The Chartae Burgundiae Medii Aevi are an online database.

Homepage

• http://ccfm.ens-lyon.fr

Description

Consortium international pour les Corpus de Français Médiéval International Consortium for Medieval French Corpora

Keywords

• Languages: Old French, Middle French
• Countries: Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States

Membership

Overview

The Digital Resource for Palaeography (DigiPal) is a project funded by the European Research Council that brings digital technology to bear on scholarly discussion of medieval handwriting. At its heart will be hundreds of newly-commissioned photographs of eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon script from the major manuscript collections in the world, with detailed descriptions of the handwriting, the textual content, and the wider manuscript or documentary context. However, another important aim is to develop freely-available generalised framework for the online presentation of palaeographical content which allows scholars to search for, view, and organise detailed characteristics of handwriting in both verbal and visual form. Users will therefore be able to search for material such as ‘show me images of the letter a in charters issued from Canterbury during the mid-eleventh century’, ‘plot the frequency of a given form of trelative to all other forms of t’, or ‘show me images of the letter g in manuscripts of Old English homilies arranged on an interactive timeline’. This also requires theoretical work on the nature of handwriting and how it can best be described and captured systematically in digital (or any other) form.

Timeframe

The project began in October 2010, and is due to complete in September 2014.

Outcomes

The project comprises three main parts:

• The generalised web framework for the delivery of palaeographical content online.
• The database of content specific to English Vernacular minuscule of the eleventh century.
• A series of print publications which put this content into practice for our understanding of English Vernacular minuscule in particular and palaeographical method in general.

In addition to these, the project website also contains an active blog with regular articles on theoretical questions relating to the project, and a news section which contains regular updates of events and other points relating to medieval palaeography.

Project Team

• Peter A. Stokes – Project Director and Principal Investigator
• Stewart J. Brookes – Research Associate
• Beatriz Caballero – Lead Interface Developer (2010–2012)
• Paul Caton – Lead Analyst
• Stephan Hügel – Lead Developer (from 2012)
• Neil Jakeman – Developer
• David Little – Lead Interface Developer (from 2012)
• José Miguel Vieira – Lead Developer (2010–2012); Developer (from 2012)
• Matilda Watson – PhD Student

References

DigiPal Project Website

• Project ‘About’ Page
  • Project Rationale
  • Project Outcomes
• Project Blog
• Project News

Aims

MESA (Medieval Electronic Scholarly Alliance) is an initiative to federate people and resources: 1° it is a community of scholars, librarians, and students developing and using digital resources; 2° it is a website that federates disparate collections and projects. This website will provide a search across various types of resources spanning the disciplines, geographical areas, and temporal spans that make up the Middle Ages, in the broadest sense.

MESA serves two related purposes:

• to develop a federation of digital medieval resources
• to provide peer review for scholarly digital projects in all areas of medieval studies.

Organisation

MESA co-Directors are Dot Porter (Indiana University Bloomington) and Timothy Stinson (North Carolina State University).

MESA joins with Nineteenth Century Scholarship Online, 18thConnect, and the Renaissance English Knowledgebase (REKn) project as a node of the Advanced Research Consortium (ARC). ARC is a developing organization, centered at Texas A&M University and directed by Laura Mandell, which serves to provide support for the constituent nodes. This support includes coordination, sustainability, and scalability by providing shared infrastructure – including development of the COLLEX platform and maintenance of a shared catalog including metadata from objects represented in all the nodes.

After a one-year planning grant, the Mellon Foundation has awarded the Medieval Electronic Scholarly Alliance (MESA) a three-year implementation grant in June 2012.

Tasks

During the second half of 2012, the first group of 12 resources will be loaded into the MESA website. The site will launch with those resources in late 2012. At the same time the team will be developing its procedures and policies for including other resources in the site.

Anyone can suggest projects to include in MESA and contact the co-directors.

Sources

MESA federation blog Press Release from NCSU