Digital Codicology: Medieval Books and Modern Labor 9781503634190

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
Note on Manuscript Designations
Illustrations and Tables
Preface: Vanishing Act
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION Embodied Books, Disembodied Labor
1 Scriptorium 2.0
2 Value and Visibility
3 Digital Incunables
4 Interoperable Metadata and Failing toward the Future
CODA. Glitch
Appendix: Doing Digital Codicology
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

DIGITAL CODICOLOGY

STANFORD

TEXT TECHNOLOGIES

Series Editors

Elaine Treharne Ruth Ahnert Editorial Board

Benjamin Albritton Caroline Bassett Lori Emerson Alan Liu Elena Pierazzo Andrew Prescott Matthew Rubery Kate Sweetapple Heather Wolfe

DIGITAL CODICOLOGY

Medieval Books and Modern Labor

BRIDGET WHEARTY

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2023 by Bridget Whearty. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free, archival-­quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Whearty, Bridget, author. Title: Digital codicology : medieval books and modern labor / Bridget Whearty. Other titles: Text technologies. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2022. | Series: Stanford text technologies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022010955 | ISBN 9781503632752 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503634190 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Manuscripts, Medieval—Digitization—Case studies. | Codicology—Technological innovations—Case studies. | Digital humanities—Case studies. Classification: LCC Z110.R4 W47 2022 | DDC 091.0285—dc23/ eng/20220606 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022010955 Cover images: (Manuscript) Page spread from Horae Beatae Mariae Virginis, a Book of Hours from the latter half of the 15th century, Ghent. Mss Codex MO379CB, Stanford University Libraries, Special Collections; (hand) Flickr | WOCinTech, under CC 2.0 license Cover design: Rob Ehle Typeset by Elliott Beard in Spectral 10/15

CONTENTS

Note on Manuscript Designations Illustrations and Tables Preface: Vanishing Act Acknowledgments

vii ix xv xix

INTRODUCTION

Embodied Books, Disembodied Labor

1

1 Scriptorium 2.0

41

2 Value and Visibility

80

3 Digital Incunables

121

4 Interoperable Metadata and 

168

Failing toward the Future CODA

Glitch

213

Appendix: Doing Digital Codicology Notes Bibliography Index

235 241 265 293

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N O T E O N M A N U S C R I P T D E S I G N AT I O N S

is mentioned in a chapter, the full shelfmark is given. Later references in the same chapter use the following shortened forms: THE FIRST TIME A MANUSCRIPT

Austin, University of Texas, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, MS 143

HRC 143

Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, MS W.102

W.102

Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, MS W.168

W.168

Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, MS W.537

W.537

Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, MS W.559

W.559

Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, Matthew Parker Library, MS 153

MS 153

Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, Matthew Parker Library, MS 304

MS 304

Cologny, Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cod. Bodmer 174

Cod. Bodmer 174

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N ote on M anuscript D esignations

Durham University Library, MS Cosin V.III.9

Cosin V.III.9

London, British Library, Harley MS 1766

Harley 1766

London, Sir John Soane’s Museum, volume 137

the Soane Hours

New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Library, MS 493

Beinecke 493

New York, Columbia University, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Plimpton MS 255

Plimpton 255

Philadelphia, the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Rosenbach MS 439/16

Rosenbach 439/16

San Marino, Huntington Library, MSS El 26 C 9

the Ellesmere Chaucer

San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 111

HM 111

San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 744

HM 744

Stanford, Stanford University Libraries, Department of Special Collections, Manuscript Collection, MSS Codex, M0379

M0379

Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Vat. ebr. 402

Vat. ebr. 402

Victoria, University of Victoria, Ms.Eng.1

Ms.Eng.1

I L L U S T R AT I O N S A N D TA B L E S

Preface

Figure P.1. Henry Noel Humphreys, Specimens of Illuminated Manuscripts of the Middle Ages, from the Sixth to the Sixteenth Century. The blur in the lower right corner of the scan is the hand of an anonymous digitizer, wearing a pink finger cot.

Introduction

Figure I.1. The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. MSS El 26 C 9, The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer. Screenshot of the “Object Description” metadata as it appeared in the Huntington Digital Library, ca. 2019. Figure I.2. The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. MSS El 26 C 9, fol. ir. Screenshot of the first image in the digital copy of MSS El 26 C 9 as it appeared in the Huntington Digital Library, ca. 2019.

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I llustrations and T ables

Figure I.3. The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. MSS El 26 C 9. Screenshot of the “Item Description” metadata, including information about the manuscript’s digitization, as it appeared in the Huntington Digital Library, ca. 2019. Chapter 1

Figure 1.1. Benchmarking the digitization of Stanford University Libraries, Department of Special Collections, Manuscript Collection, MSS Codex M0379. Figure 1.2. Golden Thread device-­level color target by Image Science Associates, similar to the one used in the digitization of Stanford University Libraries, Department of Special Collections, Manuscript Collection, MSS Codex M0379. Chapter 2

Figure 2.1. Medieval copy machine cartoon, original mise-­en-­page in The Crab, May 1990. Created by an unknown cartoonist, unknown date. Figure 2.2. Screenshot showing the first lines of an untitled begging poem, with correction in the first line of Huntington Library, San Marino, MS HM 111 fol. 41r, as it appeared in the Huntington Digital Library, ca. 2021. Figure 2.3. The Huntington Library, San Marino, HM 111, fol. 16v. The first lines of “La Male Regle,” showing Hoccleve’s “inconparable.” Figure 2.4. George Mason, Poems by Thomas Hoccleve, Never Before Printed (1796). The first lines of “La Male Regle,” showing Mason’s correction of “inconparable” to “incomparable.” Figure 2.5. Cambridge, Harvard University, Houghton Library, Horblit TypPh Album 30, Phillipps Ms. 20976, seq. 80. Calotype showing a bifolium from what is now Berlin, Phillipps 1745; original photography by Amelia Guppy, ca. 1850.

I llustrations and T ables

Figure 2.6. Cambridge, Harvard University, Houghton Library, Horblit TypPh Album 51, Phillipps Ms. 23287, seq. 27. Salt print showing an opening from what is now National Library of Wales, Cardiff MS 2.81; original photography by Charles Phillipps, ca. 1858–­59.  Figure 2.7. Frederick J. Furnivall, Hoccleve’s Works, vol. 1: The Minor Poems (1892). The first lines of Hoccleve’s untitled begging poem. Chapter 3

Figure 3.1. The Fall of Princes, New York, Columbia University Libraries, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Plimpton MS 255. Screenshot showing the first view of the digital manuscript, as it appeared in Digital Scriptorium in late 2021. Figure 3.2. The Fall of Princes, Victoria, University of Victoria Libraries, Ms.Eng.1. Screenshot showing the first view of the digital manuscript, as it appeared in the “University of Victoria, Lydgate MS, Fall of Princes” boutique project website in late 2021. Figure 3.3. The Fall of Princes, Victoria, University of Victoria Libraries, Ms.Eng.1. Screenshot showing the first view of the digital manuscript, as it appeared in Samvera, the University of Victoria’s current digital collections management system, in late 2021. Figure 3.4. The Fall of Princes, © British Library Board. London, British Library, Harley MS 1766. Screenshot showing the first nine thumbnail images as they appeared within the Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts in late 2021. Figure 3.5. The Fall of Princes, Philadelphia, Rosenbach Museum and Library, Rosenbach MS 439/16. Screenshot showing the first image of the digital manuscript, as it appeared in OPenn in late 2021. Figure 3.6. The Fall of Princes, Philadelphia, Rosenbach Museum and Library, Rosenbach MS 439/16. Screenshot showing the first image of the digital manuscript, as it appeared in the custom BiblioPhilly viewer in late 2021.

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Figure 3.7. The Fall of Princes, Philadelphia, Rosenbach Museum and Library, Rosenbach MS 439/16. Screenshot showing the first image of the digital manuscript, as it appeared in the Internet Archive in late 2021.

Chapter 4

Figure 4.1. Screenshot showing the MARC record for Binghamton University Libraries, Binghamton, New York, BS2275.N 53 1340, Postilla Litteralis Super Epistolam ad Hebraeos, by Nicholas of Lyra, as it appeared in late 2021. Table 4.1. Simplified crosswalk, mapping the concept of “author” across MARC, DC, MODS, and one possible markup option in TEI P5. Table 4.2. Sample crosswalk, mapping ways of encoding author, scribe, artist, and translator across e-­codices DC, Walters Art Museum TEI P5, e-­codices TEI P5, and Stanford University Libraries, MODS. Table 4.3. Sample crosswalk, mapping how the MODS element @displayLabel might be used in MODS to contain manuscript description elements originally marked up in the Digital Walters TEI. Table 4.4. Sample crosswalk, mapping how marked up content in Corpus Christi College Cambridge, Parker Library, MS 304, TEI P4 markup would have appeared in DMS-­Index-­style MODS. Table 4.5. Sample crosswalk, showing the macaronic manuscript description that would be made by combining e-­codices DC and TEI into a single DMS-­Index MODS record.

I llustrations and T ables

Coda

Figure C.1. Chantilly, Musée Condé, Bibliothèque du château, 0297, fols. 53v-­5 4r. Upside-­down opening as it appeared in the Bibliothèque virtuelle des manuscrits médiévaux’s instantiation of the Mirador viewer in late 2021. Figure C.2. The Fall of Princes, © British Library Board. London, British Library, Harley MS 1766. Screenshot of fol.5r, scanned backward, as it appeared within the Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts in late 2021. Table C.1. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, the Brut Chronicle to 1449, Siege of Thebes by John Lydgate, Austin, University of Texas, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, MS 143. Sample imaging errors, as they appeared in late 2021. Figure C.3. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 493. Close-­up view of fol. 1r, second stanza of “My Complaint” by Thomas Hoccleve, as it appeared in Yale Library’s digital collection viewer in late 2021. Figure C.4. Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, MS W.102, fol. 33v. Error and correction in Psalm 128, highlighted by the addition of two laboring figures. Figure C.5. Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, MS W.102, fol. 39v. Error and correction in Psalm 121, highlighted by the addition of two laboring figures. Figure C.6. Henry Noel Humphreys, Specimens of Illuminated Manuscripts of the Middle Ages, from the Sixth to the Sixteenth Century. Most recent update: March 3, 2020; copyist’s hand “corrected” out of existence.

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PREFACE VANISHING AC T

O N A U G U S T 2 8 , 2 0 0 6 ,  an

unnamed woman employed within the Scanning Operations, or ScanOps, division of Google digitized Henry Noel Humphreys’s Specimens of Illuminated Manuscripts of the Middle Ages, from the Sixth to the Sixteenth Century. A Series of Twelve Plates from Richly Illuminated Manuscripts, Executed in Exact Imitation of the Originals (London, 1853)—­a collection of chromolithographic plates re-­ creating content from medieval manuscripts that Humphreys found particularly beautiful and worth copying (fig. P.1). The colors in the digital copy are raucous, and plate 7 is particularly striking, bursting with magentas and fuchsias that wildly exaggerate the subdued brick reds and paler pinks found in hard copies of this book.1 The first and most obvious lesson of the image, thus, is that the act of digitizing fundamentally transforms books, creating not close mimetic representations of hard-­copy exemplars but new copies, at times garish, always entrancing. Lesson two, taught by the brilliant blur of xv

Figure P.1  Henry Noel Humphreys, Specimens of Illuminated Manuscripts of the Middle Ages, from the Sixth to the Sixteenth Century. A Series of Twelve Plates from Richly Illuminated Manuscripts, Executed in Exact Imitation of the Originals (London, 1853), plate 7; itself copied and adapted from Sir John Soane’s Museum, Volume 137 (fol. 82v), a sixteenth-century book of hours. The blur in the lower right corner of the scan is the hand of an anonymous digitizer, wearing a pink finger cot. The digital copy was created by an unnamed employee of Google’s ScanOps division, August 28, 2006. On March 3, 2020, it was updated and these visible traces of the digitizer were erased; see figure C.6. Public domain, Google-digitized, courtesy of HathiTrust. Hard-copy exemplar owned by the University of Michigan.

P reface

the digitizer’s hand, is that digital books are created by real human labor that often goes invisible, misunderstood, and unacknowledged. But just because end users are not in the habit of seeing them does not mean that the labor and laborers are not there. Books do not leap by magic onto our screens. Whether by happy accident or deliberate design, traces of humans who do the work of digital bookmaking can almost always be found. Lesson three is that information is vanishing. Until March 3, 2020, the digitizer’s hands were visible in her book. A black-­and-­white photograph showed her turning the book’s opening flyleaves, preserving a glimpse of a diamond ring on her left hand. The color scan of plate 7 froze her fingers as a blur of action, her fingertips covered with pink plastic cots. Now, not even those traces remain. Google Books uses an algorithm to correct and remove errors from its scans. On March 3, 2020, those automated “improvements” erased this digitizer, cutting her from the end product and polishing the previously blurred corner to a humanless perfection. The sudden erasure of this creator’s hands—­nearly fourteen years after she made this new digital copy of a nineteenth-­century copy, of a sixteenth-­century copy, of an older medieval book—­powerfully demonstrates how digital copies are not static. They are complicated, changeable objects, and they each carry their own stories of labor, community, erasure, and care. In Digital Codicology, I tell some of these hidden stories of digitized medieval books, connecting modern acts of copying to their medieval predecessors and also to experiments like Humphreys’s Specimens of Illuminated Manuscripts from the Middle Ages that sought to reproduce medieval books in emerging media long before the rise of the internet and digital repositories. The story of Henry Noel Humphreys and Specimens of Illuminated Manuscripts is a story of copies all the way down. Although Humphreys sells his book of specimen plates as “Executed in Exact Imitation of the Originals,” his copying is just as transformative as that of Google Books. Sir John Soane’s Museum, volume 137 is a lavishly decorated sixteenth-­century book of hours known in scholarship by its older, alternative shelfmark, Sir John Soane’s Museum, MS 4, or more simply

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as the Soane Hours. Fol. 82v is Humphreys’s original for plate 7 in Specimens of Illuminated Manuscripts—­but in the Soane Hours the miniature’s border is blue, its acanthus sprays and twigs arranged in different shapes, and the flowers entirely different colors and species from Humphreys’s nineteenth-­century “exact imitation.”2 Humphreys, however, is by no means the originator of this chain of transformative copying. As is often the case with medieval manuscripts, and especially with books of hours, the Soane Hours cannot accurately be called the “original.” As a genre, all books of hours are copies that simultaneously mimic and transform the more complex monastic religious practices from which they are derived. Furthermore, the miniature that Humphreys found so striking in the hard-­copy book in Sir John Soane’s Museum, vol. 137 is not original to the Soane Hours, which Elizabeth Morrison has named “a virtual compendium of copies” mimicking miniatures found in earlier works.3 Dig into the network of copying and transformation that binds together the digital copies, with their analog chromolithographic copies, with their analog manuscript copies, and it becomes clear that there are only copies of copies; each a unique object with its own story to tell about technology, transformation, transmission, and labor, generally uncredited and unseen.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

to write acknowledgments for a project about crediting the often-­invisible laborers that have remade medieval books in modern forms. Wonderful, because it gives me a chance to publicly name and thank the many people who have contributed to making this book. Terrifying, because I know these acknowledgments will inevitably be imperfect. Even as I write with the best intentions, I am certain I will leave someone out, or miss naming some key contribution—­and thus enact the same kind of accidental erasure that this book argues against and strives to counter. There are digital correctives and addenda that I hope to employ for the gaps that inevitably arise. But, as I also trace throughout this book, digital projects are profoundly changeable, their futures in flux. Thus, any correction I make in the future, like any acknowledgments I write here, can only ever be partial. Nevertheless, it is my hope that in laying out and celebrating some of this project’s many roots and mentors I will succeed in offering even an imperfect portrait of the great generosity, labor, and IT IS WONDERFUL, AND TERRIBLE,

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community that have supported my work and the making of this book. The ideas for this project began when I was a Council on Libraries and Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Medieval Studies at Stanford University from 2013 to 2015. I am profoundly grateful to the funders—­or, to use more medieval language, the patrons—­of that position: to everyone at the Council on Libraries and Information Resources who created and who continue to work on the CLIR postdoc program I got to be part of, and to everyone at the Mellon Foundation who supported the Data Curation for Medieval Studies cohort. My debts and gratitude to Benjamin Albritton and Elaine Treharne cannot be overstated. As coprincipal investigators of the CLIR postdoc at Stanford, Treharne and Albritton created the position I held and were my direct supervisors. They were also, and continue to be, trusted mentors, supportive and challenging in the best ways. Without either of them, this book would not exist. I remember sitting on the benches outside Meyer Library (now demolished), confessing to Treharne that I had no interest in turning my earlier doctoral research into a book. There was only one truly good idea in it, and surely that could be an article. Instead of dismissing this as unreasonable, she asked me, so what do you want to write instead? A book about manuscripts and digitization, I replied. She answered, “Okay, map it out: write me a book proposal.” Although the book you are reading bears only passing resemblance to that early plan, it was catalyzed in that moment. It was likewise catalyzed through myriad exchanges with Albritton: from the nuts-­ and-­bolts of metadata, interoperability, crosswalking, and XQuery; to 10,000-­foot-­view discussions about who digital medieval books exist to serve, and how and why these books get made and maintained in certain ways. His unflappable patience calmed me as a learner, and his trademark intellectual generosity and rigor continue to be my model, as a writer and a teacher. In the years since my postdoc concluded, both Albritton and Treharne have continued to offer invaluable suggestions, explanations, and critiques that have always bettered and pushed this project forward. Elaine, Ben: I can never thank either of you enough.

A cknowledgments

Heartfelt thanks also go to my anonymous peer reviewers. Peer review fuels academic research. The work is hard and time-­consuming—­ and often unseen, running below the surface of resulting publications. To my reviewers: I see what you have done for me and for this project. While I cannot thank you by name (because I don’t know who you are), please know how grateful I am for the work you have done, for the many gifts you have given me. Your encouragement helped me keep faith with the project in moments of doubt, and your astute critiques have enriched everything, strengthening my thinking and deepening my analysis. This book is also indebted to my colleagues and former coworkers at the Digital Library Systems and Services Department and at Stanford University Libraries more broadly. My CLIR postdoc is the foundation of this book, and my library colleagues at Stanford helped me build those foundations. To Cathy Aster, Tony Calvano, Tom Cramer, Greta de Grote, Hannah Frost, Tony Navarrete, Laney McGlohon, Lynn McRae, John Mustain, Bess Sadler, Astrid J. Smith, Wayne Vanderkuil, and Laura Wilsey (among many others who I fear I have missed): in formal training sessions, informal lunchtime conversations, and questions and answers shared across cubicle walls, you were unstinting in your support and welcome. I am so thankful for the time I got to be part of your team. As individuals and collectively, you have inspired so much of my thinking and this book. Since summer 2015, this book has been further supported by many librarians and staff at Binghamton University Libraries. The hardworking staff at Interlibrary Loan under the leadership of Elise Thornley have been indefatigable, helping gather all the materials I needed that my university does not own. Staff in Technical Services and Collections have likewise tirelessly maintained our existing holdings at Binghamton, while also finding ways to purchase materials I needed, even, impressively, in times of severe budget cuts. Metadata librarians Rachel Turner and Laura Evans both provided expert feedback on different iterations of chapter 4, critiquing and vastly improving my work. Amy Gay, assistant head of Digital Initiatives for Digital Scholarship, has been an incredible sounding board. Additionally, without

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ORB (the Online Repository @ Binghamton), which she manages, the Caswell Test would have remained a one-­off conference roundtable rant, instead of growing into what it has become. My colleague Jeremy Dibbell, Special Collections Librarian, has likewise been an invaluable resource, particularly in navigating six hundred years of media history in chapter 2. To all my beloved colleagues at BU Libraries: I am—­very happily, and very deeply—­in your debt. Additional, largely invisible labor has been performed by my writing groups. It has been almost a decade since we completed our doctoral work, but my PhD writing group continues on. Jillian Hess, Hannah Doherty Hudson, Rebecca Richardson, and Bronwen Tate: “thank you” is insufficient for all that we have been and given to each other, all that we continue to give and be, but I simply have no other words. I trust you to read between the lines and know what is there. Since early 2018, I have also benefited from near-­daily conversations with Johanna Green, Dot Porter, and Keri Thomas. Johanna, Dot, Keri: you have given invaluable feedback and treasured community, alternately talking me down and lifting me up, and letting me try out some truly wild analogies in our group chats. Special shout-­out to Johanna who, in April 2021, performed vital midwifing services for chapter 2—­reading it (twice) in the midst of chemotherapy sessions. Johanna: I still cannot believe how you helped fix what was then going by the name of “hell chapter”—­literally, at times, with a chemo drip in your arm, dealing with the return of stage-­four cancer, and in the midst of the ongoing global pandemic. I am profoundly grateful to a number of other friends and colleagues, in and beyond my current institution who have provided additional feedback and support, including Bat-­Ami Bar On, Marilynn Desmond, Olivia Holmes, Kathleen Kennedy, John Kuhn, Jeanette Patterson, Diane Scott, Michelle Warren, Anna Wilson, Nancy Um—­ and Tarren Andrews and Cynthia Turner Camp (medievalist cousins). I also want to express my thanks to the students—­undergraduate and graduate—­who have worked with me at Binghamton University since 2015. I have learned a great deal with all of you.

A cknowledgments

Over the years, I have honed these ideas at many conferences and seminars: among them, the Modern Language Association, the International Congress of Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University, the International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds, the Montana Medieval Roundup at the University of Montana, the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) at Stanford, the Quadrivium Symposium at the University of Glasgow, the Schoenberg Symposium on Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age at the University of Pennsylvania, the Digital Medieval Manuscript expert meeting hosted by the University of St. Andrews, and the LAMAR Seminar hosted by CMERS Center for Early Global Studies at UCLA. My thanks to the organizers of each of these events, to all the staff behind the scenes involved in the labors of running them, and to my fellow attendees and interlocutors who encouraged and motivated my work on this book. The writing of this book was financially supported by three fellowships. An Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) Fellowship at Binghamton University released me from teaching one course in Spring 2017. A Dean’s Research Semester at Binghamton released me from all teaching work for one semester in Spring 2018. A one-­month Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of Glasgow Library in early summer 2019 provided me with vitally important new perspectives. The fact that this book contains color, as well as grayscale, plates is due to financial support generously given by my institutional home, the Department of English, General Literature, and Rhetoric at Binghamton University. Financial assistance for this publication was also provided through the generosity of donors to the Harpur College Advocacy Council Faculty Development Endowment—­an endowed fund that invests deeply in the research, creative activities, and professional development of Harpur College of Arts and Sciences faculty at Binghamton University. Through their generous support I was able to hire a professional indexer and license the one high-­quality digital image that had to be purchased for this book. I am also deeply grateful to all of the cultural heritage institutions that allowed me to reproduce

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high-­quality screenshots of their digital manuscripts and interfaces at no cost. In addition to the contributions and support named above, each part of this book carries the fingerprints and contributions of many people, especially those who allowed me to interview them—­and write countless follow-­up emails—­about their involvement in historic digital manuscript projects. Copying, as this book explores, is an imperfect act. I take responsibility and apologize for any errors I have made transmitting information gained in these interviews, and I am thankful to each of you for your time, trust, and stories. In the preface, Frances Sands, curator of drawings and books at Sir John Soane’s Museum, identified Humphreys’s manuscript original; and Frank Stratikis, Buhr Shelving Facility staff at the University of Michigan Library, kindly performed eyes-­on color confirmation of the hard-­ copy original of plate 7 of Specimens of Illuminated Manuscripts of the Middle Ages. In the introduction, the idea to use the Ellesmere Chaucer as an opening case study was inspired by Marilynn Desmond, whose editorial erudition provided a vitally important guiding light to my earliest publication involving digital manuscripts. Chapter 1 owes profound debts to Astrid J. Smith, who allowed and supported my experiential research with her in 2014 and who has continued to answer questions and read drafts over the years. Wayne Torborg of the Hill Museum and Manuscripts Library also generously shared his expertise on the difficulties of performing image capture on gold leaf. Chapter 2 is indebted to Vanessa Wilkie, William A. Moffett Curator of Medieval Manuscripts and British History at the Huntington Library, and Andrea Denny-­Brown, associate professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, who made time for lengthy interviews in April 2021 and follow-­up emails, and who subsequently read and improved my drafts. Helen Spencer and Daniel Wakelin helped substantially in the sections on Furnivall, Burrow, and Doyle—­ performing for me additional, time-­consuming labor that I could not do myself, due to ongoing COVID-­19 travel restrictions.

A cknowledgments

Chapter 3 is indebted to what feels like the proverbial “cast of thousands”: for Digital Scriptorium, especially Debra Cashion and Consuelo Dutschke; for the University of Victoria digitization, especially David Badke, Jonathan Bengston, and Heather Dean; for the Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts, especially Kathleen Doyle, Eleanor Jackson, Peter Kidd, and Andrew Prescott; for Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis, Elizabeth Fuller at the Rosenbach Museum and Library; and at the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, Jessie Dummer, Doug Emery, Nicholas Herman, Amey Hutchins, Andrea Nuñez, Mick Overgard, Dot Porter, and Jordan Rothschild. This chapter also incorporates material from interviews with Special Collections and Imaging staff at the University of Glasgow, especially Stephen McCann, head of the Photographic Unit. In addition to my many coworkers, teachers, and mentors at Stanford University Libraries named above, chapter 4 is indebted to the four other members of the 2013–­15 CLIR Postdoctoral Fellows in Data Curation for Medieval Studies cohort. Alexandra Bolintineanu, Matthew Evan Davis, Tamsyn Mahoney-­Steel, and Ece Turnator: I am so grateful to each of you, and the work we have gotten to do, together. The book you are holding in your hands, or viewing on a screen, is also the work of myriad hands—­the people at Stanford University Press. Some I know through email and zoom meetings: series editor Ruth Ahnert; press editors Erica Wetter and Caroline McKusick; production editors Susan Karani, Emily Smith, and Gigi Mark; Susan Olin, my copy editor; and Shannon Li, my indexer. Others I have yet to meet as I type these words: Ekaterina Zhigalova, who is processing the art for printing; Rob Ehle, who designed the cover; and Elliott Beard, the compositor for this book. Still others I may never meet at all. Nevertheless, I am profoundly grateful to all of you: the editors; graphics, text, and cover designers; all who, like alchemists, have been part of the production process, doing the hands-­on, expert labor of taking digital files and making them into a beautiful book.

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A much earlier version of my engagement with the digitization of the Ellesmere Chaucer was published as “The Leper on the Road to Canterbury: The Summoner, Digital Manuscripts, and Possible Futures,” special issue, “Medieval Futures,” guest editor, Marilynn Desmond, Mediaevalia 36/37 (2015/2016): 223–­61. Parts of chapter 4 previously appeared as “Adam Scriveyn in Cyberspace: Loss, Labour, Ideology, and Infrastructure in Interoperable Reuse of Digital Manuscript Metadata,” in Meeting the Medieval in a Digital World, edited by Matthew Evan Davis, Tamsyn Mahoney-­Steel, and Ece Turnator (Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2018), reprinted with permission of Arc Humanities Press.

DIGITAL CODICOLOGY

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INTRODUCTION EMBODIED BOOKS, DISEMBODIED LABOR

O P E N A S E A R C H E N G I N E  and enter the terms “ellesmere manuscript chau-

cer.” When hyperlinks appear, click the one that leads to the Huntington Library’s digital collections. What is the object that appears on your screen? San Marino, Huntington Library, MSS El 26 C 9 is commonly known as the Ellesmere Chaucer; it contains an early, deluxe copy of The Canterbury Tales, composed by Geoffrey Chaucer between 1380 and 1400. The hard-­copy volume was made sometime around 1400, but the precise details of its creation and creators are much debated.1 When and why was it made? Who were its copyists? Can one be identified with the historical scribe Adam Pinkhurst? If so, moving out from the particular book to Chaucer’s lifetime of work, does that mean that one of the contributors to this early, luxurious copy of The Canterbury Tales can be linked to the scribe mocked in the lyric poem “Adam Scriveyn,” which has been attributed to Chaucer by the fifteenth-­century scribe John Shirley? All of these questions coalesce around the object 1

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illuminated on your screen. But the much-­studied object of scholarly devotion—­the book written and decorated entirely by hand, in oak-­gall ink, on processed animal skin—­is patently not the same thing as the digitized object researchers and students access online, a point frequently made in publications on digitized books.2 When we work with a digitized manuscript, we work not with the manuscript itself but with digital images of medieval books, wrapped in layers of metadata, all of it mediated by unseen workers, using hardware and software most end users do not perceive, and served out to us through modern internet infrastructures and screens. This book seeks to provide answers to the question, What is a digitized manuscript? While what we look at in a glow of pixels may appear to be a manuscript, made by medieval scribes and illuminators, touched and used by centuries of readers, it is not. So what is it that we work with when we use digital copies of rare books and manuscripts, maintained on distant servers and used by countless readers via thousands of glowing screens? Over the past forty years, research in the humanities has been transformed by the digitization of a wide array of cultural heritage objects—­ including pre-­and nonprint medieval texts.3 As this transformation has occurred, a consensus has emerged concerning what digitized books are not—­they are not perfect surrogates for or transparent windows to their analog originals. Less ink has been spilled and fewer pixels illuminated concerning what digital manuscripts are. While there is an exciting literature emerging on digital manuscripts, scholarly end users still generally know little about how digital manuscripts are made, their recent history, and how new digital copies fit into the much longer history of copying medieval books across media.4 My preferred term for these objects, “digital manuscript,” emphasizes what I take to be a key element of these new copies and their long media history—­the human labor that is always involved in their creation, preservation, and transmission. The word “manuscript” comes from the Latin manū, from manus—­“ hand”—­and scrīptus, from scrībere—­“to write.”5 The German term Handschrift shares this etymology. In both languages, the terms

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foreground the realities of human labor: this thing, “manuscript” says, was created through the work of human hands. Like their analog progenitors, digital copies are created through intensely hands-­on processes, but names like “digital surrogate,” “digital facsimile,” and “digital avatar” keep that hands-­on labor out of sight and therefore, I fear, out of mind. In describing these objects as “digital manuscripts” I seek to emphasize how much hands-­on human labor continues to be the story of medieval manuscripts, especially as they are copied into new media. The academic disciplines of bibliography and codicology analyze books as material, cultural objects. In much the same way that every medieval manuscript is a unique object, every digitization is unique. Even manuscripts copied according to “mass digitization principles” are shaped by particular individuals, institutions, and funding agencies as well as the historical moment and technologies of their creation. As digital archives continue to proliferate, we need a rigorous codicology for digital manuscripts and books, distinct from their analog, hard-­ copy originals. At the heart of this expanded codicology rest the same questions that we have long asked of digitized books’ analog originals: Who made this book? when? where? for whom? using what tools? to what end? The rules of book history and manuscript studies do not end—­or even change very radically—­when a medieval book is copied into digital form. Our answers, however, grow more interesting and complex. Answering questions about when and why a digital book was made requires developing a curious double vision, simultaneously seeing the stages of medieval creation and digital re-­creation—­fostering an awareness of the ways digital resources are both true and untrue to their analog counterparts, both faithful and false witnesses. The digital copy of the Ellesmere Chaucer ca. 2017 exemplifies the benefits of employing this double vision. Below the larger digital photographs and smaller thumbnails that support easy browsing, an “Object Description” lists information about the object you see on your screen (fig. I.1).6 The title of the book is “Canterbury Tales” and its creator is listed as “Chaucer, Geoffrey,–­1400, author.” Pinkhurst and the debates that

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Figure I.1  The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. MSS El 26 C 9, The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer. Screenshot of a portion of the “Object Description” metadata as it appeared in the Huntington Digital Library, ca. 2019. From photographs by Robert Schlosser, 1995; transparencies digitized by unknown team, September 16, 2011. Image reproduced with permission of the Huntington Library.

