In recognition of Delbert Russell

Conference Outcomes

List of current projects in Digital Medieval Studies presented at the Third International MARGOT Conference
(in alphabetical order):

Toby Burrows, University of Western Australia

Australian Research Council Network for Early European Research (ARC NEER)

The ARC NEER is an Australian initiative to build a national research community in medieval and early modern studies. Its activities during the period 2005-2010 have included conferences, seminars, training workshops, mentoring programmes for postgraduates and early career researchers, and funding for emerging research groups. It has also developed three major digital services for its 350 participants:

Mogens Devantier, Society for Danish Language and Literature
Thomas Hansen, Society for Danish Language and Literature

Diplomatarium Danicum

Diplomatarium Danicum is an ongoing publishing project funded by The Carlsberg Foundation. The principal aim of the project is to publish medieval letters from Denmark as well as material from outside Denmark that refers to Danish affairs. The records that we publish include medieval charters, privileges, wills, treaties and some private letters that are judicial in nature; these types of text are called /diplomer/ in Danish, or 'records' in English. They are written mainly in Latin, Low German and Danish, with Danish becoming more widely used in these records around the beginning of the fifteenth century.

Elena Cantarell, Mireia Comas,
Daniel Piñol, University of Barcelona

The Arquibanc Databases

We currently have two databases, as required by the large volume and the characteristics of the documents contained in one of the archives we are working in: One is the Fontcuberta database, which is made of three fonds and contains parchments from the 10th to the 17th centuries; and the other one is the Arquibanc database, which includes documents from different sources, like personal diaries, letters, etc. All the documents come from different catalan private archives. The website will be available in October 2010.

Consuelo W. Dutschke, Executive Director, Digital Scriptorium and Curator, Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University

Digital Scriptorium

The Digital Scriptorium is a growing image database of medieval and renaissance manuscripts that unites scattered resources from many institutions into an international tool for teaching and scholarly research. It bridges the gap between a diverse user community and the limited resources of libraries by means of sample imaging and extensive rather than intensive cataloguing.

Colum P. Hourihane, Princeton University

The Index of Christian Art

The Index of Christian Art was founded in 1917 by Charles Rufus Morey with the specific aim of developing an iconographical archive for medieval art from early apostolic times to the end of the fifteenth century. Initially developed as a paper archive it is now being transferred to an electronic format and offers its resources on a subscription scheme to the world. It is the largest iconographical database in existence and can presently provide access to complex information on approximately 200,000 photographic reproductions of Christian art. The term "Christian" is broadly construed and is not restricted to art produced within ecclesiastical contexts or theological in theme. Further information is available at http://ica.princeton.edu.

Morgan Kay, Fordham University

Online Medieval Sources Bibliography (OMSB)

The Online Medieval Sources Bibliography is a searchable annotated bibliography of texts - from private letters, wills, and household accounts to literary works, philosophical treatises, chronicles, court proceedings, church records, and a host of other documents - that were written in the Middle Ages and are now available in printed or online editions and translations. The aim is to provide annotated entries that include information on the genre, contents, archival reference and original language of the text, as well as whether the publication includes a translation, introduction, appendices, glossary, and index. Where appropriate, the bibliography also includes hyperlinks to sources that are online. Begun in Summer 2003, OMSB was designed to record details about printed and online primary sources that can shed light on the history, literature, culture, and religion of the Middle Ages. The primary sources included here date primarily from the period between roughly 300 and 1500, although there are sources that date from before and after these years.

Dorothy Kim, Vassar College, Scott Kleinman, California State University Northridge

Bodleian, Laud Misc 108 Project

The Bodleian, Laud Misc 108 project is a digital edition of the manuscript Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Misc 108, which is currently being developed under the auspices of the Early Middle English Society. The long-term plan is to develop a Corpus of Middle English Texts which would be accessible from a single location, in an interchangeable format, and accompanied by a selection of visualization and analytic tools. The edition of Laud Misc 108 will serve as a test case for the editing principles to be applied to the entire Corpus. We are proposing to make the edition as independent as possible of proprietary software but easily extendable through simple script-based modules and plug-ins. There is currently no web site for the project, but the web site we used for our presentation is available at http://scottkleinman.net/MARGOT/. This site demonstrates an internal module which produces a dynamic gloss and a plug-in which serves as a bridge to Wordle.

