Conference Agenda

Manuscript catalogues present problems and opportunities for researchers, not least the status of manuscript descriptions as both information about texts and texts in themselves. In this panel, we will present three recent projects which have used manuscript catalogues as data for research, and which raise general questions in text encoding, in manuscript studies and in data-driven digital humanities. This will be followed by a panel discussion to further investigate issues and questions raised by the papers.

1. Investigating the Origins of Islamicate Manuscripts Using Computational Methods (Yasmin Faghihi and Huw Jones):

This project evaluated computational methods for the generation of new information about the origins of manuscripts from existing catalogue data. The dataset was the Fihrist Union Catalogue of Manuscripts from the Islamicate World. We derived a set of codicological features from the TEI data, clustered together manuscripts sharing features, and used dated/placed manuscripts to generate hypotheses about the provenance of other manuscripts in the clusters. We aimed to establish a set of base criteria for the dating/placing of manuscripts, to investigate methods of enriching existing datasets with inferred data to form the basis of further research, and to engage critically with the research cycle in relation to computational methods in the humanities.

2. Re-thinking the <provenance> element in TEI Manuscript Description to support graph database transformations (Toby Burrows and Matthew Holford):

This paper reports on the transformation of the Bodleian Library’s online medieval manuscripts catalogue, based on the “Manuscript Description” section of the TEI Guidelines, into RDF graphs using the CIDOC-CRM and FRBROO ontologies. This work was carried out in the context of two Linked Open Data projects: Oxford Linked Open Data and Mapping Manuscript Migrations.

One area of particular focus was the provenance data relating to these manuscripts, which proved challenging to transform effectively from TEI to RDF. An important output from the MMM project was a set of recommendations for re-thinking the structure and encoding of the TEI <provenance> element to enable more effective reuse of the data in graph database environments. These recommendations draw on concepts previously outlined by Ore and Eide (2009), but also take into account the parallel work being done in the art museum and gallery community.

3. The use of TEI in the Handschriftenportal (Torsten Schaßan)

The national manuscript portal for Germany in the making, the Handschriftenportal, is built on TEI encoded data. These include representations for manuscripts, descriptions that have been imported, authority data, and OCR-generated catalogues. In the future, it will be possible to enter descriptions directly into the backend database.

The structure of the descriptive data shall be adopted according to the latest developments in manuscript studies, e.g. the risen importance of material aspects, or the alignment of the description of texts and illuminations.

Especially the latter, the data to be entered in the future, poses several issues to the TEI encoding as currently defined in the Guidelines. This comprises the overall structure of the main components of a description, as well as needs on a more detailed level.

Bios

Dr Toby Burrows is a Digital Humanities researcher at the University of Oxford and the University of Western Australia. His research focuses on the history of cultural heritage collections, and especially medieval and Renaissance manuscripts.

Yasmin Faghihi is Head of the Near and Middle Eastern Department at Cambridge University Library. She is the editor of FIHRIST, the online union catalogue for manuscripts from the Islamicate world.

Matthew Holford is Tolkien Curator of Medieval Manuscripts at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. He has a long-standing research interest in the use of TEI for the description and cataloguing of Western medieval manuscripts.

Huw Jones is Head of the Digital Library at Cambridge University Library, and Director of CDH Labs at Cambridge Digital Humanities. His work spans many aspects of collections-driven digital humanities, from creating and making collections available to their use in a research and teaching context.

Torsten Schaßan is member of the Manuscripts and Special Collections department of the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel. He was involved in many manuscript digitisation and cataloguing projects. In the Handschriftenportal project he is responsible for the definition of schemata and all transformations of data for import into the portal.

Chair: Dr Katarzyna Anna Kapitan is manuscript scholar and digital humanist specialising in Old Norse literature and culture. Currently she is Junior Research Fellow at Linacre College, University of Oxford, where she works on a digital book-historical project, “Virtual Library of Torfæus”, funded by the Carlsberg Foundation.

Respondent: Dr N. Kıvılcım Yavuz works at the intersection of medieval studies and digital humanities, with an expertise in medieval historiography and European manuscript culture. She is especially interested in digitisation of manuscripts as cultural heritage items and creation, collection and interpretation of data and metadata in the context of digital repositories.