when James and I were writing up this question, because I had the great pleasure of reviewing an early draft of that chapter, when you came out to visit the University of Washington. And it was compelling. 

Matthew Kirschenbaum  18:47
I remember that. Yeah, yeah. Thank you.

Caitlin Postal  18:50
No, it was really compelling to me. And that’s exactly what I was thinking about when we were coming up with this question about bit rot and obsolescence and digital materiality. So thank you for saying that explicitly. 

Matthew Kirschenbaum  19:01
Great, thank you.

James Harr  19:03  
I think the more that people read or write about bit rot, you’ve got two extremes. You’ve got the Vint Cerf, who’s with a sandwich board and a bell walking down the street saying the end is near. And then you’ve got someone like Tim Gollins, who was at the National Archives and UK and now he’s up at Glasgow, who just says bit rot is switching ones and zeros, which is kind of scary in itself, when you kind of think about this automated world of self-corruption that all of a sudden ones and zeros are being switched, but he minimizes it. We’re on one side and then we got this, again, end of the archive, end of digital preservation on the other side, and I feel like you’ve presented a very nice, middle of the road that yes, it can happen, but we’re aware of it and we’re trying to stop it. So thank you very much for that response.

Caitlin Postal  19:45  
I just want to pop in. The visual that came into my mind was scribal error and just words out of place or eye-skips, lines that have been eye-skipped. And I love, I just love the resonances between when we’re thinking about medieval material culture, and then contemporary digital culture. And it’s, even though it’s temporally distant, it’s actually really quite similar.

[MUSIC]

James Harr  20:19  
So our next question is how does archival work, including the digital archives, necessitate varying skills that are cultivated through different educational environments? So you know, Eric, let’s see, you, in addition to your background at North Carolina State University, you have training with the MLS program at North Carolina, and then you have your PhD training at Yale, you kind of brought these worlds together. And so from your perspectives, both of you, I would say you’re not just sitting down and teaching literature classes. You’re in disciplines brought together. So how does this work on archives and studying archives bring in those skills necessary for doing this? And I guess, for people who want to engage in this type of scholarship, how do you two navigate all these different disciplines coming together?

Eric Ensley  21:05  
So I guess I’ll start with kind of a job ad, actually, that hit this past week that has ended up with everybody on Twitter sort of retweeting it and saying, “Oh, you need to apply for this, everybody needs to apply for this.” Which is, there’s an early cataloguer job that the Beinecke just opened up this week, and everybody’s kind of, you know, atwitter about it. And the thing is that I was kind of glancing at the job and I know the kind of position that it is, and just looking at the requirements for this position is kind of stunning. It’s metadata standards, structural standards, class systems, project design, writing, early lit in history, broad knowledge in the humanities, Latin, Neo-Latin, Latin abbreviations, paleography, book history, Middle English, Middle French, German vernacular, and an MA or PhD in an humanities subject.

Matthew Kirschenbaum  22:00  
Oh my God, I haven’t seen this. I need to go looking for it.

