The Bibale Database at the IRHT: A Digital Tool for Researching Manuscript Provenance

The Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes (IRHT) in Paris makes available a series of specialized electronic tools on medieval manuscripts, among which is Bibale, a database that aims to trace the provenance of medieval manuscripts and to reconstruct historic book collections from the medieval and early modern periods. This article explains the history, scope, and present state of this database and its links with several other tools, among which are the image repository Bibliothèque virtuelle des manuscrits médiévaux (BVMM) and the Biblissima project that is working on interoperability of a series of French digital humanities projects concerning manuscripts and early printed books

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

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

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

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

Familial Longevity Is Marked by Lower Diurnal Salivary Cortisol Levels: The Leiden Longevity Study

BACKGROUND: Reported findings are inconsistent whether hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) signaling becomes hyperactive with increasing age, resulting in increasing levels of cortisol. Our previous research strongly suggests that offspring from long-lived families are biologically younger. In this study we assessed whether these offspring have a lower HPA axis activity, as measured by lower levels of cortisol and higher cortisol feedback sensitivity. METHODS: Salivary cortisol levels were measured at four time points within the first hour upon awakening and at two time points in the evening in a cohort comprising 149 offspring and 154 partners from the Leiden Longevity Study. A dexamethasone suppression test was performed as a measure of cortisol feedback sensitivity. Age, gender and body mass index, smoking and disease history (type 2 diabetes and hypertension) were considered as possible confounding factors. RESULTS: Salivary cortisol secretion was lower in offspring compared to partners in the morning (Area Under the Curve = 15.6 versus 17.1 nmol/L, respectively; p = 0.048) and in the evening (Area Under the Curve = 3.32 versus 3.82 nmol/L, respectively; p = 0.024). Salivary cortisol levels were not different after dexamethasone (0.5 mg) suppression between offspring and partners (4.82 versus 5.26 nmol/L, respectively; p = 0.28). CONCLUSION: Offspring of nonagenarian siblings are marked by a lower HPA axis activity (reflected by lower diurnal salivary cortisol levels), but not by a difference in cortisol feedback sensitivity. Further in-depth studies aimed at characterizing the HPA axis in offspring and partners are needed

Nouvelles acquisitions IRHT (été-automne 2016) : Catalogues d'exposition

Quelques nouvelles acquisitions, disponibles à la section de codicologie, histoire des bibliothèques et d'héraldique de l'IRHT, 40, avenue d'Iéna (décembre 2016) : Expo 1111 : Petra van Boheemen & Paul Dirkse, Duivels en demonen. De duivel in de Nederlandse beeldcultuur, Utrecht : Museum het Catharijneconvent, 1994 Catalogue d'une exposition tenue du 27 mars au 26 juin 1994 au Musée de l'art religieux Catharijneconvent à Utrecht, Pays-Bas. Parmi les objets exposés et décrits quelques manus..