Jan Kolacek, Charles University, Prague

Global Chant Database

The Global Chant Database is an online research tool for studying plainchant and medieval monody that enables to search most of the Gregorian repertoire by melody, text, or liturgical function. The project is an attempt to build a central index of sources, editions and databases for searching concrete chant information. The database includes a tool for digitizing plainchant melodies (Volpiano editor) and a bibliography database.

Geert Maessen, Independent Scholar, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Tenth-century music notation for chant and its relation to performance

Since tenth-century adiastematic notation can be considered to represent an intermediate period between the oral and written transmission of chant, the comparison of early chant repertories and modern oral musical traditions is of crucial importance for the understanding of early chant performance and practice.

Projects:

Chris L. Nighman, Wilfrid Laurier University

The Electronic Manipulus Florum

The Electronic Manipulus florum Project seeks to provide an online critical edition of this very influential late medieval Latin florilegium. The site is equipped with an intertextuality search engine ("Janus") which allows users to compare long passages or entire texts to the edited quotations in the database in a single search. The edition is currently about 60% complete.

Electronic Sources for the Council of Constance

This project provides transcriptions of a number of public domain Latin texts from this important council (1414-1418) from rare editions (late 15th to early 18th century), primarily sermons but also one reform tract, all of which are provided in searchable PDF documents. This project is the result of my collaboration with Dr. Phillip H. Stump of Lynchburg College, Virginia.

Bibliographical Register of Sermons Delivered at the Council of Constance

This online resource (co-edited with Dr. Phillip H. Stump) has been published on the Bibliographical Society of America's BIBSITE. It is a detailed register of all surviving sermon texts which includes information on each sermon's theme, incipit, explicit, author, manuscripts, editions, and other relevant data. Other resources include a register of lost sermons from this council, a list of the manuscripts in which these sermons have been found, a list of sermons by Petrus Roger which appear in Constance sermon manuscripts, and various indices. All of these materials are provided in searchable PDF documents.

David Peterson, Universidad del País Vasco

Digital Edition of the Becerro Galicano

A team based at the University of the Basque Country in Spain is preparing a critical digital edition of the Becerro Galicano of San Millán de la Cogolla, a late twelfth-century monastic cartulary, that is one of the most important but also one of the most complex sources for the early medieval history of northern Spain. Our digital edition offers access to both high-quality digitised images of the original and a transcription of the text, dynamically linked in parallel windows, reproducing the original structure while still permitting traditional chronological access. Accompanying analytical tools, which are currently under development will, include a search-engine based on the lemmatisation of the whole text, an index verborum, an anthroponymic index incorporating prosopographical information, and a toponymic index with a cartographic function.

Dagmar A. Riedel, Center for Iranian Studies, Columbia University

Encyclopaedia Iranica

In the early 1970s, Ehsan Yarshater, then Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies at Columbia University, embarked on the project of an Iranian Studies reference work dedicated to the lands and cultures of the Iranian speaking peoples. Initially, the project aimed at giving general readers information about all matters related to Iran, while offering a small and widely dispersed scholarly community of Iranian studies specialists a platform for the publication of research outside often inaccessible journals. The first fascicle of the printed edition appeared in 1982, and since 1996, the project has had its own website (www.iranicaonline.org), where all the entries are available free of charge. During the last three decades the reference work has become an international project whose collaborative approach reflects the multi-disciplinary nature of Iranian studies. The Iranian plateau has over centuries served as the Eurasian gateway for the migration of peoples and the diffusion of knowledge between the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, and the Mediterranean. The project relies on scholars from a wide range of disciplines including archeology, classics, linguistics, religious studies, and anthropology to cover this vast and significant region in all its cultural diversity.

Entries concerning Turkish dynasties in Asia Minor during the Crusades such as the Saljuqs of Rum, Mongol history, Eastern Christianity, Judaism, or Islamic historiography are particularly relevant to research about the European Middle Ages, as they further the comparative study of medieval societies around the Mediterranean.

