Digital Attraction : from the real to the virtual in manuscript studies

In a BBC Radio 4 programme broadcast on 26 April 2011 (Tales from the Digital Archive), archaeologist Christine Finn explored some of the ways in which the digital revolution has changed writers’ working methods, and the consequential impact that these have had on librarians, curators and conservators. Wendy Cope recently donated an archive of 40,000 emails to the British Library, providing scholars with invaluable material for research on drafts of her poems as they developed. Fay Weldon found herself changing quite easily from pen and paper to computer and mouse, discovering in the process that it changed how she actually wrote her novels. Altering phrases or drafts became much easier, and much cheaper too. Weldon’s archive is destined for the University of Indiana. Salman Rushdie’s archive went to Emory University in 2006, becoming available to researchers in 2010; it includes 15 years of electronic material from his computer. The British Library has a Curator of Digital Manuscripts, Jeremy John, whose strongroom contains IBM and Macintosh computers, floppies, CDs and other ephemera such as post-it slips (stored in archive boxes alongside the machines they were attached to). 

Froissart's Chronicles. 6The more practical aspects of manuscript culture featured in the guise of pens, brushes, pigments and other implements used by the scribes and artists responsible for the miniatures found in many manuscripts of the Chronicles, kindly loaned by the Scriptorial museum in Avranches, Normandy.The centrepiece of the exhibition was a display in two glazed cases facing one another across a darkened room, of two pairs of twin manuscripts.Besançon Municipal Library mss 864 and 865 (comprising respectively Book I and Books II-III of the Chronicles) thus found themselves just yards away from Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France fonds français mss 2663 and 2664 (Book I and Book II of the Chronicles).This was exciting for Froissart scholars, since the four volumes had originally been copied and illustrated in central Paris around 1412-1418 under the direction of bookseller Pierre de Liffol, who seems to have glimpsed a market opportunity for the production of luxury copies of Froissart's Middle French Chronicles (Croenen). 7The four volumes were displayed open at a fixed point inside sealed cases, but their entire contents could be explored in virtual format via interactive touchscreens nearby, using the Kiosque software specially developed for the purpose at the University of Sheffield by the Department of French and the Humanities Research Institute (Meredith). 8e Chronicles remain one of the most important prose accounts in French of the Hundred Years' War between France and England and their respective allies; they 6 Images from the exhibition can be viewed at: http://hrionline.ac.uk/onlinefroissart / under "About the Project", iv.Related Projects. 7The books were sold mainly to clients in the service of Charles VI of France, though the iconographical emphasis of the illustrations to Besançon BM, ms.864 testifes to a client with pro-English sympathies: Peter Ainsworth, 'Representing Royalty: Kings, Queens and Captains in Some Early Fifteenth-Century Manuscripts of Froissart's Chroniques', The Medieval Chronicle IV, Editions Rodopi (Amsterdam/Atlanta, 2006), pp.1-38. 8Kiosque was developed by Dr Mike Meredith working with Peter Ainsworth and Tribal (Sheffeld).
The virtual versions of the Besançon and Paris manuscripts are part of a corpus comprising more than 6,000 high-resolution image fles captured photographically from ten digitised manuscript volumes (2TB of data).
remain a key source for study of the conflict.Their content forms the basis of the Online Froissart discussed later on in this paper.The Sheffield team on the Digging into Data to answer Authorship-Related Questions (DID-ARQ) project engaged above all with the virtual Chronicles, considered not so much as flexible surrogates for the originals locked in their closed display cases or hidden away in the strongrooms of their research libraries,9 but rather as a supplementary source of data.
However, the research began with the originals themselves (collation, codicology, palaeography, etc.).A second phase involved the careful nurturing over many months of good relationships of mutual understanding between the researchers and the conservators and librarians at the various libraries where photography was to take place.Once these were in place, the recruitment of talented specialist photographers10 led in due course to the capture, under almost identical conditions, of no fewer than ten complete facsimiles (most of which are currently viewable via the Online Froissart), seven of them at an unusually high resolution (500 dpi).
Development of fit-for-purpose manuscript viewing and manipulation software followed, Virtual Vellum; final copyright clearance and permissions were then obtained to cover shared use of the images for the Online Froissart and by the international DID-ARQ consortium.All but two of the virtual manuscripts were shared in this way.
Colleagues at Illinois's College of Fine and Applied Arts, in partnership with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, adopted as their particular focus the virtual manuscripts' decorative and illustrative content, concentrating on the twin manuscripts displayed in Paris in Spring 2010.Art historians working on early fifteenth-century iconography, artists and artistic schools in Paris long ago identified the hand responsible for the primary decoration of Besançon BM, ms.864 and Paris, BnF f. fr.ms.2664 as being that of a disciple of the Rohan Master.The artist responsible for the miniatures of Besançon BM, ms.865 and Paris, BnF f. fr.ms.2663, on the other hand, was for many years thought to be a mediocre follower of the Master of the Berry Apocalypse, so called after a copy of the Apocalypse illustrated for the Duke of Berry and housed today at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York The Sheffield operation, meanwhile, concentrated on the copying process and its outcome: the writing or script constituting the narrative of the four volumes.This extensive text was copied from exemplars by at least two teams of scribes to whose workshops the unbound quires were sent by Pierre de Liffol. 13Scholars tend to call these scribes 'A', 'C' or 'G', so anonymous are they for the most part. 14Scholars have 12 The scientifc fndings of our Illinois colleagues are to be published separately (paper submitted to Digital Humanities Quarterly); in broad terms, two key iconographical elements generally used by art historians as an index of authorship were identifed for scrutiny: (i) the faces of queens, kings and other fgures within the illuminations; and (ii) representations of armour.
13 Unbound quires were also sent out to the illustrators; their circulation and the 'piece work' character of their gradual preparation prior to receiving the attentions of bookbinder and bookseller are key aspects of the book culture of this period, as evidenced in Patrons, Authors and Workshops.none the less gradually built up an idea of particular scribal 'personalities' by singling out and describing the distinguishing features of their particular hands, and have been able in this way to adduce significant characteristics on which to found conclusions: particular ways of executing certain sequences of letters, such as the ligatures 'th' and 'ch', the ending '-ent', or certain ways of writing the letters 'a' and 'r' (against the models furnished by contemporary bookhands taught to all apprentice scribes).DID-ARQ's archive comprises 10 virtual manuscripts, each of which contains 300,000 words or more, all copied in a bookhand known to specialists as littera cursive libraria.Early in 2011 the Sheffield DID-ARQ team began to test some of the hypotheses just referred to against this digital dataset, applying algorithms referred to below.The key research question (broadly formulated here) underpinning research theorization and practice in this domain was:

