Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age
Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age explores one major manuscript repository’s digital presence and poses timely questions about studying books from a temporal and spatial distance via the online environment.
Through contributions from a large group of distinguished international scholars, the volume assesses the impact of being able to access and interpret these early manuscripts in new ways. The focus on Parker on the Web, a world-class digital repository of diverse medieval manuscripts, comes as that site made its contents Open Access. Exploring the uses of digital representations of medieval texts and their contexts, contributors consider manuscripts from multiple perspectives including production, materiality, and reception. In addition, the volume explicates new interdisciplinary frameworks of analysis for the study of the relationship between texts and their physical contexts, while centring on an appreciation of the opportunities and challenges effected by the digital representation of a tangible object. Approaches extend from the codicological, palaeographical, linguistic, and cultural to considerations of reader reception, image production, and the implications of new technologies for future discoveries.
Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age advances the debate in manuscript studies about the role of digital and computational sources and tools. As such, the book will appeal to scholars and students working in the disciplines of Digital Humanities, Medieval Studies, Literary Studies, Library and Information Science, and Book History.
About the Author
I am a Welsh medievalist with specializations in manuscript studies, archives, information technologies, and early British literature. I have published widely in this area over the last twenty years, focusing on religious poetry and prose, and manuscripts from c.600 to c.1300. I teach core courses in British Literary History up to about 1600, on Text Technologies, and on Palaeography and Archival Studies. I supervise honors students and graduate students working in early literature, Book History, and Digital Humanities. I am committed to providing a supportive and ethical working environment for all scholars and colleagues. My current projects focus on the book as object and the long history of Text Technologies. I research the hapticity and phenomenology of the medieval book, and will be publishing Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts: The Phenomenal Bookwith Oxford University Press in 2021. My newest work concerns the application of machine learning and AI to investigate medieval manuscripts and the transmission of textual culture. Two new book projects are underway: an Introduction to Manuscript Studies; and a new collaboration with Greg Walker, Landscapes of Immortality, which investigates sacred sites, memorialisation, and the human desire to be remembered.
I am the Director of Stanford Text Technologies (https://texttechnologies.stanford.edu), and, with Claude Willan, published Text Technologies: A History in 2019. Other projects include 'CyberText Technologies' and research into personal archives ('Recollections'). In the former, we've developed models for predicting the future of information technologies, based on discernible patterns and cyclical trends inherent to all historic forms of communication. Text Technologies' initiatives include an annual collegium now in its sixth year: the first, on 'Distortion' in May 2015 was published as Textual Distortion in 2017. The fourth, the largest with 25 speakers, was recently published by Routledge as Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age. I am the Principal Investigator of the NEH-Funded 'Stanford Global Currents' (https://globalcurrents.stanford.edu/) and Co-PI of the AHRC-funded research project and ebook, The Production and Use of English Manuscripts, 1060 to 1220 (Leicester, 2010, http://www.le.ac.uk/ee/em1060to1220/; the expanded version 2.0 appeared in 2018: https://em1060.stanford.edu/). Recent publications include A Very Short Introduction to Medieval Literature (OUP, 2015); Living Through Conquest: The Politics of Early English (OUP, 2012); and the Cambridge Companion to British Medieval Manuscripts, co-edited with Dr Orietta Da Rold. Among other work, I edited The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English (OUP, 2010) with Greg Walker. With Walker, I'm General Editor of the OUP series, Oxford Textual Perspectives and with Ruth Ahnert, I'm General Editor of Stanford University Press's Text Technologies Series.
Some of my new work in both teaching and research is focusing specifically on the issue of Digital Interpretative Frameworks and the phenomenology of the digital environment. I'm a keen advocate for and critic of the use of digital technologies in the classroom and in research; and I am concerned about the ways in which we describe and display manuscripts, and employ palaeographical and codicological tools online. As the former Director of the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) at Stanford, I focused on enhancing the archival projects we supported. I'm a qualified archivist and, with colleagues, am developing archival courses and methodological scholarship. Also with colleagues at Stanford and at Cambridge, we launched the massive online courses, 'Digging Deeper 1 and 2': 'Making Manuscripts' and 'Interpreting Manuscripts'. I blog and tweet regularly, and my most read publication was 'Beowulf in 100 Tweets' (#Beow100)!
I have been an American Philosophical Society Franklin Fellow and a Princeton Procter Fellow. I'm a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries; a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society; an Honorary Lifetime Fellow of the English Assocation (and that Association's former Chair and President); and a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales. I'm affiliate faculty in Stanford's Human-centered Artificial Intelligence Institute; the Woods Institute; and the Europe Center. In April 2021, I became a Trustee of the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth.