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swirl around him are nowhere to be seen. The object you see, the metadata say, is made up of two modern parchment flyleaves, one flyleaf of medieval parchment, 232 leaves of text and decoration, two more flyleaves of medieval parchment, and ends with four flyleaves of modern parchment. The notes also acknowledge that the six-­hundred-­year-­old book’s binding is a recent addition, dating from 1995 “when the manuscript was conserved and rebound to meet modern standards of preservation.” That binding is absent in the digital copy (fig. I.2). The digital manuscript loads already open to the first medieval parchment flyleaf, offering only a glimpse of something more modern on the far side of the gutter. Scholarship on digitized books conventionally warns us about this kind of absence, explaining that when bindings, flyleaves, book covers, and other content go unphotographed, each elision risks leading users astray. These gaps can be taken as evidence of digital distortion, used in cautionary tales exhorting researchers to never trust a digital copy to perfectly represent its hard-­copy original. These warnings are useful in their way—­but they still focus on what the digital manuscript is not, rather than what the digital manuscript is. In the case of the digital Ellesmere Chaucer manuscript, there are concrete, recoverable reasons why the binding is absent, and the key to that history lies in information that used to be visible in the Huntington’s descriptive metadata. Although much of the metadata in the “Item Description” section repeats information about the analog manuscript, a few elements preserve details about the origins of this digital copy, including “Digitization Specifications” and “Cataloging Notes” (fig. I.3). Having access to this information about a digital manuscript empowers users to begin to answer the basic questions of codicology—­ about the digital copy as an object in its own right. The digital object on your screen was made, the metadata report, “from transparencies made after 1995 Conservation Project from photographs of the folios.” Knowing this and then connecting it to the hard copy’s conservation history clarify why the analog book’s modern binding is not included in the digital copy. In 1995, the Ellesmere Chaucer manuscript was disbound.

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Figure I.2  The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. MSS El 26 C 9, fol. ir. Screenshot of the first image in the digital copy of Huntington Library, MSS El 26 C 9 as it appeared in the Huntington Digital Library, ca. 2019. From photographs by Robert Schlosser, 1995; transparencies digitized by unknown team, September 16, 2011. Image reproduced with permission of the Huntington Library.

Figure I.3  The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. MSS El 26 C 9. Screenshot of the “Item Description” metadata, including information about the manuscript’s digitization, as it appeared in the Huntington Digital Library, ca. 2019. From photographs by Robert Schlosser, 1995; transparencies digitized by unknown team, September 16, 2011. Image reproduced with permission of the Huntington Library.

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It was photographed, still unbound, by Robert Schlosser, then principal photographer at the Huntington.7 After image capture, it received the new modern binding that is described in the digital manuscript’s metadata but not present in the digital manuscript. The 1995 binding and flyleaves are not in the digital image set, in short, because they did not exist when the digital manuscript’s source media were made. Embedding the digital copy more firmly in the details of its production reveals how the copy of the Ellesmere Chaucer you see on your screen is the product of a particular moment in time and space. Scholarship on digital books has conventionally positioned “the physical” versus “the digital” as though technologically mediated, visual access to medieval manuscripts is a new thing. But the metadata for the digital copy reveal how much that binary oversimplifies the media histories of digitized books. Far from a Gutenberg parenthesis, skipping over five hundred years to directly connect the pre-­and postprint eras, the digital copy of the Ellesmere Chaucer is deeply rooted in—­is in fact inseparable from—­an array of modern reprographic technologies, not the least of which is print.8 This knotted media heritage of one digital copy of a famous medieval English manuscript neatly exemplifies one of the credos of media archaeology: “Older technical media play an important part in the histories and genealogies, the archaeological layers conditioning our present.”9 The digital codicology I seek to promote builds on these insights from media archaeology. I attend to the histories and layers of media that separate original medieval objects from modern digital readers—­because those layers condition all interactions with medieval books on screens. In extending the principles of codicology to include digital copies of medieval books, modern media history matters. Developing a Codicology for Digitized Books

Codicology is the study of the physical makeup of codices, bound books.10 Unlike “philology” (which can mean studying the processes and tools of writing a text, but can also mean the love of words, learning, language, and literature; the academic discipline of studying language history; and a concrete set of techniques for making sense of

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texts), codicology focuses on the “objectness” of premodern books.11 That strict focus on materials and methods—­the how, where, and why a thing is made, and who did that making—­is precisely what I seek to extend to premodern books’ digital progeny. Digitization is the “conversion of an analog signal or code into a digital signal or code.”12 The term “digitization” thus encompasses “image scanning, microfilming and then scanning the microfilm, photography followed by scanning of the photographic surrogates”—­the method used to create the digitized Ellesmere Chaucer manuscript—­ “rekeying (typing in) of textual content, OCR (Optical Character Recognition) of scanned textual content, encoding textual content to create a marked-­up digital resource, and advanced imaging techniques for large format or specialist items.”13 In this book, I focus on the digitization of medieval manuscripts—­although my methods are extensible to other materials and media (see appendix). My case studies are manuscripts produced on either side of the English Channel in the mid-­ and later fifteenth century during the first fifty years of movable-­t ype print in western Europe, handwritten books made during what has come to be known as the “incunabula period” of print. By virtue of what they are, as well as where and when they were created, these late medieval manuscripts deny tidy narratives of technological evolution and sudden replacement. These manuscripts’ modern digital counterparts, created between the 1970s and 2010s, similarly defy narratives of technological evolution that argue the rise of digital texts will bring about the death of analog books. Like media archaeology, to which it is indebted, digital codicology “deliberately resists an uncritically celebratory approach to technological narratives, just as it resists the curiosity-­cabinet approach to treating the past as a collection of strange nostalgia objects.”14 Instead of treating digital manuscripts made in the 1990s as either lesser-­evolved precursors to be discarded or dated curios to be recalled with amusement and pity, digital codicology studies them with the same rigor as it extends to digital manuscripts made in the 2020s—­to understand what digital manuscripts are, as well as the fears and expectations that swirl around them.

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I focus, in particular, on two-­dimensional digital images wrapped in layers of administrative, structural, and descriptive metadata—­and not on methods such as OCR, multispectral imaging, or 3-­D scanning—­for two reasons. First, the world of cultural heritage is awash with two-­ dimensional digital images and their metadata. Given their abundance, we are profoundly in need of a language and methodology for analyzing them. My second reason for focusing on two-­dimensional digitization is that these digital objects are not receiving the attention they deserve—­in large part, I suspect, because they are so common. Writing in 1991, Eric Weiser rhapsodized about how successful technologies fade from view: “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”15 This has been the case with digitized manuscripts. They have become so much a part of the fabric of everyday research, teaching, and outreach that they are transparent—­as common and unseen as the air we breathe. Drawing inspiration from Daniel Wakelin’s work analyzing common medieval copying practices, I argue that an overemphasis on the quirky and exceptional rather than the quotidian and common has severely imbalanced critical conversations surrounding digitization and medieval books.16 The stories of remarkable manuscripts are frequently told. Extraordinary, new digitization methods will always draw attention. But the histories of more common digitizations—­which comprise the majority of digital manuscripts available today—­need to be uncovered and told with equal vigor. Moreover, if humanities researchers wish to be information-­literate about our data, we have to understand how they come into being. And that means understanding the most common—­and therefore most influential—­processes of digitization. Histories of Erasure

Medievalists and manuscript scholars conventionally pit “the physical” against “the digital,” as though digital objects have no real material existence—­but there is a growing body of literature analyzing how digital objects have their own, unique materiality.17 As Johanna Drucker

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emphasizes, “the stripping away of material information when a document is stored in binary form is not a move from material to immaterial form, but from one material condition to another.”18 In viewing digital manuscripts as though they have no material body and in overlooking digital labor, I believe that we are obeying imperatives set by twin rhetorics that gained power in the late twentieth century: first, that digital things are disembodied, with no real physical form; and second, that analog books are under threat of extinction from these disembodied digital forms. In “A Material History of Bits,” Jean-­François Blanchette analyzes the popularity and power of associating electronic communications with immateriality.19 He pinpoints the last years of the twentieth century as a moment during which the trope gained particular prominence, with publications like “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” (1996) insisting that “Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live. . . . There is no matter here.”20 But digital infrastructures are not immaterial. Computers may be “unique in the history of writing technologies,” as Matthew Kirschenbaum puts it, “in that they present a premeditated material environment built and engineered to propagate an illusion of immateriality”—­but computers, servers, and the data that live on them all have material foundations.21 That we persist in the language of digital immateriality may be due to one of the underlying logics of new media. In one of the foundational texts of media studies, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin posit, “our culture wants both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation: ideally, it wants to erase its media in the very act of multiplying them.” They name this push to erase all traces of mediation the “logic of immediacy” and explain how it “dictates that the medium itself should disappear and leave us in the presence of the thing represented: sitting in the race car or standing on the mountaintop.”22 The logic of immediacy, at work in the digital copy of the Ellesmere Chaucer, helps readers imagine that the object on the screen is the book. Of course, it is not. A

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screen is a screen and a hard-­copy, analog codex is a hard-­copy, analog codex. Pixels can represent parchment but they cannot become it. Nevertheless, the trope of immateriality plus the logic of immediacy shape end users’ desires and—­in anticipation of those desires—­how medieval books are digitized. The problem is that if the illusion of immediacy dictates that digital medieval books should help end users to feel we are in the presence of the medieval thing itself, then all signs of the modern work and workers involved in that mediation must necessarily be hidden from view. The second powerful rhetoric particularly popular around the turn of the millennium is the “death of the book.”23 According to this trope, computers, e-­books, and other nascent forms of digital media were going to bring about the end of analog codices. In addition to inspiring popular-­press think pieces, this approached helped catalyze scholarly approaches to the “material book.” Andrea Ballatore and Simone Natale explain that issues such as the smell of the binding and the feel of paper started to play a more significant role when e-­readers and e-­ books began to be perceived as a menace to the old paper book. Before that, neither the mainstream literary culture nor the academic culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries showed much interest in these material qualities.24 As a response to the perceived threat of media extinction, researchers rushed to emphasize the unique sensory experiences of the material book—­smell, sound, touch—­as both aesthetic experience and scholarly data. Bookish objects that did not smell, sound, or feel the same as the material book (and that therefore lacked those familiar data) could be an amusement or a threat, but they could not be “real” books. The same period spanning the final decades of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-­first also heralded a wave of medieval digitization projects—­digitized manuscripts, digital library catalogs, and digital editions. Flagship digital manuscript projects, such as The Canterbury Tales Project, The Electronic Beowulf, and The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive are rooted in the 1980s and were offi-

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cially launched in 1992–­93.25 The mid-­1990s mark another watershed moment. The Aberdeen Bestiary Project—­digital images and metadata, woven through with transcriptions, translations, and prepared commentaries—­was published online in 1996.26 Also circa 1996–­97, work began on Digital Scriptorium.27 Historically important projects continued to launch in the early years of the twenty-­first century. The Auchinleck Manuscript Project was founded in 2000, and the project site officially went live in July 2003.28 The same year saw the launch of the British Library’s Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts. And 2005 saw the launch of Codices Electronici Sangalleses, a manuscript digitization project focused on the Abbey Library of St. Gall and forerunner to e-­codices.29 In 2009, both The Codex Sinaiticus Project and Parker on the Web (1.0) went online.30 What this means is that, when these (and other) historically important digital manuscript projects launched, they did so at a moment when techno-­utopians were proclaiming the bodiless immateriality of all things digital, techno-­cautionists were warning that analog codices were locked in an evolutionary death-­match with digital books and computers, and book historians were turning ever more deeply to the materiality of hard-­copy books. All of these concerns are neatly encapsulated in Michael Camille’s 1998 essay “Sensations of the Page: Imaging Technologies and Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts.”31 He predicts a brave new—­disembodied—­ world of digital manuscripts: The future direction of a major manuscript repository such as the British Library is not in anything so bound as the book as it is in cyberspace. The advantages of this over earlier forms of reproduction are obvious: the image is not a material object but, rather, is made up of electronic impulses that demand little storage space. . . . Graphical user interface designs will make thousands of previously unavailable manuscript pages available in the home.32 Against digital immateriality, Camille positions analog books’ visceral materiality. But he positions it as threatened, more disembodied in the last decade of the twentieth century than it was in the medieval past:

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The book today has lost much of these corporeal, communicative, and erotic associations. The medieval book was activated constantly, however, by the speaking, sucking mouth, the gesturing, probing hand, and the opening, closing body. Reading a text was a charged somatic experience in which every turn of the page was sensational, from the feel of the flesh and hair side of the parchment on one’s fingertips, to the lubricious labial mouthing of the written words with one’s tongue.33 Opposed to that sensational bookish body, probed, treasured, and touched by embodied readers, Camille positions a digital experience that utterly resists readerly ecstasy: . . . the computer screen cannot be penetrated like a body, cannot be defiled or dirtied, marked by my own body. It can only be marked and changed within its own system. I send messages that relay messages to another site where my own body cannot be. True, this site/sight is vastly more multiform than any page and can be constantly played around with by myself and anyone else who cares to join in. But it is always absent, and, moreover, it can be everywhere at once.34 All the prevailing rhetorics weave together here: There is the trope of digital immateriality: “the image is not a material object.” A nod to the ways that access to repositories may be transformed: the future of the British Library is not bound in books but in cyberspace. There is the celebration of medieval books’ materialities: corporeal, communicative, sensational, somatic, erotic. Above all, there is the lament over the ways that digital manuscripts resist and deflect researchers’ bodies, the way they do not have bodies of their own. The opposition of bodily engagement with hard-­copy artifacts versus disembodied play with digital copies remains an influential trope in manuscript studies. In “Touched for the Very First Time: On Losing My Manuscript Virginity,” Angela Bennett Segler expresses Camillesque fervor for fleshly contact between the reader and the hard-­copy book, and she juxtaposes

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the ecstasies of touching analog manuscripts with the cooler foreplay and visual tease of manuscripts on screens.35 In “Fleshing Out the Text: The Transcendent Manuscript in the Digital Age,” Elaine Treharne similarly meditates on the ways that digital images and their accompanying metadata lack the body-­to-­body experience of researcher and book.36 Asa Mittman, likewise, reflects lyrically on how the experiences of touching facsimiles, looking at images on-­screen, even looking at the hard-­copy object displayed in a protective box of Plexiglas vitrine are no match for the bodily reaction he experiences laying hands on the hard-­copy Beowulf manuscript: trembling, sweating, having trouble breathing.37 I do not deny the potent combination of affective and intellectual delight that can come of laying hands on hard-­copy books. Yet the sustained focus on the intimate relationship between the book’s analog body and the scholar’s body attends to only two of the bodies involved in research labor. Generations of librarians, curators, and archivists who do the labor of cataloging and caring for collections, who make finding aids so that scholars can find our objects of study, who carry about hard-­copy codices to and from reading tables—­all of these bodies and labors go largely unacknowledged. The working bodies and expert contributions of digitizers, project managers, and library technologists are similarly absent from much humanities scholarship on digital manuscripts. Both erasures are profoundly wrong—­immoral from a labor ethics standpoint and incorrect for standards of scholarly rigor. In every encounter between user and manuscript, whether the manuscript is in analog or digital form, uncounted workers mediate end users’ encounters at every turn. In traditional codicology, encountering, analyzing, taking seriously copyists and intervening contributors are all at the heart of rigorous, academic work. Throughout Digital Codicology, I seek to show how the labor that goes into the making and maintenance of medieval manuscripts remains the heart of the histories of these books, especially as they are copied into new digital forms.

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Methods for Seeing the Unseen

The authors of the Medieval Academy of America’s 2017 special report “The Digital Middle Ages” assert that Modern digital humanists . . . are confronted with the scholarly study of a medieval heritage that they often have to digitize from scratch, even as they define a scholarly, digital practice without a tradition of existing models that can be applied easily to the computational study and dissemination of these artifacts and new insights about them.38 This is an important and valuable report; however, there are several points that I object to here. First, today’s digital humanists and medievalists rarely perform the hands-­on labor of digitizing primary sources: while we may engage in DIY-­digitization for our own research projects, that is not the same as performing access-­and preservation-­quality digital imaging designed to offer long-­term support to large communities of end users. That work is more often performed by teams of digitization specialists, and it is striking how quickly in published scholarship the real creators of a digitization are pushed offscreen. Second, it is no longer accurate to say that scholars are “digitizing from scratch.” That was true of pioneering experiments done in the 1970s and early 1980s. But it has been more than forty years since John Benton led an interdisciplinary team of research faculty at the California Institute of Technology and imaging scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, using what they called “a new technology derived from computer-­ processing of spacecraft pictures” to photograph and recover illegible medieval texts.39 Their work helped win John Benton a MacArthur Fellowship in 1985 and was an important inspiration for what would become The Electronic Beowulf.40 That this and other decades-­long chains of influence, linking project to project, are not evoked suggests a collective amnesia regarding this facet of our disciplinary history. Across decades, we seem to perceive digitization as always-­already new, somehow without history—­standing outside of history writ large and lacking a history of its own. My third objection is that scholarly

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digital practices are not “without a tradition of existing models” that can be applied to digital texts and objects. There are existing models from earlier projects: those we still use, those we remember using, and those (like the work of John F. Benton, Alan R. Gillespie, James M. Soha) that have slipped from view. Throughout Digital Codicology, I build on a significant body of work produced by bibliographers, paleographers, and codicologists, especially the recent efflorescence of scholarship on medieval scribes and limners.41 Equally important for my methodology are the scholarship and expertise of librarians, archivists, catalogers, information scientists, and digital imaging specialists. In May 2018, for a roundtable entitled “Medieval(ist) Librarians and Archivists,” I developed something I named the Caswell Test, after archivist and academic Michelle Caswell.42 Caswell has damningly analyzed the erasure of librarians and archivists in humanities research. Her conclusions bear quoting at length: It is not an issue of a single scholar’s ignorance, but a failure across the humanities. I can think of no other field whose erasure in this way would be acceptable, let alone the norm. . . . The failure is not that humanities scholars do not take professional knowledge seriously, it is that they only acknowledge the existence of certain professional knowledges; not coincidentally, those professions that have been predominantly male and well-­ paid are the most respected and legitimized. While it is difficult to find evidence of an erasure, let alone the gendered and classed nature of such erasure  .  .  .  , I argue that this erasure can be attributed to the fact that archival studies as a field has been feminized and relegated to the realm of “mere” service-­ oriented practice rather than engaged with as a serious intellectual project.43 A similar, gendered policing of the boundaries between scholarship and service haunt descriptive cataloging. Kate Ozment, for instance, traces how the field of book history has engaged in what she calls “the

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gerrymandering of women’s bibliographic labor away from the core of book history scholarship” by treating cataloging work “as simple reference work rather than true scholarly labor.”44 But descriptive catalogs of manuscripts also represent the labor and choices of generations of curators and catalogers, and in a number of digital manuscript projects provide foundational descriptive metadata that render digital manuscripts discoverable. In 2018, I suggested a solution to this pervasive erasure, modeled on the Bechdel Test for gender parity in media.45 It set three criteria for humanities researchers to meet as we write about libraries, archives, and especially “the archive”: we should 1. have at least two archivists and/or librarians in the argument, who 2. appear not just as support staff in paratextual acknowledgments and thank-­you footnotes but as interlocutors in the main texts of our arguments, and who 3. we don’t just talk about, but we talk with and listen to—­that is, we read and cite librarians’ and archivists’ publications just like we read and cite those of other valued experts and authorities. I stand by my earlier arguments about the need for humanities researchers to resist romanticizing—­and disembodying—­“the archive,” but I have become increasingly aware of how similarly classed and gendered erasures may be at play in medievalists’ and manuscript scholars’ persistent forgetfulness of the history of manuscript digitization. Digital manuscript projects, including digital manuscript cataloging, need their own extension of the Caswell Test. Extending my original criteria to include all contributors to the digital imaging workflow will markedly improve end users’ work on digital manuscripts. In “The Digital Archive, Scholarly Enquiry, and the Study of Medieval English Manuscripts,” A. S. G. Edwards describes efforts at digitally reconstructing hard-­copy medieval books cut apart and sold by the twentieth-­century American book collector, book arts instructor, and biblioclast Otto Ege.46 Efforts at digitally reconstructing Ege’s purposefully scattered leaves, Edwards explains, are hampered

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by idiosyncratic and inadequate metadata wrapped around some of the digitized fragments. An image itself is not enough. Not all libraries are able to provide the necessary information, since not all those who create such projects understand why such data can matter. The result is (for me) a fair number of either ill-­tempered or bemused conversations with American librarians in which I either ask them for information, the relevance of which they find baffling, or in which I offer them information about the history and material of a manuscript leaf that they find irrelevant. Digitization in such respects runs the risk of operating in a vacuum, one in which the act of archive creation exists separately from necessary material and historical context.47 Edwards’s description strikes a chord with users of digital manuscripts. We know how irksome it can be when a digital object lacks sufficient data to be discoverable, accessible, usable. However, the critique of how underdescribed digital fragments risk “operating in a vacuum” itself operates in something of a vacuum, cut off from the research fields and people that could address this problem. The underlying query—­Why are some digital manuscripts wrapped in insufficient metadata?—­is familiar to librarians, archivists, digitization specialists, and information scientists involved in manuscript digitization. Indeed, there is significant librarian-­authored scholarship addressing this. Medievalist-­librarians Sheila A. Bair and Susan M. B. Steuer connect thin descriptive metadata to inadequate institutional funding. For libraries that own only a few manuscripts and that lack the money to hire or train a staff member to specialize in the intricacies of medieval manuscript description, Bair and Steuer suggest “the best solution for many is to describe the material, however imperfectly, ideally with digital images, and hope to attract an interested scholar who will, in the course of his or her research, supply the library with information to correct, enhance, and refine the manuscript description and metadata.”48 This suggestion—­get the data out and then subsequently enrich it—­connects to larger trends in cata-

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loging scholarship, coalescing around the 2005 article, “More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing.”49 Alternately, light metadata might be deliberate. Or data may be locked in an older content management system that is difficult to edit. My point is that many questions about digital manuscripts can—­should—­be answered by working more closely with scholarship authored by librarians, archivists, curators, catalogers, and digitization specialists. But extending the Caswell Test to digitization faces a significant challenge. Particularly when set against the masses of digitized manuscripts that have been produced worldwide, the body of publications about manuscript digitization authored by digitization specialists at this time remains comparatively small.50 This is in part because writing about digitization takes time, a limited resource generally dedicated to the hands-­on labors of digitizing rather than writing about it beyond a concise “Read Me” document. Thus, a necessary corollary to extending the Caswell Test to include digitizers and digitization is a turn toward ethnography: when end users cannot find all the answers we seek in published documentation, we can talk to living people doing the work.51 One might imagine, for instance, an alternate version of Edwards’s Ege fragments experiment that began by asking involved librarians and curators about what local, historical conditions caused the thin descriptive metadata. A self-­conscious codicology of digital text pushes beyond retrospectively judging whether a project made the “right choice” (whatever that might mean) and instead seeks to understand why those choices were made. What larger social and institutional pressures made this the correct choice for these project-­builders in this moment? What might that choice reveal about the larger structures in place that support the creation of digital manuscripts? And, perhaps most pressingly, what do these decisions reveal about the unseen humans behind the digital manuscripts on our screens? Throughout this book, I seek not just to name manuscript projects or stages of digitization but also to name the specific, individual workers involved. D. F. McKenzie contends that bibliography as a discipline

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“allows us to describe not only the technical but the social processes” of texts’ transmission.52 I extend this and suggest that bibliography and codicology challenge us to analyze the social processes through which texts are transmitted from creators to readers—­and from one medium to the next. All of those transmissions are, at their core, processes of human labor. Knowing the names of at least some contributors helps us see more clearly the workers upon whose labors we depend as embodied, real people. Studying acknowledgments in academic books, Emily Callaci writes, At their best, acknowledgments dismantle the myth of the lone, self-­contained genius-­at-­work, and instead expose the messy interplay of institutional support, finances, intellectual genealogies, and interpersonal chaos that shape how an idea is brought into the world. In aggregate, they offer a glimpse into the political economy of academic life, revealing truths that we intend to share, as well as many that we do not.53 In quoting, citing, and naming digitization specialists, I seek to do the same: dismantle the myths of digital books; expose the interplay of institutional support, finances, and branching intellectual genealogies; reveal the political economies of manuscript digitization. Naming, moreover, Callaci reminds us, is serious business, a statement “about who belongs, and on what material terms.”54 At the same time, in writing this book, I have been repeatedly reminded that my ideological commitments to naming and credit are shaped by my position as an academic researcher—­but not every work-­ culture wants or needs to be named. I studied late medieval death culture before I studied digitization. Reading owners’ notes and scribal colophons asking for living readers’ prayers helped me see the ethical claims made by the medieval dead upon the living. My values around memory and credit in digitization are shaped by fifteenth-­century English texts about memoria. But this background and these values are not universally shared. As my interviews with librarians, curators, and digitization specialists have shown, there are significant differences

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around credit between a research-­faculty culture that brands all individual contributions by name in order to quantify individual scholarly impact for hiring and promotion, and the cultures of collective labor and uncredited collaboration more common to galleries, libraries, and museums. Thus, I want to be clear that I am not arguing for compulsory naming of the workers involved in making digital medieval books. What I am arguing for is compulsory noticing. I name where I can, where that information is available, and where I have permission to share it. But it’s important to also notice where I—­where we—­do not name. As end users, we must learn to read into the absences in digital books the vivid presence of the many someones who did the labor of making them, in the same way that we know to read those same absences in the bodies and histories of hard-­copy books. Ethnography must also, necessarily, include autoethnography. In part this is because certain veins of humanist writing on digitization are already autoethnographic. One of the subterranean sources for the perception of digitization as manual labor requiring little intellectual engagement on the part of the copyist may well be our own experiences hovering over a copy machine: lift the lid, lift and flip the book, turn the page, press the book back down on the platen, lower the lid, press the button, and repeat. Those who have done this kind of work know how swiftly it can slide into mindless tedium. From these personal experiences, it can be tempting to extrapolate that this is the work of digitization, albeit with a more expensive, more sophisticated copy machine. But believing this does not make it so. We cannot know what the work is until we ask. This book is the product of that asking. In part, this book’s commitment to ethnographic and autoethnographic modes of inquiry derives from the book’s catalyst: a period of two years, in the early 2010s, when I worked hands-­on with digital manuscripts and their metadata. In 2013, I was hired to be a Council on Libraries and Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Medieval Studies at Stanford University. Some CLIR Fellows begin their positions and then help determine and self-­ assign their core tasks as the fellowship progresses.55 I was not one of

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those. Instead, the position into which I was hired had a developed set of tasks and expectations attached, determined by the project’s principal investigators, Elaine Treharne and Benjamin Albritton, and connected to much larger expert teams in the Digital Library Systems and Services Department in Stanford University Libraries. An incomplete list of some of the people who trained me and/or to whom I answered includes Treharne and Albritton, Tom Cramer, Tony Navarrete, John Mustain, Bess Sadler, Laney McGlohon, Greta de Groat, Lynn McRae, Laura Wilsey, and Astrid J. Smith. One of the tasks I was given was to contribute to the Digital Manuscripts Index (hereafter DMS-­Index), an ongoing initiative in medieval manuscript interoperability.56 At roughly the same time, experiential research was being seriously embraced by manuscript scholars as a viable research methodology. An interdisciplinary team of medieval manuscript scholars, contemporary scribes, and book arts practitioners, for instance, convened at the University of Iowa to try their hands at making parchment and copying out medieval texts—­and then published an edited collection on the experience. In it, they positioned their hands-­on work as a methodological corrective to the disembodiment they associated with digitization: How can responsible scholars overcome the disadvantages of digital reproductions and more fully engage with the physicality of the book? How can we better understand and convey the craft that went into the handmaking of books? How can we enter into the world of scriptorium practice that brought us the manuscripts that we study? . . . The innovative turn that gives us new insight on such questions comes from engaging with those who make books by hand today.57 Inspired by this turn to hands-­on research—­but concerned that digital imaging specialists, who also make medieval books by hand today, were positioned outside the expert community—­I lobbied my supervisors within Stanford University Libraries to see if I could join in the labor of digitizing a single medieval book, to better understand the labor that went into crafting the digital manuscripts I was curating by

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the hundreds and thousands. That experience (the subject of chap. 1) crystallized for me the bizarre friction in codicological and book historical methodologies that claim to value the processes of creation and creators, from manuscript codices to modern archives, while simultaneously overlooking modern digital labor and laborers. Too often, humanities researchers have seen the scribe who has been dead for more than half a millennium with greater clarity than the living digitizer who creates the digital manuscripts we use daily. Ethnographic, and at times autoethnographic, research can act as an important corrective to this. Medieval Theorists for Modern Texts

Into this constellation of transdisciplinary modern expertise, I also draw medieval authors: especially Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Hoccleve, and John Lydgate. Mats Dahlström writes that libraries and other so-­called memory institutions have throughout history developed a range of methods and tools for transmitting full texts between material carriers and across media family borders. In this sense, library digitisation belongs to the same tradition as twentieth-­century microfilming and the transcribing of manuscripts performed by ancient libraries and medieval copyists.58 I agree wholeheartedly and suggest, furthermore, that recovering the tradition of textual transmission that binds modern libraries with medieval copyists requires listening both to modern experts and to medieval scribes and authors. Because they lived and wrote free of the expectations for easy replicability that modern theorists may take for granted, Chaucer, Hoccleve, and Lydgate can be powerful authorities on coping with textual mutability.59 While I do not deny the utility of modern theorists like Walter Benjamin and Jean Baudrillard for modern copying and reproduction, they are not experts in the medieval period, medieval textuality, or modern digitization, and I thus find them of only limited utility for the insights they can give about

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the postprint re-­creation of preprint objects. Baudrillard strikes me as particularly problematic since he grounds some of his theories of copying on sweeping generalizations about medieval Byzantine iconography.60 By contrast, medieval writers like Chaucer, Hoccleve, and Lydgate—­and the many copyists who preserved and transmitted their works—­are steeped in nonprint replicative cultures and thus offer usefully older perspectives on copying problems that have too often been perceived as new. This is not to say that these medieval poets are free of expectations that copyists should be both exact and largely invisible in the final product. Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1340–­1400) was a diplomat, bureaucrat, and sometime member of Parliament. He was also a poet who portrays the best scribes as copy machines avant la lettre. In poems like The Book of the Duchess, Chaucer idealizes the labor of writing as instantaneous, passing painlessly and easily from author to reader, with no intervening copyists obscuring the view. The end of that poem shows the narrator waking up and deciding to write his dream down: Therwyth I awook myselve And fond me lyinge in my bed; . . . Thoghte I, “Thys ys so queynt a sweven That I wol, be processe of tyme, Fonde to put this sweven in ryme As I kan best, and that anoon.” This was my sweven; now hit ys doon.61 The snappy final couplet offers readers the illusion of immediate, intimate connection with the work’s author—­I woke up and wrote down my dream, and this thing you hold in your hands is it. But the work that goes into forcing a meandering dream into tightly rhymed verse happens out of sight. So too does the work of making the specific copy in which a reader encounters these lines. The desirability of invisible copying likewise appears near the end of Troilus and Criseyde, when Chaucer writes to his book

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. . . ther is so gret diversite In Englissh and in writyng of oure tonge, So prey I God that non myswrite the, Ne the mysmetre for defaute of tonge.62 The laborers responsible for making Chaucer’s copies appear here in the form of negation: may “non miswryte thee.” In Chaucer’s idealized description of late medieval book production, “no one” makes copies. Orietta da Rold argues that these lines do not critique copyist practice so much as they record authorial worries about linguistic and textual variation.63 Whether or not the lines in Troilus and Criseyde are meant as a deliberate invective against scribes is, for my purposes, immaterial: Chaucer’s words offer a compelling premodern example of the logic of immediacy, urging readers to overlook copyist labor and celebrating copyists who are so faithful that they cannot be seen. Good copyists, Chaucer suggests, exactly re-­create their original, regardless of who they are or where they personally happen to stand. Local variation, local language, and local experience are deficits to be overcome. When the original is not precisely re-­created, Chaucer offers cranky invective. In the brief lyric “Adam Scriveyn,” an unnamed speaker vividly curses his copyist “Adam”:64 Adam . scryveyne / if euer it þee byfalle  Boece or Troylus / for to wryten nuwe /  Vnder þy long lokkes / þowe most haue þe scalle  But affter my makyng / þowe wryt more truwe  So offt adaye. I mot þy werk renuwe /  It to . corect and eke to rubbe and scrape /  And al is thorugh . þy necglygence and rape65 The “scalle” with which the speaker threatens Adam, in repayment for his hurried error-­laden work, is some species of “scabby skin disease,” perhaps tinea (ringworm), which causes blisters and scaly crusts to form on the scalp.66 Whether the curse is meant in play, as a joke, or as a blast of frustrated indignation, Adam’s punishment is a tidy bit of