Books and Book Production in
How might one adduce pertinent e-Science methodologies for the interrogation of such a large-scale database, the better to explore, characterise and circumscribe several particular manifestations (individual scribal hands 'A', 'C' or 'G'…) of an attested early 15th-century bookhand (littera cursive libraria) (see Stiennon 284-5; Brown)?
Initial palaeographical study suggested that it might prove significant to compare letter and word clusters (across our many hundreds of digitized folios) of writing by a postulated scribe 'C', for instance, using semi-automated definition of the perimeters of the letter and word shapes; this, it was thought, should help to generate augmented -and more objective -evidence towards the assignment to a particular scribe of responsibility for a given section of a given manuscript ('X').Once that scribe's manual 'idiolect' had been so defined, it should become possible to search for his/her activity in other manuscripts ('Y' or 'Z').There was already some preliminary evidence to suggest that this was happening across the codices of the 'Pierre de Liffol' corpus, but it was our expectation that finer and more accurate methodologies based on the virtual manuscripts might confirm the hypothesis and account for it on the basis of more scientifically convincing evidence.Other potentially interesting areas for electronic investigation might include the ductus of the written text (the movement and direction of hand and pen as they make their upward and downward strokes and PhD students and postdoctoral colleagues) alone provided the intellectual and academic foundation for the more pervasively collaborative, interdisciplinary work described here. 18As the Arts and Humanities look to the future and its emerging new challenges, these two kinds of (complementary) academic endeavour -imperfectly termed the individual and the collaborative -need to be kept in thoughtful balance. 17Credit for designing what is in effect an extremely complex resource is due to Jamie McLaughlin; the overall look of the site is the work of Michael Pidd (both of the Humanities Research Institute). 18The present paper could not have been written without the input of our colleagues on the DID-ARQ project from Michigan State University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (also at Urbana-Champaign); we are extremely grateful for their support and partnership.For details of the other datasets studied within the DID-ARQ consortium (maps and quilts) see: http://www.sheffeld.ac.uk/hri/projects/projectpages/did_images/datasets.html

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under ms.shelfmark M.133) 11 .More recently, Inès Villela-Petit has argued that the artist, properly identified as the Boethius Master, deserves to be clearly distinguished from the Master of the Berry Apocalypse ("Deux Visions").The illustrations to Besançon, Bibliothèque Municipale, ms.864, meanwhile, are to be attributed to a forerunner of the Rohan Master, named the Giac Master for having illustrated a Book of Hours for Jeanne du Peschin, dame de Giac (Villela-Petit, "Les Heures").DID-ARQ's starting point, therefore, was four manuscript volumes whose miniatures, initial letters and decorative borders were entrusted to two artists' workshops: those of the Giac and Boethius Masters.These artists were particularly favoured by bookseller De Liffol: their handiwork, and the often elegant penmanship of the scribes given the job of copying the texts, are an eloquent testimony to the remarkable activities of book trade artisans in Paris during the first quarter of the fifteenth century.The research questions that Illinois elected to explore included the following: 1.How does the application of computer algorithms to the analysis of portrayal of the human face in the manuscript miniatures help scholars to refine the parameters of discriminating features traditionally used by art connoisseurs for 11 This was for many years the view imposed by the eminent scholarship of Millard Meiss (chap.XI, p. 360 et sq.).characterising the distinctive handiwork of individual artists such as the Giac and Boethius Masters? 122.What do these computer techniques and their application to the image data reveal about the hands responsible for secondary decoration (e.g.initials and marginal decoration) of these manuscripts?3.To what extent might our new e-Science techniques assist scholars to refine current knowledge of the human presence behind such broad-brush labels as 'Giac Master' or 'Boethius Master'?4.Do our procedures suggest the presence and activity of more than one individual actively at work behind these labels?
photography of the Stonyhurst and Toulouse manuscripts was supported by a