Author: gfranzini

Digital Medievalist communities

gfranziniLeave a comment

On 18th January we made an announcement on our mailing list and Facebook page about an analysis conducted on the Digital Medievalist social network, which revealed a minimal overlap between our Facebook community and the followers of our official Mailing list and Discussion Forum.

This thought-provoking analysis was carried out by Gene Lyman, the DM Journal reviews editor, by comparing the names of the individuals registered to our Facebook group and those who subscribe to the mailing list. The task was not trivial, and while not an error-free procedure, it nonetheless highlighted that only a very small percentage of individuals (around 9-10%) are members of both communities.

This is an interesting observation. Thanks to Gene’s network analysis skills, we will be looking at the state of our—de facto—communities more in detail to have a better idea of our different audiences. To gain deeper insight into the nature of these communities and into your expectations or needs we are planning a community survey to which we hope many of you will contribute.

Yours,

The Digital Medievalist Executive Board

Medieval and Modern Manuscripts in the Digital Age (MMSDA) 2016

gfranziniLeave a comment

2 – 6 May 2016, Cambridge and London

We are very pleased to announce the sixth year of this course, funded by the Digital Scholarly Editions Initial Training Network (DiXiT), and run by King’s College London with the University of Cambridge and the Warburg Institute. The course will run in two parallel strands: one on medieval and the other on modern manuscripts.

The course is open to any doctoral students working with manuscripts. It involves five days of intensive training on the analysis, description and editing of medieval or modern manuscripts to be held jointly in Cambridge and London. Participants will receive a solid theoretical foundation and hands-on experience in cataloguing and editing manuscripts for both print and digital formats.

The first half of the course involves morning classes and then afternoon visits to libraries in Cambridge and London. Participants will view original manuscripts and gain practical experience in applying the morning’s themes to concrete examples. In the second half we will address the cataloguing and description of manuscripts in a digital format with particular emphasis on the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). These sessions will also combine theoretical principles and practical experience and include supervised work on computers.

The course is free of charge but is open only to doctoral students (PhD or equivalent). It is aimed at those writing dissertations relating to medieval or modern manuscripts, especially those working on literature, art or history. Eight bursaries will be available for travel and accommodation. There are thirty vacancies across the medieval and modern strands, and preference will be given to those considered by the selection panel likely to benefit most from the course. Applications close at 5pm GMT on 22 February 2016 but early registration is strongly recommended.

For further details see http://dixit.uni-koeln.de/mmsda/ or contact dixit-mmsda@uni-koeln.de.

[Originally posted by Elena Pierazzo]

Re//Generate – Materiality and the Afterlives of Things in the Middle Ages

gfranzini1 Comment

The University of St Andrews School of Art History in collaboration with the St Andrews Institute of Medieval Studies (SAIMS) present Re/generate: Materiality and the Afterlives of Things in the Middle Ages, 500-1500, an interdisciplinary conference on reuse and recycling in medieval Europe taking place on 6-7th May 2016.

In recent years, the discipline of Art History has been grappling with the concept of materiality, the very thingness of art. The material of medieval art, be it parchment, precious metal, gem, bone or stone, has emerged as a spearheading topic. Unsurprisingly, this “material turn” has prompted intriguing questions. To what extent does an ivory figure of the Virgin and Child embody the divine, rather than merely represent it? What exactly did pilgrims do with the holy dust or liquid which they carried away from saints’ shrines in little ampullae? It is within this context that we wish to explore how recycling was part of the medieval (re)creative process.

This conference will investigate the different ways in which medieval people used and reused goods, materials, and other elements from existing forms to create (or recreate) new art and architecture. Why did medieval people preserve, conserve, and recycle art and materials from a different era? Did such appropriation go beyond mere economic practicality? Could the very materiality of an object have been the reason for its retention or reinvention? The two-day conference is aimed at postgraduates and early career academics from a range of disciplines including, but not limited to history, art history, museum studies, archaeology, book studies and literature.

We invite twenty-minute papers on the following range of topics and their relationship to the study of materiality, recycling and reuse in middle ages:

  • Second-hand materiality of medieval art and/or everyday objects;
  • The concept of refuse/garbage and its reuse;
  • The medieval and post-medieval afterlives of things;
  • Theoretical approaches to medieval materiality; Thing theory and Stuff theory;
  • Semiotics and anthropology of medieval recycling and recreation;
  • Issues of authorship, circulation and ownership of recycled art;
  • Genealogy of recycled materials: spoils, heirlooms, relics, ruins and remnants;
  • Conservation, preservation and restoration in medieval thought and practice.