Eric Ensley  22:04  
And it’s sort of the stunning thing where, you know, when we had these early materials job ads, especially in libraries, you kind of had this huge slate of desiderata that, you know, some are more than others but I guess what I’m kind of struck with is that it’s a difficult thing to train for. And it’s one where we have increasingly fields that are talking past each other. You know, if you start to add up the number of years it would take to learn all these skills, you’re ending up at about 10 years or so, which is a stunning amount of time to train for a job that starts out, I think, it’s 60k. Right? Like, that’s, that’s not very much, and especially in New Haven, Connecticut. And whenever you start to kind of add up these issues and realize that they’re a broad swath, right, you end up with metadata coupled with Latin coupled with this sort of humanities and old, very old styles of study, meeting with very new data standards, and you’re expected to be able to navigate both of them. And this is also happening at the same time that library schools have been accused of becoming overly technologized. So that, you know, they’re only interested in information standards is like the fear from faculty and humanities subjects. And then on the other side, you have the librarians often saying that faculty in the humanities are gatekeeping, with requirements for Latin, requirements for sort of dense book history. And these are kind of playing out in very interesting ways. I was struck by this, I don’t want to relitigate a lot of these positions, but a recent one at the Bass Library at Yale was that they were moving to an Information Commons model, because they realized most students were beginning to use PDFs more than physical books, they needed places to charge their laptops. That’s looking at the actual tools that students are using for their research. And so they planned to move a lot of books out of the library to make more study space to make more sort of integrated digital study spaces. And the humanities, a lot of the humanities faculty absolutely went wild on this. There were op-eds written in this student newspaper by faculty and undergraduates calling these people biblioclasts, you know, they’re trying to destroy the library, they’re trying to destroy the physical object, which is, of course, not true. But at the same time, you also have the librarians kind of throwing these names back at the humanities faculty. So you end up with people talking past each other, not realizing that we have to do both effectively. And that’s going to become increasingly true. I find that when we kind of end up in these name calling situations, it’s the wrong path to take in that what we should be asking is how do we reach people sooner and start thinking from the very start? You know, we need to get people trained in Latin, and that at the same time, for example, we, I think we’re almost at a crisis point with it, where we are going to have to have librarians capable of understanding early materials, and how are we going to train for it? I don’t know, it’s really a question of access to the university as well, that I hope will come back to at the end of this talk, I really would like to talk about at some point, kind of EEBO and Digital Scriptorium. And the sort of politics of neoliberalism, and how this feeds into the university as well, and who gets trained and how we train for technical expertise like these. 

James Harr  25:42 
Yeah, I remember when Cambridge, I think it was Cambridge University, when they started made the comment that they were going to digitize everything, the immediate reaction that you saw, and like, especially social media, with some academics who didn’t understand what that meant were all of a sudden panicking that all these old books were going to be thrown into this huge bonfire. And that was it. They were getting rid of all the material. And it’s certainly not the case. But that sticks in my mind, that visceral reaction to digitization equals evisceration, I guess, I don’t know, of the material. So Matthew, in archival work and digital archives, how do certain skills, varying skills, how are they necessitated by cultivating different educational environments?

Matthew Kirschenbaum  26:26  
Yeah, I mean, so I can speak a little bit. For a number of years now, I’ve been co-teaching at the Rare Book School in Charlottesville, the Born-Digital Materials course. We call it the “Rare Computers” course. And so I started doing that with Naomi Nelson, who’s the director of the Rubenstein Library at Duke. We started right back around 2009 / 2010. And we teach it every other year now. You know, I think that for a while, certainly for the first three or four or five times we taught the class, the focus was very much on, for want of a better word, skills. That’s just how you get the disk image. This is how you extract metadata from a file header. This is how you run this open source digital forensics suite. This is what our workflow looks like, and so forth. And our constituency for the course, correspondingly, was largely practicing archivists. So for a while my joke was that I was the English professor who taught archivists about computers. What we’ve been doing more recently, though, is we’ve moved away from some of the more technically-focused aspects of the course towards not only just more sort of background and conceptual material, but also more meaningful kinds of applications. So one of the exercises we do in the current iteration of the course that I really enjoy, is we look at a disk image, a virtual surrogate, a bitstream, as we were discussing earlier, of, quote, unquote, “the same digital work” and early piece of electronic fiction that was written and programmed back in the 1990s. But the three different images that we look at come from three different diskettes and three different collections. And the challenge for the students is to ascertain whether or not they are the same object. And that in turn, raises all kinds of questions because as Eric has been reminding us, hours in the day, resources, people’s time, none of these things are infinite, the same kinds of questions that you will encounter with physical books: if one institution has it, do these other four institutions need to have it as well. And so that always generates a really kind of robust conversation about sort of wherein the bitstream thresholds of differences lie, how that can be located and found. So that to me is, I think, a more meaningful kind of sort of pedagogical exercise than learning how to use a particular software package, the cost there constantly passing in and out of date. So that same kind of question when you have multiple disk images, is this the same object? How do we think about difference with regard to the digital that takes us of course to what’s been in the news, very recently, the emergence of Non-Fungible Tokens or NFTs and all of the questions these will raise both at a practical level for collecting institutions but also I think, again, with regard to how do we sort of construct — because I do believe these are always very much constructed — how do we construct digital associations or digital analogues to traditional values like authenticity and originality? How do we think about that with regard to the digital? I think as NFTs have shown us dramatically over just the last few weeks, those values systems can be upended very suddenly, and very unexpectedly and dramatically.