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contrapasso: for violating the body of the text he is copying, the copyist is bodily marked in return. From Chaucer then we inherit a vision of manuscript making in which the copyist is only visible when the work has gone badly, and bad work wounds both text and copyist. But when copying goes well, the copyist is a human-­shaped window one may look through to the well-­copied text with no smudge of that copyist’s personhood obscuring the view. Chaucer’s self-­proclaimed heirs do not entirely agree. Thomas Hoccleve (1368–­1426) was a professional copyist. He worked at the Office of the Privy Seal for more than thirty-­five years, writing out official documents in Latin and Middle French. He also freelanced working on deluxe fifteenth-­century manuscripts of canonical vernacular verse.67 Unlike Chaucer, Hoccleve insistently makes visible both the labor of copying and the workers who perform it.68 In doing so, he brings a vast, multilingual, multicultural tradition of scribal complaint into the main text of major literary productions. Take, for example, these lines from Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes: Many men, fadir, wenen þat writynge No trauaile is / þei hold it but a game:—­ . . . But who-­so list disport hym in þat same, Let hym continue, and he schal fynd it grame69 Hoccleve’s point, that people who know nothing of writing think it is “a game” (a joy, a pleasure, even a joke) but in reality copying is “grame” (rage, sorrow, punishment, even torment), echoes conventional scribal colophons like Qui nescit scribere laborem esse non putat and Scribere qui nescit nullum putet esse laborem, “one who does not know how to write thinks it is no labor.”70 Similarly, Hoccleve asserts that “Wrytyng” . . . doth grete annoyës thre. Of which ful fewë folkës taken heede Sauf we oure self; and þisë, lo, þei be: Stomak is on, whom stowpyng out of dreede

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Annoyeth soore, and to our bakkes neede Mot it be greuous; and þe third, our yen Vp-­on the whytë mochel for to dryen. What man þat þre and twenti yere and more In wryting hath continued, as haue I, I dar wel sayn it smerteth hym ful sore In euery veyne and place of his body; And yen most it greeueth, trewely Of any crafte þat man can ymagyne: Fadir, in feith, it spilt hath wel ny myne.71 —­and his words echo a tradition of scribal complaints cataloging the occupational injuries caused by copying. Approximately 460 years earlier on the Iberian Peninsula, the scribe Florentius wrote: One who knows little of writing thinks it no labor (work/suffering) at all. For if you want to know I will explain to you in detail how heavy is the burden of writing. It makes the eyes misty. It twists the back. It breaks the ribs and belly. It makes the kidneys ache and fills the whole body with every kind of annoyance.72 Modern English near-­cognates invite us to take Hoccleve’s claims less than seriously, as does an inherited critical tradition that shrugged at his “sensitivity.”73 But like Florentius’s Latin, threaded through Hoccleve’s Middle English are pervasive hints of bodily pain. “Annoyes” can mean “irritation” like the modern “annoyance,” but it also means discomfort, affliction, and a source of hardship.74 To “doon annoy” means to cause trouble and harm.75 The Middle English word “dryen” can mean “to dry” like the “dry eyes” one may get from looking too long, unblinking, at one’s computer screen, but it also suggests shriveling and withering away; doing penance; suffering hardship.76 Hoccleve’s description of scribal labor may not be a straightforward report of the true experiences of medieval scribes in general nor the true experiences of the historical copyist Thomas Hoccleve. As David Watt has noted, Hoccleve offers more of “a reflection on, not a reflection of, his experi-

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ence making books.”77 But whether or not these lines offer a completely accurate representation of the occupational disabilities experienced by medieval copyists, they undeniably show a portrait of what Hoccleve wants readers to believe about a life spent copying. Through his litanies of withered eyes, twisted backs, and aching bodies, Hoccleve tries to make his readers believe that scribes did difficult physical and mental labor as they created the documents that kept the English government running as well as the medieval manuscripts we read today. Chaucer’s other self-­proclaimed heir is John Lydgate (ca. 1370–­ca. 1450). Lydgate was a professional religious. By his early teens he had joined the Benedictine Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds, which had a library of over two thousand volumes, one of the largest book collections in England.78 The library’s books were a blend of volumes produced elsewhere and gathered to the library along with books produced in the abbey’s own scriptorium.79 Lydgate, Alexandra Gillespie writes, “became a reader and then a poet amid that collection.”80 But despite his close proximity to an active scriptorium, Lydgate’s visions of medieval textual transmission are decidedly disembodied, more akin to Chaucer’s vision of workerless production than Hoccleve’s portraits of cramping hands. In “Compleynte of a Lover’s Lyfe,” Lydgate offers a decidedly peculiar portrait of scribal labor. In the midst of claiming he is a poor writer, Lydgate apologizes that, in the poem we are about to read, he can only do like as doth a skryuener That can no more what that he shal write But as his maister beside dothe endyte.81 Lydgate paints copyists as passive, obedient—­incapable of doing anything but following where their masters lead. The copyist Lydgate invokes here, the copyist he pretends to be, is like Chaucer’s idealized good scribe, obediently and precisely transmitting the text without introducing any change. He offers a very different portrait of textual transmission in The Fall of Princes (1430–­38), a Middle English translation and expansion

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of Laurent de Premierfait’s French translation and expansion (1409) of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Latin De casibus virorum illustrium (1355–­74). The opening lines of The Fall of Princes portray textual transmission as a process of fruitful change: Artificeres hauyng exercise May chaunge and turne bi good discrecioun Shappis, formys, and newli hem deuyse, Make and vnmake in many sondry wyse, As potteres, which to that craft entende, Breke and renewe ther vesselis to a-­mende.  Thus men off crafft may off due riht, That been inuentiff & han experience, Fantasien in ther inward siht Deuises newe thoruh ther excellence; Expert maistres han therto licence Fro good to bettir for to chaunge a thyng, And semblabli these clerkis in writing, Thyng that was maad of auctours hem beforn, Thei may off new fynde and fantasie, Out of old chaff trie out ful cleene corn, Make it more fressh and lusti to the eie, Ther subtil witt and ther labour applie, With ther colours agreable off hewe, Make olde thynges for to seeme newe.82 Lydgate suggests that experienced, wise creators not just can but should change inherited texts to better fit the needs of the present. The transformations Lydgate idealizes here are not just small or surface changes. Gifted writers, he claims, have the right to transform a text’s very nature, pulling fresh new nutrients (“ful cleene corn”) out of what was previously tired agricultural waste. To make an old book “more fressh and lusti” to living readers, writers may enhance and transform it, breaking with their duty to replicate the past in order to make a copy that better serves the present and future.

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To be sure, Lydgate is writing about the work of literary composing rather than scribal copying. But the lines are still useful for ferreting out preprint ideas on the nature of textual copying and change. For one, like medievalists and manuscript scholars who claim “I have digitized X” without acknowledging the unnamed experts who did the hands-­on labor of digitization, Lydgate claims for the author the labor and craft identity that properly belongs to the book’s copyists, eliding scribes’ existence by claiming their labors as his own. Moreover, Lydgate’s ambivalence about the nature of his writing and authority in the mid-­fifteenth century (Am I a writer who can do nothing more than transmit what I am given? Am I a writer who updates, breaks, and makes anew? Am I some combination of those things?) can be made to speak to current concerns about digitization and postprint textuality. How much of making digital manuscripts is about copying and preserving the past unchanged? How much should it be about breaking with old authorities in order to better serve present and future end users? In fact, that is precisely what I did as I contributed to the labors of the DMS-­Index team. As I helped digitize Stanford, Stanford University Libraries, Department of Special Collections, Manuscript Collection, MSS Codex M0379 (see chap. 1) or transform metadata for more than five hundred manuscripts from the Matthew Parker Library (see chap. 4), I found Lydgate’s limited and recurring terms prescient for considering my own place amid conflicting modern claims about what digitized medieval books should be and do—­Do we serve the living or the dead? the noble or the common? writers or readers? the past or the present and future? My desires and fears as a medievalist using digital copies of premodern manuscripts were molded, at least in part, by the hopes and fears articulated by the same medieval authors I sought out in digitized books. Chaucer, Hoccleve, and Lydgate are certainly not the only writers who can be used as preprint theorists of postprint textuality. Other premodern thinkers and philosophies have been used to theorize modern copying: Stephen G. Nichols and Melissa Terras have turned to Plato, Marcus Boon to Mahayana Buddhism.83 You need not read all of Lydgate’s massive oeuvre nor become a Hocclevean to extend the methods I champion to your own work. But we need to expand our theorists of

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textuality beyond a narrow selection of modern, predominantly Western philosophers. Yin Liu has modeled how approaching modern digital dilemmas from the perspective of a medievalist carries advantages: one is “that the very strangeness of the medieval context alerts us to the familiarities we might not otherwise have noticed”; another is “that the longer historical view helps to prevent us from assuming that any property of text is universal or necessary when it may be a product of our own historical position and cultural prejudices.”84 By using medieval writers as canny theorists of preprint textuality, I follow Liu’s path; in doing so, I hope to destabilize assumptions about what is the natural, necessary, or universal way of copying. Medieval writers and medievalist methods—­especially given the long fights we have had about the place of scribes in the histories of literature, of literary criticism, of editorial theory—­can and should be used to understand medieval scribes’ modern heirs. The rhetoric of digital humanities and digitization can slip into techno-­utopianism. Against these impulses, medieval writers’ insights into the labor, purpose, and limitations of bookmaking can serve as a useful corrective. Bringing this medieval prehistory into contemporary conversations on digitization helps shift modern discussions away from sweeping claims of radically democratized access to more nuanced considerations of how wide-­scale access is still predicated on exclusion: exclusion of texts from digitization programs, exclusion of certain kinds of bodies from reading rooms, exclusion of the laborers who create and maintain our vast digital libraries. Close attention to these erasures is key to understanding the creation of these “democratizing” collections: What, and especially who, has been treated as expendable? Chapter 1, “Scriptorium 2.0,” demystifies the processes of creating digital manuscripts by tracing the creation of a single digital book: Stanford, Stanford University Libraries, Department of Special Collections, Manuscript Collection, MSS Codex M0379, a largely unstudied fifteenth-­century book of hours that was digitized in November 2014. Pushing against scholarly generalizations about digitization, this chapter foregrounds the specifics of library-­authored digitization work-

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flows. I also foreground the intellectual and bodily labor that goes into making a digital book, connecting modern digitization to a long history of scribal labor. The chapter concludes by showing how embracing a more self-­consciously medieval and global perspective on digitization reveals that the erasure of modern copyists is a particular, limited, regional choice and not a transhistorical, transnational norm. By closely studying the digitization of one book of hours in 2014, this chapter challenges the history and the ethics of conventional blanket erasure, pointing toward a more humane possible future for digitization. Erasing the creators of medieval books is not part of some shared, universal past. It need not—­it ought not—­be the standard for our digital futures. Chapter 2, “Value and Visibility: Copying San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 111” follows a single autograph manuscript made by Thomas Hoccleve across six hundred years of reprographic technologies, in order to better ground current digital copying practices in their much longer, older media histories. I begin with the previously untold history of how HM 111 came to be digitized. Then I move back in time and follow HM 111 from its manuscript origins through its appearances and absences in print and photography. A beloved commonplace about new copying technologies is that they break down barriers to inaccessible works and usher in an age of access and democratization. But much of the copying history of HM 111 is a narrative of not being copied into emerging media: it is not printed for more than three hundred years after movable type print was introduced to England; it is not fully photographed for more than a century after the invention of photography; it is not digitized until well after the conclusion of what Stuart Lee has named the “decade of digitization.” Telling its story, thus, helps bring nuance to this long-­standing commonplace. It also offers an opportunity to analyze which contributors over the book’s long life have been acknowledged and made visible and which have gone uncredited and unseen. Chapter 3, “Digital Incunables: Copying Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, ca. 1997–­2017,” focuses on the rise of digitization from the mid-­1990s to the mid-­2010s. Drawing heavily on interviews with key contributors,

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I analyze four separate digital manuscript projects involving John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes: Digital Scriptorium and New York, Columbia University, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Plimpton MS 255 (1997–­ 99); the student-­driven digitization of Victoria, University of Victoria, Ms.Eng.1 (1999–­2000); the British Library’s Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts and London, British Library, Harley MS 1766 (2007); and Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis and Philadelphia, the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Rosenbach MS 439/16 (2017). Even when these digitized manuscripts exist cheek-­by-­jowl in the murky atemporality of the internet, each is the product of a particular moment in history, a particular institutional home, and particular creators. Reading these digital book histories together helps bring that particularity back into view, along with some of the overlooked ancestors of modern digital manuscripts and the precedents that have shaped our thinking about access and digital manuscripts today. Chapter 4, “Interoperable Metadata and Failing toward the Future,” returns to the autoethnographic mode of chapter 1 to explore descriptive metadata, data curation, and interoperability within the digital manuscripts project DMS-­Index. My case studies here are data sets created by three successful, indeed paradigm-­defining, digitization projects—­the Digital Walters by the Walters Art Museum; Parker on the Web by Corpus Christi College Cambridge, Cambridge University, and Stanford University Libraries; and e-­codices: the virtual manuscript library of Switzerland. Between 2013 and 2015, I worked with local metadata specialists to copy and transform metadata from each repository to add to a single, searchable system. This chapter seeks to show, first, how the formal qualities of each metadata set, as well as the metadata schemata each repository used, determine the future of manuscript reuse; and, second, how metadata and reuse are always shaped by a vast community of unseen bookmakers who are collectively deciding the digital futures of medieval books. DMS-­Index closed in 2016: thus, this chapter also grapples with how we label projects successes or failures, and how those labels are not a good fit with the temporality of truly global, ongoing digital manuscript initiatives.

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The book concludes with a coda, “Glitch,” and an appendix, “Doing Digital Codicology: A Manifesto.” “Glitch” uses copying errors in analog and digital manuscripts to explore a fault line in digital codicology: how much we think of digital manuscripts like programs to be updated and overwritten and how much we treat them as books to be preserved, without change. It ultimately uses the software practice of versioning to offer a middle path between the two extremes. The appendix offers seven steps for readers to put in action the methods developed throughout this book. In writing this book, I seek to serve several ends. First, in offering a series of precise portraits of specific projects, I hope to preserve some of the history of digitizing medieval books before that history is lost. Early innovators, especially those active in the 1980s and 1990s, are nearing retirement. Some have already retired. Some have died. As Nancy Ide and Jean Veronis wrote of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), “These pioneering efforts, while likely to be refined and extended, should not be lost.”85 Like the workers involved in building the first iteration of TEI, digitization teams have provided the intellectual, technological, and social basis upon which we are building the future of medieval books. Understanding the digital books we use today and tomorrow, thus, requires understanding where—­and who—­they came from. Second, I wish to assert the ongoing relevance of medieval writers and medievalist methodologies to address pressing contemporary concerns. In doing so, I take up a challenge issued in 1953, by E. N. Johnson, to the Medieval Academy of America: If we do not make it possible for the best in our tradition to be passed on to all those who can absorb it, if we cannot justify our interests by some sort of contribution to the solution of major contemporary problems, then we shall be deserted for some system or someone who promises to do what we do not do. If the instruments of mass communication are not to master us, we must master them. If we are actually entering upon a new Dark Ages, we shall have to take the steps of a Gregory the

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Great, Gregory of Tours, Isidore of Seville, Boethius, and Bede to avoid it. We shall not get it done by merely attending as usual to our own comfortable, irrelevant, esoteric, and academic busy work while the world goes to its ruin and we together with it.86 More broadly, Digital Codicology participates in an ongoing transdisciplinary push, in academic and popular writing, to recover and understand the labor and laborers who formed our fields.87 Ultimately, I seek to do right by the digital imaging specialists, without whom neither medieval studies nor the humanities more broadly could exist in their present form. Like countless medieval scribes and early modern printshop workers, today’s digitizers are often unnamed, unseen, and unacknowledged. But although the erasure of copyists has been an influential part of our medieval past and our digital present, it need not be our future. Throughout, my arguments treat digital manuscripts as primary sources; others might argue that they are better understood as a special kind of secondary source, close kin to descriptive catalogs and other types of scholarly reports on cultural heritage objects.88 One cannot greatly profit from manuscript catalogs without prior instruction in manuscript production and description. Digital manuscripts are analogous, requiring special knowledge from prospective users. I have no objection to this interpretation. In fact, I find much appealing about it, provided that whether we approach digital manuscripts as primary or secondary sources, ultimately, the end result is greater attention paid to the labor that goes into making them; to the specific historical, technical, and social pressures that cause digital objects to look and function the way they do; to the digital imaging teams and other specialist laborers who make and maintain our digital books. A Few Notes on Word Choice

One of the arguments of this book is that names and words matter. Like any writer, I have deliberately chosen some words over others. Rather than leave those decisions implicit, I outline some of the most important of those choices here.

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Copy and copyist. In what follows, I largely avoid some of the common terms for digital manuscripts: (digital) facsimile, (digital) surrogate, and (digital) avatar.89 I avoid “facsimile” because it carries a connotation of something that is not quite as good as its original. Consider, for instance, the colloquial phrase “a pale facsimile,” or when novelist Deirdre McNamer describes people attending a funeral looking “as though they’d been snuffed out, as if the real people had been erased and it was their facsimiles that walked around.”90 Unlike “facsimile,” “surrogate” does not carry persistent connotations of not-­quite-­good-­enough: gestational surrogates and surrogate families do work that others cannot for whatever reason—­in much the same way that a 3-­D rendering of a now-­ ruined Roman building provides a mode of access that does not exist in the modern world. Nevertheless, I eschew “digital surrogate” because it suggests substitution, and I resist treating digital manuscripts as stand-­ ins or replacements for hard-­copy exemplars, preferring to study them instead as their own unique things.91 I resist “avatar” because its two main meanings are in direct contradiction with each other, in ways that are especially confusing for discussions of materiality and embodiment. Theologically, “avatar” means the embodied presence of a god on earth. In computing and in science fiction, “avatar” means “a graphical representation of a person or character in a computer-­generated environment.”92 A term that sometimes means “the divine/virtual made flesh” and sometimes means “the human/flesh made virtual” is not useful for the kind of concrete, praxis-­oriented work this book seeks to do. In additional to “digital manuscript,” I use “copy”—­and I use it to describe multiple versions of medieval books: a digitized manuscript is a digital copy, an edition is a print copy. In doing so, my work is aligned with Marcus Boon and Hillel Schwartz, both of whom explore how modern hostility to copies and copying is less a universal concern than a particularly time-­ and geography-­bounded belief, narrowly shaped by Western European and American canons.93 By naming analog manuscripts, print facsimiles, print editions, microfilm reels, and digital manuscripts all “copy,” I seek to emphasize the continuities that bind together these different versions of medieval books, in whatever media. As much as we may think of copying as theft or deterioration, the long

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history of copying manuscripts across media—­whether performed by a scribe, a printer, a photographer, an editorial assistant for the Early English Text Society, or a team of digital imaging specialists—­shows it is also a story of abundance, addition, and increase.94 Access and accessibility. “Access” is a buzzword in digitization. In addition to describing whether something is imaged and online, it is increasingly tied up with Open Access initiatives: Can it be downloaded and reused? Can it be downloaded and reused for free?95 “Access” is invoked to talk about whether projects still exist in a form that can be used: I used to use such-­and-­such, but it’s no longer accessible. It can be used to discuss how much digital manuscript projects need to include more, and more welcoming, information to help a wider range of end users: Is it just available, or is it accessible? In American institutions of higher education, “access” and “accessibility” also mean whether or not a digital resource has been designed to support equal engagement by users with disabilities.96 While I want to keep these other meanings in play, when I write about “access” and “accessibility” I do so in the senses used by archivists and librarians: “the ability to locate relevant information through the use of catalogs, indexes, finding aids, or other tools”; “the permission to locate and retrieve information for use”; and “the characteristic of being easily reached or used with a minimum of barriers.”97 At time of writing. Temporality in digital manuscripts is an odd thing. The “now” of the first creation of a book a thousand years ago jostles against the “now” of the digital re-­creation of that same book, and both jostle against the “now” of the hard-­copy’s and digital object’s readers. Moreover, there are the multiple-­layered “nows” in which I have written and revised, and the “now” when you read. Things that exist in one of these may not in another. Electronic publications are prone to sudden, irrevocable change. Transcriptions can be corrected. Metadata revised. What once was true about a digital manuscript may not remain true. Indeed, when I first wrote this book’s introduction, the date of digitization—­September 16, 2011—­was part of the digital Ellesmere Chaucer manuscript’s descriptive metadata. But as select staff at the Huntington worked to make their metadata fields more uniform across digital library collections,

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“Date of Digitization” was suppressed from public view.98 The metadata you see when you look it up now may not match the metadata I saw when I first wrote this introduction. Much of what I wrote in an earlier version of chapter 4, published as “Adam Scriveyn in Cyberspace,” was never achieved. Even the digital manuscripts I study in this book are changing. Thanks to a National Leadership for Libraries grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services to support the reimagining and rebuilding of the Digital Scriptorium project as DS 2.0, by 2025 the Digital Scriptorium copy of Plimpton 255 will look different than it does in the images in chapter 3. Another digital manuscript also analyzed in chapter 3, Ms.Eng.1, is in the queue for redigitization.99 Digital manuscript projects are always shifting, and just because something was so “at time of writing” does not mean it will remain so “at time of reading.” Although much of what I write about contemporary digital manuscripts has been created as a report of the moment, it will inevitably become a historical study. They/them. “He” is not universal.100 Some book history publications conventionally default to “he/him” pronouns for all medieval bookmakers, arguing that this is good practice because the majority of parchmentiers, scribes, and illuminators were probably men. However, there exist decades of scholarship identifying women who were highly involved in medieval book production—­which the use of “he” elides. Women workers also play significant roles in many of the case studies in this book: from early manuscript photography in the 1850s, to data standardization initiatives in the 1960s, to digitization labs in the 2010s and 2020s. Moreover, the growing fields of queer and trans bibliography and codicology are highlighting how nonbinary and gender-­ nonconforming people have also, always, been part of the history of books. Defaulting to “he” may still be accepted in some areas of book history, but it is often incorrect, and always politically dubious. Thus, throughout Digital Codicology, I use the singular pronoun “they” for all instances in which I do not explicitly know the gender of a contributor, whether medieval scribe or modern imaging specialist. In doing so, I seek to foreground the very real diversity of the long history, and rich present, of medieval books.

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CHAPTER 1 SCRIPTORIUM 2.0

Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, MS W.168, a multicentury team of copyists are responsible for a delightful coincidence.1 One-­line decorative initials mark the start of each line of prayer, alternating blue with red flourishes and gold leaf with black. On fol. 115v, the artist responsible for these decorations aligned this pattern so that a golden “I” marks the start of the line, from the Long Hours of the Holy Spirit, Illuminare hijs qui in tenebris et in umbra mortis sedent ad dirigendos pedes n[ost]ros in viam pacis, “Illuminate those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death, and guide our feet on the paths of peace.” The Latin verb illuminare, like its English cognate, means “to bring light to,” and as the gold leaf catches the surrounding light, the initial quite literally brings light to the page and its reader. By choosing to mark this “I” in gold, the anonymous fifteenth-­century book artist has cleverly literalized a bookish metaphor. This visual-­verbal play is all the I N T H E D I G I TA L CO PY O F

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more satisfying because, in manuscript studies, “to illuminate” means to decorate a book with gold and silver.2 But when users encounter this initial in the digital copy of W.168, it is not just the long-­dead book artist’s wit and skill on display. The gleaming “I” of Illuminare also depends on imaging specialists in the Walters’s digitization lab and how they have positioned the lighting apparatus. In photography, a term of art for this lighting setup is “illumination.” A fifteenth-­century illuminator’s wordplay comes, shimmering, into view thanks to the lighting work of a twenty-­first-­century illuminator-­photographer as they collaboratively manipulate light across media and centuries. In this chapter, I reveal the unseen work and workers involved in creating a single digitized book in order to shed light on the work involved in creating a digital copy of any rare book or manuscript. The book in question is a battered fifteenth-­century book of hours that was digitized in November 2014 at Stanford University Libraries, in the in-­house studio dedicated to rare and fragile materials. This chapter follows its movement through the digitization workflow: starting with requesting and project planning, moving through image capture and postproduction processing, to finalized images and metadata and a published digital copy. My methodology here is deliberately autoethnographic. Rather than summarizing general workflows or describing work performed by others, I served as an “active stakeholder” in the digitization of Stanford, Stanford University Libraries, Department of Special Collections, Manuscript Collection, MSS Codex M0379, blending together some of the decision-­making usually allotted to the traditionally hands-­off project patron with the extremely hands-­on work of photographer’s assistant. As I trace one book’s movement through a digitization workflow, I argue that digitization studios are best understood not as radical departures from medieval bookmaking but as a striking postprint return to preprint copying cultures. The chapter’s title evokes the synchronicity between these ostensibly very different modes and copying media. In making the comparison, I join others who have likewise highlighted compelling echoes between scriptoria and digitization labs—­including the project Digital Scriptorium.3 Like me-

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dieval scriptoria and stationer’s shops, modern digitization studios are communities of specialists, engaged in the collective labor of making new copies of existing texts: from funders enmeshed in their own complicated patronage systems that influence the new copy’s final form, to digitizer-­copyists whose experiences echo medieval scribal laments like “my hand is sore, God give me a drink,” to technologists who bind digital images into bookish shareable forms. In making this comparison, I am not proposing a facile one-­to-­one analogy between the two very different sites of copying. Certain stages in the workflow of bookmaking are unique to each: from the preparation of animal-­based writing supports for medieval scriptoria to the creation of unique digital identifiers and file name conventions for modern digitization studios. Without eliding these important differences, however, certain threads apply to the work of copying medieval books across media. I propose that there is great value in recovering the ways that modern digitization labs connect to this longer history of copying, because—­through reading digital manuscripts back into this longer tradition of copying medieval books—­we can develop a more sophisticated understanding of the objects that are increasingly part of humanities research and teaching. The processes of their creation, as Mats Dahlström has argued, are more complex than outsiders may initially understand.4 Tracing these links, looking beyond the polished, published digital copy into the processes through which it was made, reveals the factors that have affected the form and content of the digital resource that appears to hover on our screens, seemingly untouched by human hands. How to Make a Copy

Stanford, Stanford University Libraries, Department of Special Collections, Manuscript Collection, MSS Codex M0379 is a typical fifteenth-­ century book of hours. Insofar as one can identify standard contents for horae, its contents are standard. M0379 contains a Kalendar, the Office of the Holy Cross, Hours of the Holy Spirit, Mass of the Virgin, Hours of the Virgin, Penitential Psalms, Litany of Saints, Office of the Dead, and the short Marian devotions “O Intermerata” and “Obsecro Te,” as well

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as more personalized prayers in later hands. Its seven full-­page miniatures are tipped in on singletons, a common practice for mid-­range books of hours produced around Ghent at this time.5 Their iconography is conventional, as is their placement: an image of Pentecost faces the incipit for the Hours of the Holy Spirit (11v–­12r); a resurrected Christ in majesty faces the start of the seven penitential psalms (69v–­70r); mourners surrounding a pall-­covered coffin face the incipit of the Office of the Dead (83v–­8 4r; this image is the basis for Digital Codi­cology’s cover art); and so forth. Like many books of hours, M0379 overflows with readers’ notes, recording the significant life events of historically insignificant people. Some of these notes, especially those on the outer flyleaves, are nearly illegible due to smoke and water damage dating from the manuscript’s survival of a once-­infamous, now largely forgotten warehouse fire in Gilded Age New York City. According to a Stanford Libraries catalog note, not online at time of writing: “This book is one of the fifty-­t wo Books found among the ruins of Morrel’s Storage House after the great fire, whi[c]h, on the 10th of October, 1881 destroyed over 2000 volumes.”6 Even in this dramatic event, M0379 is typical: many more famous medieval manuscripts have been damaged and destroyed by fire and flood. The team responsible for creating a new digital copy of M0379 was led by Astrid J. Smith, a modern book artist and photographer who at the time of digitization was Stanford Libraries’ digital imaging specialist for rare and fragile materials. Additional professional staff were involved in image capture support and postproduction labor: Micaela Go (senior lab staff and independent professional photographer), Selina Lamberti (part-­time lab staff member), and myself. Additional project leadership and support were provided by Doris Cheung Wu, digital production coordinator and specialist in resources allocation, staffing, and equipment; Wayne Vanderkuil, a senior digitizer in the same department with particular expertise in image capture and reflective metals; Benjamin Albritton, then Stanford Libraries’ digital manuscripts project manager; and John Mustain, then Stanford Libraries’ Rare Books curator.

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One must be cautious offering sweeping generalizations about digitization, as each studio develops its own good practices and accepted standards.7 Moreover, within and across studios, standards are constantly evolving. Digitizers experiment with new lighting techniques. Hardware and software change. Accepted practices are embraced, revised, and discarded as teams work toward the constantly moving target of protecting the hard-­copy objects entrusted to their care while creating more and better digital copies. Moreover, the same studio might digitize similar books very differently—­in order to fit a specific project or patron’s needs. At the same time, there are steps that tend to occur across digitizations, a shared road map for digitizing collections. They are also the stages through which M0379 had to go to be fully digitized.8 First, the institution must engage in large-­scale collection assessment and project planning. Especially important here is determining how digitizing these particular materials matches institutional needs. Beyond the general sense that digitizing materials serves the common good, how will digitizing these exact objects serve the institution’s particular constituencies? How will it increase access and support preservation?9 Next, the objects are assessed to determine whether and how they can be digitized safely. Some how-­to guides on setting up a digitization workflow can seem to suggest that object assessment is done solely by the curators who then pass on information to the digitization team. But successful object assessments are often highly collaborative, involving digitization, conservation, metadata, and curatorial staff. Working together, this multidisciplinary team determines whether an object should be digitized, what conservation care it might need prior to entering the digitization workflow, the best methods for digitization given the hard-­copy object’s needs and the larger digital project goals, any planned postproduction image handling that might be necessary or desirable, and the ultimate form that a successful digital copy will take. Success is defined locally, with one eye on present need and another gazing toward possible futures. What are the needs of local stakeholders? What will satisfy the project’s funders? What does the immediate

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audience require? What should be built in now to support future use and audiences? Following assessment, conservation staff will complete any necessary object care that needs to be accomplished prior to digitization. If the team has determined that additional cataloging and/or metadata creation are a core part of the digitization project, this cataloging may be completed at this point, or it might occur after image capture. But additional cataloging is not always part of a digitization: it was not for M0379. Next, the project manager(s) will determine the complete digitization team.10 Materials will then need to be transported to the identified digitizer(s) and/or digitization studio. This can be as simple as carrying a book to an in-­house digitization studio within the same building or as complex as creating an on-­site digitization setup for objects that cannot be moved, whether due to their size or security concerns. Next, beginning project documentation will be completed, including the creation of the persistent digital object identifiers that will be attached to all subsequent project files, including technical metadata and individual image files. The lead digitizer(s) will then engage in an initial assessment and a process sometimes called “benchmarking,” in which they determine what method of digitization is appropriate for both the analog object and the larger digital project mission.11 This is when decisions about cropping and digital display will be made: for example, projects that are interested solely in text-­mining may want image cropping well inside the margins of the hard-­copy exemplar, while those committed to representing the codex as a material object may plan for a wider crop that preserves views of the text block, binding, gutter, and facing page. Once set, these benchmarks will be used to calibrate all hardware and software involved. Calibration may include a process called “Item-­Driven Image Fidelity” (IDIF), during which the digital imaging specialist uses a loupe to measure the smallest visible details on a selection of leaves to determine the ideal image resolution for the object about to be photographed. Lead photographers will confirm that all surface areas of the object are equally in focus, that the

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lighting system is functioning appropriately for the task at hand, that the object is evenly illuminated, and the colors are accurate. Only after these steps have been completed will actual image capture occur. Throughout image capture, the digitizer(s) continue to check calibration. Especially at the start and close of every work session, image resolution, focus, lighting, and colors are checked to ensure that the resulting digital object is consistent with itself. This consistency during imaging is what allows end users to trust that any changes in color they perceive in the digital copy are an accurate representation of its hard-­copy original and not due to changes in the setting within which digitization occurred. After the object has been photographed, it goes through an initial “completeness check,” sometimes called “passive QC,” during which the digital files are checked for major errors. Intervention at this point in the workflow avoids an incomplete or flawed digital copy moving fully through digitization. Has everything that needs to be in these digital photographs been captured? Are there photographs that show things they shouldn’t? Is the imaging stand or a copyist’s hand sliding into view? If the digital files fail this check, then the digitizer moves back into the image capture phase, rephotographing as needed—­with additional images calibrated to the original benchmark settings for the book’s color, focus, image resolution, and illumination. Once the missing pages and/or unsatisfactory digital images are replaced, the digital object is ready to move on to a more rigorous quality assurance and quality control (QA/QC) process. After passing through both passive and active QA/QC, postproduction editing of the complete digital files may occur. Depending on the project goals and the software used, this can include the rotating and cropping of image files. This is also where composite photographs, image sharpening, or other planned image interventions will occur. After this, the changed files are saved and derivative copies created. QA/QC is once again performed on those derivative files. Then, all the files—­originals and derivatives—­are saved “according to agreed upon file-­naming and (digital) preservation standards.”12 If one of the desired outcomes of the digitization project is

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that the object-­images will be served out in a specific viewer or digital display setting, that will happen here. Finally, all project documentation will be completed, the project will be officially closed, and the hard-­copy exemplar will be returned to its usual home.13 Useful as this tidy workflow map may be at offering a sense of the general shape a digitization can take, its abstractions elide the individual efforts of specific humans making these decisions and doing this labor. Approaching manuscript and rare book digitization as part of the “sociology of texts” requires peeling back the layers of the ideal, abstracted workflow to “consider the human motives and interactions” which shape every stage of a digital manuscript’s production.14 In the next sections of this chapter, I seek to do that. Patronage, Power, and Affect—­What’s Love Got to Do with It?