Papers on other issues related to the study of materiality and reuse of materials in the Middle Ages or of medieval materials in post-medieval practice are also welcome. Please direct your submissions (250 word abstract) along with a short biography (100 word) to regenerate2016(at)st-andrews.ac.uk no later than 1st of February 2016. Conference website: regenerate2016.wordpress.com

CfP: 2016 Göttingen Dialog in Digital Humanities

gfranziniLeave a comment

The Göttingen Dialog in Digital Humanities has established a forum for the discussion of digital methods applied to all areas of the Humanities and Social Sciences, including Classics, Philosophy, History, Literature, Law, Languages, Archaeology and more. The initiative is organized by the Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities (GCDH) with the involvement of DARIAH.EU.

The dialogs will take place every Monday from April 11th until early July 2016 in the form of 90-minute seminars. Presentations will be 45 minutes long and delivered in English, followed by 45 minutes of discussion and student participation. Seminar content should be of interest to humanists, digital humanists, librarians and computer scientists. Furthermore, we proudly announce that Prof. Dr. Stefan Gradmann (KU Leuven) will be giving the opening keynote on April 11th.

We invite submissions of abstracts describing research which employs digital methods, resources or technologies in an innovative way in order to enable a better or new understanding of the humanities, both in the past and present. We also encourage contributions describing ‘work-in-progress’. Themes may include – but are not limited to –  text mining, machine learning, network analysis, time series, sentiment analysis, agent-based modelling, lexical and conceptual resources for DH, or efficient visualization of big and humanities-relevant data.

For more information, please visit: http://etrap.gcdh.de/call-for-papers-2016-gottingen-dialog-in-digital-humanities/

History of Libraries Summer School – Oxford, Lincoln College, 13–15 July 2016

gfranziniLeave a comment

The Application of the Digital Humanities to the Transmission, Preservation, and Dispersal of the European Written Heritage between the 15th and 16th Centuries.

Website: http://www.lincoln.ox.ac.uk/Summer-School-History-of-Libraries
Leaflet: http://www.linc.ox.ac.uk/uploads/files/Dec.%20Draft.pdf

Oxford scholars and digital projects lead the way in the fields of the transmission of written heritage, the history of libraries, and in the development of cutting-edge digital tools, funded by important institutions and in collaboration with research libraries in Europe and the United States.

The Summer School will involve a series of four visits, seven lectures, and eleven hours of workshops on primary sources and specialist databases including:

MLGB3

This resource brings together two standard research tools for medieval libraries: Neil Ker’s Medieval Libraries of Great Britain and the British Academy series, Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues. MLGB3 is a comprehensive project that reconstructs the contents of medieval institutional libraries by uniting two categories of evidence for the medieval provision of books: first, the extant library catalogues and booklists and other documentary sources; and second, the surviving books themselves that bear evidence on which a judgement of provenance can be made. A key component is the List of Identifications, the cumulative index of identified authors and works, which contains more than 30,000 entries for provenanced copies of about 7,500 texts, and it is still growing.

Material Evidence in Incunabula (MEI)

A database specifically designed to record and search the material evidence of 15th-century printed books: ownership, decoration, binding, manuscript annotations, stamps, prices, etc. Locating and dating any of these elements  enables the movement of books across Europe and the US to be tracked throughout the centuries, from place of production to the books’ present locations.

TEXT-inc

Continuing the pioneering text descriptions of the Bodleian catalogue of incunabula, Bod-inc, this database is designed to host and make searchable the corpus of texts printed in the 15th century, including secondary works and paratext.

CERL’s Thesaurus and other resources for Provenance Research

Summer School Lecturers and Tutors

Bodleian Rare Books Curators, Irene Ceccherini, Sarah Cusk, Geri Della Rocca de Candal, Cristina Dondi, Rahel Fronda, Ian Maclean, Matilde Malaspina, Sabrina Minuzzi, Gaye Morgan, Richard Ovenden, Alessandra Panzanelli Fratoni, Fiona Piddock, Richard Sharpe, Julia Walworth, James Willoughby, Henry Woudhuysen.

Accommodation: at participant’s expense. Lincoln College Rooms are available for booking.
Breakfast and Lunch: included in the School’s fee.
Dinners: at participant’s expense. One dinner in College, others in town. Breakfast and lunches arranged via College.
Cost: £150.
Signing Up: Applicants are requested to send their curriculum vitae (max 2 pages) to Dr Birgit Mikus at birgit(dot)mikus(at)mod-langs(dot)ox(dot)ac(dot)uk and explain their interest for attending the summer school.