Eric Ensley  30:50  
Matthew, if I can jump in for a second and just ask if you have been following the sort of back and forth that’s been taking place in Textual Cultures, over EEBO between Herman and Michael Gavin, kind of going back and forth. And I was actually kind of curious about it, because it kind of brings up some of the topics you’re talking about here talking, thinking about the sort of material surrogate, and then the sort of idea of a more disembodied text functioning as a digital object where Gavin wants to celebrate the sort of EEBO TCP document as this kind of liberating document that will allow all sorts of people to access text. And Herman kind of is saying, well, you know, there’s all these issues with TEI, where if we had all the time in the day, we could keep adding more and more tags, and perhaps approach something more perfect, but it’s not there. And, you know, we tend to use the material surrogate in there. I was just kind of not asking you to weigh in, exactly, but I was just wondering, what do you kind of see it as the stakes of these sorts of arguments? And how does capitalism and other things come into play with these sorts of surrogates versus text versus access and bigger issues like that?

Matthew Kirschenbaum  32:11  
I think over time, I’ve become much more sort of convinced by a kind of minimalist approach or more product less process, as you all say, just in the sense that, you know, so I cut my teeth on the William Blake Archive which is still around and still one of the sort of boutique digital humanities archival projects today. The really wondrous thing about that Blake Archive is I understand they’re getting close to being done. The Blake Archive was like the sort of epitome of that kind of bespoke approach to what a digital project or a digital archive is. I mean, it participated in lots of different standards, but it was very much its own idiosyncratic thing and still is. And, you know, I don’t know that even to this day for all of the kind of success and popularity and notoriety that the Blake Archive has generated, whether it’s really sort of produced the kind of breakthrough work in Blake scholarship that was its original promise, and sort of the original vision of people doing all kinds of comparative image searches. And, you know, using the deep encoding that was part of the archive, the archive sort of ethos to kind of really generate these high-powered scholarly interventions and discoveries. I suspect its uses are much more sort of, I think it has a vast popular audience. I think it’s used in classrooms all the time. I think it’s a tool of convenience for many, many scholars. But I guess my point is that it seems to me that a lot of the features that we sort of lavished a lot of energy and just kind of heartache on and heartburn with in those early days, it’s not clear to me that they turned out to be at all what’s most important about the Blake Archive. So I don’t know if that speaks to kind of the terms of that current EEBO debate or not.

Eric Ensley  34:25  
I think it does, in a way. And I also think that it kind of brings up, again, another fascinating issue for me, which is these archives that don’t quite reach their promise. But then they do other things. And I think that’s been really fascinating. When I was on a job interview a couple of years ago, I got this question, I was talking about Fragmentarium, because I’m a big fan of Fragmentarium and medieval studies. You know, because every university in the world has a medieval fragment somewhere in their collection. So it’s this kind of invitation to universities that may not be always invited to participate in digital archives. And I had a question from a scholar that was, well, you know, sure, but what do you get out of that? And at the time, I didn’t have a good answer if I’m going to be honest with you. And now in retrospect, what has come out of that is that Lisa Fagin Davis has kind of backdoored in that everybody’s on IIIF now, you know, and all of a sudden everybody’s using a standardized system so that they can participate with their medieval manuscripts in Fragmentarium. So that maybe the fragments themselves weren’t the actual great thing to come out of it. I mean, I think they’re cool that maybe not everybody else does. But now we’re all using a standardized framework, which is the good takeaway. 

Matthew Kirschenbaum  35:44
That’s a great example.

