Teaching Manuscripts in the Digital Age

This chapter reflects on the author’s practical experience teaching palaeography in several different contexts at the start of the so-called “digital age”. Material for manuscript-studies is becoming available at an enormous rate: perhaps most obvious are the results of the large-scale digitisation programmes which are making high-quality colour facsimiles of manuscripts available online to wide audiences. At the same time, Virtual Learning Environments provide new possibilities for teaching and learning, and many tools for research on manuscripts can also be used for teaching. Perhaps more fundamentally, however, it has often been noted that scholarship is changing as a result of digital tools, resources, and methods. What, then, of teaching? Should the teaching of manuscript studies also change along with the scholarly discipline, bringing the Digital Humanities into our classes on palaeography and codicology? To begin answering this question, and to suggest some pedagogical possibilities brought about by technology, the author’s own experiences are discussed. Some limitations of technology for teaching are then considered, and some general remarks are then provided on the relationship between palaeography and Digital Humanities, two fields which are both fighting for recognition as full academic disciplines and not “mere” Hilfswissenschaften

Computer-Aided Palaeography, Present and Future

The field of digital palaeography has received increasing attention in recent years, partly because palaeographers often seem subjective in their views and do not or cannot articulate their reasoning, thereby creating a field of authorities whose opinions are closed to debate. One response to this is to make palaeographical arguments more quantitative, although this approach is by no means accepted by the wider humanities community, with some arguing that handwriting is inherently unquantifiable. This paper therefore asks how palaeographical method might be made more objective and therefore more widely accepted by non-palaeographers while still answering critics within the field. Previous suggestions for objective methods before computing are considered first, and some of their shortcomings are discussed. Similar discussion in forensic document analysis is then introduced and is found relevant to palaeography, though with some reservations. New techniques of "digital" palaeography are then introduced; these have proven successful in forensic analysis and are becoming increasingly accepted there, but they have not yet found acceptance in the humanities communities. The reasons why are discussed, and some suggestions are made for how the software might be designed differently to achieve greater acceptance. Finally, a prototype framework is introduced which is designed to provide a common basis for experiments in "digital" palaeography, ideally enabling scholars to exchange quantitative data about scribal hands, exchange processes for generating this data, articulate both the results themselves and the processes used to produce them, and therefore to ground their arguments more firmly and perhaps find greater acceptance

Bildungswesen im Spannungsfeld von Demokratisierung und Privatisierung. Das Beispiel England

This paper presents a view of the reality of education in English schools in the maintained sector since the passing of the Education Reform Act 1988 and legislation subsequent to it. It does so by using a framework of ideology, policy and practice. The last of these is of particular significance because of the changed professional roles of heads and classroom teachers and the consequences for the education of the schoolchildren.(DIPF/Abstract übernommen

Putting the Text back into Context: A Codicological Approach to Manuscript Transcription

Textual scholars have tended to produce editions which present the text without its manuscript context. Even though digital editions now often present single-witness editions with facsimiles of the manuscripts, nevertheless the text itself is still transcribed and represented as a linguistic object rather than a physical one. Indeed, this is explicitly stated as the theoretical basis for the de facto standard of markup for digital texts: the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). These explicitly treat texts as semantic units such as paragraphs, sentences, verses and so on, rather than physical elements such as pages, openings, or surfaces, and some scholars have argued that this is the only viable model for representing texts. In contrast, this chapter presents arguments for considering the document as a physical object in the markup of texts. The theoretical arguments of what constitutes a text are first reviewed, with emphasis on those used by the TEI and other theoreticians of digital markup. A series of cases is then given in which a document-centric approach may be desirable, with both modern and medieval examples. Finally a step forward in this direction is raised, namely the results of the Genetic Edition Working Group in the Manuscript Special Interest Group of the TEI: this includes a proposed standard for documentary markup, whereby aspects of codicology and mise en page can be included in digital editions, putting the text back into its manuscript context

The Vision of Leofric: Manuscript, Text and Context

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King Edgar's Charter for Pershore (AD 972)

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Efficient numerical solution of the time fractional diffusion equation by mapping from its Brownian counterpart

The solution of a Caputo time fractional diffusion equation of order $0<\alpha<1$ is expressed in terms of the solution of a corresponding integer order diffusion equation. We demonstrate a linear time mapping between these solutions that allows for accelerated computation of the solution of the fractional order problem. In the context of an $N$-point finite difference time discretisation, the mapping allows for an improvement in time computational complexity from $O\left(N^2\right)$ to $O\left(N^\alpha\right)$, given a precomputation of $O\left(N^{1+\alpha}\ln N\right)$. The mapping is applied successfully to the least-squares fitting of a fractional advection diffusion model for the current in a time-of-flight experiment, resulting in a computational speed up in the range of one to three orders of magnitude for realistic problem sizes.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures; added references for section

Generalised balance equations for charged particle transport via localised and delocalised states: Mobility, generalised Einstein relations and fractional transport

A generalised phase-space kinetic Boltzmann equation for highly non-equilibrium charged particle transport via localised and delocalised states is used to develop continuity, momentum and energy balance equations, accounting explicitly for scattering, trapping/detrapping and recombination loss processes. Analytic expressions detail the effect of these microscopic processes on the mobility and diffusivity. Generalised Einstein relations (GER) are developed that enable the anisotropic nature of diffusion to be determined in terms of the measured field-dependence of the mobility. Interesting phenomena such as negative differential conductivity and recombination heating/cooling are shown to arise from recombination loss processes and the localised and delocalised nature of transport. Fractional transport emerges naturally within this framework through the appropriate choice of divergent mean waiting time distributions for localised states, and fractional generalisations of the GER and mobility are presented. Signature impacts on time-of-flight current transients of recombination loss processes via both localised and delocalised states are presented.Comment: 21 pages, 4 figure