Manuscript Studies in the Covid-19 Age

Peter Stokes, École Pratique des Hautes Études – Université PSL (Paris)

As the Schoenberg Symposium and the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies have long been demonstrating, access to digital images of manuscripts has grown enormously in recent years, particularly with IIIF and the movement towards increasingly open and rights-free content. At the same time, we have also seen increasing access to relatively powerful computers, fast internet connections, and now access even to hardware and software for deep learning such as free software libraries, increasingly affordable GPUs, and, in some cases, high-performance computing clusters. At the same time, however, librarians are often reporting less time for cataloguing and metadata, and at least in some cases access to original items is becoming increasingly difficult, not to mention the increasing complexity of computational methods and the widely-recognized fact that the ‘reasoning’ of modern machine learning is inaccessible even to specialists. The current health crisis seems to be accelerating these trends, which leaves the question: what of paleography? Looking at the past and present of digital and computational methods, in this talk I will attempt to identify some of the promises and problems of where we are now and where we seem to be going.

Alberto Campagnolo, Università degli Studi di Udine

Sarah Bowen Savant, Aga Khan University, Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilizations

Laura Morreale, Independent Scholar

Alessandro Bausi, Universität Hamburg

The project Beta maṣāḥǝft: Manuscripts of Ethiopia and Eritrea, based at the Hiob Ludolf Centre for Ethiopian and Eritrean Studies, and funded by the Union of German Academies in the Academies Programme through the Academy of Sciences of Hamburg, started in 2016 with the aim at creating a comprehensive research environment for the description and multimedial display and access of the written heritage of Christian Ethiopia and Eritrea. At the centre of the environment there is a relational database on Gǝʿǝz and Amharic manuscripts and inscriptions collecting data and information on works and texts, paratexts and paracontents (colophons, additional notes), but also authors, owners, scribes, places, and institutions, as well as data on all available physical features of the manuscripts. The project website provides digital images, supplied wherever possible, and some of the texts and passages edited and linked to lexica. The portal interoperability with other online repositories allows search from one central place across several existing platforms and the users can thus perform queries on texts, authors, scribes, and codicological elements for most known and accessible manuscripts from Ethiopia and Eritrea. Given the specific goals of the project and its structure since its very inception, the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic has prevented field trips, research, and digitization in the Horn of Africa, but has not affected the research work based on the platform, that, quite on the contrary, has proved effective and sustainable—of which the presentation will provide some examples.

Daniel Gullo

The HMML Authority File, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, addresses two primary challenges that confront access to endangered manuscripts from understudied traditions digitized by the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML): the need to identify and standardize understudied and unknown names and titles used to describe and search manuscripts in literary traditions that lack a national infrastructure to create authority files, and the need to create a system to share this data with the Library of Congress Linked Data Service and the Virtual International Authority File. HMML Authority File, or HAF, will also include different types of metadata, unicode characters, and other identifiers not supported by traditional MARC record creation to create better files for unique persons, works, and places. The complex database will be designed to allow faceted advance searching, thus removing the obstacles of string searching found in systems like VIAF and Library of Congress Linked Data Service. The goal is a robust database of authority files that will be submitted to the Library of Congress and be harvested by VIAF and Wikidata to help create a reference resource for librarians and scholars worldwide. 

The Florentine Codex is a sixteenth-century Mexican manuscript produced collaboratively by Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún and a team of Nahua authors and artists. Its twelve books contain a primary Nahuatl text (an Indigenous language of central Mexico), a Spanish interpretation of the Nahuatl text by Sahagún, and over two thousand images painted by Nahua artists. Modeled after ancient Roman and medieval encyclopedias, the codex is renowned as a critical source on central Mexican culture and for its history of the conquest of Mexico.

The collaborative Florentine Codex initiative, initiated at the Getty Research Institute in 2016, leverages Getty’s expertise in digital scholarship and vocabulary standards to produce: 1) the Digital Florentine Codex, a critical digital edition giving full online access to the manuscript and its transcriptions and translations; 2) a scholarly digital publication on the codex’s Mexica perspective of the conquest of Mexico; 3) K-12 lesson plans on the conquest contrasting Indigenous and European perspectives; and 4) 4,000 entries contributed to the Getty Vocabularies (in English, Spanish, Classical Nahuatl, and contemporary Eastern Huasteca Nahuatl) drawn from the codex’s unique linguistic content.

The Florentine Codex was completed in the midst of a devastating epidemic of 1575. Consequently, pigment supplies ran dry and illustrations went unfinished. Almost 500 years later, we tackle this digital initiative during a global pandemic and face a new set of unexpected circumstances. Although our born-digital outcomes were planned from the outset, today’s obligatorily virtual world makes plain the urgency for more comprehensive access to cultural heritage. 

Johanna Green, University of Glasgow

Digitally communicating the materiality of medieval manuscripts has long been a subject of conversation and debate; where older scholarly arguments bemoaned the lack of sensory engagement offered by digital medieval manuscripts, more recent work has sought to demonstrate the myriad ways manuscripts exist as sensory objects both through and within the digital realm. While there are many more important things to have been impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, access to our medieval manuscript collections was nevertheless also affected. Working remotely, and initially without any physical access to Collections, practitioners and users alike were left with the digital manifestations of our manuscript collections as their only material witness; rather than occupy the position of “surrogate”, these digital remediations suddenly took on “object” status. And yet the question remained: given the 2D and text-focused nature of our professional digitizations, where is the material manuscript to be found when we are all working at a distance, and experiencing the material codex through a digital lens? This paper considers various spaces the material codex might be located digitally, considers how our former use and opinion of DIY digitization and Collections’ social media content might now shift from “edutainment” to consider them “source material”, and, via a case study of use at the University of Glasgow, evaluates how lessons learned from those spaces might influence investment in Virtual Collections technology, to continue to expand how we digitally communicate the material book at a distance.

Bill Endres, University of Oklahoma