Caitlin Postal  35:46  
I think one of the things we’ve sort of been talking around, and I want to make sure that we talk explicitly about is labor. And this is both in terms of standardization as well as just people’s time, their job responsibilities. Where when we’re thinking about physical archives, when we’re thinking about digital archives, when we’re thinking about the digitization of physical archives into digital archives, a lot of that work is being done by librarians, and curators, and archivists and not done by tenured faculty. But then tenured faculty are using those materials in their research, in their teaching. And I want to pose the question about how that work, how that labor is made visible in these different processes, how digital projects that are using those materials can recognize the labor of the people involved. And I’m thinking sort of specifically about Bridget Whearty’s Caswell Test where, when we’re talking about archives, are we citing and referencing archivists and librarians? How are we valuing their labor in traditional research? So I’ll pose that question to both of you: How is the work made visible? How are we made aware of the work that’s happening? Like Eric was talking about these different groups that are talking past each other, when they could really be talking to each other? And then if you have a specific project in mind that clearly recognizes the labor of all those involved. This is something I’m personally interested in.

Mathew Kirschenbaum  37:25  
You know, I still have a very sort of vivid and fond memory. And this again, goes back a few years to when I was doing a lot of collaborative work with archivists, around projects like BitCurator and some of the material that I was developing for NEH and the Mellon Foundation that involved collaboration with practicing archivists. But I remember, probably this was over beers, an archivist who I’m very fond of said to me something very close to, “I just love it when an English professor comes to me with a certain gleam in their eye and tells me that they’re going to problematize what it is that I do.” And this, you know, this usually is accompanied by, you know, the kind of breathtaking revelation that archives are not neutral, or archives don’t collect and save everything. And the kind of presumption that archivists are this sort of benighted class who don’t understand these things. That people who have read Derrida and Archive Fever do, right. And I actually, you know, I’ve read Archive Fever, and I actually like the book a little. I mean, it’s an easy book to make fun of. You know, I think it’s a pretty, it’s, there’s a lot there that’s compelling, but I also and this, this is also something that I hope is on display in Bitstreams, I cite archivists, and I cite archivists for their contributions to collections but I also cite their professional literature. There are journals devoted to archival practice. Archivists write books, they have conferences. I’ve been to a couple of them. They’re pretty good times. Right? Right. And in other words, they do all of the things that humanities faculty do by way of professional dialogue and intellectual exchange. And there is a record of that in the form of things like journal articles that we can cite. So I cite Derrida, but I also cite Michelle Caswell. I cite Terry Cook. I cited Gerald Ham, who was the State Archivist of Wisconsin, who gave an address to the SAA in 1974 that minus the Freud and the Jewish intellectual history basically says everything Derrida says in Archive Fever, right? And so I think the potential for interchange between these two conversations is really rich. I don’t know of any way to kind of facilitate it other than to, it’s like anything else, you’ve got to go out and read. And it’s not hard. The journals are out there, you can follow citations, but you’ve got to be willing to do that work. And it starts with acknowledging that there is, in fact, a professional literature that is associated with archivists.

Eric Ensley  40:39  
Matthew, you took the words right out of my mouth but yes, you’re absolutely right. And I appreciate that you’re citing archivists and, you know, librarians and curators and information professionals. There is a whole kind of ecosystem of literature. Caitlin, I was really struck, too, that when Bridget Whearty says that, gave her presentation on the Caswell Test that she points out that, you know, it’s not that I don’t understand archives, I’ve read the literature. And she goes on to paragraph out, like, everything she’s read, and at the end, it’s, and I’ve even gotten through Archive Fever before, YET… And I think that’s kind of a powerful thing, it’s not that archivists don’t understand that literature, they live that literature, if they don’t explicitly know it, through reading, they implicitly know it, that the archives are not neutral, of course. And I guess the sort of thing I wanted to take a step down from, the sort of archivists and librarians, for just a moment, if I may, because, you know, if we are in universities, like, or large research libraries, we tend to be middle class, we tend to be white, we tend to be… our positions may not be the greatest in this sort of academic ecosystem, but they’re not uncomfortable, typically. And why I’m saying this is that whenever you take the next step down, and you start to look at people like, say, at Google, who are scanning rare books, which they are now doing, you know, you see their fingers show up visibly in the pages as they turn them. And Google’s answer to this is, well, not that we don’t pay enough wages, it’s that we’re going to try to remove the image of their fingers from now on, you know, and that’s the thing, trying to literally erase the labor that they do in their gloved fingers. And I would also add to that with EEBO, of course, that they are outsourcing to South Asian countries, Vietnam, India, and paying very, very low wages to the people who are doing a lot of the markup for the EEBO editions. So there, even if we are talking about archivists and librarians, there are still several rungs down that we should be looking at, too, and how this factors into a global neoliberal kind of institution, wherever we, you know, we say that what we’re doing is kind of this academic good, but it’s also built on really horrible labor practices, just rife with it. Then to take another step back up to what we’re doing in universities with archivists and librarians, I was always fond of a lot of what we saw at Yale with the Beinecke, where librarians were invited to teach courses, they were invited to work on exhibitions, and they were billed as full members of the curatorial teams. I think that that’s really important, too, given the kind of job ad I was telling you about. So many of the librarians and archivists and curators do have PhDs, they have MAs, but not that that should be the standard for, you know, celebrating their work. I mean, I think that’s pretty exciting, too, that you’re beginning to see, archivists and curators seen as not just members of the library community but also the teaching community on campus; that it’s seen that paleography, codicology, are not just things you bring in your class once a semester for. They’re actual things that you can teach semester long courses. And they’re valuable skills that are obviously needed in libraries and sort of academia more broadly. So I think that’s pretty heartening. And I’m starting to see that here at Iowa. We’ll be teaching a course in the fall directly in Special Collections called “What is a Book?” where we’re bringing in first year students their first weeks on campus to teach about special collections and what we do and what a day in our life is like, which is really heartening for me.

