Mapping Manuscript Migrations: Building and Using a Linked Open Data Environment for Medieval and Renaissance Manuscript Studies

“Mapping Manuscript Migrations” is a digital humanities project that brings together three distinct data sets about the histories of more than 215,000 medieval and Renaissance manuscripts for browsing, searching, and visualization. Four leading institutions from Great Britain, France, Finland, and the United States collaborated on this project, pooling their expertise in Semantic Web technologies and medieval manuscript curation and research, as well as contributing their own data from the three contrasting datasets. The Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania, the Medieval Manuscripts Catalogue at the University of Oxford, and the Bibale database from the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes--are brought together in a Linked Open Data environment, constructed by the team members from the e-Research Centre at the University of Oxford and the Semantic Computing Group at Aalto University in Finland, to aggregate, enhance, and present the data, with a data model based on the CIDOC-CRM and FRBROO ontologies. While also considering the challenges and successes of this international collaboration, Dr Lynn Ransom (Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, University of Pennsylvania) will show how the project builds on the data and functionality of the source datasets and enables new approaches to research in manuscript history and provenance

Mapping Manuscript Migrations: Digging into Data for the History and Provenance of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts

Mapping Manuscript Migrations is a new two-year project funded by the Trans-Atlantic Platform in the fourth round of its Digging into Data Challenge. The project is a collaboration between four international partners: the University of Oxford, the University of Pennsylvania, the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes (IRHT) in Paris, and Aalto University in Helsinki. The project aims to combine data from various different sources to enable the large-scale analysis of the history and provenance of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts

A Linked Open Data Service and Portal for Pre-modern Manuscript Research

Peer reviewe

Linked Open Data Vocabularies and Identifiers for Medieval Studies

This paper examines the use of Linked Open Data in the research field of medieval studies. We report on a survey of common identifiers and vocabularies used across digitized medieval resources, with a focus on three internationally significant collections in the field. This survey has been undertaken within the “Mapping Manuscript Migrations” (MMM) project since 2017, aimed at aggregating and linking disparate datasets relating to the history of medieval manuscripts. This has included reconciliation and matching of data for five main classes of entities: Persons, Places, Organizations, Works, and Manuscripts. For each of these classes, we review the identifiers used in MMM’s source datasets, and note the way in which they tend to rely on generic vocabularies rather than specialist medieval ones. As well as discussing some of the major issues and difficulties involved in conceptualizing each of these types of entity in a medieval context, we suggest some possible directions for building a more specialized Linked Open Data environment for medieval studies in the future.Peer reviewe

Harmonizing and publishing heterogeneous premodern manuscript metadata as Linked Open Data

Manuscripts are a crucial form of evidence for research into all aspects of premodern European history and culture, and there are numerous databases devoted to describing them in detail. This descriptive information, however, is typically available only in separate data silos based on incompatible data models and user interfaces. As a result, it has been difficult to study manuscripts comprehensively across these various platforms. To address this challenge, a team of manuscript scholars and computer scientists worked to create "Mapping Manuscript Migrations" (MMM), a semantic portal, and a Linked Open Data service. MMM stands as a successful proof of concept for integrating distinct manuscript datasets into a shared platform for research and discovery with the potential for future expansion. This paper will discuss the major products of the MMM project: a unified data model, a repeatable data transformation pipeline, a Linked Open Data knowledge graph, and a Semantic Web portal. It will also examine the crucial importance of an iterative process of multidisciplinary collaboration embedded throughout the project, enabling humanities researchers to shape the development of a digital platform and tools, while also enabling the same researchers to ask more sophisticated and comprehensive research questions of the aggregated data.Peer reviewe

The Treasured Hunt: Collecting Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, Past, Present, and Future

Welcome and Opening Remarks: E. Ann Matter, University of Pennsylvania, and Lynn Ransom, Free Library of Philadelphia Session 1. Beginnings: Collecting in the Middle Ages and Renaissance Session Chair: Emily Steiner, Department of English, University of Pennsylvania Claire Richter Sherman, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, The Manuscript Collection of King Charles V of France: The Personal and the Political David Rundle, History Faculty and Corpus Christi College, Oxford University, The Butcher of England and the Renaissance Arts of Book-Collecting Session 2: Civic Service: The Legacies of Philadelphia-Area Collectors Chair: Peter Stallybrass, Department of English, University of Pennsylvania James Tanis, Director of Libraries and Professor of History Emeritus, Bryn Mawr College, Migrating Manuscripts Derick Dreher, Director, The Rosenbach Museum & Library, Of Private Collectors and Public Libraries: Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach and John Frederick Lewis Session 3: Keynote address Welcome: H. Carton Rogers, Vice Provost & Director of Libraries, University of Pennsylvania Chair: Robert Maxwell, Department of the History of Art, University of Pennsylvania Christopher de Hamel, Gaylord Donnelley Fellow Librarian, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University, The Manuscript Collection of C. L. Ricketts (1859-1941) Session 4: The Hunters and the Hunted: A Roundtable Discussion with Private and Institutional Collectors Chair: David Wallace, Department of English, University of Pennsylvania Moderator: Richard Linenthal, Bernard Quaritch Ltd. Panelists: Lawrence J. Schoenberg, Private Collector Gifford Combs, Private Collector Toshiyuki Takamiya, Private Collector, Keio University Consuelo Dutschke, Curator of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, Columbia University William Noel, Curator of Manuscripts and Rare Books, The Walters Art Museu

A New Model for Manuscript Provenance Research: The Mapping Manuscript Migrations Project

Since it was awarded a Round 4 Trans-Atlantic Platform Digging into Data Challenge grant in 2017, the Mapping Manuscript Migrations project has been working to develop and test a methodology to link disparate datasets from Europe and North America with the aim of providing large-scale analysis and visualizations of the history and provenance of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. Guided by a set of research questions identified at the outset of the project, MMM developed an innovative Linked Open Data model and dataset which unifies three separate manuscript-related databases in a semantically consistent way, together with the workflows for transforming the institutional data contributions into the common structure. The dataset has been made available through a Linked Open Data service hosted by the Linked Data Finland platform and the MMM semantic portal. The aggregated data can be queried and visualized at scales ranging from a single manuscript to a total of more than 216,000 manuscripts as a group. Visualization tools developed in the portal show how the manuscripts have traveled across time and space from their place of production to their current locations, where they continue to find new audiences. The following report summarizes our methodology and results, and lays the groundwork for further research using our processes

Intermittent existence of a southern Californian upwelling cell during submillennial climate change of the last 60 kyr

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/95021/1/palo1108.pd

Gamma-ray and radio properties of six pulsars detected by the fermi large area telescope

We report the detection of pulsed γ-rays for PSRs J0631+1036, J0659+1414, J0742-2822, J1420-6048, J1509-5850, and J1718-3825 using the Large Area Telescope on board the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (formerly known as GLAST). Although these six pulsars are diverse in terms of their spin parameters, they share an important feature: their γ-ray light curves are (at least given the current count statistics) single peaked. For two pulsars, there are hints for a double-peaked structure in the light curves. The shapes of the observed light curves of this group of pulsars are discussed in the light of models for which the emission originates from high up in the magnetosphere. The observed phases of the γ-ray light curves are, in general, consistent with those predicted by high-altitude models, although we speculate that the γ-ray emission of PSR J0659+1414, possibly featuring the softest spectrum of all Fermi pulsars coupled with a very low efficiency, arises from relatively low down in the magnetosphere. High-quality radio polarization data are available showing that all but one have a high degree of linear polarization. This allows us to place some constraints on the viewing geometry and aids the comparison of the γ-ray light curves with high-energy beam models