Situating Digital Archives

This essay is the introduction to an essay collection about the Middle English Prose Brut manuscript purchased by Dartmouth College in 2006. I consider how the competing pressures of access and preservation condition scholarship in medieval studies. I suggest several analogies between the digital humanities in general, digital philology in medieval studies, and the historical practices of medieval writers: hacking, dark archive, and prosthesis

Zombies in the Library Stacks

This chapter examines the stacks as a zombie category that retains the power to shape understanding despite being outmoded. We analyze three ways of thinking about the stacks that sustain digital humanities: first, the physical library stacks that are part of the information architecture that arranges scholarship; second, the technology stack of globalized computing that distributes scholarship; and finally, the social stack of human relationships that make everything possible. Each stack reveals something different about the digital humanities and the patterns of labor embedded within it. Drawing on the sociological lessons of the zombie category, we aim to disaggregate the stacks as discursive assemblages, thereby exposing the mechanisms through which infrastructure effaces its own social labor while also rendering social labor a visible component of infrastructure

Re-Imagining Digital Things: Sustainable Data in Medieval Manuscript Studies

The Middle English prose Brut chronicle survives in nearly two hundred manuscripts. This corpus has been the subject of extensive study for more than a hundred years. The most recent research, however, has turned out to be the most fragile. In 2017, the multiyear digital humanities project “Imaging History: Perspectives on Late Medieval Vernacular Historiography” disappeared from the live Internet, only a decade after its publication. We describe the website’s lifecycle as well as our progress so far in creating a new dataset for the Brut corpus, “Re-Imagining History,” part of the ongoing project “Remix the Manuscript: A Chronicle of Digital Experiments.” Because the dataset is relatively small, we are using it to explore ongoing challenges in manuscript studies related to discoverability, interoperability, and sustainability. Our research questions address the interface between digital data and manuscripts themselves. How do catalogue and database structures impact research outcomes? How can we ethically represent the relative authority of disparate sources? How can we enable users to discover things they don’t already know? How do we plan for longevity and growth? We combine social, technical, and historical factors in order to account for “digital things” as complex networks of relationships. By laying bare the data design process, this essay deepens the dialogue between medieval studies and critical infrastructure studies

The Dartmouth Brut: Conservation, Authenticity, Dissemination

This essay describes the conservation process of the Dartmouth Brut manuscript: Dartmouth College, Rauner Special Collections Library, MS 003183. The format alternates between the observations and descriptions of the conservator, Deborah Howe, and those of medievalists Michelle Warren. The essay includes photos of Deborah\u27s process in making a fragile fifteenth-century manuscript useable in the twenty-first century

Remix the Medieval Manuscript: Experiments with Digital Infrastructure

Remix the Manuscript: A Chronicle of Digital Experiments is a collaborative research project that takes up this challenge. It brings together academics, librarians, technologists, conservators, and students to study the many permutations of a single manuscript—a fifteenth-century Middle English prose chronicle of Great Britain, commonly referred to as the “Prose Brut.” Our project raises fundamental questions about the digital research environment. How is today’s code configuring tomorrow’s historical knowledge? How do digital technologies affect our access to and understanding of material culture? By investigating these broad questions through the example of one manuscript, we define a limited yet infinitely expandable dataset. In this way, we try to ensure that team members, whose time and capability to participate varies, can complete projects while not sacrificing epistemological concerns to expediency. We seek the flexibility to adopt new tools as they emerge, change course in response to new problems, and abandon lines of inquiry as team members change. Our approach is therefore grounded in sampling and prototyping. We aim to develop insight into how digital culture is reshaping medieval manuscript studies, while remaining connected to the unique sensualities of historic books. In the long run, we hope that this research will identify some of the distinct affordances of digital forms. In this project, remix is a method, a theory, and an aesthetic philosophy

Ar-ar-archive

A reflection on the state of the archive in the state of post-theory

La Chevalerie à la créole

L’expérience coloniale de Joseph Bédier joue un rôle fondamental dans sa conception du Moyen Âge. Bédier importe certaines idées sur la chevalerie de son héritage créole à l’Île de la Réunion : responsabilités sociales de l’aristocratie, primauté de la pureté raciale, et inspiration poétique d’un amour impossible. Étant donné l’influence durable des théories de Bédier, la chevalerie créole reste pertinente au vingt-et-unième siècle

