"The Anonymous, Executed Widow of Ailsworth"

For: Anglo-Saxon Women: A Florilegium (2018

The Remanence of Medieval Media

The Remanence of Medieval Media (uncorrected, pre-publication version) For: The Routledge Handbook of Digital Medieval Literature, edited by Jen Boyle and Helen Burgess (2017

The Undoing of Exeter Book Riddle 47: ‘Bookmoth’

Prepublication draft for "Transitional States: Cultural Change, Tradition and Memory in Medieval England" (ACMRS 2017

Recalling the Medieval: Stained Glass, Longboards, and Rain; Closing Remarks of the Executive Director for the 2017 ISAS Meeting, University of Hawai’i, Manoa August 4, 2017

Closing Remarks of the Executive Director for the 2017 ISAS Meeting, University of Hawai’i, Manoa August 4, 2017; text and accompanying slides; slightly edited to include improvisatory notes and expansions from keyword prompts

Medieval Manuscripts: Media Archaeology and the Digital Incunable

This chapter assesses the evolution of the digitized manuscript from fragmented data to increasingly accessible and interoperable forms. The long view of media history and the tenets of the emerging field of media archaeology frame this exploration, considering how digital representations of manuscripts function as a kind of incunable – an extended media moment caught between old and nascent methods and practices. Archaeologically, the medieval manuscript functioned as a convergence of media forms existing in partnership with larger ecologies of material expression. Today, increasingly agile digital architectures create the potential not only for excavation of historical forms, but for significant new ecologies of media. As a touchstone for such ideas, this chapter considers the critical and technological treatment of a single Anglo-Saxon manuscript (London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius MS B.v) from the eleventh century until the present day, and over the course of three media ages: manuscript, print, and digital. The complicated and protean nature of this manuscript's form, content, and interpretation over these ages, along with the fractured way it now exists digitally, serves as a starting point for considering how future digital applications might enable more capacious architectures for studying medieval manuscripts in both time and media

The DM Environment: From Annotation to Dissemination

DM (formerly Digital Mappaemundi) is an online environment that allows users to easily assemble collections of images and texts for study, produce their own rich analysis data, and publish online resources for individual, group or public use. DM is ready for multi-year work with five partner projects (including a new partnership with the British Library) to implement a publicly available user-friendly environment that enables users to 1) assemble collections of resources from any combination of accessible repositories; 2) create richly linked data (e.g., annotation networks involving combinations of images, texts, fragments, web resources, and other annotations) and collections, sequences and indices that organize this data; 3) export data in a number of linked data formats; and 4) easily produce publicly accessible and interactive websites based on such data and linked data published elsewhere

A sensual philology for Anglo-Saxon England

What forgotten forms can philology assume anew? Reassessing how early medieval writers loved words differently than we do reveals significant gaps between past and presence senses of the physical phenomena words can index. In the early medieval language of Old English texts there remains a largely uncharted capacity for less linguistically driven aspects of expression, formed through a network of words, sounds, bodies and media: how the mute sound of a bell and the crook of a silent finger come together in medieval sign language, or how the Old English word for ring becomes a weeping, poetic gasp within a heaving breast. Such early medieval moments of communication survive because of language and in spite of language, and qualify the visualist framework through which we predictably reconstitute the medieval past, calling, /sotto voce/, for more than lovely words

Creating and curating an archive: Bury St Edmunds and its Anglo-Saxon past

This contribution explores the mechanisms by which the Benedictine foundation of Bury St Edmunds sought to legitimise and preserve their spurious pre-Conquest privileges and holdings throughout the Middle Ages. The archive is extraordinary in terms of the large number of surviving registers and cartularies which contain copies of Anglo-Saxon charters, many of which are wholly or partly in Old English. The essay charts the changing use to which these ancient documents were put in response to threats to the foundation's continued enjoyment of its liberties. The focus throughout the essay is to demonstrate how pragmatic considerations at every stage affects the development of the archive and the ways in which these linguistically challenging texts were presented, re-presented, and represented during the Abbey’s history