Text Encoding Medieval Manuscripts: Dr Matthew J. Driscoll and Professor Elena Pierazzo

The workshop with Dr Matthew J. Driscoll, ‘Fundamentals of Text Encoding and Medieval Manuscripts’, took place on 14-15 March 2015. 

This two-day workshop gave medievalist-focused training on the theory and practice of encoding in XML using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines. 

Dr Driscoll has had long-standing involvement in the work of the TEI, serving on its Council from 2001 until 2010, during which time he acted as chair of the Task Force on Manuscript Description (2003-5). He was also chair of thePersonography working group (2006-7), which was charged with defining special purpose elements for the markup of biographical and prosopographical data. The work of both these groups has been integrated into the latest version of the TEI Guidelines, TEI P5.

The theme of text encoding is to be continued for the subject of the final workshop in our series, ‘Digital Scholarly Editing for Medievalists’ by Professor Elena Pierazzo on the 2-3 May 2015, 10am-5pm. The workshop introduces participants to several approaches to editing medieval manuscripts in a digital framework, also using TEI. Professor Pierazzo is the chair of the TEI Manuscripts SIG with Malte Rehbein and an elected member of the TEI Council since 2007. She is one of the members of the MS-SIG task force that proposed a new TEI module for documentary and genetic editing. Read more about the workshop here.

The workshop will take place at the University of Leeds (venue TBC). All of our events are free of charge and everyone is welcome but spaces will be limited so we kindly ask you to register via Eventbrite.

February Workshops: Vincent Hiribarren and Tony Harris

The workshop with Dr Vincent Hiribarren, ‘Fundamentals of GIS and Online Map-Making’, took place on Saturday 7 February 2015 and the last worskhop of the month, with Tony Harris, was on Saturday 21 February 2015, entitled ‘Digital Imaging for Medievalists’.

Dr Hiribarren’s one-day workshop provided introductory training on Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and explained the benefits of using mapping software for thinking about research topics spatially. The content of the workshop was informed by his experience and interest in cartography and map creation. For example, GIS and online mapping were in an integral part of the AHRC-funded project, ‘The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe (1769-1787)’, on which he was a member of the research team. ​

Dr Hiribarren is also interested in public engagement activities related to the digital humanities. His website includes examples of some of his projects.

Tony Harris is a medievalist with 20+ years of computer experience. His workshop focused on digital imaging, discussing problems and solutions associated with the digital capture, storage, manipulation, and digital reproduction of medieval resources.

During the day, Harris introduced participants to techniques for enhancing their images when photographing manuscripts. He explained which resolutions are best for personal photography, and gave advice on how to maintain the quality of these images over time. He also covered topics relating to the management of images in digital projects, including copyright restrictions, and the dissemination of photographs. Harris was involved in the AHRC-funded project to digitise parts of the Hart collection at the Blackburn Museum, examples of which can be seen here.

First Workshop in the Medieval Studies in the Digital Age Series by Hervin Fernández-Aceves

The first workshop in the Medieval Studies in the Digital Age Seminar and Workshop Series at Leeds will be with Hervin Fernández-Aceves, entitled ‘Fundamentals of Quantitative Narrative Analysis’ on Saturday 31 January 2015.

Hervin Fernández-Aceves is a PhD Candidate in Medieval Studies, Institute for Medieval Studies, School of History, University of Leeds, UK. He specialises in Medieval manuscript studies, Eastern Mediterranean studies, and network analysis​. His MA dissertation experimented with the application of Quantitative Narrative Analysis (QNA) as an alternative method for reading a medieval source, namely, the Liber de Regno Sicilie​ and his doctoral research is a study of the Hauteville kings’ relationships with their functionaries and nobles, especially within the context of the territorial leaderships in the mainland counties. ​

QNA is a method designed by Roberto Franzosi, on the basis of content analysis, to study the behaviour of historical actors as reported by narrative. This approach to historical texts, taking advantage of structural linguistic properties of the narrative, allows historians and social scientists to study the actions and relations of actors.

The workshop will explain, from the basic concepts of narratology, how QNA uses the properties of narrative in order to structure textual information in ways so that basic qualitative information can then be analysed quantitatively, as well as including a hands-on introduction to Program for Computer-Assisted Coding of Events (PC-ACE), a software that can be employed for conducting QNA. Read more about the seminar here.

The seminar will take place at the Le Patourel Room, 4.06, Parkinson Building, University of Leeds from 10am-5pm. All of our events are free of charge and everyone is welcome but spaces will be limited so we kindly ask you to register via Eventbrite.

