From Socially Distant to Socially Engaged: Exploring the Soundscape and Material Environment of Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune

Ostensibly a story about gaining confidence in love, Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune has been explored as a summa of contemporary musical styles and a treatise on the memorial arts. It has also been examined as an important example of the use of citation and allusion in the fourteenth century because it incorporates references to Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy and Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s Le roman de la Rose. This essay enhances these studies by focusing on a particular aspect of the narrative: the use of soundscape and material environment to express the protagonist’s emotional growth. After exploring key concepts such as soundscape, authorial self-presentation, and melancholy, it considers how sound is introduced and presented in relation to the narrator’s emotional world and how music is woven through the narrative. An analysis of how sound and touch play a role in the narrator’s interaction with Lady Hope leads to a discussion of the use of soundscape and material environment in the description of the Park of Hesdin and the festivities at the manor house. As this examination of soundscape and environment will show, Machaut chooses to use them as a means to convey the narrator’s burgeoning confidence: he gives a minimal and clichéd description of the wonderful park when the narrator is mired in melancholy yet offers an elaborate, exciting treatment of the manor house after the narrator’s confidence-building interaction with Lady Hope. The essay closes with a consideration of how the presentation of sound and material environment relates to Machaut’s use of Boethius. In the context of the material turn within medieval studies, I argue that we can view sound and objects within medieval literature as media for the communication of ideas about narrative and character development and that this form of analysis sits comfortably with other lenses of interpretation

Content is not Context: Radical Transparency and the Acknowledgement of Informational Palimpsests in Online Display.

Whether for print or for the internet, dividing structure and content—the layer approach used in modern web development—has influenced our modern notions of textual presentation. Conscious of it or not, popular conceptions of “content” treat the text as a Platonic ideal loating in the cloud, divorced from any mechanisms of production or display. Since the presentation and display layers are handled separately in most modern web and publishing tools, the underlying assumption is that content can fluidly it any container it is placed into, like water poured into beakers of differing shape, but similar volume. As scholars of medieval manuscript and early print culture can attest, however, this is ultimately a dangerous misconception

Transcribing "Le Pèlerinage de Damoiselle Sapience": Scholarly Editing Covid19-Style

This article describes a methodological experiment conducted during the 13th Annual (Virtual) Schoenberg Symposium on Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age, hosted by the University of Pennsylvania, November 18–20, 2020. The experiment consisted of a “relay style” event in which three teams transcribed, revised, and prepared for submission to this journal a full edition of the “Le Pèlerinage de Damoiselle Sapience” and other texts from UPenn Ms Codex 660, ff. 86r–95v within the three-day timespan of the conference. The project used methods typical of crowdsourcing and drew participants from all over the world and from all different stages of their careers. After one group completed its work, the results were passed into the hands of the next. The final result—in the form of a finished manuscript edition, ready for submission to Digital Medievalist—was presented on the last day of the conference. The main purpose of this experiment was to demonstrate how the work of the transcriber and editor might be structured as a short-term digital event that relied wholly on virtual interactions with both the source materials and among collaborators. This method also reveals the positive aspects of the many challenges posed by working simultaneously, remotely, and globally

Discovering the Digital: Reimagining a Module and Co-creating Assessment at Foundation Level

This paper will describe the adaptation of a foundation level (UK level 4) module to include the use of digital tools and discussions of digital ethics. Previous years’ feedback indicated Humanities students did not feel digitally prepared for either university or the world beyond. The previous version of the module involved an extended essay working with a subject specialist supervisor. However, while some of the students coped very well with the assignment, many were not prepared or did not have the emotional maturity for this kind of self-guided study at this stage. This was an opportunity to adapt the module to incorporate more digital humanities-related content so that the students would feel more prepared to both use digital tools and discuss the issues and ethics of digital society, whilst providing more scaffolded learning. Part of this change involved the students co-creating the assessment criteria, so they would feel a sense of ownership and responsibility for their learning process. In incorporating these module changes, we discovered that students do not always understand the concept of digital, frequently confusing it with more general concepts like technology or electronics, nevertheless, this module gave us the opportunity to address this misconception after submissions of initial project plans for assessment. Early signs suggest that the students are appreciating the challenge of using new digital tools and are finding creative ways to adapt their final project to their chosen degree programme. Additionally, the co-creation of assessment criteria has given them a sense of agency and investment in the process