Well before analog objects are brought into digitization studios, the essential first step in digitization is articulating the larger project’s overarching mission and goals: Why digitize at all? why these specific objects and not others? what value do they have already, and what added value will digitization bring? what institutional stakeholders—­ what real purposes and audiences—­will these newly digitized objects serve?15 Value, however, is a tricky category. Some manuscripts and rare books are internationally embraced as “treasures.” For many objects, value is defined more locally. After all, when an institution owns no illuminated manuscripts, the acquisition of a fifteenth-­century book of hours is cause for rejoicing. But at wealthier institutions possessing richer and deeper holdings, the same book may be considered significantly more workaday—­useful as a “starter” teaching object offered in place of hands-­on access to a collection’s “real treasures,” or as an object upon which one experiments before photographing rarer and more valuable codices.16 A major challenge in this first step of digital project design is that digitization brings these very different definitions of value into the same geographically unmoored online space. How can someone working with a modest collection make a case for why their codices—­which in other contexts might be described as “sturdy,”

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“unexceptional,” or of “indifferent quality”—­are worthy candidates for digitization?17 By the time my postdoctoral fellowship began, Stanford’s Digital Library Systems and Services team had been involved for years in multi-­institution digital manuscript projects.18 These large-­scale collaborations focused on celebrated collections owned by other institutions, most famously the Matthew Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and Parker on the Web. But as of 2013, Stanford Libraries had not yet begun to systematically digitize its own manuscript collections. Prior to 2013, Stanford Libraries had digitized some locally owned medieval codices and fragments, but these were done primarily as trials and often produced only sample leaves: at the time, the libraries owned approximately thirty-­three manuscript codices created before 1500, none of which had been fully digitized.19 As the DLSS postdoc, I helped draft interdepartmental memorandums on the value of digitizing our locally held medieval codices. At the same time, I was curating descriptive metadata for the many hundreds of manuscripts held and digitized by the Walters Art Museum and other internationally renowned manuscript collections. The striking contrast between what others held and what we held, in number, in fame, in linguistic and geographical origin, and in aesthetic quality, was inescapable. At the time I was contributing to these memorandums, it was estimated that less than 1 percent of all extant medieval manuscripts worldwide had been digitized.20 What was being digitized, it was sometimes suggested, risked deforming emerging digital archives by hewing too closely to older understandings of canonicity and value. In 2012, Andrew Prescott asserted, Libraries and museums have frequently seen digital technologies as a means of giving access to their so-­called ‘treasures’, so that it is the elite objects rather than the everyday to which we get access. . . . the Codex Sinaiticus, Caxton editions of Chaucer, illuminated manuscripts from the old library of the English

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Royal Family, early Byzantine manuscripts, and Renaissance Festival Books.21 Rather than breaking open the inherited analog canon, digitization seemed in some quarters to be simply reinforcing it. Our internal, prodigitization memorandums argued that Stanford’s medieval codices offered two different types of value. To be sure, they were valuable to us locally because they were our medieval holdings. But they were valuable globally, and therefore especially worthy of digitization, because of the ways that they pushed against the de facto digital canon which emphasized the rare, famous, vernacular, and secular at the expense of the anonymous, common, Latinate, and private-­devotional.22 Stanford’s codices created before 1500 included a collection of city statutes from Marseille written in Latin and old Provençal, a thirteenth-­century copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a copy of Niccolò Borghesi’s Sanctae Catharine Senensis said to be the working copy used to create the first print edition of that text, and several breviaries and books of hours, one of which bears light censorship marks revealing its presence in England during the Reformation. Yet the codex I used most in our project proposal was M0379. The most frequently copied books of hours, I argued, are the most sumptuous, aristocratic, and luxurious.23 But these are the least representative of the larger genre through which less aristocratic readers also sought to order their days, lives, and afterlives. M0379, I suggested, would be a valuable addition to digital medieval manuscript archives because it lay at the borders of canonical, traditional value frameworks. While M0379 may be illuminated, its gilding is badly damaged and mostly gone, thanks to poorly made gesso during the initial creation and then compounded by later misfortune and deliberate damage.24 Its hastily produced miniatures are very different from the lavish, bespoke intricacies created by book artists like the Limbourg brothers, the Master of the Hours of Catherine of Cleves, and Jeanne de Montbaston. For example, on fol. 33v the miniature showing Judas betraying Jesus with a kiss leaves Jesus’s hands vague and unfinished. Finally, I argued that the copious readers’ notes spilling across its margins and blank spaces could be seen as blurring the boundaries

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between an illuminated manuscript and a run-­of-­the-­mill historical document. Adding all this together, I ultimately claimed that the digitization of M0379 might help serve as a corrective to earlier digitization projects that had privileged the beautiful, rich, and rare over the typical, middle class, and common. In truth, my case for digitizing M0379 was rather more complicated than my memorandums admitted. For those who work with actual run-­ of-­the-­mill historical documents—­financial accounts, letters, and receipts—­a highly decorated manuscript like M0379 cannot be seen as anything except rare and special, damaged and note-­riddled as it may be. Moreover, even though it is not as sumptuous as more famous, oft-­ reproduced medieval manuscripts, M0379 is the product of a certain kind of canon. It is a product of Western Europe in the messy overlap between the medieval and early modern periods. According to the seller’s notes, it was possessed by Henry van Schaick, a rich, white, American man who—­while no Henry E. Huntington or J. Pierpont Morgan—­still has a recognizable, historically significant name. In these ways, both its individual digitization and the larger push to digitize medieval books like it inescapably participate in imbalances in the digital humanities that have reified the canonical over the marginal, and Anglo-­American and European subjects over projects focused outside Europe and North America.25 As Lorna Hughes and Andrew Prescott warn: There is a risk that digitization programs, by focusing on making “treasures” more widely available, will reinforce existing cultural stereotypes and canonicities. The criteria used to select manuscripts for digitization and the way they are presented online are very poorly articulated and require wider discussion and debate.26 But answering Hughes and Prescott’s prescient challenge, at least for the case of M0379, requires slipping past the pose of cool scholarly objectivity. The truth is that I had developed a great affection for M0379. Stanford had other valuable medieval codices, but I loved this one. In “Feminism and the Future of Library Discovery,” Chris Bourg and

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Bess Sadler reflect on how both in traditional scholarship and in digital archive design “we make choices with our emotional responses, and then we come up with justifications after the fact.”27 In writing this chapter, I could have justified our decision to digitize M0379 without admitting to the strong influence exerted by my vague, unquantifiable bibliophilia for this particular grubby book. Doing so would follow the accepted rules of scholarly discourse which prioritize the objective over the subjective and pit thinking versus feeling (as though one might ever exist without the other). But beneath a veneer of scholarly propriety, such an approach would be an inaccurate narrative of this digitization. Despite its admittedly canonical status and its elaborate decorations, I truly did believe that M0379 was an excellent test case with which to launch systematic codex digitization. Its spine and binding were flexible and strong enough for the handling that image capture entails. Its badly damaged gilding would pose real challenges for illumination, and problem-­solving those challenges could be useful for subsequent local digitizations. But beyond these respectable, defensible, scholarly reasons—­and lurking behind my somewhat disingenuous arguments that M0379 was not that canonical, sumptuous, or mainstream—­the fact remains that we also digitized M0379 because of love. Francois Lachance argues that love is a necessary component of labor in the vast ecosystems of digital humanities. After quoting from Wendell Berry’s essay “Preserving Wildness”—­“ The good worker loves the board before it becomes a table, loves the tree before it yields the board, loves the forest before it gives up the tree. The good worker understands that a badly made artifact is both an insult to its users and a danger to its source”—­Lachance concludes, “care of quality at every moment.”28 Seen in this light, we may extrapolate that when affect is a significant driver in digitization, that love is present in all digital copies created for that project. The proof of that devotion is found in the simple fact of those digital objects’ existence. There is no standard for documenting the affective charge behind a digitization. Nevertheless, affect is an important part of this tale. One of the substantial threads running through medievalist-­authored commentary on digitization is how affective, sensual connection drives

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intellectual discovery when working with hard-­copy books.29 Digital manuscripts, in these comparisons, are often held up as lacking that powerful emotional-­intellectual resonance. Indeed, a recurring implicit argument seems to be that the warm, unquantifiable emotional response one may feel for the analog codex, which I undeniably feel for M0379, is emphatically not something that can be felt with a digital copy. But this opposition denies the ways that affective connection to an analog object can (occasionally) drive a digitization. Admittedly, this may not be such a common catalyst. The scholars having highly theorized emotional responses to analog objects are rarely the people making the decisions about what gets digitized. Furthermore, those making the decisions use workflows that, at their best, methodically determine priorities based on local ability and need, not individual affection and caprice.30 Nevertheless, in the case of M0379, this catalyst is still real—­and closely connected to my hybrid “active stakeholder” status, involved in the digitization simultaneously as an outsider and researcher and as an insider and data curator. To be clear, my personal bibliophilia for M0379 was only a small cog in an institutional machine, and the final decision to select M0379 as the first locally held pre-­1500 manuscript codex to be digitized in full was ultimately made by levels of library administration far above me. Yet my unquantifiable love of the analog book still is one of those underdiscussed criteria that Hughes and Prescott argue users of digitized texts should seek to excavate. All digital manuscripts are made by real people, each with their own intellectual and affective responses to the objects of their labor. Even in the midst of workflows that emphasize systematic digitization, human elements and human emotions remain. Greater Labor Than It Seemeth—­ Benchmarking and Image Capture

After initial project planning, the next step in digitizing M0379 was benchmarking. Continuing my comparison between pre-­and postprint copying cultures, benchmarking can be seen as roughly analogous to the work undertaken by a supervisor in a scriptorium or stationer’s shop. Before the labor of copying words onto parchment can begin,

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someone must gather the raw materials of copying: select the type and quality of writing support. Ink and other necessary pigments must be procured or made. The correct number of columns and lines of text per page must be laid out. The formality of the script must be determined, so too must the placement of miniatures and significant litterae notabiliores. Similarly, in benchmarking, the lead digitizer sets concrete project hardware and software standards. This is the stage in the workflow where the aspirational declarations of a mission statement and abstract wishes of a project patron must be transformed into achievable, measurable, repeatable standards for image resolution, color consistency, and so on.31 Like the labor that went into planning an analog manuscript well before stylus was put to parchment, this testing, fine-­tuning, and setting of project imaging standards takes a great deal of mental and physical work. It is high-­stakes, fiddly labor—­and if all goes well, it is invisible in the completed digital copy. But if a digitized book looks effortlessly consistent in lighting, color, and focus, those are all signs that very real, ongoing effort has gone into benchmarking. Benchmarking for M0379 began with Astrid Smith personally retrieving the manuscript from Special Collections and carrying it to the in-­house digitization studio dedicated to rare and fragile materials. For manuscript scholars and other humanities researchers, the digitization of medieval books is something of a figurative “black box,” a largely unseen process that results in a commonly usable object “whose internal mechanism[s] may not readily be inspected or understood.”32 In November 2014, Smith’s studio was a literal black box. Past several study carrels and behind an inconspicuous, locked, and windowless door, the studio was a small, uniformly dark room. To create a consistent imaging environment throughout and across digitization projects, the walls and ceiling panels were all painted the same neutral dark gray.33 Large black velvet curtains further reduced the possibility of light being introduced from the surrounding environment. Echoing the colors of the room, Smith’s preferred uniform was plain, dark clothing, which helped avoid color cast: wearing bright colors or patterns, particularly in a project that took more than one day to complete, ran the risk of introducing color variation in digital copies, as the light reflected from

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the illumination system onto the copyists’ bodies and from us to the analog book and into the waiting camera. She followed all the common wardrobe restrictions of special collections reading rooms: long hair had to be pulled back; loose scarves and jewelry on wrists and fingers were forbidden, as were nail polish and hand lotion. The bulk of the space in the small studio was taken up with the imaging hardware and software. A PhaseOne P65+ camera and Digital Transitions R-­Cam Reprographic camera system equipped with a Schneider Digitar 72mm lens were mounted to a pillar affixed to the matte black copystand. The copystand was surrounded on two sides by softboxes mounted on tripods situated in precise symmetry to create uniform illumination across the copystand so that the object received the same amount of light from each side (fig. 1.1).

Figure 1.1  Benchmarking the digitization of Stanford University Libraries, Department of Special Collections, Manuscript Collection, MSS Codex M0379. Preliminary planning sketch by Astrid J. Smith, photographed by Astrid J. Smith. Reproduced with permission of the artist.

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To the left of the copystand stood a desk holding two large external monitors, a mouse, and a keyboard. Under this desk sat a computer processing unit, already loaded with the software and storage necessary to complete the tasks at hand. To the right of the copystand stood another small table that held additional materials: cleaning supplies to keep the imaging area pristine, book supports and weights like those used in special collections, and M0379’s archival storage box. The grouping of desk, copystand, and table of support materials created a U-­shaped alcove large enough to comfortably fit the body of one human worker. It was a close fit for two. At the time, Smith generally worked alone. Her studio was one of several small labs, tucked into unused library spaces, which together comprised the larger Digital Imaging Services within the Digital Libraries Systems and Services Department within the larger Stanford University Libraries system. (In 2015, these smaller studios were consolidated into a much larger set of rooms. The studio in which M0379 was digitized no longer exists as such.) While Smith was in near-­constant digital contact with any number of people across different library departments, in practice this physical location meant that Smith spent hours alone in a small, dark, windowless room, solely in the company of her tools and the analog originals she was copying. Taken together, the darkness, sense of enclosure and social isolation, combined with the rigorous simplicity of clothing and body care products suggested not just monastic—­but anchoritic—­discipline. Smith designed a custom setup to digitize M0379, closely based on the object’s handling needs, all in adherence with what were then locally defined best practices. Humanities researchers may, at this point, imagine a technologically advanced cradle. While there are a number of imaging support systems available on the market (some of which are represented in other chapters in this book), when working with objects like M0379 Smith preferred to create her own, low-­tech imaging supports. Doing so, she said, meant that the cradle could be endlessly adapted to the evolving needs of the book, as opposed to forcing a five-­ hundred-­year-­old book to adapt to the needs of a new, highly advanced cradle. The supports she used to cradle M0379 for image capture con-

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sisted of the flat black table; the same foam book support-­wedges and cloth-­covered weights common in special collections reading rooms; stacks of gray, archival-­grade cardstock; unused, clear plastic compact disc cases; a small square of glass which served as a platen; and two sets of human hands. In modern copying technologies, a platen is “the glass surface of a photocopier or scanner, on which items are placed to be copied.”34 Perhaps its most familiar modern incarnation for nondigitizers is the glass surface in copy machines onto which we press books open and face down. In printmaking, a platen is the surface that offers resistance for whatever inked surface is coming into contact with the paper. In typewriters, the platen is the cylinder “against which the paper is held as it is struck by the printing elements.”35 As the term moves into cultural heritage digitization, it carries a specter of centuries of abused texts: of books squashed open and writing supports pinched, pressed, and struck repeatedly. This is not how the platen was used in digitizing M0379. Here, two of the core tenets of digital codicology come into play. First, all digital manuscript projects must be historicized and localized with the same care given their analog exemplars. Imaging techniques and practices are ever-­evolving. Local, national, and international guidelines change in keeping with these shifting norms. This narrative, thus, is neither a general description of how all manuscripts are digitized. Nor is it a portrait of how medieval manuscripts at Stanford are digitized. Nor even is it a portrayal of how medieval codices at Stanford were digitized in 2014. In much the same way that printed objects vary, sometimes quite wildly, each digital manuscript and digital manuscript project is shaped by very specific, historicizable and localizable practices and philosophies. We need to work to recover those practices and place them correctly in their own moment in the evolving good practices of digitization. Second, a rigorous codicology of digital texts goes beyond retrospectively assessing whether or not something was the “right choice”—­a vague term which seems largely to mean whether or not the writer dis-

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approves of or would use the same method. Rather, digital codicology seeks to understand why these choices were made. What local, historicizable, specific concerns made them the correct choices, for these project-­builders, in this moment? The use of the platen to digitize M0379, for instance, was not a decision made by a lone and/or inexperienced digitizer. It was a practice shared across institutions that had been used, successfully, in the imaging of medieval books for decades: for example, at the Huntington, a platen was used in the photographing of San Marino, the Huntington Library MSS El 26 C 9 in 1995 (see introduction) and in the digitization of San Marino, the Huntington Library, MS HM 111 in 2014 (see chap. 2).36 When M0379 was digitized, the Digital Imaging Services team agreed that, in particular cases, it could sometimes be an acceptable good practice to use a small square of extremely thin glass to help photograph texts written on parchment. The glass square was positioned over a single leaf at a time—­it did not press a book fully open to 180 degrees. It was always lifted and lowered straight down, never shifted directly against ink, gold, or other pigments. The team of experts who consulted on this method were aware of its potential problems and shortcomings, the possibility of microscopic flaking for pigment with poor adherence. They considered platen use an acceptable risk. Other studios and experts might see the same risks and choose differently. The same team with a different book, or at a different time, might also choose differently. A codicological approach to digitization sees these risks and wonders why—­given the known issues—­the platen was considered acceptable practice at this time, in this place, for this book. What problems in image capture did a platen help the team of curators, conservators, and digitizers solve? Simply put, the physical form of the traditional codex defies the powers of modern cameras. In general, cameras focus at a single focal plane. But an open book’s pages gently undulate, lifting up from the gutter before curving down to the edge of the leaf. Moreover, open books are not static objects. Writing supports, especially parchment, are heat-­ and humidity-­sensitive: even in climate-­controlled imaging centers, pages may curl and flex. Bindings may want to shift further

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open or begin to close. While these things can make aesthetically pleasing photographs, they do not support analysis of a complete leaf at maximum magnification. To fully support the needs of multiple audiences and types of use, books being digitized need to offer the camera a flat focal plane—­even though that goes against the nature of bound books. Different studios, at different times, for different projects may hold hard-­copy exemplars open using spatulas, paper bone folders, light plastic bands, pressurized air, and human hands.37 Platens are another a way of holding open a book, stilling the potential curl of parchment, and creating a steady flat surface on which a camera can focus. Under the 2016 Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative, platens (whether made of glass, plastic, or pressurized air) are allowed, provided the book is protected during that process.38 To photograph M0379, Smith positioned the book on the copystand immediately under the camera and opened it, as though she were about to read this book. She cushioned the open cover on a small stack of archival-­quality cardstock cut slightly smaller than the size of the book’s cover. She rested the facing side of the book against a foam wedge. This position protected the book’s spine while also ensuring that the side of the book under the camera did not cast a shadow upon or obscure the page being photographed. Books photographed in this way are open more than 90 degrees but less than 135 degrees, which is the point at which pages may begin to attempt to spring up.39 On the other three sides of the photographed leaf, Smith positioned three pillars, or “feet,” by stacking squares of archival-­quality cardstock atop clean CD cases purchased just for this task. As Smith explains, Because of the tendency for each page to spring up, the glass platen was used to apply a minute amount of pressure to the page being photographed. In order to ensure that the pressure is correct, we used gray card stacks to measure the distance from the surface of the copystand to the top-­most point of the curvature of the leaf, and then one to two pieces of card were removed from the stack. Two additional stacks were prepared to the same

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height, and placed around the object. The glass could then be safely placed on the stacks, ensuring no more than a few millimeters of pressure would be applied to the area with the most curvature, and the page would not spring back or shut.40 Compromising between the hard-­copy book’s desire to curve and the camera’s need for a flat focal plane, the method means that just outside the frame of every photograph in the digital copy of M0379 there stood gray stacked-­paper feet supporting the platen with as little contact as possible between parchment and glass. The idea was that, in this way, M0379 could still mostly follow its natural curvature, and the camera would still largely have a single focal plane. It took four hands to do this. Smith did the more delicate work of turning pages and subtly positioning the book. As her assistant, I lifted and lowered the platen onto its support pillars. My job was to place the platen on its pillars, as close as I could to M0379’s gutter without ever making contact with ink, pigment, or gold leaf. Then, I moved my hand to where Smith gently held the facing leaves, taking her place and freeing her to make any final necessary adjustments. When I handled the platen, I wore white cotton gloves to keep the natural oils of my hands from smudging the glass and making it visible. This strictly limited when and how I was allowed to touch the book. After years of experience in cultural heritage handling and imaging, as well as conservation training, Smith was familiar with the debates about the use of cotton gloves in archives and special collections. For imaging M0379, she warned that gloves were not conducive to sensitive handling. They reduced a wearer’s dexterity and awareness of even slight sensations—­both of which are vitally important for safely digitizing rare and fragile materials. She cautioned about the subtle roughness in the gloves’ surface, which could pull the surface of the leaves in subtle but deleterious ways. Whenever I placed my glove-­clad hand on M0379, Smith instructed me, I needed to touch only blank parchment—­and I needed to think of my hand not as a body part that could shift and turn but as an immovable weight. As soon as I touched the book, my hand

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had to become a snake weight at the end of my wrist that I could lift and lower on command, but never slide along the parchment. As we fine-­tuned this choreography in the benchmarking stage for M0379, the entire process was helped by the fact that Smith is experienced and functionally ambidextrous. I, however, am neither, and so for me the entire process hummed with low-­level, persistent anxiety. One of the most important issues in benchmarking is “ascertaining what level of capture is satisfactory—­i.e. for present and future needs.”41 After examining the analog object and modifying the photographing setup to suit the book’s needs, the general digitization workflow moves into determining spatial resolution.42 In digital objects, spatial resolution is measured in pixels per inch (ppi), pixels per centimeter (ppcm or pixel/cm), pixels per millimeter (ppmm), or dots per inch (dpi).43 The higher the ppi, the greater support for magnification. Nonspecialist end users may believe that higher ppi is always better, but this is not always the case. The digitization project mission plus the nature of the analog object being imaged determines appropriate image resolution. For instance, the 2016 Federal Guidelines advise that the highest standard for imaging manuscripts is 400 ppi, but the highest standard for digitizing microfilm (including microfilm depicting manuscripts) is 4000 ppi.44 Image resolution can be determined by even closer attention to the material object, following IDIF, which uses a representative sample of the smallest details that need to be in focus for “research-­worthy” digital images.45 In print objects, this can be determined by using character height. For manuscripts, “a better representation of detail would be the width of the finest line, stroke, or marking that must be captured in the digital surrogate. To fully represent such a detail, at least 2 pixels should cover it.”46 To determine spatial resolution for M0379, Smith selected a representative sample of M0379’s leaves. Then, using a ruled loupe, she measured the smallest visible details on those leaves. With these measurements, Smith determined that 600 ppi was the ideal, achievable image resolution for our digitization. After determining project ppi, benchmarking for M0379 moved into setting color balance. For digitization, colors are calibrated using

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a “target” and related computer software. This process ensures that there are standard measurements for color balance applied consistently to every photograph taken. For M0379, Smith began by photographing a device-­level target by the Golden Thread image quality system, by Image Science Associates (fig. 1.2; colored squares are not visible in the black-­and-­white image reproduced here). Object-­level targets, in the form of rulers with squares of black, white, gray, and various colors, sometimes appear along the edge of photographs of rare books. Before participating in the digitization of M0379, I confess I had not understood what these color targets were for. As a frequent user of digitized manuscripts, while I understood the utility of a visible ruler, I did not see how tidy squares of different colors helped me verify the colors of the book itself. My confusion lay in the fact that when manuscript scholars and humanities researchers speak of color accuracy, we generally are referring to how closely the images on our screens match to the colors we would see in person with the hard-­copy exemplar before us. That is, indeed, one goal of color matching—­but in important ways it is also the least achievable. Whether viewing analog manuscripts or modern printed facsimiles, “light comes from an external source, rebounds off the painted support and is reflected upon our eyes.”47 Digitized manuscripts, by contrast, as Giovanni Scorcioni explains, are viewed via “backlit screens, composed of millions of tiny lamps made in three colours—­red, green, and blue. Each lamp can turn from completely off to fully bright. Millions of lamps (or pixels) together, seen at a proper distance, create the illusion of images on the screen.”48 Due to the underlying different materialities of analog manuscripts and digital copies, and the ways that light functions differently in paint-­based color systems versus screen-­based color systems, the play of light and color in digital copies and their hard-­copy originals can never quite match. The condition of the screen through which one views a digital manuscript will also affect how one perceives a manuscript’s colors. For instance, when you drop your phone or tablet and smash its screen, color production changes along the cracks. Consider also the experience of

Figure 1.2  Golden Thread device-level color target by Image Science Associates, similar to the one used in the digitization of Stanford University Libraries, Department of Special Collections, Manuscript Collection, MSS Codex M0379. Photograph by Astrid J. Smith. Reproduced with permission of Image Science Associates.

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viewing a manuscript on an older, secondhand monitor versus viewing the same manuscript on the newest, top-­of-­the-­line screen. Although it is rarely discussed in manuscript studies, a user’s relative wealth or poverty does not just influence whether or not they can afford to go on pilgrimage to the analog original. It also influences the quality of screens they use to access digital manuscripts, and those screens will change the colors of the digital manuscripts they see. Expecting color to remain stable across all possible viewing devices is technologically and socioeconomically naive. Furthermore, even if all screens did show precisely the same colors, humans do not perceive color in precisely the same way. Universalizing meditations on the reader viewing the colors of the book elide the diversity of users of manuscripts, analog and digital. Some bibliographers are color blind.49 Others may be tetrachromats with more sensitive color vision than trichromats. Illness can change a person’s color vision, as can the normal aging process. Rather than try to rely on simply “eyeballing” a digital copy against its analog original—­and risking all the variation that that kind of individual human-­based assessment can entail—­Smith and other digitizers rely on image quality management systems, including the use of color targets. The Golden Thread device-­level target Smith used was roughly the size of a sheet of 8½″ × 11″ or A4 paper. It is an anodized aluminum sheet mounted with five offset squares of black, gray, and white: four in the corners and one in the middle. Also in the middle of the sheet are small stripes: two comprised of squares of colors, and two more moving through a range of grays between white to black. Once Smith photographed the target, she used Golden Thread software to analyze the color and resolution of that photograph. When these measurements were set to her satisfaction, she recorded the settings to use as the norm to which all future photographs of M0379 would be set. Taking every photograph at the same calibration ensures that any visible color shifts between leaves can be trusted as representative of shifts in color occurring in the hard-­copy exemplar. Observing this stage in benchmarking clarified how, in important ways, the color targets were not—­or at

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least, not just—­for human users. Target and software, together, help set image standards beyond what human eyes can perceive, and then the digital imaging specialist can use those standards to ensure that the color values remain consistent across the book. Extending my analogy between pre-­ and postprint manuscript copying cultures, we might think of photographing the target and setting resolution (which happens during benchmarking and then at the opening and close of every imaging session) as the modern equivalent to doodling and pen trials, getting ink and nib ready for the work of copying. Only after measurements were taken and standards set were we ready to begin image capture. In photographing M0379, we did not move sequentially forward through the book as though we were reading. Instead, we photographed all the versos first and then all of the rectos. As we moved through the book, leaf by leaf, Smith added or removed cardstock beneath the platen’s pillars and beneath M0379 so that the focal plane was maintained and the degree of openness and height of the platen were always as safe as possible for the hard-­copy book. In practice, this sensitivity—­first, to the needs of the book, and second, to the needs of the imaging system—­results in grinding, repetitive labor for human copyists. Once Smith had turned the leaf and positioned M0379 for its next photograph, I lowered the platen onto its pillars, taking care to never let the glass brush the leaf. After I positioned the glass and Smith finished any necessary fine-­tuning of my placement, both of us would step back from the table and try to assume the same position we held for each photo to further minimize even slight variations in light in the surrounding environment. Then Smith would take the picture, using an external trigger, a button attached by a long cord to her computer. Then, she would replace the trigger on the edge of the imaging table and each of us would step forward and lean over to begin setup on the next photograph. I would lift the glass directly up from its supporting “feet.” Then, I would wait, still hunched, as Smith gently turned the leaf and settled M0379 open for the next image capture. After I lowered the glass onto its “feet,” Smith, spine curved at something approaching a 90-­degree angle, might gently correct my platen

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placement. We would then both straighten, step back into our habitual places, and close our eyes against the flash. Smith would take the picture, we would open our eyes, step forward, and begin again. This process happened for every side of every leaf in the manuscript, often more than once. Sometimes multiple photographs of the same leaf were a deliberate, artistic choice, using enhanced lighting techniques in order to better reproduce the gleam of gold on a decorated leaf (about which more below). Other times, repeated photographs were the result of technical copying errors—­as when the occasional failure in communication between hardware and software created a photograph that was a dazzling rainbow of color. To me, these glitchy blends of colors looked astonishingly like the auras that can appear during a migraine. Repeat photographs were also made necessary by minute changes in the imaging environment. In order to prevent reflection in the surface of the platen, Smith draped the camera supports in soft black fabric. Sometimes, this fabric shifted, leading to hints of lines reflected in the surface of the platen. When these reflections grew visible (by which I mean visible to Smith—­who was attending to minute details that I, as a codicologist, had never been trained to see), she would pause production to rearrange the fabric so there was not even a ghostly hint of platen or camera. Once this was corrected, any photographs we had taken that showed reflection had to be retaken. Finally, repeat photographs were sometimes made necessary by human error. In my anxious efforts to lift the platen cleanly away from M0379, I sometimes nudged one of the support pillars that held the platen suspended just above the leaf. Over time, this minute nudging could result in a bit of gray cardstock crawling into view. Part of the job of the photographer’s assistant is to keep an eye out for this kind of image interruption, so that the lead photographer can focus all of her attention and energy on the needs of the analog book and on image capture. But I was not skilled at this multitasking. Focusing intently on M0379 and mastering the two-­ person dance it took to photograph each leaf, several pages might go by before one of us—­usually Smith—­would notice a small gray corner of cardstock had crept into view in our photographs. Once my error was uncovered, all of those leaves had to be rephotographed.