Third Seminar for Medieval Studies in the Digital Age Series by Dr Alaric Hall

The third seminar in the Medieval Studies in the Digital Age Seminar and Workshop Series at Leeds will be with Dr Alaric Hall, a seminar entitled ‘Open-Source Scholarship’ on Tuesday 27 January 2015.

Dr Alaric Hall is a Lecturer in Medieval English Literature, School of English, University of Leeds, UK, where he teaches and researches on the Middle Ages in north-west Europe, particularly Scandinavia and early medieval Britain. He is also an advocate for open access publishing, and most of his own published work is freely available to view from his website here. 

Open Access (OA) publishing means that scholarly works are made available online, in a digital format, at no charge to the reader and with limited restrictions on re-use. There are two ways of making your publications open access: green open access (self-archiving) or gold open access. For more information on the OA at the University of Leeds, please visit http://library.leeds.ac.uk/open-access

Benefits of OA include:

* Increased visibility of publications

* Research disseminated faster

* Increased citation and impact

* Public good

* Compliance with funder & REF requirements

* Authors retain control over the integrity and re-use of work

* Raised profile for author, funders and university.

Dr Hall’s seminar will discuss the purposes, ethics and politics of open-access publishing. It will also help participants orientate themselves to these new developments and encourage them to consider how their own research might benefit from and contribute to new modes of publishing. Read more about the seminar here.

The seminar will take place at the Le Patourel Room, 4.06, Parkinson Building, University of Leeds and start with tea and coffee at 5:30 pm. All of our events are free of charge and everyone is welcome but spaces will be limited so we kindly ask you to register via Eventbrite.

Archaeology Data Service: Guides to Best Practice

Katie Green’s seminar last Tuesday gave an insight into the work of the Archaeology Data Service (ADS), and emphasised the importance of best practice when creating, depositing and preserving digital data.

In line with this issue, we thought we’d share ADS’s Guidelines for Depositors, which provides guidance on how to correctly prepare data and compile metadata specifically for deposition with ADS, as well as describing the ways in which data can be deposited with ADS. The Guidelines for Depositors are available to download as a PDF here.

Other resources for the use of potential depositors include a series of Guides to Good Practice. The Guides to Good Practice address the preservation of data resulting from discipline specific archaeological data collection, processing and analysis techniques such as: aerial, geophysical and marine survey; laser scanning; close-range photogrammetry; Geographical Information Systems (GIS); Computer-Aided Design (CAD); and virtual reality. The scope of the Guides to Good Practice not only includes the United Kingdom and Europe, but also North and South America, and other parts of the world. The Guides to Good Practice complement the ADS Guidelines for Depositors and provide more detailed information on specific data types.

Katie also mentioned ADS’s affiliation with the open source journal, Internet Archaeology, which is hosted by the Department of Archaeology at the University of York and digitally archived by the ADS. The new issue of the journal has opened with the publication of ‘Understanding Archaeological Authority in a Digital Context’ by Lorna-Jane Richardson:

http://dx.doi.org/10.11141/ia.38.1

This article considers the issues of archaeological authority, expertise and organisational reputation in the UK from an online perspective, and questions whether the participatory promise of social media technologies can, and should, challenge archaeological authority. It explores how these issues are approached and mediated online, the issues of digital literacy for audience reception, and the approaches used by archaeological organisations to address the challenges of undertaking digital public archaeology projects whilst maintaining archaeological rigour and the visible performance of expertise.

It discusses how the concepts of archaeological authority and expertise are demonstrated and practised online, using data from my doctoral research, undertaken from 2011 to 2013. This article questions if the presence of websites dedicated to the promulgation of alternative archaeologies on the Internet can present challenges for the performance of archaeological expertise online, and how organisations monitor and respond to alternative archaeological interpretations and news stories. This research was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Open Access to this article was also provided by the AHRC.

Second Seminar for Medieval Studies in the Digital Age Series to be Presented by Dr Katie Green

The second seminar in the Medieval Studies in the Digital Age Seminar and Workshop Series at Leeds will be with Dr Katie Green, a seminar entitled ‘Data Management, Digital Preservation and the Archaeology Data Service’ on Tuesday 2 December 2014.

Dr Katie Green is the Communications and Access Manager at the Archaeology Data Service (ADS), University of York, UK. The ADS is a specialised digital repository for archaeological data and supports research, learning and teaching with freely available, high quality and dependable digital resources. It does this by preserving digital data in the long term and by promoting good practice in the use of digital data in archaeology. 

Archaeology is in a special position in that much of the creation of its data results from destruction of primary evidence. Over the years, archaeologists have amassed a vast collection of fieldwork data archives, a significant proportion of which remain unpublished. Access to data, even those which are published, is often difficult or inconvenient at best. The ADS is building an integrated online catalogue to its collections, and a gateway to other collections, which will be available over the Internet.