Posfilología

La filología ha sido más a menudo irrelevante que controvertida dentro de los debates críticos dominantes. Con la expansión de las tecnologías eléctricas y la fragmentación de las disciplinas nacionalistas que primero nutrieron la filología, su desaparición puede parecer más segura que nunca. De hecho, Roberta Frank ha señalado que algunos diccionarios declaran audazmente que la palabra ya no está en uso. Parece que muchos se han tomado a pecho el consejo de René Wellek de "abandonar" la filología. Frank, sin embargo, sigue preguntándose por el futuro y concluye con una pregunta que me ha interesado desde que me enfrenté por primera vez a la perspectiva de impartir un curso de postgrado en filología (tradicionalmente un curso técnico para especialistas en estudios medievales) para estudiantes interesados principalmente en las literaturas modernas: "¿Tiene la filología, retrógrada hasta la médula, un tiempo futuro? "1 Mis experiencias con "Introducción a la filología románica" me llevaron a formular la pregunta en términos propios de los debates críticos actuales: ¿puede la filología alcanzar el siguiente "post" junto con lo "moderno" y lo "colonial"? ¿Cómo puede una disciplina dedicada a las metanarrativas sobre el lenguaje hacer frente a las críticas sobre la unidad tanto del lenguaje como de la subjetividad? ¿Y cómo puede una disciplina fomentada en medio de los colonialismos europeos del siglo XIX enfrentarse a las críticas de esa historia y sus legados? Abstract Philology has been more often irrelevant than controversial within mainstream critical debates. With the expansion of electric technologies and the fragmentation of the nationalist disciplines that first nurtured philology, its demise may seem more certain than ever. Indeed, Roberta Frank has pointed out that some dictionaries boldly declare that the word is no longer in use. Many, it would seem, have taken to heart René Wellek’s advice “to abandon” philology altogether. Frank, however, still wonders about the future and concludes with a question that has interested me since I first faced the prospect of teaching a graduate course in philology (traditionally a technical course for specialists in medieval studies) for students primarily interested in modern literatures: “Does Philology, backward looking to her core, have a future tense?”1 My experiences with “Introduction to Romance Philology” led me to formulate the question in terms specific to current critical debates: can philology reach the next “post” along with the “modern” and the “colonial”? How can a discipline devoted to meta-narratives about language cope with critiques of the unity of both language and subjectivity? And how can a discipline fostered in the midst of nineteenth-century European colonialisms engage critiques of that history and its legacies? DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1043341

Diversity in Every Course, Cross-Cultural Encounters in Every Classroom

Round Table on Diversity and Teaching Medieval Studies sponsored by Graduate Student Council. Session title: "Tearing Down Walls, Building Bridges: Medieval Diversity and Cross-Cultural Encounters in Syllabus Design and Teaching." This paper is about two courses that illustrate the principle "Diversity in Every Course Title" and several approaches to "Cross-Cultural Encounters in Every Classroom.

The Science of Open Spaces: Theory and Practice for Conserving Large, Complex Systems. Charles G. Curtin.

The phrase “open spaces,” may bring to mind expansive tracts of prairie, rangeland, or even desert, stretching lonely and unchanged to the horizon. Open spaces also could conjure open oceans or interstitial rural lands between urbanized hubs, dotted with farms, fields, and woodlands. In an abstract sense, open spaces could represent gaps in human understanding or blank spaces on a map. In his book The Science of Open Spaces, landscape ecologist Charles Curtin combines all these perspectives, expanding the definition of “open spaces” to multi-layered and multi-scaled complex systems that are “greater than the sum of their parts.” He populates these vastnesses with the diversity of species, hierarchy of biotic and abiotic interactions, and human social elements that comprise and link open spaces together as social-ecological systems. The Science of Open Spaces provides readers with a roadmap to 21st century land management, where the stakes are high, collaboration is crucial, and profound uncertainty in the face of the complexity often hampers decision-making