Geoffrey Roger, University of Glasgow

MS Hunter 252 'Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles': the Digital Edition

A digital edition of the celebrated fifteenth-century Burgundian collection of short stories is currently under way at the University of Glasgow. Photographs of each manuscript folio will be matched with XML text transcription, highlighting the elements of interest across the document: miniatures accompanying the tales, possible literary and judicial sources, later adaptations/translations, biographies of storytellers etc. Within the text, items of linguistic interest will be tagged and tied in with linguistic atlases and online resources (e.g. Dictionnaire du moyen-français). The unique profusion of referential details across the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles make it possible to bring the world of the raconteurs back to life. References to classical and contemporary literature, historical figures and events, geographical settings, political and religious institutions, cultural traditions and artefacts will point towards relevant external sources (online editions, bibliographies, encyclopediae, historical atlases, etc.), making this digital edition a unique witness of fifteenth-century European culture. Contact: Geoffrey Roger

Marc H. Smith, École des Chartes, Paris (with Maria Gurrado, IRHT/CNRS, Paris)

Graphem

Graphem is a three-year project based in France, funded by the ANR (Agence nationale de la recherche), and developed by palaeographers from the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes and the École nationale des chartes (Paris) together with computer scientists (LIRIS/INSA, Lyon; LIPADE, ex-CRIP5, Paris; LIFO, Orléans). It aims to explore new approaches to mediaeval scripts, beyond traditional palaeographical categories and procedures such as typologies of scripts or time-consuming and subjective one-to-one verbal comparisons. Massive image-analysis technologies are used to quantitatively assess multi-criteria similarities between samples of handwriting, based on contours, and to group them accordingly. The resulting distributions may be interpreted in historical terms, from a theoretical perspective, or used to sort out large corpuses for practical purposes, e.g. collections of manuscript fragments. Other aspects include the automated analysis of the ductus of letters (deconstructing letter forms into elementary strokes, then building a distinctive ‘code-book’ of strokes for each script), and word-spotting or word-retrieval, i.e. localising specific words in handwritten texts, taking into account possible variations in letterforms and spellings, such as standard mediaeval abbreviations.

Nadia Togni, University of Geneva, Switzerland

BIBLION: A Data Processing System for Italian Giant Bibles

BIBLION is a data processing system developed for the analysis of Italian Giant Bibles. It has been designed to classify, store, manage, research and consult data about the palaeographical, ornamental and textual characteristics of Italian Giant Manuscripts from the eleventh and twelfth century, and of Giant Bibles in particular. The automated processing of data enables the detailed analysis of all material aspects of a manuscript, such as the structural decomposition of materials, as well as graphic and ornamental elements. BIBLION permits researchers, universities and institutions devoted to the study of medieval manuscripts and medieval history to share their research results on Italian Giant Manuscripts on an international scale. The system provides an immediate access to published data in order to further collaboration.
Contact: Nadia Togni
URL: http://cms.unige.ch/biblion/
To consult BIBLION, use this login:
User Name: Demo
Password: Margot

David A. Trotter, Editor, Anglo-Norman Dictionary
Head, Department of European Language, Aberystwyth University, Wales

The Anglo-Norman Dictionary (AND)

Revision of the Anglo-Norman Dictionary (1977-1992). The site currently houses: the complete AND (A-Z): A-K in the second edition, L-Z in the first. Full search facilities for the whole alphabet (search by headword, variant spelling, form in citations, combinations in citations, text, English translation). In addition: a range of Anglo-Norman texts online; a number of scholarly articles (W. Rothwell) on Anglo-Norman.

Zdeněk Uhlíř, National Library of the Czech Republic, Deputy Director Historic and Music Collections

MANUSCRIPTORIUM: European Digital Library of Written and Documentary Heritage

The Manuscriptorium project is creating a virtual research environment providing access to all existing digital documents in the sphere of historic book resources (manuscripts, incunabula, early printed books, maps, charters and other types of documents). These historical resources, otherwise scattered in various digital libraries around the world, are now available under a single digital library interface. The service provides seamless access to more than 5 million digital images. The interface is designed for easy searching and viewing of documents, enabling the creation of individual collections and virtual documents. Content providers can use various services and tools which have been developed for easy aggregation and integration of heterogeneous digital content. Contributing partners.

Cynthia Vakareliyska , University of Oregon

An Electronic Collation of Medieval Eastern Orthodox Calendars of Saints

This ongoing project provides scholars with a free-use corpus of data and search program for the comparison and analysis of medieval Eastern Orthodox calendars of saints, which vary dramatically in their listings for any given day of the year. Currently 19 Slavic, Greek, and Latin calendar texts are completed. The corpus will eventually consist of the texts of c. 120 unpublished medieval Slavic calendars of saints that I collected in archives in Bulgaria, Russia, and England, plus published Slavic, Greek, and Latin calendars of all genres. The project uses Unicode 5.1 coding in, XML, a Relax NG schema, and software program .