Course Description
Over the past 20 years, the number of medieval and renaissance manuscripts that have been digitized has expanded dramatically. What opportunities does this widespread digitization make possible? In this class, students will learn about the process of digitization, focusing on photography and touching on other methods for making manuscripts available through digitization. We will learn and experiment with various tools for working with digitized manuscripts. Finally, we will discuss both the promise and the limitations of digitization.
Over the course of the week, students will have the opportunity to apply new knowledge to a digitized manuscript of their choice and share their progress and results with the class. The course will combine lectures, tours, readings, hands-on project development, and group discussion.
Students should come to class with a digitized manuscript they wish to work with and should have access to images and a description of the manuscript. Applicants’ personal statements should include a description of the manuscript and a discussion of what kind of project they are interested in undertaking with the manuscript.
Faculty
Dot Porter
As Curator of Digital Research Services at the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, Dot Porter works with a wide-ranging digital humanities research and development team within the context of a …
Advance Reading List
Required Reading
Siân Echard, “The Ghost in the Machine: Digital Avatars of Medieval Manuscripts,” chapter in Printing the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008): PDF
Dot Porter, “The Uncanny Valley and the Ghost in the Machine: a discussion of analogies for thinking about digitized medieval manuscripts,” Blog post, October 2018: http://www.dotporterdigital.org/the-uncanny-valley-and-the-ghost-in-the-machine-a-discussion-of-analogies-for-thinking-about-digitized-medieval-manuscripts/
Bridget Whearty, “Embodied Books, Disembodied Labor,” chapter in Digital Codicology: Medieval Books and Modern Labor (Stanford University Press, 2022): PDF
Michelle Warren, “Marking Manuscripts,” chapter in Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet (Stanford University Press, 2022): PDF
Mateusz Fafinski, Facsimile narratives: Researching the past in the age of digital reproduction, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Volume 37, Issue 1, April 2022, Pages 94–108, https://doi-org.proxy.library.upenn.edu/10.1093/llc/fqab017
Roopika Risam and Alex Gil, “Introduction: The Questions of Minimal Computing,” Digital Humanities Quarterly, Volume 16, Number 2, 2022: Online
Course Evaluations
Course History
- 2023–
Dot Porter teaches this course online (22 hours).