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Another challenge for image capture on M0379 was keeping our background work area pristine. This is not due to any “dust” lingering in the climate-­controlled location where M0379 resides when it is not in use in the reading room. Rather, minute traces of airborne particulate are simply part of the world, even in the filtered air of digitization labs. But when this particulate landed on the matte black copystand below M0379, it interrupted the clean emptiness of that background. When it landed on our platen, it rendered the glass visible. This too is part of the unseen labor of digitization: as the 2016 Federal Guidelines note, platens and the surrounding area “will have to be cleaned on a routine basis to eliminate the introduction of extraneous dirt and dust to the digital images.”50 While these bits of particulate could all have been erased in postproduction using image correction software, Smith felt that such intervention damaged the veracity of the master images. As a result, part of the time invested in digitizing involved cleaning the platen and the table—­and retaking photographs whenever the table or platen were anything less than pristine. All of this took time, as well as physical and mental effort. When we began work on M0379, it took us an average of 3.56 minutes to successfully photograph each leaf. At our best, we achieved 1.76 minutes per image. When Smith worked with Micaela Go, a significantly more experienced photographer’s assistant, they averaged 1.38 minutes per image. There are several important takeaways here. First, the work of digitization is skilled labor. With the rise of high-­quality, personal, digital cameras, researchers may be tempted to believe that digitization is not so different from snapping pictures with your smartphone in the reading room. But from project planning, to benchmarking, to image capture, to digital preservation, digitizing a book is a different, more rigorous process than taking snapshots with your phone. If the task of book history is to consider the human interactions involved at every stage of a text’s production, then understanding all the stages of the workflow can act as a helpful corrective to simplistic analogies between researchers with cameras or photocopy machines, and digitizers in studios with developed procedures and established workflows. Second, I wish to emphasize how the work of creating a digital pres-

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ervation copy of a bound book is grueling—­physically and mentally. At the end of a copying session with M0379, I was exhausted. My mind was foggy. My forearms, fingers, and shoulders were tired. My back hurt, especially when I tried to stand upright. The bottoms of my feet ached. This bodily experience is another thread binding together medieval and modern copying. The fifteenth-­century poet Thomas Hoccleve worked for decades as a professional copyist, both as a clerk in the Office of the Privy Seal and as a freelance scribe. In his own poetry, Hoccleve repeatedly foregrounds the labors of bookmaking, most famously in The Regement of Princes (ca. 1410–­12), a Middle English verse translation of the popular “advice to princes” genre that Hoccleve dedicated to the prince who became King Henry V in 1413. In the Regement’s prologue, an unhappy, insomniac narrator named “Thomas Hoccleve” encounters an unnamed, impoverished Old Man. Thomas and the Old Man discuss, among other things, the pains suffered by underpaid copyists. At one point, Thomas confesses that he is so poor that purchasing adequate food is a source of real anxiety. He briefly considers taking up small-­scale urban farming to alleviate his food insecurity before dismissing the possibility: My bak vnbuxum hath swich thyng [digging, plowing, filling carts] forsworne, At instance of writyng, his Werreyour, That stowpyng hath him spilt with his labour.51 In Middle English “unbuxum” is associated with disobedience, refusal, unwillingness, and pride. These lines flicker with self-­mockery as Hoccleve jokes that his literary alter ego, poor and unhappy though he may be, is still too proud to bend and work in the dirt. Yet. “Unbuxum” also means stiff and unbending—­not just as an inner character trait but also as a literal, bodily state of being.52 Given what Thomas says about his habitual “stowpynge” posture from days spent “wrytynge,” these lines may well also suggest that Thomas’s back has stiffened into a perpetual curve.53 These hints of literal, serious bodily discomfort point back to traditional scribal complaints and colophons.54 They also point forward

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to the occupational disabilities associated with the work of copying books in print.55 This is not an exact analogy: the studio responsible for creating the digital copy of M0379 had strict rules to avoid harming workers’ bodies and Smith made sure that we adhered to them. But even with mandated breaks, as I struggled to straighten my own spine after just a few hours spent stooping, lifting, and lowering, Hoccleve’s words felt very near. In the same cluster of scribal complaint, Hoccleve mentions how his eyes are dazzled from years spent gazing on white parchment.56 Smith and Go shared a bone-­deep knowledge of the rhythms of copying. They knew when to close their eyes against the flash that brought M0379 into even, bright light. I did not. Often, I did not time my blink quite right. As a result, my vision crawled with multicolored afterimages even as I pushed onward with the support work for copying M0379. With my back and eyes rebelling, I gained a new, embodied sympathy for medieval scribes—­whose complaints about sore eyes, hands, back, and stomachs took on a new depth of meaning as I blinked, bent, lifted, and turned. I also gained a deeper appreciation for modern digitizers in whose labors I was discovering profound echoes of Hoccleve’s litanies of medieval, scribal discomfort. In the early years of mass digitization, Michael Camille insisted that medieval manuscripts bind together beauty, bodies, and pain. Every book is a relic of bodily pain, desire, and death. We should not forget, too, the books were also produced from bodies, first of all in the parchment pages which were the stretched and treated skins of animals. Inks and colors were often produced with human spittle and urine, according to contemporary recipes. Moreover, the manuscript is a product of the hands and body of human labor that have registered every pressure and point of contact upon the flesh itself.57 “It seems to me,” Camille writes elsewhere, “that we cannot treat the works from the past . . . as things only to be read in our heads. Our images are not just about networks but about textures. They are not

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read on screen but felt on flesh, and pushed out of matter even to the level of pain.”58 Going into a professional digitization lab and laboring (albeit briefly) as a photographer’s assistant taught me that digital manuscripts are also, powerfully, products “of the hands and body of human labor that have registered every pressure and point of contact.” Even though end users of digitized texts may not feel parchment in their own hands, digital books are still the products of many hands: medieval writers, illuminators, parchmentiers, and binders, and also modern curators, conservationists, digital imaging specialists, project managers, postproduction imaging assistants, digital repository managers. The labor of making medieval manuscripts is ongoing, and to treat digitization like it is a profound break from what came before ignores the significant continuities that bind together medieval and modern copying practice. Make More True: Postproduction and Image Fidelity

After Smith, Go, and I completed image capture, M0379 moved into postproduction image processing. First, we addressed the problem of gold. In writing by manuscripts specialists, the experience of gold reflecting light on a manuscript’s leaves serves as a synecdoche for the in-­person interaction between researcher and book in the special collections reading room.59 But in digital copies, gold does not always glint like in-­person gold leaf. For instance, the gilded I of Illuminare on W.168, fol. 115v with which I began this chapter gleams brightly, but on fol. 115r, there are two more gilded Is, which appear, to my eye, more dull bronze-­brown. Digitizers are familiar with this problem. As Wayne Torborg, digitization specialist at the Hill Museum and Manuscripts Library, explains, in the standard copy setup a book is photographed “with the camera perfectly parallel and coplanar with the subject matter”—­but light bounces best at angles. So positioning a camera’s lens perfectly parallel with the hard-­copy exemplar can cause lively, reflective gold to appear as flat bronze, dull brown, or even brown-­green in photographs.60 Different institutions, projects, and digitizers have different philosophies for working with gold while digitizing primary sources. Some studios may choose to avoid extra burnishing work and

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limit reproduction to a single image for each leaf—­even if that means that the gold in some photographs does not gleam. Some studios go in for the “hottest” gleam, the point where reflected light moves past yellow-­gold to flash bright white. Others eschew such “hot spots” in favor of promoting a more general overall sense of glow and warmth. Some seek to bring gold to life by layering together two photographs taken with different lighting sources.61 The digitization of M0379 was not under the time constraints of a short-­term grant-­funded project. While it was the first codex of a longer queue of medieval codices to be digitized, it was also something of a bespoke research project—­a digitization case study, demonstrating how this particular studio, in this particular moment, might digitize this particular book. Because of this flexible project mission, the team that designed the digitization plan decided to utilize a technique called “compositing.” During image capture, each time we came to a leaf with what Smith identified as a significant amount of gilding, we would take the main photograph set at the same standards of benchmarking for all photographs of M0379. Then, we shifted position. Standing at one side of the imaging table, I would hold at an angle a flexible sheet of mirror-­board cardstock. Smith, standing at the other side of the imaging table, would use a flashlight in one hand to bounce light off the mirror board and onto specific areas of the leaf to highlight its gilding at different angles (shown in fig. 1.1). Doing this, we were able to bring to light areas of the leaf that had reflected only dark-­bronze in our master image. When we achieved the angle of light Smith wanted, we would hold it, close our eyes, and she would use the external trigger to take the picture. During this process, it was imperative that we not touch M0379 or the copystand, as any movement would mean that the images would not line up perfectly and the subsequent postproduction image processing would not work correctly. On average, we took three to six of these supplemental “gilding images” for each leaf receiving this treatment. After image capture, Smith used these supplemental gilding images to digitally burnish M0379’s gold leaf. In Photoshop, Smith would open the main image of a leaf and its supplemental gilding shots. She

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a­ rranged these images in a stack, with the main photograph on top. Then, she carefully masked—­blocked from view—­the sections of the main photograph where the gold had not been fully illuminated. Smith then selected one of the supplemental photographs, which showed more dynamic gleam in this region of the page, and let that part of that photograph show through. Andrew Prescott argues in “Representing Texts: Manuscripts and Archives in the Digital Age” that “the problem in representing manuscripts and archives” is “a problem of reality.”62 The edition purports to be real because it is representing the purest and most refined form of the text. In fact, in its multiple witnesses and complex career, the life of the text in the world is more adventurous than the sanitised version a printed edition can ever hope to be. The facsimile also purports to provide a purer form of the text, one which has been transmitted to the user without the intervention of the human hand, but it is, in fact, a piece of craftsmanship often involving greater skill and more radical intervention than the printed edition.63 Arguably, our technique with M0379 is very much in that latter camp: it looks as though it came into being without the intervention of the human hand, but it is an object of more radical intervention than end users may realize. Burnishing the book’s gold leaf to make the digital images look more like their hard-­copy exemplar took extra time, manual labor, and mental effort during and after image capture. But there are no signs of that labor in the final, published digital text. Part of the problem bedeviling makers and users of digitized books is that end users do not always see where interventions have occurred. Nor, when we do see (or fear) that interventions have occurred, have we approached these interventions with a codicological methodology. Rather than offering blanket praise or condemnation for image interventions like compositing, a more productive mode of analysis might seek to learn, first, where these interventions have occurred and then, second, to understand the motivations that drove the makers to embrace a certain type

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of image intervention for a particular project. Balancing medievalist sensibilities with library and information sciences can be incredibly helpful here. For instance, when medievalists write about “fidelity,” we generally mean it in terms of faithfulness and its failures. Infidelity is taken to mean something like a breach of devotion, a failure that is simultaneously coded religious, marital, and sexual—­as when G. Thomas Tanselle invokes “virgin documents that have never been violated by camera or copying machine.”64 The Society for American Archivists, by contrast, defines “fidelity” as the “ability to reproduce sound with quality similar to the original.”65 The important point about image manipulation in digitization is not that a touched-­up digital manuscript image has been violated but that image intervention is generally designed to enhance a digital copy’s ability to reproduce qualities similar to the hard-­copy original. When I mentioned to Smith that some end users might see our work on M0379’s gold as deceptive, or as making a copy that is somehow unfaithful to its original, she replied that taking a single photograph also creates an untrue experience of the analog original. With a single photograph and single source of light, some parts of the leaf were lit white-­hot. Other areas—­even those areas that gleam undamaged in the hard-­copy original—­looked muddy brown in the first photograph. Particularly with a damaged manuscript like M0379, which contains several different types of gold with varying levels of light-­responsiveness, what she strives for is something that might be termed “experiential honesty.” With a copy of the untouched main photograph to serve as the overall record for M0379, the extra effort and subtle artistry of compositing can bring the gold back to life, reviving some of the real magic of the book that tends to evade image capture. Ultimately, Smith said that she wanted to remove the untrue representation of gold that did not gleam. In its place, she tried to offer something more like the warmth and light a reader might experience with the hard-­copy original in a library reading room.

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Digital Deluxe

We photographed M0379 all versos and then all rectos (back to front, and then front to back) in order to minimize stress on the spine. Thus, once digital burnishing was complete, the photographs needed to be bound into the same order as the leaves in the hard-­copy exemplar. Micaela Go performed an initial completeness check on M0379 and then completed the digital binding process. After this, I did another round of QA/QC, checking again that every leaf was imaged and in the right order.66 Then, all of the images went through another round of image intervention. Over the course of image capture, an analog codex can shift slightly in its positioning under the camera. When this happens, unmodified images seem to wriggle back and forth. An important part of making digital photographs resemble a hard-­copy codex involves squaring every photograph along the same vertical and horizontal axes as all the other photographed leaves—­a process called straightening or “deskewing.” At the same time, each photograph had to be cropped so that each digital leaf appeared the same size. A particularly important part of this task was ensuring that each leaf appeared in the same size frame. Rather than look at the photographs we had taken of M0379 as pages, she urged me to imagine them as distinct pieces of art. The work I would be doing was analogous to the work of framing; I needed to make sure each leaf had the same size mat. In each photograph she takes of a bound codex, Smith includes the gutter and a glimpse of the facing page. She does this to preserve in every photograph a sense of the book as a three-­dimensional object. She wants to give end users the security of knowing that nothing has been left out. The effect of this kind of imaging is that when two facing leaves are juxtaposed, there is a visual echo, or stutter. We see the same gutter twice—­a form that is fundamentally different from a book a reader might hold in her hands. But this double-­gutter view is a feature, not a bug. It is a statement of a digitization team’s philosophy for representing bookish materiality. Paradoxically, in order to more accurately represent the bookishness of the analog exemplar, the photographs had to move past attempting to exactly replicate the hard-­copy original in digital form.

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When I was initially assigned deskewing and framing as part of the postproduction work on M0379, I assumed that it could be given to an untrained worker because it was not important. Smith swiftly explained how wrong this was. Rotating and cropping the master photographs, she explained, was one of the most important steps in the digitization workflow. Imagine, she said, that I painted a work of art, and I gave it to you to frame, and you went and bought a cheap plastic frame and glued my art—­crooked—­to the wall. “You have the power to ruin everything.”67 Poorly cropped manuscript images, she explained further, will leave viewers focusing on all the wrong things, or unable to focus at all. Once I finished QA/QC, rotating, and cropping, part-­time lab staff member Selina Lamberti completed another round of quality control on my work. Then all the final image files had to be renamed using the correct digital resource unique identifier, or “druid,” created for this digital manuscript so that the images were bound together in the correct order. We began benchmarking for M0379 on November 3, 2014. All major postproduction work concluded on November 21, 2014, with the digital manuscript published to the Stanford Digital Repository. In total, the digitization of M0379 took approximately 1,508 minutes (25.133 hours): 993 minutes of hands-­on labor by Smith and her assistant(s) copying the codex; 360 minutes of postprocessing; and 155 minutes of automated computer processing of the images. The final digital manuscript is made up of 240 digital images, although significantly more were taken in the process of digitization. None of this information is in the digital book’s publicly available descriptive metadata. There is no published note recording that the book was copied primarily by Smith, nor naming other members of the digitization team and the larger interdepartment collaborations that went into making a new digital copy of M0379. Nor is there a record of the physical toll this work takes: the sore backs and hands, the constant mild dehydration that is a side effect of working for hours every day with rare books in areas with no beverages present, the dry and cracking skin on hands from constant handwashing—­all in order to protect the analog book. Like most digital collections and repositories, M0379 looks like it has simply

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appeared on the screen, like Athena bursting fully formed from Zeus’s brow. It looks like there was never a modern copyist, larger digitization team, and complex workflow. When book historians attempt to calculate the value of the medieval books, we estimate how many animals died to produce the writing support. We make educated guesses of how long we believe it took to make the manuscript, or note how many scribes and limners were involved in its production. If we were to try to similarly calculate the cost of a digital copy of a medieval book, we would need to know how many people worked on the book, the hours they spent, their salaries or hourly wages, and whether or not their position came with other benefits (such as health-­care coverage, for those digital imaging labs in countries without national health-­care systems).68 We would need to try to recover the sunk costs of digitization studios: the cameras, computers, servers, and software that can total in the thousands, or tens of thousands, of dollars. We must also take into account the fact that digitized books, like all books, require ongoing care. After the initial labor of digitization is done, digital manuscripts must be maintained against bit-­rot and other forms of entropy. These new copies of old books live on servers that must be paid and cared for so their contents can continue to exist. The hard-­copy exemplar M0379 might well be a book of hours of only moderate value, by some estimates. But when we extend to their digital progeny the principles that codicologists use for hard-­copy books, the revealed constellation of human labor and laborers mean that digitized books—­particularly those like M0379 that have been enhanced via additional handling and image intervention—­are deluxe manuscripts. Global Perspectives on Digital Manuscript Making

The invisibility of the labor of modern copying is perhaps the most striking thread that binds it to at least some medieval copying cultures: one can easily read a through line connecting the conventional anonymity of medieval English scribes to the efforts in modern digitization studios that meticulously hide signs of digitization teams’ intervening

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labors. But copyist invisibility is not a shared transnational, transhistorical value. One of the many benefits of our increasingly global digital archives is how they destabilize notions of a single medieval copying culture, challenging sweeping generalizations with specific local detail. At the same time that I was conducting autoethnographic research with Smith and the larger project digitization team, I was curating metadata for hundreds of manuscripts digitized by the Walters Art Museum through three projects funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). I worked with metadata for Latin books of hours like W.168, and also for manuscripts in Arabic, Armenian, Dutch, Ge’ez, German, Greek, Russian, and Spanish. Reading the data in aggregate highlighted how anonymizing copyists is not a shared best practice across medieval books. For example, Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, MS W.559 is an illuminated copy of the Qur’an completed in ‫شَ ْع َب ان‬‎ 723 AH (1323 CE). We owe the precision of this date to a scribal colophon on fol. 432a, in which the copyist records his name. This poor creature, ever in need of [the mercy of] God—­exalted be He—­Mubārak-­Shāh, the son of Quṭb, may God forgive our sins and conceal our shortcomings, has written [this work] on the month of Shaʿbān, in the year 723, thanking God—­exalted be He—­for His favors, and beseeching Him to send His blessings and salutations upon His Prophet Muḥammad and upon his magnanimous, noble, kind, and pure kindred.69 Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, MS W.537, among the oldest extant Armenian gospel books, pays similarly close attention to the copyists and human networks that drove its creation. Fol. 2v holds two colophons.70 One, in the center of the leaf, records the name of the manuscript’s patron and the larger community in which he lived: This Holy Gospels was written 415 of the era of our Lord [966 CE] by the order and at the expense of Tʿoros the priest through the cooperation of all the families as decoration and for the splendor of (the) holy church and for the pleasure of the congregation of

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Rznēr. Now you who read (it) and who hear (it) remember the priest Tʿoros and all his brothers and his parents in Jesus Christ our Lord.71 The second, embedded in a decorative frame, records the name of the manuscript’s copyist: I, Sargis, unworthy priest wrote this Holy Gospels in the year 415 of the kingship over us of our Lord Jesus Christ. To him glory is fitting forever and ever, amen.72 Like Arabic and Armenian manuscripts, medieval Hebrew manuscripts also conventionally preserve the names of their copyists.73 Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Vat. ebr. 402 is perhaps best known for preserving the works of the Anglo-­Hebrew poet Meir ben Elijah of Norwich. The codex also preserves the names of three of the four scribes responsible for the manuscript: Joseph, Meshullam, and Samuel.74 Against the silence of the scribes in books like W.168 and M0379, these equally strong medieval manuscript traditions ring with the voices, and demands, of their copyists. Remember my siblings. Remember my parents. Remember me. Dipesh Chakrabarty has analyzed how European history and temporal standards have been exported to non-­European geographies. Insofar as the academic discourse of history—­that is, “history” as a discourse produced at the institutional site of the university—­is concerned, “Europe” remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories, including the ones we call “Indian,” “Chinese,” “Kenyan” and so on. There is a peculiar way in which all these other histories tend to become variations on a master narrative that could be called “the history of Europe.”75 In the widespread invisibility of modern copyists in digitized books, a similar universalizing principle is at work. Anglo traditions of scribal anonymity, filtered through long years of scholarship treating librarians, archivists, and curators as invisible service workers, are exported

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globally as a shared value in digitization—­as though anonymity were the accepted and eternal order of things. But global digital manuscript archives show that it is not. We accept that for medieval scribes copying a book was a creative, intellectual, and physical act. As my autoethnographic narrative of the digitization of M0379 shows, this remains true when the tools of the copyist move from stylus and parchment to computer and camera. Medieval writers like Thomas Hoccleve argue that there are profound ethical dimensions to understanding the conditions under which manuscripts are created. In medieval scribal colophons there is a multilingual, transhistorical tradition of copyists claiming credit for their work, asking to be remembered centuries after their deaths. Coming to the digitization lab with medievalist eyes, steeped in descriptions of a scholar’s duty to serve and preserve the dead, ultimately challenges us to listen to what the dead teach.76 Applying the lessons of Thomas Hoccleve, Mubārakshāh ibn Quṭb “the golden pen,” Sargis the priest, and Samuel the scribe to digital copies of medieval books challenges us to also look to the living. If we turn just a portion of our professional care for the dead into curiosity for the living, and if we take seriously our own credos as book historians, we will speak with and listen to the digitization teams that are re-­creating medieval books in new digital forms. Medieval scriptoria do not map seamlessly onto modern digitization studios. But thinking about them together helps illuminate both. Moreover, in attending to the living copyists of medieval manuscripts, we can begin to write medieval scribes’ modern heirs back into the shifting histories, and futures, of medieval books.

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CHAPTER 2 VALUE AND VISIBILIT Y Copying San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 111

in some corners of the internet. In it, a small man clutches a large book, open to a page with a large decorated initial, vaguely resembling an illuminated manuscript. He stands before a bespectacled woman in medievalish garb, who is gesturing toward a monk sitting at a tall desk. “DARN IT . . .” she exclaims, “the copier broke down again!” The “copier”-­scribe is visibly “broken” in at least two ways. His closed eyes and the “Z” floating over his head proclaim that he is asleep on the job. But his arm also appears to be in a sling. In a single punchline, the cartoon knits together the trope of the medieval monk-­copyist/copy-­machine comparison beloved by tech advertisements made in the period of messy overlap between the late print and early digital ages, with a joke about worker laziness and at least a passing nod to the complexity of embodied labor.1 In its usual T H E C A R T O O N I S W E I R D LY P E R V A S I V E

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habitats—­Pinterest pages, blog posts, the header for Earthlink.net’s 2001 “Brief History of Librarians and Image”—­the cartoon floats free of its original context: it simply is, made by no one, at no specific place or time, serving no clear purpose or mission beyond being funny. In fact, its uncited original appears to be a May 1990 advertisement for the library and school supply company Demco Inc., published in the Maryland Library Association’s newsletter (see fig. 2.1). The corporate creator and earlier context are a part of the story that later digital copyists did not feel compelled to reproduce in their acts of sharing. The original artist, moreover, does not appear to have signed their cartoon, or—­if they signed some earlier version—­their signature does not appear in the 1990 cartoon or its later digital progeny. I start with this cartoon and its short media history because they neatly encapsulate many of the concerns of this chapter: how not

Figure 2.1  Medieval copy machine cartoon, original mise-en-page in The Crab, May 1990, page 9. Created by an unknown cartoonist, unknown date. Source confirmed in original hard copy by the Maryland Library Association. Reproduced with permission of the Maryland Library Association and Demco, Inc.

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making a copy the way another end user might wish is often framed as the copy or copyist being broken, lazy, or unfaithful; the flickering between visibility and invisibility of the laborers involved in every copy’s production; the way that later copyists—­in the act of copying—­ are always choosing what aspects of their exemplar to retain and what features to cut as irrelevant to the new project mission. This chapter expands chapter 1’s comparisons between modern and medieval copyist cultures to include more of the media histories that connect them. We have accepted that digital media remediate earlier text technologies, in much the same way that early printed books imitated and remixed their manuscript models.2 Dot Porter has called attention to how the “gallery” or “thumbnail” view of a digital manuscript resembles neither the experience of walking through a museum gallery nor of paging through a bound codex—­but it looks very like a sheet of microfiche, just as the “scroll view” in a digital manuscript imitates the functionality of a reel of microfilm.3 Earlier copies condition modern end users’ reactions to digital copies of medieval books—­ whether responses of delight (how wonderful to have color instead of black-­and-­white) or frustration (how irksome that flat images on a screen do not give visceral experience of hard-­copy codices) or some combination thereof. Because modern responses to digitization have been honed on earlier iterations and copying practices, we cannot properly understand what a digital book is without fitting it into that much longer history of textual transmission. As useful as it can be to read digital manuscripts alongside their analog exemplars, it is ultimately not enough: we need to approach digital manuscripts with an awareness of how earlier copying technologies—­print and photography—­have previously re-­created these medieval books. To do this, I focus on one manuscript made by Thomas Hoccleve in the first quarter of the fifteenth century, tracing how this particular book has been transformed and remade across multiple media over six hundred years. I also highlight some of the many instances when this book was not seen as valuable enough to copy into a newly emergent medium. A recurring celebratory claim about digitization is that

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it makes previously inaccessible texts rapidly accessible to new readerships. A recurring critique is that digitization focuses too narrowly on making new copies of already much-­copied canonical works. Tracing the fate of San Marino, the Huntington Library, MS HM 111 through the interlocking ages of manuscript, print, photography, and digitization shows the limits of both these celebrations and critiques.4 There is a deeply rooted practice of copying and recopying whatever is counted as a “treasure,” supporting long centuries of selective reproduction across multiple media formats. But what, and who, count as treasure worthy of copying is varied and shifting. I begin with the never-­before-­written project history of the 2014 digitization of HM 111. Next, I move to the analog manuscript: when it was made, what it contains, its status as a collection of copies with no extant originals. Then, I analyze HM 111’s late transition into early print and George Mason’s Poems by Thomas Hoccleve, Never Before Printed (1796). After, I proceed to one of the major reprographic revolutions of the nineteenth century—­photography—­and analyze how three medieval books served as test cases for early photographers and consider why HM 111 is not among their numbers. From there, I move to Frederick J. Furnivall’s edition of Hoccleve’s Works, vol. 1: The Minor Poems (1892), and to J. A. Burrow and A. I. Doyle’s black-­and-­white photographic print facsimile, Thomas Hoccleve: A Facsimile of the Autograph Verse Manuscripts (2002). I conclude by returning to the Huntington’s complete digital copy to knit together the threads about presence and absence, value and visibility that extend throughout the six hundred years this book has been copied across media. Print editions and digital manuscripts have sometimes been treated as opposing technologies or as rival approaches to creating accessible texts, but here I treat them together. This is because each copy of HM 111—­whether edition or facsimile, print or digital—­is, at its core, an argument about what counts as essential in a text: what content must be in a future copy and what can be set aside in the act of copying.5 In making these arguments about what is and is not essential content, each copy is ultimately making an argument about project mission

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and audience. Describing a transcription project at the Wittgenstein Archive, Alois Pichler makes a powerful argument that is broadly extensible to multiple copying technologies. The aim of these projects, Pichler writes, has often been defined as “to represent the original manuscripts as correctly as possible.” This needs a clarification, therefore let us ask some questions: What does “as correctly as possible” mean? What is the criterion of correctness? And what does “to represent” mean? To represent in which medium?  I think, the essential question is not about a true representation, but: Whom do we want to serve. . . . What is “correct” will depend on the answer to this question. And what we are actually going to represent, and how, is determined by our research interests.6 Engaging with Pichler’s questions moves us away from a singular abstract notion of correctness and the related habit of adjudicating whether a copyist is faithful or unfaithful, a copy good or bad, and toward a more nuanced understanding of how “accuracy” must be measured by each project’s specific mission, including its goals for its desired audiences. In each copy of HM 111, I seek to uncover those moments where the promise of making a “faithful copy” cracks open to reveal who, and what, the copy is trying to be faithful to. Ultimately, this media history of HM 111 shows how the issue of hidden labor in digitization is built on centuries of practices that have obscured many workers and bookmakers from the historical record. HM 111: The Digital Copy

The complete copy of HM 111 in the Huntington’s Digital Library looks almost exactly like a digitized medieval manuscript should. That is, it ticks nearly all of the boxes for a 2-­D digitized manuscript, according to a general international consensus that emerged across the 2010s (see fig. 2.2). Rather than targeted sampling, the manuscript’s contents are fully digitized, from its somewhat worn seventeenth-­century binding (front

Figure 2.2  Screenshot showing the first lines of an untitled begging poem, with correction in the first line of Huntington Library, San Marino, MS HM 111, fol. 41r, as it appeared in the Huntington Digital Library, ca. 2021. Digitization by the Huntington Imaging Services, 2014; image capture performed by Jennifer Sullivan. Image reproduced with permission of the Huntington Library.

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and rear covers, as well as spine) to the abundant notes appended to the front pastedown—­including editorial notes left by Thomas Tyrwhitt (d. 1786) and Frederick J. Furnivall (d. 1910), to its blank flyleaves, to all of its text-­bearing leaves. At time of writing in spring 2021, it is served out through an interface that supports zoom functionality for each leaf and flipping through the book page by page as well as less linear navigation, including jumping via thumbnail images of surrounding leaves and the option to leap to a specific leaf by entering its image number. It also supports multiple kinds of viewers: in addition to the ContentDM viewer, the Huntington Digital Library has a “View this item in Mirador” button—­a stylized white “M” just to the right of the “request this item” dropdown menu. Individual pages can be downloaded and printed for use offline. And the complete image set is paired with descriptive metadata that offer a detailed description of the digital object’s analog exemplar.7 These metadata include:  • the manuscript’s title “[Poems]: manuscript, [between 1400–­1425]” and its call number “mssHM 111”;  • its creator “Hoccleve, Thomas, 1370?–­1450?, author,” • two forms of date: a “date,” “between 1400–­1425” and a more extensive “date searchable” range,  • both languages contained in the manuscript, • a short “physical description” element as well as a “notes” element that contains a more extensive record of the manuscript’s collation, page layouts, script, decoration, and binding, • an extensive provenance statement and a list of previous owners and historically significant annotators (slotted into the “contributor” element), • a “Cite As” direction and image rights and reuse statement, and • an IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) manifest. The metadata contain only a little visible information on the digital manuscript distinct from its physical exemplar: what digital collection

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it is part of, its digitization specifications (“High resolution”), and its unique digital identifier—­4 43133. This too follows emerging consensus. There exist good arguments against including the date of digitization in a digital object’s metadata; in particular, how useless “date of digitization” is for searches focused on the digital object’s analog original, as well as how unusual it is for users of digital copies to want to know about these modern copies as objects in their own rights.8 Even where they were included in earlier iterations of a project, as a digital collection develops, details about digitization may be removed from public view: this has been the case for the digital copy of HM 111. In late 2018, select staff at the Huntington concluded a multiyear, multidepartmental effort that established a set of core metadata fields for every digital object in the collections. This work included determining which metadata fields would continue to be publicly visible and which would not. “Date of digitization” was one of the fields suppressed from public view. The information itself is not lost: it persists in technical metadata attached to each scanned image, but it is no longer visibly part of the digital copy’s story. In the years since the date of digitization for HM 111 left the publicly accessible descriptive metadata, I have been told that I am the first—­and thus far, the only—­person to have asked about its disappearance.9 The cleanness of the digital copying creates an environment wherein end users may look through the acts of modern mediation to seek to encounter the manuscript HM 111 itself, in much the same way that the professionalized anonymity of many late medieval English manuscripts may invite readers to look past the scribe who made that particular copy to focus our attention on the text itself. Yet I want to resist that easy slippage, by recording some of the previously unwritten book history of how HM 111 came to be digitized. Behind its beautifully standardized surface, in which nothing and no one obscures readers’ view of Hoccleve’s verse and Hoccleve’s hand, is a remarkable story of how a pedagogically oriented, cross-­institutional collaboration in Southern California catalyzed global access to the Huntington’s Middle English manuscript collection. 

