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Signed the paperwork today so it is finally official, and I am pleased to report that I will be the 2020-2021 Graduate Fellow @sims_mss !!! I’ll be working on a side project to my dissertation on trauma, which will be a digital interface that offers book historians...1/
a space to collate their manuscripts (and early modern books) temporally, thereby enabling them to visualize how a manuscript’s contents change over time. I also want to offer speculation a seat at the table for what counts as meaningful when rendering mss in digital spaces 2/.
This project, which I have tentatively called “Bindr,” (
) seeks to lay bare a manuscript’s full history of loss and repair in a single space. I started the thinking for this project in @whitneytrettien's DH class in the Spring of 2018... 3/
) seeks to lay bare a manuscript’s full history of loss and repair in a single space. I started the thinking for this project in @whitneytrettien's DH class in the Spring of 2018... 3/
when I was simultaneously working in the conservation lab in Kislak (shoutout to my fav @sarahreidell), taking apart UPenn, MS Codex 196, studying it, and then putting it back together (n.b. those are not my hands in the first image, I did *not* take it apart, only observed) 4/.
This manuscript contains the only known copy of the Middle English Lament of St. Anselm ( https://sites.trinity.edu/akraebel/lament ). When the manuscript was unbound and in its loose-leaf state, I was able to determine an accurate collation formula for 2018, but through careful research ... 5/
I was also to confirm what the manuscript contained c.1600 and in 1933. I also had a pretty good idea for what the book contained in its original state in the late 14th century, and what was lost between 1933 and 1939. Despite the amount of data collected, however... 6/
I found it difficult to render this information digitally, and in a way that centered its significance. Manuscripts in digital spaces (understandably) focus on concrete details that are present in an extant codex, but they leave little (if any) space for a visualization... 7/
of its known or suspected past lives. Working off of models like @leoba's Viscoll, or @lisafdavis's "Reconstructing the Beauvis Misal," I hope to offer a space where users can oscillate between different temporal nodes to see how the structure of the book changes over time 8/.
Book historians also have intimate knowledge of a manuscript’s mise-en-page and the various choices made by its scribe(s); oftentimes we even know which bits of texts were present but are now missing, and it is my hope that Bindr will offer users a place where they can... 9/
incorporate that knowledge more substantially by (perhaps controversially) offering users the option of constructing their own digital avatars of missing folios. I want a digital space for a little speculation in a field that is so heavily centered on empirical data. More soon!
