This week, at quite short notice, the excellent Michael Madrinkian and I found ourselves in a room recording readings of lyrics from Richard Rolle’s Ego dormio. This isn’t normal. Indeed, when I mentioned this to a friend and said that it’s unusual to be reading Rolle aloud, my friend said ‘It’s unusual to be reading Rolle full stop.’ So what happened?
Leave a CommentMonth: July 2016
I enjoyed speaking at the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School, and I hope the audience got something out of it! They were a kind, engaged set of listeners and they asked very useful questions. Those questions prompted this post.
In my session we looked at some objects from the Bodleian’s collections, handled ‘live’ in the lecture theatre by the brilliant Martin Kauffmann (Martin is the Bod’s Tolkien Curator of Medieval Manuscripts, and he’s both a formidably knowledgeable scholar in his own right and a great facilitator, the linchpin of much manuscript-based teaching). Among other things, we examined a couple of books of hours: one printed example, which both contains older woodblock prints and later manuscript material, and one in manuscript.
In one facet of my argument I emphasised how these books offer us much intimate and fascinating information despite being examples of one of the most ordinary and commonplace kinds of surviving book. In my conclusion I made a more general plea for attention to seemingly humdrum, ordinary objects in our research, whatever it is we’re researching.
Leave a CommentPrompted by the work I’m doing on the Wycliffite Bible project, I’m going to throw some thoughts at the wall and see if any stick.
Transcription is a significant part of the project work at the moment: an early step in the process of editing. In fact it’s how my first day started after an initial meeting and learning how to make a cup of tea in the faculty kitchen. Transcription was also a significant feature of my work for my DPhil thesis—I was handling, and sometimes quoting from, a lot of unpublished, unphotographed material. (Because if you work on the most successful English poem before print the rise of digital facsimiles hasn’t done much for access—but this is a topic for another time.)
Transcription’s a skill. We’re taught it, or have to teach ourselves, or muddle our way to grasping it through some combination of the two. On the MSt course here the palaeography exam requires you to transcribe and (roughly) date manuscripts from images. My interview for my current job began with a timed transcription test: how much of these two pages from different manuscripts can you transcribe accurately in ten minutes each? More broadly, transcription’s an activity which underpins editing and calendaring, or in other words it’s necessary for the things which are necessary for pretty a lot of the other work carried out by medievalists.
2 CommentsA quick note: on Monday I’ll be speaking at this year’s Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School. I’m not there as a digital humanities expert—I’m…
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