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Whether or not one ought to include rulers and visible color-­ calibration targets in final, published digital manuscripts is a point of ongoing debate. There are large communities of practitioners for whom the inclusion of a visible ruler and color bar in every photograph of a digital object are standard, best practice—­and have been, for decades. There are also communities whose standard best practice is not to include color bars and rulers in every image of every page of a book. Some digitization programs walk a middle path, including a photo of one color-­calibration target bound into the body of their digital books but do not have visible color target bars visible for every page. The digitization team behind Stanford, Stanford University Libraries, Department of Special Collections, Manuscript Collection, MSS Codex M0379 adhered strictly to the second camp: although we followed a strict best practice of using color-­calibration targets to open and close every photography session, those target photos are not included in the final digital book. The Huntington’s imaging practices adhere staunchly to the first camp. The digital copy of HM 111 includes a visible ruler plus gray-­scale color-­calibration bar in every picture of HM 111. This is a marked, visible, material difference between the two digitizations—­ and it is all the more striking for the fact that both digital books were made in the same country, same state, and same year. The ruler in HM 111 is a visible trace of the pragmatic, technical steps that go into any digitization, from medieval manuscripts to modern maps. It is also, simultaneously, an argument in a much larger methodological discussion over whether, when, and where rulers and color-­calibration bars should be visible in hard-­copy books’ digital progeny. As a nonpartisan, what I find most interesting in these disciplinary debates is how they participate in the recurring themes across HM 111’s copying history: first, that creating a new copy of a medieval book is always an act of subtraction and addition; and second, that everyone who makes a new copy of an old book follows what they perceive as best practice—­even when those best practices are slightly, or significantly, different.  The digital copy of HM 111 has been imaged as single leaves. Each leaf is framed in much the same way that Astrid J. Smith used in dig-

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itizing M0379. Each image of HM 111 clearly shows a portion of the facing leaf across the gutter—­an assurance to end users that nothing has been cropped or cut from view—­and offers a glimpse of the imaging platform below the book (although the Huntington used a lighter gray background and not the heavy black favored in Stanford Libraries’ imaging lab). Look closely at the far side of the gutter on most pages and you may notice a thin, vertical line. This, too, is evidence of an imaging practice similar to what was used at Stanford Libraries in the digitization of M0379: the vertical line is the edge of a lightweight plexiglass platen that was used to create a flat focal plane. Other Middle English manuscripts digitized shortly thereafter do not show the same evidence of a platen; reading across the collection thus offers useful reminders both of how each digital object is unique, shaped by the material realities of its physical exemplar, and can vary markedly from others, depending on the books’ needs, the available technologies, and the ongoing evolution of digital copying practices. Denny-­Brown and Wilkie: Digitizing HM 111 in 2014

By the early 2010s, the Huntington already had significant experience in, as well as the tools and technical support for, manuscript digitization.10 Its manuscripts had had a significant online presence since at least ca. 2000, when the Huntington began sharing select images and descriptive metadata of a number of its medieval books via the project Digital Scriptorium.11 Furthermore, its staff had, for years, been digitizing select “treasures” and had established processes for supplying digital images to support individual researchers’ needs. But all of these earlier digitizations had been boutique projects and were therefore quite different from a standardized, institutional digitization workflow.12 To launch a full digitization program, technical experience must also be matched with consensus and will—­and at the Huntington in the early 2010s, a critical mass of people in key institutional positions were committed to developing a holistic digitization program that would make and share full digital copies of objects held across the library, art

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museum, and botanical garden’s vast collections. The director of the Huntington Library at that time, David S. Zeidberg, was extremely interested in SharedCanvas (the underlying data model and precursor to the International Image Interoperability Framework, IIIF). Mario Einaudi, who had been coordinating digital projects since 2009 when the library acquired ContentDM, the current backend for the Huntington Digital Library, was likewise interested in making more of the Huntington’s collections systematically available online. John Sullivan in the Imaging Department had significant experience imaging, among many other objects, medieval books—­including having performed image capture on both of the Huntington’s Hoccleve autograph manuscripts for Thomas Hoccleve: A Facsimile of the Autograph Verse Manuscripts, published by the Early English Text Society (EETS) in 2002. Then, in September 2013, Vanessa Wilkie was hired as the William A. Moffett Curator of Medieval Manuscripts and British History. Wilkie recalls that, in her job interview, she made a case for creating a robust, systematic digitization program—­one that included, but was not limited to, digitizing the Huntington’s medieval manuscripts.13 Six weeks later, Andrea Denny-­Brown, a newly tenured professor at the University of California, Riverside, who had spent 2012–­13 working at the Huntington on an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation research fellowship, came into Wilkie’s office with an announcement and a request. She had $30,000 to spend, and she wanted to spend it digitizing the Huntington’s Middle English manuscripts.  This is a case of research and teaching not just cross-­pollinating but activating each other. During her research fellowship at the Huntington, Denny-­Brown recalls thinking about how the library’s Middle English manuscripts would be amazing to teach. At that time, UC-­ Riverside owned very few medieval books, and none written in English. While their antiphonal and Latin Bible are gorgeous, Denny-­Brown knew they were unreadable—­and therefore would feel inaccessible—­to most beginning students. This was also true, Denny-­Brown felt, of many of the digital medieval manuscripts then available online in the early 2010s. Although they were fascinating for advanced research-

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ers, very few were “teachable objects”—­especially for undergraduates. Undergraduate-­friendly, teachable medieval manuscripts, Denny-­ Brown determined, needed to be fully digitized, and they needed to be written largely in English and contain literary texts that could be fitted into her department’s curricula.14 These criteria neatly matched several manuscripts that Denny-­Brown had been working on as a Huntington research fellow the previous year: EL 26 A 13, a mid-­fifteenth-­century compilation of poetry and prose written by Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Hoccleve, John Lydgate, John Walton, and other lesser-­known late medieval writers; HM 140, a later fifteenth-­century miscellany containing works by Chaucer, Lydgate, and other less canonical writers; HM 142, a collection of religious prose and verse copied in the middle of the fifteenth century; HM 268, a mid-­fifteenth-­century lavishly illuminated copy of John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes; and HM 744 and HM 111—­both “autograph” (or “holograph”) manuscripts by Hoccleve.15 Autograph manuscripts are texts in which the author of the content and the scribe responsible for writing it out are one and the same. These manuscripts are considered particularly valuable by literary historians and textual editors because they preserve at least one version of an author’s original words, free of the accreted changes, great and small, that cling like barnacles to later copies. Another, powerful element of that value is that autograph manuscripts function as affectively charged relics, with an author’s handwriting evoking the presence of an absent writer, even one who has been dead for six hundred years.16 Desire, especially shared desire, is a start, but it is not enough to bring a systematic, robust manuscript digitization program into being. Setting up a fully articulated digitization workflow requires time, expertise, and money. Around the same time that Denny-­Brown was dreaming of digital manuscripts fit for inclusive instruction, UC-­ Riverside put out a call for applications for grants supporting what they named “Innovative Use of Information Technology.” Although these grants had been envisioned as funding the creation of large databases, or digital platforms to support the production and dissemination of Massive Open Online Courses (the New York Times had recently de-

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clared 2012 the “Year of the MOOC”), Denny-­Brown put in an application for $30,000 to digitize manuscripts at the Huntington, specifically so she could create course work for undergraduates as well as graduate students. It was, Wilkie and Denny-­Brown agree, a rare alignment of the stars. At the Huntington, there were materials worth digitizing, a shared eagerness to digitize, a team of willing and experienced collaborators, and then suddenly, due to a teaching-­oriented grant at a nearby university, there was funding. This lucky confluence, however, was only the first step. In chapter 1, I follow a medieval manuscript through an existing digitization workflow. In this case, however, before they could begin digitizing Denny-­ Brown’s wish list, an interdepartmental team at the Huntington had to bring into existence a new institutional workflow dedicated to making and maintaining complete digital objects. New cost calculation systems had to be developed. For instance, while they had templates for estimating the cost for labor performed by the Cataloging and Metadata and the Imaging Departments, there was no similar existing template for estimating the cost of any necessary preliminary work done by the Department of Conservation. Yet conservation work had to be performed prior to image capture. Metadata had to be made. Image shoot lists had to be created and assessed. More full-­time photographers had to be hired. Moreover, because there was growing hunger in the international research community—­as well as intense local interest in SharedCanvas and IIIF—­it was decided that the digital manuscripts would be produced to be IIIF-­compliant. So that intellectual and technical area had to be mastered and incorporated into workflows it had not previously been part of. Only after all of that necessary and time-­consuming preliminary work was completed could image capture begin. HM 111 was the prototype for this project, the first manuscript to undergo complete digitization. Analyzing digital manuscripts, it can be easy to indulge in teleological reading—­as though what we have come to expect to see on our screens was the inevitable end toward which digital manuscripts were always fated to grow. But in the case of HM 111, even the base unit of

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imaging was up for discussion. Originally, Denny-­Brown wanted the imaging unit to be the full opening—­in order to better replicate the experience of having the codex in front of her students who might never before have interacted with a medieval book.17 But speaking on behalf of the Huntington, Wilkie argued that the unit of imaging had to be the single leaf. Wilkie connects this decision in part to the Huntington’s then in-­progress work joining the IIIF community, which in general adhered to a data model that treated the single leaf as the most atomistic representation of the data.18 Moreover, the needs of Denny-­Brown’s students could be met once a IIIF manifest and Mirador “button” were installed in the Huntington’s digital collections interface (which Einaudi was in the process of making happen), but it would be easier for the Huntington to reuse these images in the long term (for instance, to support other researchers’ different image requests) if HM 111 were imaged as single leaves.19 Often “collaboration” between research faculty and curators, librarians, archivists, and digital imaging specialists can be code for “departmental faculty tell others what to do, and they do it.” But here, Wilkie had the responsibility to say no, and Denny-­Brown had the intellectual flexibility to listen. Although the published digital copy of HM 111 is entirely in keeping with expectations and standards honed over more than three decades of manuscript digitization, knowing this subterranean project history can reveal how the digital body of HM 111 is built as much out of person-­to-­person collaboration as it is out of data, pixels, and code. Answering Pichler’s question—­who did the makers of this copy of HM 111 want to serve?—­offers a more expansive vision of the “scholarly community” that is generally said to be served by medieval manuscript digitization. Grant applications may nod to pedagogical and outreach applications, but the core arguments for digitizing medieval books tend toward first serving advanced scholarship. In the case of HM 111, however, the precise inverse was true. Wilkie describes this digitization as designed from its inception to serve a much wider array of potential end users, not just scholars at elite institutions but especially students and teachers living and working in more isolated geographies, including

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small liberal arts colleges and state universities that own no medieval books.20 She wanted to make the Huntington’s special collections as widely available as possible to any and all learners and enthusiasts.21 In our interview, Denny-­Brown similarly emphasized how the digitization of HM 111 and the Huntington’s other Middle English manuscripts created much broader access beyond specialist researchers, and ultimately supported more inclusive pedagogy: When I’m teaching paleography to my undergraduates to a room of sixty or seventy students, with a grad student TA, and we’re all working on Hoccleve’s Secretary Hand, there is something really unique that’s happening. You are creating new medievalists and new scholars who never thought about archive theory, and conservation, and archive work.22 Both project PIs are equally emphatic that the digital Middle English manuscript collection they helped build acts as a gateway, not a substitute. UC-­R iverside is arguably quite close to the Huntington: the two institutions are separated by roughly fifty-­five miles. But proximity is not just a matter of mileage: a 110-­mile research trip, perhaps taken via public transit, combined with course work, jobs, and family can still be prohibitive for many end users. In this situation, Wilkie and Denny-­Brown suggest, digital manuscripts serve as a hook—­and a learning support for those extended periods of time when in-­person handling cannot occur. Digitization helps students know they can visit institutions like the Huntington, even though they may be able to make the trip only once a term, or once a year, or even less frequently: “but,” as Denny-­Brown explains, via digital copies of medieval books “they can work on those manuscripts all quarter or all year—­all that means a great deal, in terms of scholarship, accessibility, and social justice.”23 Strikingly, Wilkie and Denny-­Brown’s arguments—­about how producing new copies of old books can be an act of welcome, opening up medieval manuscripts to more diverse readerships—­participate in long-­running debates between the copyists of HM 111. As the copying history of HM 111 shows, across six hundred years and multiple copying technologies, all of the re-­creators of HM 111 have been deeply

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concerned with whether the manuscript is for a small cadre of elite readers only or represents content that ought to be broadly accessible to almost anyone. Analog HM 111: Hoccleve Copying Himself in the Early Fifteenth-­Century

The nineteen poems contained in HM 111 were originally composed in the first decades of the fifteenth century, but this particular manuscript was compiled and created in the early 1420s, in the final years of Hoccleve’s life.24 The manuscript is comprised of 47 leaves of parchment described by Burrow and Doyle as “smooth membrane of medium to lower quality.” Its leaves have been trimmed down from their original size and now measure 210 mm × 155 mm.25 It is decorated simply: poems begin with small pen-­flourished initials. The poems’ contents range from self-­ mockery of the poet’s own youthful errors to addresses to early fifteenth-­ century political leaders to accolades calling on the Virgin Mary. The manuscript shows Hoccleve—­at times, quite obviously—­ changing his verses as he copies, updating his own works to serve newer audiences and evolving authorial needs. Take, for example, the untitled poem on fols. 41r-­v requesting patronage and financial assistance. It begins by directly addressing the would-­be patron Hoccleve seeks to cultivate: “See heer my maist[/(er) Carpenter] I yow preye” (see fig. 2.2). This poem has been obviously changed. It is not just that there was an earlier iteration of the poem addressed to someone else (although that is also likely true): it is that this particular copy in this manuscript was originally addressed to someone else. Then, for whatever reason, Hoccleve scratched out and replaced that earlier name with “Carpenter” in a noticeably darker ink. George Shuffelton suggests that this poem might have functioned as “something of a begging template for Hoccleve.”26 The accompanying paratext in the right margin—­“¶ A de B and C de D, &c”—­reinforces the sense of a poem designed to be adaptable to any possible funder. Read within the contexts of late medieval literary form, it hearkens back to similar “begging poems” by Chaucer and other writers. The “Dear X, please help me with Y” format is also instantly recognizable as a modern genre closely connected to digitization. We need

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only switch the dedicatee to more familiar funding sources: “See here, my good NEH and/or Mellon Foundation,” “Dear Arts and Humanities Research Council and/or JISC Grants for Digital Research in the Humanities, I you pray.” In fact, Hoccleve’s purpose—­what we might think of as the project mission of this poem—­is best served when readers of HM 111 are unable to locate different versions that court other funders, in much the same way that grant committees generally prefer to not see vestiges of other funding agencies’ names. Offering a medieval counterexample to the modern cartoon of scribe-­as-­premodern-­copy-­machine, this poem shows how—­at least in some cases—­exact copying is not the point. As a funding template, this poem exists to be remade, a copy that strives to beget more copying, each tweaked to court a different source of funding, a new patron, more support. It does not appear to have been particularly successful in this task. There exists a web of powerful commonplaces about what has been called the Print Revolution (ca. 1450 in continental Europe, 1470s in England): that Johannes Gutenberg’s invention fundamentally revolutionized access to information, allowing new audiences to engage with previously siloed knowledge. Much is exaggerated and incorrect in these claims (not the least of which is the elision of centuries of earlier printing in Asia). Yet they remain beloved in comparisons between the rise of print and the rise of digitization. While there is something rhetorically satisfying in claiming that a new mode of technology swiftly brings about the widespread circulation of works hitherto accessible to a privileged few—­in the case of Hoccleve and HM 111, the opposite is true. HM 111 is not known to be the source for additional manuscript copies. Manuscript copies of The Regement of Princes, The Series, and other of Hoccleve’s shorter poems were made throughout the fifteenth century: before and after Gutenberg, before and after books began to be printed in English ca. 1475, and before and after William Caxton set up the first printshop in England in 1476. But print is another story. In the new medium of print, Hoccleve was remixed, quoted, and sometimes sampled within other literary productions, particularly those dedicated to Chaucer.27 But he was not copied into printed books dedicated to his own work. HM 111 meets a similar fate with the rise

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of this new copying technology. Three poems preserved in HM 111 appear in print in William Thynne’s The Workes of Geffray Chaucer Newlye Printed, wyth Dyuers Workes Whych Were Neuer in Print Before (1532), where they are attributed to Chaucer, not Hoccleve. But there is no evidence that Thynne copied them from HM 111. The manuscript continues to exist; it is considered valuable enough to be purchased, inherited, traded, and sold. Yet throughout nearly the entirety of the handpress printing era, neither Hoccleve in general nor the contents of this manuscript in particular are treated as much worth printing. In this, early print is not unlike patterns of reproduction in rare book digitization. Some canonical authors and works are repeatedly recopied in the new medium and thus “freed” for even wider circulation, but the commitment to copying is not applied equally. Mason and Poems by Thomas Hoccleve: Printing HM 111 in the Late Eighteenth Century

On March 10, 1785, HM 111 was purchased at auction by George Mason, gentleman book collector and sometime author.28 In 1796, Mason published a selection of its contents as Poems by Thomas Hoccleve, Never Before Printed. Selected from a MS. in the Possession of George Mason, with a Preface, Notes, and Glossary, printed by Charles Roworth for the publishers and booksellers Sotheby and Leigh. The new book’s title suggests at least two reasons why HM 111 finally has been deemed worthy of being copied into print. First, the allure of the rare: it has gone unprinted for so long that its contents have become antiquarian curiosities. Second, its editor and owner are the same person: it is owned by someone who has the interest and means to print at least some of it. In his preface Mason promises that he has followed the strictest copying standards: The editor makes a point of omitting nothing in the pieces here published, which he finds in his Ms. If he adds but so much as a letter, which the metre calls for, he prints it in italics. He has scrupulously adhered to the practice of the Ms. in dividing some words which are now constantly one, as un to,

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wher as, ther of, &c. It makes the edition a faithful copy of old orthography.29 Claims of fidelity in copying are always a matter of perspective, and late eighteenth-­century editors seem to have labeled whatever practice they were following as the true “faithful” copying. In 1795, for example, the British Critic denounced the antiquarian Joseph Ritson (sometimes seen by modern scholarship as an example of early editorial fidelity) as an example of striking infidelity, asserting where a trivial song has, in the lapse of time, been grossly and evidently corrupted, he who obstinately retains the corruptions is the faithless editor, and not he, who, to the clearest conviction of every discerning reader, removes and corrects them: and an affected anxiety to retain or notice every minute particle of the old blundering readings, is perfectly ridiculous.30 Reading Mason’s pages against the digital manuscript HM 111 reveals how Mason attempts to balance the duty to replicate with the duty to improve in the course of making said advertised “faithful copy.” There is a striking degree of similarity between the manuscript HM 111 and Mason’s print edition. Yet Mason also changes Hoccleve’s texts. For instance, in the first line of “La Male Regle,” Mason changes an n to an m, turning the nonsense word “inconparable” into the more meaningful “incomparable” (figs. 2.3 and 2.4). In line with the philosophy of faithful copying promoted by the British Critic, Mason is gently massaging HM 111, fixing what that magazine’s reviewer might call a “minute particle of an old blunder.” Other changes creep in as Mason addresses the issue of abbreviations and older letterforms. In the second line of “La Male Regle,” for instance, he copies Hoccleve’s Tironian et—­the shape that looks like a stand-­alone extravagantly flourished z in the manuscript—­as “and,” the English translation of the Latin word that Hoccleve’s z-­like abbreviation stands for. Similarly, in line seven in the untitled begging poem (which Mason names “A de B, & C de D, &c”), Mason silently changes Hoccleve’s “þt” into “that.”

Figure 2.3  The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. HM 111, fol. 16v. The first lines of “La Male Regle,” showing Hoccleve’s “inconparable.” Digitization by the Huntington Imaging Services, 2014; image capture performed by Jennifer Sullivan. Image reproduced with permission of the Huntington Library.

Figure 2.4  George Mason, Poems by Thomas Hoccleve, Never Before Printed (1796), image #41 (page 27). The first lines of “La Male Regle,” showing Mason’s correction of “inconparable” to “incomparable.” Digitized by an anonymous employee of Google’s ScanOps division, July 16, 2007. Most recent update, June 13, 2020. Public domain, Google-digitized, courtesy of HathiTrust. Hard-copy exemplar owned by the New York Public Library.

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He also adds little symbols, resembling italicized equals signs, within words to mark syllable counts. Applying Pichler’s question to Mason’s copy—­who does Mason serve in his “true representation” of HM 111?—­suggests service done not to HM 111 as a material artifact but to the idealized text and to Hoccleve himself. The small changes Mason introduces suggest an overall determination to show the long-­ dead author at what Mason sees as Hoccleve’s best. The punctuation marks and metrical signs Mason adds to his copy of HM 111 serve to highlight Hoccleve as a skilled metrist, medieval in content and language but nevertheless still appealing to the aesthetic preferences of late eighteenth-­century gentleman readers. Yet despite polishing HM 111 to make it serve a new audience and a new medium, Mason and his copy of HM 111 do not appear to have enjoyed much success among those readers. In September 1796, a review in the Gentleman’s Magazine suggests that Poems by Thomas Hoccleve is agreeable but wishes that Mason had given more poems “to gratify the lovers of old English poetry with this specimen.”31 This fairly positive review is an outlier. In March 1797, the Critical Review dismisses Hoccleve as a weak poet not particularly worth copying but allows that Mason’s book might serve a narrow group of specialist researchers who value anything “that smells of antiquity,” even works that are not “monuments of genius.”32 Also in March 1797, the Monthly Review describes Mason’s edition of HM 111 as “trash,” “an imperfect edition of stupid stanzas,” and a “waste of the time of our readers,” and the writer suggests it would have been better to use that time, labor, and money on new editions of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Spenser.33 In December 1797, the British Critic declares Poems by Thomas Hoccleve “among the most unfaithful editions of any of our ancient poets” and denounces Mason for putting Hoccleve’s verses on “a Procrustes’s bed,” stretching or amputating imperfect fifteenth-­century verse to fit the ideals of eighteenth-­century meter.34 Even Ritson, who might have seemed a possible ally to Mason’s copying values, condemns the new print copy of HM 111. In Bibliographia Poetica (1802), Ritson acidly notes of the manuscript’s contents, “of these 17 pieces, in a MS. formerly belong-

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ing to Dr. Askew, and afterward to Mr. Mason . . . six of peculiar stupidity were selected and published by its late owner.”35 In aggregate, these reviews sound very like critiques that are leveled at digitization projects, two centuries later. The copyist has sampled too little. The project spent resources on an undeserving object that appeals only to a small group of specialists, wasting capital better spent on more popular works. The maker copied wrong, failing to faithfully represent the exemplar manuscript as it is, or ought to be. Talbot, Phillipps, and Guppy: Not Photographing HM 111 in the Mid-­Nineteenth Century

On April 25, 1799, Mason sold HM 111 at an auction managed by the same company that had served as his publisher two years earlier.36 By the late 1830s, the manuscript was in the collections of Sir Thomas Phillipps.37 These same decades saw several revolutions in reprographic technologies that, together, fundamentally changed what “print” could mean. Steam-­powered printing presses were developed that were capable of printing 800 sheets an hour, more than three times the ideal daily productivity rate of a nonmechanized handpress printing shop.38 Industrialization impacted other stages of the book production workflow: from the milling of paper, to the making of type, to the invention of inking rollers.39 On January 31, 1839, William Henry Fox Talbot presented to the Royal Society his experiments in what he called “photogenic drawing.” The process was not invented with rare books in mind, and initially Talbot expressed uncertainty over “whatever value it may turn out in its application of the arts.”40 But his writings are filled with language familiar to would-­be copyists of medieval texts: his photogenic drawing paper, he promises, renders flowers and leaves “with the utmost truth and fidelity.”41 By the end of 1839, Talbot was using the same process to copy medieval books. Or, at least, one page of one book: the last page of chapter 19 from his father’s copy of Nova Statuta (printed by William de Machlinia ca. 1484–­85), cut loose and heavily waxed to facilitate repeated copying.42 This copying process involved laying special, chemically treated paper directly atop the medieval page

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(or other object being copied), and then exposing the stacked pages to light.43 The resulting image was a negative print; that is, what was white space on the original page would come out black (grayish or red-­ brown) while the black letters on the original medieval remained white (see fig. 2.5). To make a positive print, another piece of the same treated paper was laid under the negative and both were again exposed to light. Finally, all images had to be stabilized, or “fixed,” by applying a solution of salt, sodium thiosulphate, or potassium bromide.44 Critiques of digitization sometimes compare the making of two-­dimensional images from three-­dimensional books to earlier acts of biblioclasm performed by the likes of John Ruskin and Otto Ege. Talbot’s 1839 copying experiments on the Nova Statuta remind us that slicing up a book for easy reproduction is not always a metaphor. In Talbot’s first experiments in copying medieval books, this was his developed “good practice”—­one that echoes with modern digitization projects that cut off books’ covers and guillotine their spines for fast automated scanning. The history of early photography intersects with the copying history of HM 111 through a professional friendship struck up between Talbot and Phillipps. The illegitimate son of a wealthy Manchester industrialist, Phillipps used his inherited wealth to amass “one of the largest private collections ever assembled.”45 “The manuscripts alone are estimated to have numbered well over forty thousand in total,” Toby Burrows writes, “larger than most public collections to this day.”46 In addition to collecting manuscripts, printed books, artifacts, drawings, and paintings, Phillipps was interested in early photographs: both as collectible objects and “in the possible application of photography to recording and disseminating manuscripts.”47 By June 1841, Talbot was corresponding with Phillipps, and by June 30, 1846, Phillipps was seeking Talbot’s advice on how to photograph his medieval books.48 “I have often reflected on the important uses to which this may be turned & among others the preservation of remarkable writing,” Phillipps writes, and mentions a potential test subject for their experiments: “a MSS of the 7th Century written in so remarkable a character that it would be

Figure 2.5  Cambridge, Harvard University, Houghton Library, Horblit TypPh Album 30, Phillipps Ms. 20976, seq. 80. Calotype showing a bifolium from what is now Berlin, Phillipps 1745. The bifolium’s four corners are pierced with small nails. Original photography by Amelia Guppy, ca. 1850. Digitization by Imaging Services, Harvard Library, unknown date. Image used in accordance with Harvard Library Policy on Access to Digital Reproductions of Works in the Public Domain.

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well worth the trouble to make a fac simile [sic] of it by means of your discovery.”49 Talbot replies he is not available at that time, but offers to send an assistant “to copy the M.S. of the 7th Century for you, if it be found copyable.”50 What exactly “copyable” might mean may be recovered, at least somewhat, from a set of mid-­1850s photographs of a seventh-­century manuscript in Phillipps’s collection. The Houghton Library at Harvard University owns what was once Phillipps Ms. 20976, a hand-­sewn album made ca. 1853 by the photographer Amelia Guppy, using Talbot’s “calotype” technique developed in the early 1840s.51 Alongside images of medieval seals and cuneiform cylinders in Phillipps’s collections, Guppy’s album contains four early photographic reproductions—­one calotype negative and three salt-­ print positive copies—­of a bifolium now found in Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz Phillipps 1745.52 Berlin, Phillipps 1745 contains approximately half of a seventh-­century copy of the Dionysiana collection, a compilation of ecumenical council decrees made before 500 CE.53 Sometime between 1629 and 1824, the original book was split into two manuscripts: the second half of Berlin, Phillips 1745 is now St. Petersburg, F.v.II.3. The manuscript is notable for its Insular-­influenced uncial, anonymous readers’ notes in Merovingian cursive, and annotations left by Florus, deacon of Lyon (d. ca. 860).54 Guppy’s photo album both preserves an image of the manuscript and serves as evidence of the fact that Phillipps considered this manuscript a treasure worthy of copying. It also preserves photographic evidence of then-­current “good practices” in rare book reprographics. Guppy’s photographs clearly show four small nails driven through the corners of the pages of the then thousand-­year-­old manuscript (see fig. 2.5). This kind of heavy handling of particularly treasured manuscripts is also evident in another Phillipps photograph album. The Houghton Library also owns what was once Phillipps Ms. 23287. Digital images 12 through 14 are salt prints of an opening of what is now National Library of Wales, Cardiff MS 2.81, the Llyfr Aneirin. Llyfr Aneirin, or the “Book of Aneirin,” is a late thirteenth-­century Welsh manuscript containing some of the earliest surviving Welsh literature, works attributed to the

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late sixth-­century poet Aneirin. In the nineteenth-­century photograph, the manuscript is held open with string held under piled-­up bound books (fig. 2.6). HM 111 is not among the early experiments at photographing the treasures of the Phillipps manuscript collection. Its absence is not be-

Figure 2.6  Cambridge, Harvard University, Houghton Library, Horblit TypPh Album 51, Phillipps Ms. 23287, seq. 27. Salt print showing an opening from what is now National Library of Wales, Cardiff MS 2.81. Manuscript held open for image capture using stacked codices and string. Original photography by Charles Phillipps, ca. 1858–59. Digitization by Imaging Services, Harvard Library, unknown date. Image used in accordance with Harvard Library Policy on Access to Digital Reproductions of Works in the Public Domain.

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cause it was considered too valuable a treasure to risk the heavy handling undergone by Cardiff, MS 2.81 and Berlin, Phillipps 1745. Rather, those manuscripts were considered worth the resource expenditure of the new copying technology precisely because they were so valued. Phillipps asked Talbot for help photographing “a MSS of the 7th Century written in so remarkable a character that it would be well worth the trouble to make a fac simile of it”—­not for help first testing reprographic methods on “a late fifteenth-­century French Book of Hours, of indifferent quality,” like the first digitization team of The Aberdeen Bestiary described practicing on, or “an early fifteenth-­century English book of poetry, of indifferent quality”—­as HM 111 might then have been described.55 Many of the values that make Hoccleve appealing and canonical today, and that therefore make autograph manuscripts of his works particular “treasures,” were not shared by nineteenth-­ century collectors, scholars, and reprographic specialists. The relative lateness and the Middle English that made HM 111 such an attractive candidate for digitization in 2014, as well as the autobiographical and confessional content that make HM 111 a teachable object for beginning students, may in fact have worked together in the nineteenth century to keep HM 111 below the threshold of a manuscript valuable enough to be considered worth copying. These manuscript photographs from the 1850s highlight how value is a continuum, and one in which a manuscript’s place can change drastically over time. Furnivall and Hoccleve’s Works, I: Printing, and Not Photographing, HM 111 in the Late Nineteenth-­Century

On March 14, 1872, Frederick J. Furnivall proposed the creation of a “Lydgate and Occleve Society” dedicated to publishing new editions of these authors’ works.56 “From the amount of work before the Early English Text Society,” Furnivall writes, “it is clear that they cannot hope to print LYDGATE’S and HOCCLEVE’S Works for something like 20 years, though these works are wanted by students at once.” His suggestion of throngs of students clamoring for affordable print editions of Lydgate and Hoccleve seems more than a little hyperbolic.

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Yet, it is hyperbole that strikes familiar chords for manuscript digitization. His vision of users clamoring for access to inaccessible texts is close kin to the boosterish language of applications making the case for digitization. Like some important digitization projects, Furnivall emphasizes the canonicity of his authors, claiming Lydgate and Hoccleve are the “two earliest and best-­known authors of the fifteenth century,” closely connected to the even more canonical Chaucer.57 When Furnivall writes of “our common object of making accessible to students the unprinted works of our old authors” and “providing the grammarian and the social historian with the necessary materials for their work,” his ringing claims sound like digitization projects’ bold assertions about serving simultaneously the needs of several different fields of advanced research and also multiple levels of teaching and outreach.58 Indeed, his claims sound embarrassingly like the list of potential beneficiaries I compiled in 2014, contributing to the case for fully digitizing M0379 at Stanford Libraries. I may not have named “grammarians” as beneficiaries of our digitization, but I likely would have if I’d thought of them and believed they’d be compelling to the high-­level administrators making the final call. And when Furnivall’s proposal for this new society fails, it fails for some of the same reasons that digitization proposals fail—­lack of an audience, adequate funding, and sufficient community support. Twenty years later, Furnivall published Hoccleve’s Works, vol. 1: The Minor Poems: an edition of HM 111, combined with the contents of a manuscript that Furnivall excitedly described as “not noticed by Ritson, Warton, or any other writer on English Poets, so far as I know,—­a seemingly autograph volume in Bp Cosin’s library at Durham.”59 Helen Spencer notes how Furnivall was intrigued by the application of photography to manuscript studies.60 But there is no photograph of HM 111 in Hoccleve’s Works, vol. 1. There is a photograph from the Durham manuscript. Sandwiched between pages 242 and 243 is a black-­and-­ white reproduction of the final text-­bearing page of Durham University Library, MS Cosin V.III.9, showing the final stanzas, a decorated initial, a dedication note to a patron, and Thomas Hoccleve’s signature.