Matthew Kirschenbaum  44:25  
Yeah, I love that. Yeah, I think it also bears mentioning along those lines, given where we are now, I think we’ve all seen examples that get shared out over Twitter and other networks. So it’s really noxious behavior on the part of faculty that seems especially most often during the pandemic have had very much a kind of service orientation, a service view of what it is that the librarians and archivists are there for; you know, occasional instances of outrage that somebody is not available, somebody is not on-site to do a kind of Zoom session in Special Collections for their students, all of whom, along with the instructor are remote. Right? And so, again, that takes us back to Archive Fever in the sense that Carolyn Steedman talks about it as a kind of literal epidemiological phenomenon. But COVID, I think, has also certainly surfaced a lot of those inequities. And I think too, just sending this off to really just kind of echo something Eric was saying. I remember, you know, another conversation with an archivist where, you know, I thought I was being very sort of perceptive and enlightened and I talked about the need to have, you know, kind of full-time salaried individuals responsible for the caretaking of collections. And the person I was speaking with stopped me and said, well, you know, I would love it if we lived in a world where that was the norm, but the reality is, you know, at my institution, it’s typically unpaid interns who do the kind of work that you’re talking about. Right? So that was kind of another layer of revelation and understanding for me that it wasn’t even the kind of idealized notion of the professional who is often doing this work, but in fact that there are deep inequities. Even, you know, once you get down to the level of how a collection is actually processed.

[MUSIC]

Caitlin Postal  46:35
The sort of last question that we’ve planned out for today is thinking about the behind-the-scenes work, so to speak, and more public-facing work. So how do we distinguish between what we consider to be behind-the-scenes digital archival work and public scholarship? Can and should we even draw those distinctions when we’re doing different kinds of work? And I’m thinking, I’d like Eric, for you to speak to this initially. Because I know that you’re doing a lot of public facing work with UI special collections, including videos on their YouTube channel, and the class that’s going to be taught in the fall of “What is a Book?” bringing in first year students to get some hands-on experience just sounds really fantastic. So yeah, that question about what’s considered behind-the-scenes, what’s considered public, and why we make those distinctions.

