Digitally Enabled Scholarship with Medieval Manuscripts (2015-18)

I directed part of a multi-year, multi-institution Mellon-funded project on enabling digital scholarship with medieval manuscripts. Hoping to move beyond the simple digitization of manuscripts and the increased access that digitization makes possible, we asked what new research questions could be imagined–and answered–through a second generation of digital tools.

My part of the project involved the corpus of c. 800 extant English Books of Hours, through which I investigated what could be done with a large and relatively standardized body of data to find discrepancies and locate patterns. I was also interested in exploring how digital data can be used for visual, as well as textual, analysis. Finally, we worked through the project as a whole to re-imagine scholars’ working environments in a digital future: bringing digital facsimiles of two distant objects together on one screen, annotating the images themselves, and archiving notes for collaboration and personal use.