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There are several intertwined reasons why HM 111 remains below the threshold for copying in the newest technology. First, there is cachet in being the first to publish on an object that has never before been reproduced. In the final decades of the nineteenth-­century, HM 111 is already a known quantity, while the Durham manuscript is not—­and therefore has perhaps greater value as a scholarly discovery. Second, there is the allure of the autograph manuscript. In the 1870s Furnivall believed both HM 111 and Cosin V.III.9 to be autograph manuscripts. By the early 1890s, his belief had been broken. He decided there were too many errors in HM 111, HM 744, and Cosin V.III.9 for the manuscripts to have been the author’s own handiwork, and that only the dedication and signature at the end of Cosin V.III.9 were truly in Hoccleve’s own hand.61 The one photograph reproduced in Furnivall’s new copy of HM 111 thus reproduces what Furnivall had come to believe was the only authentic example of Hoccleve’s writing. But a third reason why a photograph of HM 111 is not included in Hoccleve’s Works, vol. 1 has less to do with scholarly cachet and shifting beliefs and more to do with money, institutional power, and a very specific understanding of what gives a book value. Sir Thomas Phillipps died in 1867. Thus, throughout the making of Hoccleve’s Works, vol. 1, HM 111 was in the possession of Thomas Phillipps’s heir, John Fenwick, whom Furnivall thanks by name in his foreword.62 Furnivall’s public expression of gratitude notwithstanding, Fenwick made it rather difficult for researchers to access the Phillipps manuscripts. Under Phillipps’s ownership the library had been relatively open to visiting scholars, but under Fenwick “it was decided that each scholar who came to consult a manuscript should pay a fee.” According to A. N. L. Munby, “by 1880 a standard charge of one pound per day was fixed for access to the library,” a per-­day fee of approximately £120, or US$165, in 2021. Prices might rise, steeply, depending on the kind of scholarship—­and amount of reproduction—­being done. Munby explains, “manuscripts might be collated without any extra payment, but for complete transcripts or large extracts an additional sum was demanded which varied in accordance with the value of the manu-

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script.” These charges were in part Fenwick’s attempt to raise funds to maintain Thirlestaine House. In the same way that maintaining a digital collection takes money, so too does a brick-­and-­mortar library. But the fees at Thirlestaine House were also shaped by Fenwick’s belief “that the reproduction of any part of a manuscript detracted from its cash value.” Fenwick’s ultimate goal was to sell off Phillipps’s collections, and he feared that making even partial copies risked lowering the books’ selling price. The same belief inspired Fenwick to ban photography outright.63 In this way, Fenwick’s stewardship of the Phillipps collections at Thirlestaine House is not dissimilar from collections that charge, or even forbid, researchers from embarking on their own DIY-­ digitizations. For Furnivall, access to the hard-­copy manuscript HM 111, and the right to hand-­copy its contents, could be purchased; photographs could not. In the absence of a photograph of HM 111 in Hoccleve’s Works, vol. 1, we thus can see a familiar constellation of reasons against copying, all of which have their counterparts in more recent decisions about what can and cannot be digitized. Unable to rely on photography as a copying medium, Furnivall’s book still attempts to give readers some sense of the materiality of HM 111 (see fig. 2.7). Running vertically in the margins are bracketed notes that record the location and page breaks of each poem in its manuscript original, something that Mason’s copy never attempted to do. The move was invented neither by Furnivall nor the Early English Text Society but is customary in nineteenth-­century editions. But that conventionality is what makes these notes useful to pay attention to, in much the same way that it is useful to notice the conventionality of the 2014 digital copy of HM 111. It shows Furnivall’s copying adhering to an accepted community good practice that attempted to give readers of these new copies of old books some hint of the materiality of the hard-­copy manuscript. The same commitment to representing the manuscript exemplar, even without photography, is also evident in how Furnivall addresses the erasure and overwriting in the first line of Hoccleve’s untitled begging poem. Mason’s edition appends to the name “Carpenter”

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Figure 2.7  Frederick J. Furnivall, Hoccleve’s Works, vol. 1: The Minor Poems (1892), image #151, page 63. The first lines of Hoccleve’s untitled begging poem. Digitized by an unnamed employee of Google’s ScanOps division, February 28, 2008. Most recent update, February 8, 2020. Public domain, Google-digitized, courtesy of HathiTrust. Hard-copy exemplar owned by the University of Michigan.

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an explanatory footnote identifying a particular historical dedicatee. Furnivall’s edition also looks to identify who Carpenter was—­but only after explaining the odd details of the name in the manuscript, describing how “‘Carpenter’ is written over an erasure,” and speculating why that might be.64 One critique of printed critical editions is how they erase signs of the material manuscripts they are built upon. This late nineteenth-­ century edition of HM 111 shows the opposite. Instead of erasure and disembodiment, its paratexts show an editorial team that sees faithful and correct representation (to borrow Pichler’s phrase) as necessarily including representation of the material form of the underlying manuscript. Beyond his attempts at nonphotographic representation of manuscript materiality, Furnivall’s notes are striking in their abundance. Particularly when compared with Hoccleve’s patronage-­seeking original, Mason’s antiquarian-­oriented edition, EETS’s black-­and-­white printed facsimile, and the Huntington’s full-­color digital copy, Furnivall’s pages teem with editorial interventions. Most seem designed to serve beginning readers. Notes explain information readers might easily discern for themselves, like rhyme schemes and the standard number of lines per stanza. They offer constant plot summaries. And in the untitled begging poem, renamed here as “[Balade to my maister Carpenter],” Furnivall added to “¶ A. d B. & C. d D &c.” the note “[Creditors]”—­as though failure to do so might leave the contents illegible to his intended readership. Applying Pichler’s question to Furnivall’s copy—­who does Furnivall serve in his “true representation” of HM 111?—­suggests values almost diametrically opposed to Mason’s. Furnivall’s copy seeks to serve not an idealized, tidied text or Hoccleve himself (who Furnivall memorably calls a “weak, sensitive, look-­on-­ the-­worst side kind of man”), but the new book’s future readers, especially those readers just starting out in Middle English. Where Mason adds to his copy of HM 111 small marks to shape Hoccleve’s works to the taste of a small cadre of antiquarian, gentleman readers, Furnivall layers his copy of HM 111 in an abundance of paratexts, as though

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through sheer bulk of editorial materials he can make the text fit for almost any reader. Thirty-­one years after the publication of Hoccleve’s Works, vol. 1, HM 111 is purchased for the American railroad baron and collector Henry E. Huntington. The purchase moves it from a collection that had strictly limited the copying of manuscripts to a hotbed of reprographics and technologically enhanced methods for manuscript study.65 In this new context, the scratched-­out name below “Carpenter” in the unnamed begging poem on fol. 41r could conceivably have been an appealing—­if very small—­research subject for a library known for using ultraviolet light and X-­rays to uncover hidden images and texts. But this small curiosity in HM 111 cannot overcome a larger issue that keeps the manuscript pinned below the threshold of “worth copying.” That is, the problem of Hoccleve’s reputation. In the early twentieth century Hoccleve is not a valued member of the English literary canon. The 1911 assessment offered in that vehicle of popular knowledge, Encyclopedia Britannica, is extremely damning, condemning Hoccleve as mediocre and dismissively grouping him “among those poets who have a historical rather than intrinsic importance in English literature.”66 The article’s summary of Hoccleve’s works is essentially a précis of HM 111: “His hymns to the Virgin, balades to patrons, complaints to the king and the king’s treasurer, versified homilies and moral tales, with warnings to heretics like Oldcastle are illustrative of the blight that had fallen upon poetry on the death of Chaucer.”67 In the early 2010s and 2020s, Hoccleve is considered significant, his autograph manuscript a compelling treasure and a worthy prototype for launching a systematic digitization program. But for much of the twentieth century Hoccleve is none of those things. Before HM 111 could be considered worth photographing, Hoccleve’s entire reputation had to be transformed.

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The EETS Facsimile: Photographing HM 111 in the Early Twenty-­First Century

Over the next century, that transformation occurs. Furnivall’s edition of HM 111 and the Durham manuscript are reprinted together (1937) and then revised and reprinted (1970). Mary Ruth Pryor earns her doctoral dissertation at UCLA in 1968 with a new edition of the Durham manuscript that is presented as an improvement on Furnivall’s editorial weaknesses. By August 1973, demand—­not just for Hoccleve but for HM 111 in particular—­had grown sufficiently for the Huntington to produce a 35mm negative microfilm reel of HM 111.68 In the 1980s, a copy of that microfilm helped provide the raw data for an early digital humanities project mining Hoccleve’s autograph manuscripts for his accidentals—­personal quirks in spelling, letterforms, and punctuation—­to create a more authorial edition of The Regement of Princes.69 An early outgrowth of that editorial project is M. C. Seymour’s Selections from Hoccleve (1981), which includes another round of poems from HM 111 copied into print. Alongside this burgeoning number of access points to HM 111 run publications dedicated to Hoccleve, his poetry, his manuscripts, his social and historical settings. This “burgeoning Hoccleve industry,” as A. S. G. Edwards names it, shifts the poet-­scribe’s reputation to the point where in 2001 Lee Patterson can unself-­consciously call Hoccleve “the most strenuously autobiographical poet of early English literature: not until at least Donne, or perhaps even Wordsworth and the high Romantics, do we find his equal in self-­ observation.”70 Although it takes decades of scholarly labor to transform Hoccleve’s reputation, once enough of that work has occurred, the stage is set for a complete photographic copy of HM 111, more than five hundred years after Hoccleve copied out HM 111 and more than 150 years into the age of photography. In 2002, the Early English Text Society publishes Thomas Hoccleve: A Facsimile of the Autograph Verse Manuscripts, accompanied by a lengthy introduction by J. A. Burrow and A. I. Doyle, both major actors in the multidecade overhaul of Hoccleve’s reputation. At 290 mm × 220 mm, the facsimile is markedly larger than HM 111. With digital manu-

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scripts, there is an anxiety that end users are working with a copy that does not accurately depict the hard-­copy exemplar; no similar anxiety is evidenced in the printed facsimile. Burrow and Doyle simply note on the first page, “there may be some slight discrepancies between the dimensions of the facsimiles and the originals” and move on. Expert end users of digital manuscripts sometimes worry that the colors on their screen may not perfectly reproduce the colors they would see studying the hard copy in the reading room, but that concern is likewise absent in the printed facsimile. Burrow and Doyle just explain that a mission other than color fidelity was an overriding goal in facsimile production: “It should also be noticed that the colour of the leaves and ink here is only an approximation, preferred for sharpness of definition, and not an exact rendering of the colours of the original manuscripts, which vary somewhat but are in general rather yellower.”71 The fine paper upon which the book is printed is pleasingly glossy and satiny, but looks and feels nothing like any medieval parchment I have worked with. Does it look like a “real” medieval manuscript: is it the right colors, the right size, does it sound, smell, feel like one? It seems as though Burrow and Doyle have carefully considered most of the conventional critiques leveled at digital manuscripts, and then firmly dismissed the concerns as marginal to the print facsimile’s project mission. By the later 2010s and early 2020s, end users of digital manuscripts expect that every part of an analog book should be copied. But the editors of Thomas Hoccleve: A Facsimile of the Autograph Verse Manuscripts are clear that their volume is shaped by different values. For the copy of HM 744, only those pages that are written by Hoccleve have been included: not the cover, pastedowns, and flyleaves, nor those 12 leaves of non-­Hocclevean content written by scribes who aren’t Hoccleve. The contents of Cosin V.III.9 are reproduced more abundantly, including the opening replacement leaves written in the hand of Elizabethan antiquarian John Stowe. The outer view of the cover is not included, but Thomas Hoccleve: A Facsimile includes a photograph of that manuscript’s inner pastedown, showing significant owners’ marks. Fols. 1r and 2r, which bear more owners’ marks, are reproduced, but fols. 1v and

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2v are not. Fol. 95v (which is abundantly scrawled over with readers’ notes) is reproduced, but other flyleaves are not, nor are there any views of the back cover. The contents of HM 111 included in Thomas Hoccleve: A Facsimile are somewhere between these two extremes. The outside cover has been photographed, but its inner pastedowns and flyleaves have not. Put differently, the editorial notes by Tyrwhitt and Furnivall on the flyleaves of HM 111 which are part of the 2014 digital copy are absent in the 2002 printed copy. I do not find evidence of platen use or of some other tool to create a flat focal plane. In each photograph, a sheet of pale paper seems to have been inserted behind the leaf, blocking out further view of the book below: the emphasis seems to be on the page’s content rather than the leaf as part of a complete 3-­dimensional bookish object. Each photograph is framed in lavish white margins. Conceivably they could be treated as spaces in which users might write notes, adding themselves in among Hoccleve and his readers. But I find that doubtful. Although it lovingly reproduces some of the centuries of doodles in Hoccleve’s autograph verse manuscripts, Thomas Hoccleve: A Facsimile does not invite similar interactive manhandling by new generations of readers. Working with it, I recall Siân Echard’s wonderful phrase, “One worships at the altar of the manuscript; one does not doodle on it.”72 The book’s introduction is a magisterial gathering together of almost everything that had come to be known by 2000 about the three hard-­copy autograph manuscripts—­including the mention of an attempt at using ultraviolet light to recover the scratched-­out name written beneath “Carpenter” in the first line of Hoccleve’s untitled begging poem.73 This introduction is perhaps the most significant way that the 2002 printed facsimile differs from the digital copy of 2014. One of the repeated promises of digitization is de-­siloing: that is, the opportunity to connect new research directly to the digitized object, so each enriches the other. In this way, medieval manuscript research might come to function less as an ever-­growing set of semi-­isolated islands and more like a vast continent of shared, collaborative knowledge. But in the printed facsimile, a version of that de-­siloing has already oc-

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curred, with Burrow and Doyle’s introduction gathering together the sum total of known evidence to pass on to future readers. A similar de-­siloing has not yet occurred in the 2014 digital manuscript. Reading the 2002 printed facsimile against its 2014 digital compatriot reveals a reversal of the traditional scholarly workflow. The printed facsimile follows patterns set by earlier generations of scholarship, performing and publishing editorial work along with a new copy of a very old text. But in the digital manuscript, the new copy is made and published in anticipation of new research and editorial work yet to be done. Reviews of Thomas Hoccleve: A Facsimile celebrate the volume as a feat of accessibility. “We have Hoccleve’s literary manuscripts made fully and authoritatively accessible in this volume,” A. S. G. Edwards writes.74 Robert Meyer-­Lee asserts that the facsimile “ensures broad and well-­informed access to the most authoritative surviving copies of Hoccleve’s verse.”75 Derek Pearsall concurs, declaring that Thomas Hoccleve: A Facsimile provides “immediately accessible material for readers of Hoccleve to do their own original work on the poet’s text and spelling, his metre and punctuation, the way he laid out his texts, the order in which he thought it good for them to stand, the technique of ‘compilation.’”76 Importantly, the reviewers are celebrating more than the creation of new modern photographs. Again and again, reviewers praise Burrow and Doyle’s introduction, naming it “hours of fun for the whole (scholarly) family,” “a master class in the description of manuscripts and the analysis of handwriting,” and “essential reading not just for the burgeoning Hoccleve industry but also for all students of manuscript production in this period.”77 Applying Pichler’s question to Burrow and Doyle’s copy—­who do they serve in this “true representation” of HM 111?—­suggests a blend of approaches. Like Mason, service is being done to Hoccleve himself. But Mason’s loyalty and service seem focused on Hoccleve-­as-­poet, as he polishes the medieval poet to appeal to eighteenth-­century tastes, while Burrow and Doyle’s facsimile seems more focused on serving Hoccleve-­as-­scribe. It is not just his ideas or the idealized version of his texts that matter but the exact words and letterforms shaped by the

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long-­dead writer’s own hand. Like Furnivall, service is being done to students and scholarly readers, particularly those who seek to better know the original book. But for all it offers “a master class” for codicologists and paleographers and is essential reading “for all students of manuscript production in this period,” its size, deluxe features, and price suggest it may not be intended for regular classroom use. At US$125, it is unlikely to be assigned as a textbook for intro courses like those invoked by Denny-­Brown. When forced, Furnivall hewed more closely to serving beginners, while the EETS facsimile seems to hew more closely to serving at least somewhat advanced researchers. I say “seems” because I have not been able to ask the contributors who made this particular copy of HM 111. The printer, Paper Wright, Ltd., has closed. When they shuttered their factory, the company’s records about the making of Thomas Hoccleve: A Facsimile were thrown away. Burrow and Doyle are now deceased. While they were alive and working on this project, they did not use email or other digital files to record their thinking or the story of the labor that went into making the physical book.78 Hard copies of their correspondence may still exist in the EETS archive, but I write these words during an ongoing global travel lockdown and cannot go see the files myself.79 Due to local travel restrictions, members of the Early English Text Society have graciously answered my questions, but they have done so based on personal experiences, memories, and whatever files they do have access to. They cannot access additional records in their off-­site storage facility. Extant nondigitized records of this project, at this time, remain out of reach.80 The fact is that even in our age of “digital accessibility” not everything is copied nor made accessible. Gaps still occur—­and in ways that resonate suggestively with HM 111’s own media history of going unprinted, unmicrofilmed, and unphotographed for long years after the invention of each of those technologies. On the one hand, digitization is a wide expanding of the canon and research, teaching, and outreach possibilities. On the other, options remain very narrow—­and, during COVID-­19, even narrower. One of the recurring themes in this book has been how much information was never published—­and has since

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been lost—­about early digitization projects. But my difficulties excavating the larger contexts for the creation of the new copy of HM 111 in Thomas Hoccleve: A Facsimile remind us that data loss and gaps in project records are not new to digitization. Lost books and destroyed files are the long history of medieval manuscripts. What makes digitization unusual in this longer history is that projects are ongoing and many contributors alive: the newest copying histories can still be recorded in ways the stories of earlier books—­even books made as recently as 2002—­may not. Presence and Absence, Reception and Reward

The long history of copying HM 111 shows how digital books are not a break with the past at all, but a continuation of the desires and debates that have always catalyzed new copies of old books. Denny-­Brown and Wilkie’s primary interest in entry-­level pedagogy recalls Furnivall. The desire for their new digital manuscript copies to also be able to support advanced research recalls the project missions championed also by Furnivall and by Burrow and Doyle. Their interest in connecting with users outside of academic settings suggests also Mason’s audience and goals. The belief that unites all the projects across the centuries is that HM 111 is a book worth copying, although that belief is shadowed by equally compelling evidence of all the years when it was not. As histories of the labor that built Hoccleve into a writer worth studying and HM 111 into a book worth copying, these different copies of HM 111 show our debts to embodied people, often working through grief and strain.—­To Hoccleve himself, who wrote HM 111 as part of his ongoing quest for financial stability and a few years after recovering from incapacitating mental illness. To Mason, who finished Poems by Thomas Hoccleve three years after a stroke which he later wrote caused him “perpetual debility.”81 To Mason’s printer Roworth, celebrated in the nineteenth century as the innovator who created the Roworth press but who more recent book historians have named as an elusive figure about whom little is known.82 To Furnivall, who dedicated the whole of Hoccleve’s Works, vol. 1: The Minor Poems to the memory of Mary

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Lilian “Teena” Rochfort Smith (now claimed as the “Ada Lovelace of the digital humanities”) and who concluded his foreword to the book with deeply personal reminiscences about the young researcher who he closely associated with the time he spent working “at the Hoccleve and Chaucer MSS in the Phillipps collection at Thirlestaine House.”83 To the cluster of other contributors that Furnivall credits with laboring on Hoccleve’s Works, vol. 1.: “Mr. Horace Round, Walter Skeat (“for looking after the final es, &c.), Mr. R. G. Kirk, and all the other helpers, including our collators Mr. Rogers and Miss Parker, and Mr. Thomas Austin, who cut down the Oxford collations to the Cupid and has made the Index and Glossary.”84 To Kegan, Paul, Trench, & Trübner, who printed this and many other volumes for Furnivall’s Chaucer Society and the Early English Text Society. To the contributors, named and unnamed, who made Thomas Hoccleve: A Facsimile, and the entire team responsible for digitizing HM 111 and the other digital copies now viewable through the Huntington Digital Library collections. As labor histories, the different copies also show absences. Reading between the lines and against the grain, we can glimpse traces of contributors whose work we benefit from but never truly see. In the hard-­copy manuscript: the people who made the parchment on which Hoccleve wrote, the professional he may have hired to make those small flourished letters, the person responsible for the seventeenth-­century binding. In Mason’s copy: the people who made the paper and each piece of type, the workers in Roworth’s shop who did the hands-­on work of printing Poems by Thomas Hoccleve, Never Before Printed. In Furnivall’s copy: the people who worked in the factories making paper in great rolls, those involved in newly industrialized ways of making type, the printing house workers who are personally responsible for every properly placed “þ.” In Burrow and Doyle’s copy: those who did the photography of the autograph manuscripts, who did the work of printing and binding the books, any assistants and family members who aided the project behind the scenes. In the Huntington digital copy: everyone who worked to create and who still works to maintain the 2014 digital copy of HM 111.

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Not seeing these unnamed contributors is the naturalized state of professionalized, modern medieval studies. When we open a copy of a medieval book, we are generally seeking contact with the reconstructed words of the author, stripped of variations introduced by intervening copyists, whether scribes or printers. This push to encounter the “real authoritative book” is even more powerful in representations of autograph manuscripts—­like HM 111—­“carefully made by the poet himself and free from all suspicion of interference by scribal intermediaries.”85 Ultimately, digital manuscripts do not just remediate their analog exemplars; they also remediate all the desires, practices, and habits honed across centuries of print editions and facsimiles. The digital presents itself as immaterial, unmediated, unproduced by human laborers. But that is a lie. Humans are always there. They always have been. Paradoxically, digital manuscripts take on a richer, more sophisticated life when we look for the signs of those intermediary workers and understand how their labors are integral to the long history of medieval books, including the recent histories of digitizations, just waiting to be told.

CHAPTER 3 D I G I TA L I N C U N A B L E S Copying Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, ca. 1997–­2017

with digital manuscripts, I approached them with an ahistorical eye. In direct contradiction to best-­practices documents then in circulation, I sometimes treated digital copies as stand-­ ins, surrogates even, for their hard-­copy exemplars. Researching late medieval coffin use or the iconography of leprosy, I used digital manuscript images without planning to visit the brick-­and-­mortar repositories holding the analog exemplars. I made little effort to learn the dates, missions, and project histories of the digital manuscripts I used, and I was relatively indiscriminate in my sourcing of images. While I eschewed pulling from blogs, Pinterest, or Twitter and favored using official, institutional image repositories, wherever I found images in those repositories that helped my work, I used them—­whether or not that digital project had been built with my particular kind of use in WHEN I BEGAN TO WORK

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mind. At times I asked questions like: Why is the digital manuscript of The Fall of Princes in Digital Scriptorium so different from the digital manuscript of The Fall of Princes at the University of Victoria? Why is this manuscript of The Fall of Princes in the Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts not more like the manuscripts available through the Digital Walters? (I collected similarly ahistorical complaints from colleagues and students.) But these were all less queries of active curiosity than they were questions of grumpy, thwarted consumption. In the murky atemporality of the internet, where manuscripts digitized in 1997 rest cheek-­by-­jowl with those digitized in 2013, I neglected to notice how differences in digital manuscripts could be understood through analyzing the copies’ age and project histories or the material realities of then-­available technologies supporting image capture and online access. Matthew Davis has neatly identified this phenomenon: I was perceiving digital manuscripts as “flat, with the past, future, and now reduced to a single moment.” Moreover, that moment within which I perceived the digital books I used was neither the deep past of the analog manuscript’s creation nor the recent past of its digitization. It was my present moment of desire and use. Davis warns how this “lack of history as anything beyond the eternal now means that the objects of our study are in constant danger of being swept up into a black box of simply being ‘content.’”1 His is an accurate, if damning, summary of my early digital manuscript practice. As I began to work not just with but on digital manuscripts, I came to see that when we asked “why is X project like this?” we were not expressing rigorous curiosity into the origins of digital objects. Instead, we were asking something more like “why is this digital manuscript not precisely what I want it to be right now?” This constellation of complaint, frustration, and general lack of historical understanding is what Wendy Hui Kyong Chun describes when she writes, “New media exist at the bleeding edge of obsolescence. They are exciting when they are demonstrated, boring by the time they arrive. Even if a product does what it promises, it disappoints. . . . We are forever trying to catch up, updating to remain (close to) the same; bored, overwhelmed, and

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anxious all at once.”2 For digital medieval manuscripts, this constant, anxious movement forward helps end users overlook how every object or project on the internet (indeed, the internet itself) has its own, specific history—­and those histories help to determine mission, content, and functionality. Since at least the late 1990s, terms like “e-­incunable” and “digital incunabularity” have been used to discuss media hybridity in the midst of digital technological change.3 The terms do not refer to the literal digitization of incunables—­printed books created using movable type, in western Europe, prior to 1501—­but instead function as an invocation, borrowing language from earlier paradigmatic technology shifts to make sense of recent transitions between print and screen. The evocative phrases can be useful, as when Alan Liu names the products of a specific period of the history of digital humanities “incunabula of digital scholarship,” and says that period ended by 2012.4 But they become less useful when applied broadly to digital objects—­and especially digital manuscripts—­produced in the later 2010s and early 2020s. Digital manuscripts made during and after the mid-­2010s are profoundly different from those created in the 1990s and early 2000s, and we should not overlook that dissimilarity. While medievalists and media theorists may disagree over whether we are still in “the era of the digital incunable,” and book historians may disagree over the utility of the idea of e-­incunabula, I contend that there was a period of hybridity and experimentation in the history of digitization that we can usefully compare to the period of experimentation followed by the standardization associated with early print. Furthermore, I argue that period is over. Claiming that we are still in a period of digital incunabularity elides the significant transformations over the last quarter century that have fundamentally changed what a digital manuscript can be and contain—­as well as the labor, time, expertise, and money dedicated to making those transformations possible. In this chapter, I analyze four digitization projects, all involving manuscripts of John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes: a copy of New York, Columbia University, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Plimpton MS

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255 created 1997–­99 as part of Digital Scriptorium; a copy of Victoria, University of Victoria, Ms.Eng.1 created 1999–­2001 through a student-­ driven digitization project; a copy of London, British Library, Harley MS 1766 created in 2006 as part of the British Library’s Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts; and a copy of Philadelphia, The Rosenbach Museum and Library, Rosenbach MS 439/16 created in 2017 for the project Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis. Only two of these projects sought to create digital facsimiles of their manuscript exemplars. The others focused on creating digital manuscript catalogs. I treat digital manuscripts and digital manuscript catalogs together here as part of a continuum of copying, first, because this blended approach may better reflect actual usage. Practitioners of digital manuscript studies worry about how screens make all digital manuscripts look more similar than their analog exemplars may truly be. But we also need to acknowledge that screens also make it easy for end users to lump together all kinds of digital manuscript projects. Even when a selection of manuscript images is meant primarily as accompaniment and support for a catalog description, end users may well use those images as digital surrogates (as I habitually did with the images of Harley 1766 in the Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts, prior to the publication of a complete digitized copy in the British Library’s Digitised Manuscripts project on May 23, 2016). Second, reading digital manuscript catalogs alongside other digital manuscript projects helps reveal more of the recent history of digitization. Digital manuscripts are constructed out of expectations honed on analog exemplars, critical editions, microfilm, and printed facsimiles: they are also deeply connected to manuscript catalogs, print and digital. For example, much of the descriptive metadata that make digital image sets usable is copied, sometimes credited and sometimes not, from earlier descriptive catalogs. Thus, recovering the roles that digital manuscript catalogs have played in the recent history of digitization can reveal more about the many contributors to the digital manuscripts we use today as well as where current expectations about digital manuscripts have grown.

