Digitally Enabled Scholarship with Medieval Manuscripts

I am directing part of a multi-year, multi-institution Mellon-funded project on enabling digital scholarship with medieval manuscripts.  Hoping to move beyond the simple digitization of manuscripts and the increased access that digitization makes possible, we are asking what new research questions can be imagined–and answered–through a second generation of digital tools.

My part of the project involves the corpus of 800 extant English Books of Hours.  I am investigating what can be done with a large and relatively standardized body of data to find discrepancies and locate patterns.  I am also interested in the use of digital data for visual, as well as textual, analysis.  Finally, we are re-imagining scholars’ working environments in a digital future:  bringing digital facsimiles of two distant objects together on one screen, annotating the images themselves, and archiving notes for collaboration and personal use.