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. Journal submissions or enquiries should be emailed to: editors _at_ digitalmedievalist.org (replace ' _at_ ' with an at-sign of course).

The current Editor-in-chief is Malte Rehbein, Associate Editors are Daniel O'Donnell and Peter Stokes. Reviews Editor is Rebecca Welzenbach. All other DM board members also contribute to the editorial process.

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.

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. Anyone is allowed to post news, although it will be moderated. If it has not already appeared in the DM-L mailing list, then it will be reposted there.

DM on Twitter

All news that is posted to the Digital Medievalist website, also eventually ends up on twitter. You can follow the 'digitalmedieval' user at http://twitter.com/digitalmedieval. The links in these postings however do not return to the DM website, but instead the wordpress blog used as part of the news posting service.

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 2012
  • Burghart, Marjorie (2008-2012). Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales/ (EHESS - UMR 5648), Lyon, France. Burghart 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 (2004-2012). Director: 2009- Senior Research Technologist, 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 has been responsible for a great deal of the DM technical infrastructure.
  • Ginther, James R. (2010-2012). Associate Professor of Medieval Theology in the Department of Theological Studies, Saint Louis University, and co-Director of the Center for Digital Theology. He has been active in digital humanities research for over a decade and has produced five digital products: The Electronic Grosseteste (web-based, 2000 then revised in 2004); The Virtual Basilica of St Francis of Assisi (with J.M Hammond, CD-ROM, 2006); the Virtual York Minster (with J.M. Hammond, contracted 3DRT model for client, 2008); Francis and Clare of Assisi: Early Documents. The Electronic Edition (with J.M Hammond and J. Benson, web-based, 2009); and the Electronic Norman Anonymous Project (web-based, 2010). Dr Ginther has also published two books: Master of the Sacred Page: The Theology of Robert Grosseteste, ca. 1229/30-1235 (Ashgate, 2004); and, The Westminster Handbook to Medieval Theology (Westminster/John Knox Press, 2009).
  • Kato, Takako (2010-2012). Kato has extensive working experience in digital medievalism. Since the completion of her PhD in 2004, she has been working on several digital projects as a post-doctoral researcher. She is currently directing the digital Malory Project (http://www.maloryproject.com/; best viewed with Firefox), an electronic edition and commentary of Malory's Morte Darthur, with digital facsimiles of the Winchester Manuscript (British Library, Add. MS 59678) and John Rylands copy of Caxton's first edition. The transcriptions and manuscript descriptions are in TEI-compliant xml. She is also creating a digital catalogue of medieval manuscripts using TEI P5 for 'The Production and Use of English Manuscripts 1060 to 1220' (http://www.le.ac.uk/ee/em1060to1220/). She has worked on the preparation and electronic publications of the Canterbury Tales; and got involved in the establishment of the Centre for Textual Scholarship at De Montfort University (http://www.cts.dmu.ac.uk), which is devoted to the development of digital technology for textual scholarship. She is aware of current issues, good practices, and research and teaching potentials in digital environment. She has extensively studied existing digital resources, presented research papers on electronic projects at conferences, and attended workshops on digitization, Scholarly Editions on the Web, CSS, XML, XSLT and TEI. She was recently invited to present a paper in Tokyo at the 'Keio and CCH Conference on the Digitization in the Humanities'. She is also a regular user of TEI P5 Guidelines and W3Schools, and a member of mailing lists of the Digital Medievalists, TEI and Oxygen-user.
Term ending in 2011
  • O'Donnell, Daniel Paul (2003-2011). 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
  • Rehbein, Malte (2009-2011). Lecturer in Digital Humanities, University of Würzburg. Former Marie Curie Research Fellow at the National University of Ireland, Galway (TEXTE programme). His current research interests cover various aspects of computing in medieval studies, in particular: encoding and processing of variant texts, and digital palaeography and codicology. His PhD thesis was a digital edition of a complex 15th Century book of town records. Rehbein is member of the Institute for Documentology and Scholarly Editing and co-chair of the Special Interest Group for Manuscript Encoding of the TEI. See also his homepage www.denkstaette.de.
  • Schassan, Torsten (2007-2011). Schassan is currently preparing a digital edition of a medieval palimpsest manuscript at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbuettel. 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.
  • Stokes, Peter (2009-2011). Project Research Associate (Analyst), Centre for Computing in Humanities (CCH), King's College London. After degrees in Computer Engineering and in Latin and Old and Middle English, Stokes's PhD was on Anglo-Saxon palaeography and included an extensive database of manuscripts and letterforms. He spent two years at CCH on the LangScape project, and then received a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Cambridge on digital methods in palaeography before returning to King's. Other projects and teaching include Rinascimento Virtuale, Medieval Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age, and a course on digital publishing for the London Rare Book School.

Previous members of the executive

  • Baker, Peter. (2003-2007)
  • Ciula, Arianna. (2007-2009)
  • Foys, Martin. (2003-2007)
  • McGillivray, Murray. (2003-2008)
  • Porter, Dorothy Carr. (2005-2010)
  • Robinson, Peter. (2007-2009)
  • Rosselli Del Turco, Roberto. (2003-2010)
  • Solopova, Elizabeth. (2003-2007)

The original members of the executive prior to it becoming an elected board were: Peter Baker, James Cummings, Dot Porter, Martin Foys, Murray McGillivray, Daniel O'Donnell, Roberto Rosselli Del Turco, and Elizabeth Solopova.

Acknowledgements

Apart from members of the executive, some DM members have brought and bring an invaluable help to the community, as volunteers

  • Rebecca Welzenbach, reviews editor for the Digital Medievalist Journal
  • Grant L. Simpson, conversion of old wiki articles and other wiki editing