Abstract
Alongside the proliferation of digital databases and digital tools of inquiry that have shaped our research over the last two decades, our epistemological approach to medieval manuscript studies and literary works of the past has also changed. With a nod to Marshall McLuhan, the medium, i.e., the internet allowing for networked knowledge has enabled us to investigate large sets of data comparatively opening the field of medieval studies to a whole new range of research inquiries. We, and the cultural assets we produce are integrated into networks, physically and virtually. Temporal and geographical contexts of production and how one work, in our case the French medieval work, the Roman de la rose, fits into and relates to these contexts can now be studied, thanks to the proliferation of digital content databases and archives. In my presentation, I intend to discuss an example from my own research process where access to digital corpora of its manuscripts has become absolutely indispensable. Having all these manuscripts at our fingertips is one thing, yet extensive metadata and advanced search capabilities are what make these digital collections so useful. The image delivery API defined by the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) has advanced the development of ever more sophisticated search tools, and I show how this has transformed the analysis of medieval manuscript corpora.
Presenters
Christine McWebbProfessor and Director, Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Interdisciplinary studies, Digital Humanities, Knowledge Networks, Medieval Literature, Metadata
