Term I Outline
- Meet the Class & the Manuscripts
- Establishing an Online Presence: Blogs and Twitter
- What Kind of Website Does Your DH Project Need?
- Keeping Track of Your Project with GitHub
- Writing Supports
- Scripts and Palaeography
- Abbreviations
- Codicology: Describing manuscript features
- Genre: Liturgical Manuscripts
- Cataloguing & Provenience
- Working it out
- Putting it Together
Detailed Readings
1. Meet the Class
No readings. Come prepared to meet your classmates, talk about yourself, and look at some medieval manuscripts.
2. Establishing an Online Presence: Blogs and Twitter
This class is devoted to considering how and why you might want to develop an online presence as an individual, but also as heritage institution. We’ll dip out toes into the online world by signing up for an hcommons.org profile, preparing to write blog posts and beginning to Tweet.
3. What Kind of Website Does Your Project Need?
In recent years, there have arisen so many platforms for hosting DH projects that it is difficult to know which to choose. We will be looking at how WordPress and Omeka function –the two main platforms we will be using this term- and how they differ (for better or worse) from their alternatives.
4. Keeping Track of Your Project with GitHub
At the core of many DH projects is the belief that data wants to be free. But, most DH project require lots of labour and usually many people collaborating together (and using expertise/ tools developed in previous projects). Github is a platform built to allow collaboration on projects, but its ethos is grounded on the idea that users share their work and their experience. In this work, transparency about collaborative work (and the problems which arise) is key to moving forward. In this class we will talk about the issues of engaging in larger scale DH projects (i.e. more than one or two people) and will ask students to work some more with Github.
5. Writing Supports
This week marks a transition in the class away from our brief introduction to some digital tools, towards a more in-depth understanding of medieval manuscripts and how they are put together. “Writing Supports” is the term used to describe the material on which text is written. Our discussion, therefore, is to understand what people write on (paper, parchment, stone, wax, banana leaves etc.) and how that affects how texts are constructed.
6. Palaeography: How to differentiate historical fonts, type, hands, and scripts
Palaeography is the study of “old” ways of writing. Scripts go in and out of fashion, and thus how something is written allows us to date it with some certainty and often identify its origin. In this class, we will briefly explore the history of medieval Western European writing to get you thinking about distinctive features that help identify scripts of the folios we have in our collection.
7. Reading Abbreviations
Reading medieval manuscripts is difficult for modern readers due to a complex use of abbreviations and codes
8. Codicology: Describing manuscript features
Introduction to Codicology by Dr James Freeman, Cambridge University Library.
9. Genre: Liturgical Manuscripts
No readings. During class time, students can meet with the professor one-on-one to get help with their final project.
No readings. Debriefing the term; and maybe heading to LAC’s Preservation Lab.