Eric Ensley  47:23 
I will kind of start by talking about the… there was a Twitter battle that was just pretty horrendous a couple of weeks ago, which was the library superstars versus the “keep your head down and do your job” librarians. And both sides are present on Twitter. And it just ended up being a massive battle between the rock stars and the “keep your head down” people. And I think the point though is that you have to have both. The rock stars, the library rock stars are doing an important service. I’m not a rock star in that regard, you know, maybe 5% of what I do is digital outreach. Most of my day is spent updating catalogs, doing shelf reads, writing finding aids, and teaching classes. But the people who are doing the outreach and showing the special collections and rare books, that they matter and that they’re cool, and that they get people in the door, that’s very important work. I would also say that I don’t want to draw a hard distinction between digital outreach and digital scholarship. Because there’s kind of an amorphous area in the middle, right. There are blog posts that can just be very close to academic articles. And there can be YouTube channels where, you know, I’m baking historical recipes and having fun doing it. I think the point though is that those all do something for the library, and that they kind of guide people that there are different ways to interact with rare books. And it’s not just the dusty professor in a tweed jacket in the Bodleian. It’s also that these are interesting things that can be fun to talk about and fun to joke about. So I think that there’s a lot of different approaches and a lot of different means to approach to go about working with rare materials and doing outreach with them. And I think the other thing, too, is that we do probably need to start thinking about how we’re going to think about giving plaudits to people for what they’re doing. So I don’t think that every finding aid that archivist or librarian writes needs to be signed. But I think of this kind of statement that you get in XML documents saying the responsibilities, like, who did what for this document are important, right. And it’s good data practices to mark when somebody does something, if somebody changes something in the code, you mark it in the XML, to show who did it and when it was done. And I think it would be nice to see an academia that functions a little bit more like that. Maybe, you know, not everybody needs the author credit, but just saying, hey, the archivists helped with this at this point, or kind of reenvisioning how we do scholarship and who gets praised at what points rather than just putting it all in an acknowledgement that maybe two people will read at the outset of a book. I don’t know. That’s a big ask, and maybe that’s a good way to end my major statement here. It’s a complete reenvisioning I would love to see.

Caitlin Postal  50:07 
I think it’s funny that you say not every finding aid needs a signature, because I would say that every finding aid does need a signature because I’m particularly interested in not just like the provenance of the object, but also the provenance of the metadata. I always want to know that information. And maybe that’s just me, maybe I’m the only person interested. But I would make that stronger argument because I want to see it.

Eric Ensley  50:32
And I actually, I want to say something real quick, which is that you’re not wrong. I know somebody who thinks that every finding aid should be signed. Why I’m against it is that we change finding aids every couple of weeks, you know, they get updated all the time. And at a certain point, you’d end up with something that looks like, you know, the Declaration of Arbroath or something, you know, with like 50,000 signatures below it. I’m being purely practical, but the idea is right, so…

Matthew Kirschenbaum  50:57
And that’s, you know, you never know what’s going to be useful or important or interesting to someone down the road, you know. The kind of something that seems like only a kind of rote statement of credit or responsibility, that becomes part of the story of what the artifact is. And it reminds me of those gloves and the Google scan and the fingers and the gloves in the Google scans which, Google may scrub those from their images, but we know now when we look at the materials in our collections, some of the things that we cherish the most are precisely those that reveal the hand of either their originator or somebody else who touched them along the way, right? And so, you know, I think that sort of sense of presence that we’ve been calling both materiality and also labor for the last hour, there’s an ethical dimension to it. But there’s also a kind of a real epistemological dimension as well. That’s how we know stuff by being able to kind of recreate, retrace those networks of responsibility. Every finding aid should have a signature.

James Harr  52:24
The question is, how do you do it in a minimalistic way?

Caitlin Postal  52:29
There’s probably some very smart people who can discern how to do every finding aid with a signature in a way so that it doesn’t become 50,000 lines of names for you know, two paragraphs of information. 

Caitlin Postal  52:40
Thanks for listening to Coding Codices, a podcast by the Digital Medievalist Postgraduate Subcommittee. I’m Caitlin Postal. 

James Harr  52:47
And I’m James Harr. 

Caitlin Postal  52:58
And our guests on this episode were Eric Ensley and Matthew Kirschenbaum. You can listen to more episodes of Coding Codices on our website, podcast.digitalmedievalist.org, or the podcast provider of your choice. Or get in touch with us at [email protected].

Credits

Music:

• Intro/Outro: TeknoAXE, “Chiptune Nobility” (CC BY 4.0).
• Interludes: Random Mind, “The Old Tower Inn” (CC0).

Graphics:

• Featured Image: Photo by Lucian Alexe on Unsplash; ed. by Tessa Gengnagel.