Who is Patrick? – Answers from the Saint Patrick's Confessio HyperStack. Supporting Digital Humanities, Copenhagen 17 - 18 November 2011, Conference Proceedings

Not everyone realizes that there are two Latin works, still surviving, that can definitely be attributed to Saint Patrick’s own authorship. On 14th September 2011 the Royal Irish Academy published his writings in a freely accessible form on line, both in the original Latin and in a variety of modern languages (including Irish). Designed to be of interest to the general public as well as to academic researchers, the Saint Patrick’s Confessio Hypertext Stack includes such features as digital images of the medieval manuscripts involved, a specially commissioned historical reconstruction that evocatively describes life in pre-Viking Ireland, articles, audio presentations, and some ten thousand internal and external digital links that make it truly a resource to be explored

All texts are equal, but... Textual Plurality and the Critical Text in Digital Scholarly Editions

Is there a future for the “old philology”? Why are “truly critical” and “truly digital” editions so rare? This article discusses the questions raised at the Leuven round table by showcasing two scholarly editions that claim to be both digital and critical: the edition of William of Auxerre’s Summa de officiis ecclesiasticis, an early thirteenth century Latin treatise on liturgy, and the so-called HyperStack edition of Saint Patrick’s Confessio, a fifth-century open letter by Ireland’s patron saint, also written in Latin and the oldest text that has survived from Ireland in any language. In giving a comparative introduction to both of these online editions — to their underlying methodology and theoretical implications — I will make the following arguments: (1) Critical texts matter. The critical reconstruction of an assumed original text version as intended by an author remains of major interest for most textual scholars and historians as well as any person with an interest in historical texts. (2) Critical texts have the same legitimacy as various and different manifestations of a text. Digital editions enable the presentation of textual plurality. (3) There is no reason intrinsic to the digital medium that makes the idea of a critical text obsolete. Rather, a critical text can serve as the standard reference, as an ideal text to start with and as a portal to access the variety of textual manifestations of a particular work

Into the Wide – Into the Deep: Manuscript Research in the Digital Age. Introduction

Manuscript research is a wide field of scholarship which is integrated in core disciplines such as history, philology, or library science. Yet manuscript research is also crucial in other fields such as archaeology, history of arts, musicology or Egyptology, to name but a few. For all these disciplines, manuscripts are fundamental sources. There are different approaches to different types of manuscripts, but questions and perspectives, methodologies and tools are often quite similar. Innovations and new research strategies from one discipline can be transferred to and adopted by others. This article is an introduction to the second volume of the anthology "Codicology and Palaeography in the Digital Age" and gives an overview of current aspects in the field of manuscript studies in both theory and practice by showing the relatedness of the contributions to the volume at hand as well as its predecessor. The texts are roughly assigned to five interrelated areas of manuscript research: (I) the photographic capturing of the manuscript surface, (II) the description of the manuscript for a catalogue, (III) the scientific examination of material aspects, (IV) the analysis of the script and (V) the deep encoding of the text itself