Digital Medievalist: About

Digital Medievalist is an international web-based Community of Practice for medievalists working with digital media. Established in 2003, the project helps medievalists by providing a network for technical collaboration and instruction, exchange of expertise, and the development of best practice. The project operates an electronic mailing list and discussion forum, on-line refereed journal, news server for announcements and calls for papers, a wiki and FAQ. It also organises conference sessions at international medieval and humanities computing congresses. It is an elected organization and has developed some governing bylaws.

Mailing list and Discussion Forum

<dm-l@uleth.ca> is the Digital Medievalist electronic mailing list. Members use the list to ask for advice, discuss problems, and share information. The list's collegial atmosphere encourages a variety of conversations: from advanced discussions of problems in the implementation of particular languages or software to more basic questions about how to begin a computing project or find help with software, languages, and formats. The list currently has around 400 members. Subscription is open to anyone interested in the use of digital media in the study of the medieval period.

Journal

Digital Medievalist (DM) is the project's on-line, refereed Journal. DM accepts work of original research and scholarship, notes on technological topics (markup and stylesheets, tools and software, etc.), commentary pieces discussing developments in the field, bibliographic and review articles, and project reports. All contributions are reviewed by authorities in humanities computing prior to publication. Contributions to DM should concern topics likely to be of interest to medievalists working with digital media, though they need not be exclusively medieval in focus. They should be of a length appropriate to the subject under discussion; in most instances this means between 1,000 and 10,000 words.

News Server

Digital Medievalist operates a news server. This can be used to announce new publications, software, or project, issue calls for papers, or promote conferences and congresses.

Wiki and FAQ

The Digital Medievalist Wiki is a central reference resource. The wiki contains the project FAQ, and articles by members on various topics of interest to the community. Users are strongly encouraged to contribute to the wiki, by improving current entries, writing new ones, or encouraging experts to contribute on specific questions and issues.

Digital Medievalist Executive

The Digital Medievalist Project is overseen by an eight-member executive of medievalists with considerable experience in the use of digital media in the study of medieval topics.

Current Executive

Term ending in 2010
  • Burghart, Marjorie (-2010). Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales/ (EHESS - UMR 5648), Lyon, France. Burgart currently coordinates the computing aspects of several projects involving the electronic edition of medieval documents in TEI format and, to a certain extent, GIS. She has led or been involved in the development of various tools . She is currently working on a companion guide for scholars wanting to produce an electronic edition. She also occasionally acts as a consultant for other academic institutions, on computing aspects of History and Archaeology related projects.
  • Cummings, James (-2010). Senior RTS Project Officer, Research Technologies Service(RTS), Oxford University Computing Services, University of Oxford. Cummings worked on the UK's AHRB-funded CURSUS project (medieval liturgical documents) and is editing an electronic edition of 'The Conversion of St Paul'. For the RTS he works on a number of projects, specialising in those involving TEI XML and/or medieval manuscripts. He has been elected multiple times to the TEI Technical Council. Cummings moderates network discussion of markup issues, especially XML and XSL implementations, and (as technical director) is responsible for a great deal of the DM technical infrastructure.
  • Porter, Dorothy Carr (-2010). Program Coordinator, Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities, University of Kentucky. Porter is the chair of the Medieval Academy of America's Committee on Electronic Resources (2006-2009) and has served on the technical council of the Text Encoding Initiative (2006 and 2007). She has worked on many digital projects in medieval studies and classics including the Electronic Boethius and the Homer Multitext project. Her particular research interests are the relationship between text and image in encoding and digital publication, and interdisciplinary collaboration.
  • Rosselli Del Turco, Roberto (-2010). Ricercatore, Linguistics and Comparative Literature, University of Turin. Rosselli Del Turco is director of the Digital Vercelli Book Project and has recently published a study, edition and translation of the Battle of Maldon. Rosselli Del Turco moderates network discussion on ITST project management, structural encoding, and image-based editing in this project.

Term ending in 2009

  • Ciula, Arianna (2007-2009). Research Associate at Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London. Ciula teaches a postgraduate course on Material Culture (Medieval manuscripts) in the MA of Digital Humanities and, in general, has been lecturing within undergraduates and postgraduate programmes on humanities computing and primary sources at the University of Siena-Arezzo. She is a member of various international digital communities (e.g. ALLC and ACH associations, Digital Medievalist, Digital Classicist) and has been an elected member of the TEI Technical Council for the term 2007-2008.
  • O'Donnell, Daniel Paul (2007-2009). Director. Associate Professor of English, University of Lethbridge. O'Donnell edited Cædmon's Hymn (Boydell, 2005), which was awarded honorable mention in the MLA's competition for the most distinguished edition in any language or period published between 2005-2007 (the first pre-print-era text ever to receive this honour). He is also at work on several other electronic projects. In addition to his position as project leader at DM, O'Donnell is also chair and CEO of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and chair of the Department of English at the University of Lethbridge
  • Robinson, Peter (2007-2009). Co-Director of the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing at the University of Birmingham, UK. Robinson is developer of the textual-editing program Collate, used by many textual editing projects worldwide, and of the Anastasia electronic publishing system. He is director of the Canterbury Tales Project, and was editor of its first major electronic publication, The Wife of Bath's Prologue on CD-ROM (Cambridge UP, 1996.) He acts as consultant on electronic publishing to many scholarly groups, and particularly Cambridge University Press. He has published and lectured on matters relating to computing and textual editing, on text encoding, digitization, and electronic publishing, and on Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.
  • Schassan, Torsten (2007-2009). Schassan is currently preparing a digital edition of a medieval palimpsest manuscript at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbuettel. Here, before that, he was responsible for the adoption of TEI-P5 for the German medieval manuscript cataloguing system. He is part of the project team of the projects CESG and e-codices.ch, responsible for metadata and server administration. Schassan's main fields of interest are digital editions as well as digitization and publication of medieval manuscripts. In a more general view he is interested in markup languages, the theory of representation of information, in database and GUI design.

Previous members of the executive

Original Investigators

Prior to 2007, Digital Medievalist was an investigator-driven project. The original executive included:

  • Baker, Peter. Baker's term expired in 2007.
  • Cummings, James (see above). Cummings ran for reelection in 2008
  • Foys, Martin. Foys's term expired in 2007.
  • McGillivray, Murray. McGillivray's term expired in 2008.
  • O'Donnell, Daniel Paul (see above). O'Donnell ran for reelection in 2007.
  • Porter, Dot (see above)
  • Rosselli Del Turco, Roberto (see above)
  • Elizabeth Solopova. Solopova's term expired in 2007.