The ADS was founded by a consortium comprising the Council for British Archaeology with the Universities of Birmingham, Bradford, Glasgow, Kent at Canterbury, Leicester, Newcastle, Oxford and York. The ADS is guided by an advisory committee consisting of representatives from all sectors of the discipline.

Dr Green’s seminar will introduce the ADS preservation strategy before presenting some of its key medieval resources. Read more about the seminar here.

The seminar will take place at the Le Patourel Room, 4.06, Parkinson Building, University of Leeds and start with tea and coffee at 5:30 pm. All of our events are free of charge and everyone is welcome but spaces will be limited so we kindly ask you to register via Eventbrite.

You can read a research paper, which uses the ADS as a case study, online:

‘The Use of PDF/A in Digital Archives: A Case Study from Archaeology’ by Tim N. L. Evans and Ray H. Moore, in International Journal of Digital Curation, 9:2 (2014), 123-138

Medieval Studies in the Digital Age Series Launch: Professor Mathisen to Talk on Prosopographical Databases

Medieval Studies in the Digital Age Seminar and Workshop Series at Leeds will be launched with Professor Ralph W. Mathisen’s seminar entitled ‘ “Garbage In Garbage Out”: The Unfulfilled Promise of Prosopographical Databases’ on 18 November 2014, Tuesday.

Ralph W. Mathisen is Professor of History, Classics, and Medieval Studies at the Department of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA, and he will be talking about how prosopographical databases can be created and thus help us to understand how people interacted with each other in the past. He will then speculate about why the great promise ofprosopographical databases never has come to fruition. Read more about Professor Mathisen’s seminar.

You can read two previously published articles by Professor Mathisen on the topic online:

‘The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow’, in Fifty Years of Prosopography: The Later Roman Empire, Byzantium and Beyond, ed. by Averil Cameron, Proceedings of the British Academy 118 (Oxford: Oxford University Press/British Academy, 2003), 23-40

‘Where are all the PDBs?: The Creation of Prosopographical Databases for the Ancient and Medieval Worlds’, in Prosopography Approaches and Applications: A Handbook, ed. by K. S. B. Keats-Rohan, Prosopographica et Genealogica 13 (Oxford: Occasional Publications UPR, 2007), 95-126

Also, see a selection of his publications made available on his Academia.edu page.

The seminar will take place at the Le Patourel Room, 4.06, Parkinson Building, University of Leeds and start with tea and coffee at 5:30 pm. All of our events are free of charge and everyone is welcome but spaces will be limited so we kindly ask you to register via Eventbrite.

 

Find out more about the events series at the annual Medieval Group Research Afternoon (25 October 2014)

Victoria Cooper, one of the organisers of the Medieval Studies in the Digital Age, will be talking about our new series of events at the 21st Annual Medieval Group Research Afternoon, which will take place at 2:00 pm-5:00 pm on 25 October 2014, Saturday. Victoria will be speaking in the afternoon session, along with other colleagues in the Institute for Medieval Studies (University of Leeds) about this new and exciting project, and the speakers that are already lined up.

With a mixture of research presentations and internship case studies, this annual event should be a really interesting afternoon, both for medievalists and students from other disciplines. Here’s the timetable of presentations:

21st Annual Medieval Group Research Afternoon

14:00 Welcome and Introduction

14:05 Volunteering and Internship Opportunities

Royal Armouries (Karen Watts)

Leeds City Museums and Galleries (Lucy Moore)

York Archaeological Trust (Chris Tuckley)

Special Collection, Brotherton Library (Rhiannon Lawrence-Francis)

International Medieval Congress (Axel Müller)

15:00 Research Presentations I

Melanie Brunner (Institute for Medieval Studies), ‘Imitation(s) at the Papal Court: the Papacy at Avignon between Courtly and Spiritual Models of Communal Life’

Margriet Hoogvliet (School of Languages & Cultures – French), ‘From “Holy Writ and Lay Readers” to “Cities of Readers”‘

Mary Poellinger (School of English), ‘Representations of Violence in Middle English Arthurian Romance’

16:00 Tea and Biscuits

16:20 Research Presentations II

Amy Devenney and Richard Thomason (Institute for Medieval Studies), ‘Annual Leeds Postgraduate Monasticism Conference’

Isabella Bolognese and Luca D’Innocenti (Institute for Medieval Studies), ‘Italian Voices’

Victoria Cooper (School of English), ‘Medieval Studies in the Digital Age’

Ricky Broome (School of History), ‘Networks and Neighbours’

17:00 Meeting of Medieval Group Steering Committee