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Manuscripts without Borders? Digitization and the Rise of the Internet

Many of the transformations that have occurred in digitization over the last quarter century depend on larger developments in the history of the internet. Thus, understanding different digitization projects requires a basic understanding of this history. The networking (originally inter-­ networking) of computers had been in development since at least the end of World War II: stories about its origins range from dire plans to maintain cross-­continent communication in the face of nuclear apocalypse to the more prosaic desire for government-­funded researchers to save money by sharing resources.5 In the United States, these efforts coalesced around the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which in 1969 launched ARPANET, sometimes identified as “the earliest version of what has become the internet.”6 Through the 1970s, ARPANET flourished, which—­given its military contexts—­became a serious problem. In 1983, facing a network that had grown beyond its control, the American Department of Defense moved military communications onto a private network and tried to sell ARPANET. When that didn’t work, it turned control of ARPANET over to the National Science Foundation (NSF), which by the end of the 1980s had moved to privatize the internet.7 In essence, this shifted the burden of supporting the growing internet from the Department of Defense to the NSF and then to what Paul Ceruzzi idealistically describes as “entities that allowed Internet access to anyone.”8 However, an internet that is “accessible to anyone” was (and still is) elusive. Despite turn-­of-­ the-­millennium boosterism celebrating the internet as a place with no borders, geography, and limits, studies throughout the mid-­ and later 1990s consistently showed how telephone, computer, and online access varied by race, ethnicity, age, the gender of head-­of-­household, relative wealth or poverty, education level, and disability status.9 Inequalities in access were (and still are) further exacerbated by end users’ location. Strong internet access has generally been highly dependent on regional wealth and population density. Poorer rural areas lagged (and in some areas still do) behind wealthier urban and suburban regions in terms of available bandwidth.10

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Histories of the internet that focus on the United States and ARPANET tend to overshadow the connectivity experiments occurring in other countries, as though what was happening in the United States could stand in, synecdochically, for what was happening everywhere. But this is not true, as the Canadian and British case studies in this chapter show. Thus, in what follows, additional brief internet histories are embedded at key points, in order to more rigorously embed all of these digitizations in their correct, historical time and space. Plimpton 255 and Digital Scriptorium

New York, Columbia University, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Plimpton MS 255 was copied in the third quarter of the fifteenth century, perhaps after 1470.11 At 54 parchment leaves, it is the largest of three fragments now held by three different institutions. Together with Free Library of Philadelphia, Lewis T.15/487 and Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Takamiya MS 79, these fragments comprise all that remains of a codex which once contained approximately 150 to 160 parchment leaves. We do not know the name of the copyist responsible for this largely lost codex—­nor even if the combined Plimpton-­Lewis-­Takamiya manuscript was the work of a single scribe or team of copyists. In modern scholarship, they have come to be known as the “Hooked G scribe(s),” for the way their letter “g” ends in a distinctive swoop, resembling a stylized fish tail.12 The digital copy of Plimpton 255 was made between April 1997 and August 1998, in one of the first batches of manuscripts produced for Digital Scriptorium (DS).13 Its images are the work of Dwight Primiano, who was hired by project managers working within Columbia University Libraries. Project assistance was also provided by Leslie Myrick.14 Primiano photographed the manuscript using a 35mm Nikon F4 camera and Kodak Royal Gold 35 color negative film. Although high-­quality digital cameras were commercially available by the later 1990s, project managers at Columbia decided not to use them for this project, using a “slide film-­to-­Photo CD method of digitization” instead of direct digital image capture. The reasons for this decision were two-

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fold. First, there was the issue of speed: at the time, creating a single digital image might run “8–­10 minutes per exposure,” approximately seven to ten images per hour, or sixty to eighty digital photographs on an ideal day. By contrast, film-­based photography could produce “an average of 100 photographs per day.”15 Second, there was the challenge of preservation: when Digital Scriptorium was launching, the standard lighting apparatuses used in most cultural heritage photography units gave off heat. Imaging specialist Stephen McCann, now head of the Photographic Unit at the University of Glasgow, recalls how over the course of a morning imaging studios would begin to smell like cooking bacon—­the scent of parchment reacting to rising ambient heat.16 With direct digital image capture, if it took 8–­10 minutes to take a single digital image, that meant leaving the manuscript exposed under hot lights for the full duration of that digital photograph, heightening the risk of curling parchment cracking a manuscript’s gold and pigment. High-­quality film-­based photography, by contrast, exposed the parchment-­based book to one moment of flash, at 1/60 of a second. Given the time constraints of the project and the needs of the books, the co-­creators of Digital Scriptorium at Columbia determined that film-­based image capture was the safer approach (their co-­creators at Berkeley chose differently).17 Once Primiano finished photographing the manuscript, his film was transferred to the company Luna Imaging, where a team digitized Primiano’s film, edited the raw files, checked for color consistency, and then saved the resulting files to CD-­ROMs.18 The disks were then transferred back to workers at Columbia involved in Digital Scriptorium. None of this information—­when the digital copy was made, where, by whom, using what tools—­is directly connected to the digital copy of Plimpton 255. Nor is it published or linked within the version of the project history currently available in Digital Scriptorium’s interface (although that may change in the future as DS 2.0 is rolled out).19 This lack of easily accessible information about the processes and workers involved in the digitization is unremarkable. The general invisibility of modern labor is a standard feature of digitized manuscripts today, as

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it is for many of the earlier reprographic technologies upon which digitizations are often modeled. The more remarkable fact about Plimpton 255 and Digital Scriptorium is that any of this—­the names of the original photographer and his assistant, tools used, and digitization company—­are recoverable at all. The currently available digital copy of Plimpton 255 consists of metadata describing the hard-­copy exemplar and six digital images (fig. 3.1). In much the same way that old books are rebound over the centuries—­either because old bindings have been damaged to the point they no longer work, or because they could be updated to better fit changing tastes—­the DS interface has been updated over the project’s twenty-­year history, each time with new interfaces overwriting the old. What figure 3.1 shows is not what the digital manuscript looked like in 2000. Although examples of early, basic user interface pages are preserved in the Wayback Machine, views of Plimpton 255 bound within that first interface are gone and cannot be retrieved.20 But while the interface has changed, and will continue to change with the advent of DS 2.0, the digital manuscript itself—­the images and short description of the physical exemplar of Plimpton 255—­has remained fairly stable, in much the same way that analog manuscripts have been disbound and rebound over the centuries, without too many changes to their main-­ text contents. The digital images represent approximately 5.5 percent of the extant analog exemplar and as little as 2 percent of the original, lost codex.21 Viewed with the expectations of the late 2010s and early 2020s, this slim image selection may initially appear to be digital fragmentation. The transformation of 54 leaves into six photographs plus metadata may seem to participate in what Tara McPherson has named a “lenticular logic”—­“a logic of the fragment or the chunk, a way of seeing the world as discrete modules or nodes, a mode that suppresses relation and context.”22 The “slicing” of 54 leaves into a few digital images and descriptive sentences might also feel like an extension of the long history of destruction to which many medieval books have fallen prey. But interpreting this digital copy in that way ignores how it was made in a particular time and place. Performing digital codicology

Figure 3.1  The Fall of Princes, New York, Columbia University Libraries, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Plimpton MS 255. Screenshot showing the first view of the digital manuscript, as it appeared in Digital Scriptorium in late 2021. Photographs by Dwight Primiano, exact date unknown. Digitization by Luna Imaging, exact date unknown. Reproduced with permission from Columbia University Libraries and Digital Scriptorium, https://digital-scriptorium.org/.

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on the Digital Scriptorium copy of Plimpton 255 thus requires understanding both my own historical contexts, desires, and expectations, and the contexts, relationships, and available technologies that brought the project to life in the first place. In late 1996, librarians in Berkeley, California, and New York City began collaborating on a Mellon Foundation Digital Library grant, seeking funding to build “a prototype database of network-­accessible digitized images coupled with a database of dating and localizing elements.”23 By fall 1998, the project, named “Digital Scriptorium,” included “about 10,000 compressed image files in 24-­bit RGB true colour.” All images were available in four sizes: thumbnails, and small, medium, and large: “For a sample folio manuscript (512 × 768 mm), the sizes of those files [were] 58K, 218K, and 384K, respectively.”24 Also in fall 1998, the US National Commission on Libraries and Information Science highlighted bandwidth, the speed of an internet connection, as “an increasingly important component of Internet service.”25 With each advance in the speed of a user’s Internet connection, new services, applications, and resources become possible, and users without high speed connections do not have the capability to make effective use of these new developments. At present, a speed of 56 kbps represents that state of the computer marketplace in terms of modem technology. Being able to connect at 56 kbps allows users to make effective use of graphic and multimedia content from the World Wide Web.26 For users of DS who achieved the level of speed desired by the commission, the smaller 58-­kilobyte manuscript image might take only slightly longer than a second to load, at least under ideal settings—­ when that “56 kbps dial-­up connection” was “dedicated to a single workstation.”27 Under similarly ideal conditions, the highest quality images in DS might take just under seven seconds to load. However, that speed was reduced when a single line was shared by multiple computer workstations—­as in a computer lab or shared public work stations in an academic or public library. Depending on whether one

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was using the fastest new cable modem with a well-­supported urban connection or a dial-­up modem with a modest 28.8 kbps connection, downloading a 10 MB file could take as little as 2.7 seconds or as long as 45 minutes.28 The overall slowness and widespread inequities in access inspired telecommunications researchers at the turn of the millennium to quip that “www” stood not for “World Wide Web” but “world wide waiting.”29 Digital manuscript researchers in 2021 still recall spending hours, circa 1998–­2001, waiting for JPEGs of medieval manuscripts to load.30 Early users of DS reported facing the same kind of slow, inequitable access due to differences in internet connectivity. In fall 1998, graduate students in an experimental, continent-­spanning manuscripts seminar jointly run by Berkeley and Columbia using a very early iteration of DS reported experiencing difficulty accessing images for independent study. In theory, “anyone could access anything online” and digital images of manuscripts “could be viewed anywhere.” But in practice, “most students used campus computers to study manuscript images, primarily computers in libraries, then those in computer laboratories, and finally at home, stimulating complaints of slow reception of the high quality, large images.”31 We cannot properly understand the size, quality, and selection principles behind early digital manuscript projects without understanding the speed and limitations of then-­current technologies. Moreover, although the image selection of Plimpton 255 in DS may seem in the early 2020s to be a study in inaccessibility, with more than 95 percent of the hard-­copy object out of reach, contextualized within the project’s origin that same narrow image selection is an act of inclusivity. At the time of its design and creation, setting strict limits on the number of image files and giving users a variety of sizes to choose from were necessary steps for making DS usable and broadly accessible. The image sampling principles of DS in the late 1990s also fit into the broader project mission of serving the varied research and teaching needs of a vast interdisciplinary audience—­all while working within the financial constraints of short-­term grant funding. As Consuelo

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Dutschke explains, the cost of performing complete image capture on all the manuscripts owned by both partner institutions was prohibitive: When DS started, we realized that our funds would allow us to fully digitize thirty-­five “average” manuscripts at Berkeley and thirty-­five at Columbia; or we could digitize selected leaves from the complete holdings of both institutions. Intellectually, the choice had to fall to widespread sampling: who could decree which seventy manuscripts should be handed to scholarship and which were not worthy?32 Image sampling was deliberately steered away from focusing on lavish illuminations. Instead, organizers urged member institutions to pick six to eight representative images, each showing as much information about the hard-­copy manuscript as possible. As the project guidelines explain, “an image chosen primarily for its decorated initial may also supply visual information on the book’s support, layout, ruling method, or quire signature as well as on significant divisions of a book’s text.”33 In an essay published in 2000, Siân Echard unpacks how DS’s commitment to bookish materiality was revolutionary in its historical moment. Unlike traditional printed manuscript facsimiles, which Echard notes “often concentrate on famous authors or beautiful manuscripts,” Digital Scriptorium prioritizes a more capacious, more accurate depiction of medieval books.34 The twelve folios of Plimpton 265 which have been scanned, for example, include the pastedown from an earlier religious manuscript on folio 1r, the figure of Laodamia, the comment about good penmanship, the signature of Edward Bromley, and the red crayon loops and daisies. . . . Directed explicitly at a scholarly audience, the Digital Scriptorium project thus emphasizes the kind of material which is of interest to current manuscript studies.35 Rather than focusing on only the famous, the canonical, and the exceptionally beautiful, DS showed pastedowns, readers’ notes, signatures and doodles—­a representation of what the project creators thought

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most useful and interesting in manuscript studies, and also more broadly of how scholarly desires were expanding the definition of what was “valuable” in medieval manuscript imaging. Echard praised DS for its focus on the needs of a “scholarly audience.” In point of fact, Digital Scriptorium had multiple scholarly audiences in mind. In her published work, Dutschke describes DS as designed to suit the needs of paleographers and textual editors, while also serving researchers in other disciplines, especially musicologists and art historians.36 But these impressive claims to broad scholarly relevance are matched by clear-­eyed assessments of project limitations. Dutschke explains how DS could not serve all research communities equally and notes, in particular, that “the purely text-­driven scholar risks disappointment . . . because DS offers sample imaging and not complete copies.”37 Recovering this early project history emphasizes that manuscripts in DS were never envisioned as full facsimiles or surrogates for analog codices. Rather, this project envisioned its digitized manuscript copies as entries in massive data sets that researchers could use to identify, date, and localize the myriad manuscripts left undated and unsigned by their medieval copyists. Image sampling was a feature, not a bug—­a cost-­driven, core project principle, not a misunderstanding of audience need. To achieve the greater project mission of a solution to the problem of thousands of undated and unidentified medieval fragments, clear-­eyed compromises were made. Ms.Eng.1 and DIY Digitization

Victoria, University of Victoria, Ms.Eng.1 was copied in the second half of the fifteenth century. The manuscript is made up of 122 leaves, a mix of paper and parchment. It is the work of a single copyist who also likely served as the book’s rubricator. Like Plimpton 255, we do not know this scribe’s name. Unlike Plimpton 255, the copyist of Ms.Eng.1 has never been deemed important enough to be given a scholarly moniker. Since its purchase in 1977, the manuscript appears to have received little sustained attention by professional researchers, a fate predicted by A. S. G. Edwards in 1978 when he concluded his study of Ms.Eng.1

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with the assessment that “the Victoria manuscript is unlikely to be a text of great significance to students of Lydgate’s poem.”38 The digital incunable of Ms.Eng.1 was created between 1999 and 2001. It contains 244 images, representing 100 percent of the extant manuscript.39 It is the work of two copyists, whose names we know. Indeed, we know an unusual amount about the making of this digital incunable—­ due largely to this digital manuscript’s uncommon origins. In spring 1999, David Badke and Nichole Green were students in a University of Victoria manuscript studies class. They began studying Ms.Eng.1 as part of an assignment to write a formal description of a manuscript fragment housed in Special Collections. As they worked, Badke and Green decided that their final paper would be enhanced if they could include in it a few images of their manuscript. At that time, the University of Victoria Libraries did not possess the necessary imaging hardware and software to support Badke and Green’s ambitions for their assignment. Undocumented, serendipitous human relationships are often the unwritten stories of digitization. In the case of Ms.Eng.1, Badke had previously worked in the University of Victoria Libraries’ Special Collections, earning the trust of Chris Petter, then head of Special Collections. Because of this preexisting relationship, Badke and Green were given permission to transport a few leaves of Ms.Eng.1 out of Special Collections and across campus to the University of Victoria’s Curriculum Lab.40 There, the two students photographed the sample leaves using a Pentax camera with a macro lens and Fujichrome film (100 ASA), which was processed to create slides. Badke and Green then used Badke’s personal Hewlett-­Packard PhotoSmart slide scanner to create digital copies of their analog slides.41 After scanning, they engaged in postproduction image processing and enhancement, beginning by tightly cropping the photographs to show only the manuscript page. This is a striking difference between the Victoria Fall of Princes digitization and several other digitizations discussed in this book. Both Stanford, Stanford University Libraries, Department of Special Collections, Manuscript Collection, MSS Codex M0379 and San Marino, Huntington, MS HM 111 are imaged with a

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“frame” around the edge of every leaf, and the imaging guidelines for Digital Scriptorium ca. 1998 included a similar commitment to showing end users that they were seeing the full physicality of the analog book and nothing had been cropped from view. End users could read the lack of a similar frame in the digitization of Ms.Eng.1 as evidence of a lack of specialist appreciation for the book as a physical object. But that reading would be incorrect. The tight crop of Ms.Eng.1 was a pragmatic decision driven by the limits of the technologies available to Badke and Green. The scanned slide files that Badke and Green produced were an unwieldly 16MB. Cropping tightly helped to reduce the image files to the rather more manageable size of 15MB (although still a size that far exceeded the capacity of the first USB drives, commercially available in 2000, with a capacity of around 8MB).42 After turning in their assignment, Badke and Green secured permission to continue digitizing Ms.Eng.1. The bulk of digitization labor, that is, happened outside of an official workflow, outside of class, and beyond the usual rhythms, rewards, and penalties of the term system. As Badke puts it, “Once we got started photographing, we just kept going, to the amazement of the professor, the Special Collections librarian responsible for the manuscript (Chris Petter), and ourselves.” They secured a combination of private donors and university grants to digitize Ms.Eng.1 in its entirety.43 The entire process took several weeks.44 In the end, Badke and Green created more than a thousand slides and three complete copies of the manuscript.45 All images (original scans and modified images) were saved as TIFFs on CD-­ROM, which seemed at the time to be a dependable long-­term preservation technology. As Badke would later write, in 2001, the CD-­ROM disks holding Badke and Green’s digital incunables were “expected to remain readable for at least a decade and probably much longer (by some estimates, at long as 100 years).”46 Badke and Green gave a complete set of discs to the University of Victoria Libraries, and the first stage of their passion-­project digitizing Ms.Eng.1 was complete. In 2001, a second phase occurred. Once again driven by personal interest, Badke created a website showcasing his digital copy of Ms.Eng.1.

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The images he and Green had created were TIFFS, so he had to make smaller, more compressed images for online viewing: TIFF images are not usable directly by Web browsers, so the images were also converted to JPEG format. This image format, intended for photographic images, compresses images by analyzing groups of pixels and discarding pixels that have minimal effect on image quality. The result is a much smaller file (around 9 megabytes compared to 15 megabytes for the equivalent TIFF) that retains most of the image details.47 The images in Badke’s website do not look so dissimilar from manuscripts digitized under less unique circumstances and viewable through commercial digital library management systems (fig. 3.2). But just because the differences are not obvious, does not mean that they are not there. Unlike a copy preserved in a more conventional digital content management system, the digital images of Ms.Eng.1 are nested several layers deep inside Badke’s website and are wrapped in layers of narrative paratext. “Index & Images” pages coexist alongside pages dedicated to the manuscript’s description (the core of the original project) as well as pages describing the tools used to photograph and digitize this copy of The Fall of Princes. The centrality of these elaborate paratexts in the digital incunable suggest that, for Badke, telling the story of how the manuscript came to be digitized was as important as telling the story of its hard-­copy exemplar. This emphasis on the modern labor behind the digital object is another strikingly unusual feature of this digital incunable. Badke’s grappling with the size of his digital images highlights larger realities in Canadian internet infrastructure in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In 1994, the Canadian government formed the “Information Highway Advisory Council (IHAC) with a vision of linking Canadians to cultural products, entertainment, business, and social services.” Throughout the later 1990s IHAC pushed for more equitable internet access across Canada. In the late 1990s and early 2000s,

Figure 3.2  The Fall of Princes, Victoria, University of Victoria Libraries, Ms.Eng.1. Screenshot showing the first view of the digital manuscript, as it appeared in the “University of Victoria, Lydgate MS, Fall of Princes” boutique project website in late 2021. Slides and digitization by David Badke and Nicole Green, 1999–2000; website by David Badke, 2001. Reproduced with permission from the University of Victoria Libraries.

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Canada showed similar disparities as the United States in terms of internet access: race, gender, age, wealth, education-­level, and region all influenced internet connectivity rates.48 But Canada was making strides to close the gaps. In 2001, the Canadian National Broadband Taskforce declared its priorities: by 2004, “all communities, including small businesses and residential users, should have Internet access at throughput speeds in excess of 1.5 megabits/s,” rural and urban access rates should be equitable, and “local broadband infrastructure should extend to schools, public libraries and other public access points.”49 Although universal broadband access in all parts of Canada was not achieved by 2004, that year Canada ranked ninth in the world among the most connected countries, “with an estimated 63.01 Internet users per 100 inhabitants,” compared to 81.95 users per 100 inhabitants in New Zealand, the highest estimated usage.50 By 2005, Canada would be ranked in the top five nations for broadband network penetration, along with Korea, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, and Denmark; in the same survey, the United States was ranked sixteenth.51 One commonplace about digital manuscripts is that they can be used anywhere in the world, by anyone at all. But the countries from which end users accessed digital manuscripts were (and still are) creating significant differences in their experiences. The future, as the oft-­quoted axiom attributed to cyberpunk writer William Gibson goes, may have arrived, but it was not evenly distributed—­although it seems to have been more evenly distributed in Canada than it was in Canada’s southern neighbor. In the intervening two decades, the University of Victoria Library’s Special Collections has taken over the work of maintaining Badke’s 2001 website. A copy of the digital manuscript of Ms.Eng.1 that Badke and Green created is also available via the University of Victoria’s digital collection management system—­at time of writing, Samvera, previously ContentDM (fig. 3.3).52 There were multiple motivations for adding Badke and Green’s digital copy to the library’s digital collections system. As Heather Dean notes, digital preservation often “requires so much more intervention than might happen with analogue objects, where more often than not

Figure 3.3  The Fall of Princes, Victoria, University of Victoria Libraries, Ms.Eng.1. Screenshot showing the first view of the digital manuscript, as it appeared in Samvera, the University of Victoria’s current digital collections management system, in late 2021. Slides and digitization by David Badke and Nicole Green, 1999–2000. Reproduced with permission from the University of Victoria Libraries.

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an acid free box and temperature-­and humidity-­controlled vault might be sufficient.” By adding Badke and Green’s digital incunable to the library’s larger collections management system, University of Victoria librarians could better ensure its preservation. They could also improve discoverability and serve out the digital manuscript through a single, searchable, up-­to-­date interface. As Dean explains, in online environments “change is a constant, and infrastructure and user expectations shift accordingly. In some ways, the innovations in the commercial sector (i.e., Google, Amazon, etc.) set our expectations, especially around discoverability, and heritage institutions are racing to meet patron needs informed by these radically different spaces.”53 Far from existing outside of the world, in some timeless cloud drifting through cyberspace, digital manuscripts are deeply in and of their moment, remediating their analog exemplars and more recent internet innovations, blending together expectations honed on manuscript descriptions and library catalogs with those honed in online shopping and information-­seeking. According to the metadata that accompany the library’s digital copy of Badke and Green’s digital copy of the unnamed medieval scribe’s copy of The Fall of Princes, the creator of the object is “John Lydgate.” The date of the object’s creation is “15th century.” In this professionalized, standardized space, with its predetermined metadata fields, there is no place for the names of the digital manuscript’s creators and the unique story of its digitization: no nod to the medieval scribe, the student digitizers, or the librarians and technologists who have worked for decades to maintain both Badke’s original digital copy and its offspring. In pointing this out, I am not calling out anyone in University of Victoria libraries, past, present, or future. Commercial digital collections management systems do not make it easy to blend together in a single metadata entry information about an analog original and its digital progeny.54 Moreover, generations of librarians and technologists at the University of Victoria have done remarkable work maintaining Badke’s original website while also serving out the digitized manuscript through their standard library system. A frequently unseen, un-

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dervalued part of digital collections labor is the continual appraising and reappraising of collections. While rare books and manuscripts are rarely weeded out or sold (at least, not by financially stable institutions), digital manuscript projects can be and are subject to ongoing change. This mutability can involve something as subtle as substituting newer and higher quality digital images as the technology and funding become available (as, in fact, will happen in the near future to the library’s digital copy of Ms.Eng.1), or as final as the end of a digital project’s lifecycle, with the project taken down.55 One of the things that I find surprising about the digital incunable of Ms.Eng.1 is that it remains accessible in its original form over two decades after it was made. (Many of the undergraduate students I teach are younger than Badke and Green’s digital manuscript.) It is unusual for a digital project to be so carefully maintained long after the students and professors involved in its creation have left the institution. The ongoing existence of this digital incunable is neither automatic nor effortless: the fact that we can still see and use Badke’s boutique project twenty years after its creation is evidence of the ongoing labor and advocacy performed by generations of librarians, archivists, curators, and technologists working at Victoria. The story of this digital incunable’s creation is a story of how personal connections—­between students and librarians, between librarians and staff at pedagogical centers—­made this experiment possible. Its preservation is a continuing story of how the personal connections that individual librarians have to this and other digitization projects support the ongoing maintenance of this particular digital book. For instance, at time of writing, the University Librarian of the University of Victoria is Jonathan Bengtson. Bengtson was involved in one of the earliest manuscript digitization projects at Oxford University, using Kontron medical cameras in the mid-­1990s to digitize medieval Celtic manuscripts, images from which are still included within the larger Oxford digital collections. Years later, in 2010, he was personally responsible for getting the digital copy of University of Toronto, Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, Bergendal MS 50—­a collection of sermons written in the later tenth century—­into

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the Internet Archive where it is among the earliest items in that repository.56 It is not a coincidence that the same library staffed by people who have repeatedly made history in manuscript digitization has seen value in maintaining the unusual digital incunable of Ms.Eng.1. In my study of digital manuscripts, it is one of the only instances I have found in which the creation of new digital copy and new interface has not overwritten an older digital copy and original interface. Its ongoing, doubled existence is, thus, a testament to unseen work and workers, to time and effort invested in digital maintenance.57 As poet and memoirist Anne Boyer writes, “The background that appears effortless appears only with great effort: the work of care and the work of data are quiet, daily, persistent, and never done.”58 Rebinding digital incunables in new viewers, interfaces, and management systems can be understood as akin to the rebinding of a hard-­ copy manuscript or rare printed book. It is a process marked by loss, yes. But it is also a process marked by gain. There can be good reasons for rebinding, connected to conservation (as was the case for the disbanding of the badly damaged analog manuscript Ms.Eng.1). Similarly, binding a digital manuscript into a new interface and digital collection management system helps to ensure its forward compatibility and availability for future users. To be sure, when a hard-­copy manuscript or early printed book is rebound, information about the book’s earlier life goes missing. So too, in the move from a one-­off personal website to a standardized digital library management system, data that fit the accepted contents continue to have a place, while data that do not—­like stories of a class assignment that became a shared passion-­ project—­may vanish. In this way, the fate of Badke and Green’s digital incunable—­bound, rebound, preserved, but also changed—­is not unlike the fate of many medieval books, hard-­copy and digital. In one of the few pieces of published scholarship to reference the existence of a digital copy of Ms.Eng.1, there is no mention that the digital manuscript exists because of students’ leadership, diligence, and remarkable extracurricular labor.59 Nor are the library workers who maintain the digital manuscript named. Read in one way, Badke,

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Green, and the digital incunable of Ms.Eng.1 can seem a cautionary tale of exploited student, staff, and other library-­located labor in early digital humanities projects.60 As Spencer Keralis pointedly warns: The scholar using a digital library may not know that the materials they rely on were digitized by students or other minimum-­ wage workers whose work is not acknowledged on the library’s website. Their labor is rendered invisible, alienable, and is easily effaced and taken for granted.61 Framed by Badke’s still-­v isible paratextual narratives and by interviews with librarians at the University of Victoria, however, it is also, simultaneously, a tale of librarian-­student collaboration: of student-­ led innovation and decades of librarian-­led digital preservation. Badke and Green’s digital copy of Ms.Eng.1 lacks easy discoverability, and the library’s digital copy lacks a visible public record of its own project history. But because both copies for now still persist, we have the rare ability to read the two copies together, with and against each other, seeing what labor and laborers can remain visible for decades, as well as what and who become invisible as early digital incunables get remixed into more discoverable and usable forms. Harley 1766 and the British Library’s Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts

London, British Library, Harley MS 1766 was copied around 1460.62 The manuscript is made up of 266 parchment leaves. The text is the work of a single scribe whose name we do not know. In modern scholarship, they are known both as the “Edmund-­Fremund scribe” and as the “Lydgate scribe.” Compared to other copies of The Fall of Princes, Harley 1766 is markedly compressed. While the standard print edition of the poem contains 36,365 lines of verse, Harley 1766 contains only 21,865 lines, or 60.1 percent of the complete work: much of book 5 and all of book 6 were removed by the fifteenth-­century copyist.63 This relative slimness of text is augmented by the inclusion of 156 marginal miniatures—­the work of a team of limners whose names we do not know.

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It is hard to offer a single date for the digital incunable of Harley 1766 in the British Library’s Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts (CIM), for much the same reasons that it is difficult to assign a single date to a hard-­copy composite manuscript.64 The digital copy was created in 2006, but largely in accordance with project principles developed in the later 1990s—­and at least some of its source media date from as early as the 1970s. Thus, like analog manuscripts added to over a period of time, dating this digital incunable requires a broader range: ca. 1970–­2006. It includes extremely thorough descriptive metadata for the analog exemplar, plus 101 digital images representing 63 leaves of the complete codex. The images sometimes show a leaf in full-­page view, sometimes only a close-­up of a miniature. Often two images will offer duplicate content, one showing full-­page views and the next a detailed close-­up of an illustration on the same leaf. If we calculate “access” as defined by an image from a leaf, even if the full page is not completely visible nor the main text readable, then the digital incunable of Harley 1766 offers something like 18 percent access to its analog exemplar. If we define access more narrowly, as readable text and full-­page views, this copy of Harley 1766 reproduces approximately 6.87 percent of its analog exemplar. But assessing it in this way disregards CIM’s actual project mission and fails to locate that project within its layered moments in history. While it is useful to read a digital manuscript against its analog exemplar and within the much longer history of copying manuscripts across media, it’s also necessary to read one digital incunable against another. Moreover, grounding Harley 1766 in CIM within the material histories of internet growth and access in the United Kingdom helps answer one of the questions I raised at the start of this chapter: why this digital incunable contains twenty times the number of images as the digital incunable of Plimpton 255 in DS—­even though, ostensibly, both digital projects are about making online manuscript catalogs. The rich descriptive metadata and abundant digital images of Harley 1766 in CIM are evidence of almost exponential growth in bandwidth, between what could be shared online in 1998 in the United States and what

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could be shared online in 2006 in the United Kingdom. Put simply, capacity had exploded and cost had dropped. In the United Kingdom, “at the end of 2006 the estimated average headline connections speed was 3.8Mbit/s, up from 1.6Mbit/s in 2005.” By 2006, internet connections supporting speeds of up to 2 megabytes per second were available for the monthly price of £15, “down from £50 in 2003.”65 Disparities in access remained (and still do): the same inequalities in race, gender, education, age, wealth, and persistent rural-­urban divides.66 Even so, these higher speeds at lower costs fundamentally changed what a digital manuscript project could be—­particularly for projects built in urban areas benefiting from stronger, faster internet infrastructure. A host of data could now be added with much less risk of overburdening average end users’ bandwidth. The Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts officially launched in 2003, but its origins are rooted in projects and events occurring at least a decade earlier.67 Melissa Terras marks 1992 and the launch of The Electronic Beowulf as the watershed year for the British Library’s digitization projects.68 But alongside this foundational boutique “slow digitization” project, mass digitization experiments were also in development.69 In the early 1990s, the British Library’s Department of Manuscripts was preparing for physical relocation, moving from the older Bloomsbury location to a new British Library campus being built at St. Pancras. In anticipation of this move, a pilot project called the “St. Pancras Treasures Digitisation Project” was launched in 1993. This project’s goal was to determine “the best method, or methods, for the digitisation of existing surrogate colour images” of select hard-­copy manuscripts that would be on permanent display in the St. Pancras Treasures Gallery. The resulting digital images, it was hoped, would simultaneously serve multiple purposes: they might help improve preservation and security for fragile, hard-­copy manuscripts, as well as support “research, commercial exploitation and improved access through electronic delivery.”70 At the time, creating a good digital scan of one extant transparency took an average of 12–­20 minutes, more if the resulting image “require[d] colour correction or manipulation in

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the image-­processing software.”71 The St. Pancras Treasures Digitisation Project concluded in early 1994, with recommendations for future applications.72 One of those applications was the Survey of Illuminated Manuscripts, which began in 1995 and used procedures honed in the St. Pancras Treasures Digitisation Project to solve another problem, also related to the upcoming physical relocation of hard-­copy medieval books. In the final decade of the twentieth century, the British Library lacked a comprehensive descriptive manuscripts catalog identifying all the illuminated manuscripts in its vast holdings.73 This lack was a significant problem both for research and preservation. As Michelle Brown, Richard Masters, and Andrew Prescott explain, Illuminated manuscripts are prone to environmental shock, as the movement of the vellum when it is exposed to different atmospheric conditions could damage the pigment on the surface of the manuscript. Good housekeeping [for transporting manuscripts to the new British Library campus] clearly required that all illuminated material in the collections should be identified in advance of the move. The only way of doing this was by a detailed examination at the shelf of each volume in the collection.74 The same year also marked the publication of The Electronic Beowulf on CD-­ROM and the relaunch of Portico, the British Library’s online information server, displaying a zoomable digital copy of the Magna Carta.75 This confluence of physical need and digital opportunity resulted in the survey’s curators planning multiple possible futures for their data. With the survey, they were finally creating a comprehensive catalog of the British Library’s illuminated medieval manuscripts. The data they were gathering might one day be published as a printed catalog or as an electronic publication—­perhaps via CD-­ROM like The Electronic Beowulf. Perhaps online, like Portico.76 Wherever possible, images for the Survey of Illuminated Manuscripts were created by scanning existing modern media rather than direct image capture—­and for some of the same reasons of speed and

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preservation that inspired digitization specialists working on DS at Columbia to choose film-­based cameras. But the Survey of Illuminated Manuscripts had an additional goal. The St. Pancras Treasures Digitisation parent project had aimed to make images of “treasured” manuscripts accessible to a broader readership; to do so, it reused existing media that attested to those manuscripts’ treasured status. Someone, in some cases many someones, had loved these manuscripts enough to pay for select imaging. But many more manuscripts in the British Library had not yet received that investment. The survey’s curators thus hoped their work would make more visible, and therefore more accessible, hard-­copy manuscripts that had not yet received significant attention.77 By taking the more affordable and faster step of scanning preexisting media of “treasured” manuscripts, the survey team could direct more of the project’s finite resources to performing direct image capture on their less-­studied manuscripts and, in so doing, hopefully bring this much larger set of manuscripts more into the research mainstream. This ultimately is another reason why the copy of Harley 1766 in CIM can contain so many more images than the copy of Plimpton 255 in DS. The digital copy of Harley 1766 is stitched together out of digital scans of older media that had already been created by in-­house imaging specialists at the British Library, over approximately forty years, and supplemented (in places supplanted) by new digital photographs made via direct image capture of the hard-­copy exemplar.78 An important point here is that—­despite usages like that to which I confessed at the start of this chapter—­neither the Survey of Illuminated Manuscripts nor the subsequent Catalog of Illuminated Manuscripts were envisioned by their creators as making digital facsimiles of analog manuscripts. Rather, CIM’s mission was to create an expanded, digital version of existing, printed surveys of manuscripts. Online, this new descriptive catalog could thrive and grow far beyond the limitations imposed by the material realities of print: entries could be updated as more information was discovered, long and detailed manuscript descriptions could be accompanied by far more color images than would be possible in a printed and bound book. But CIM was always intended

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to be a finding aid, not a surrogate—­even though this intended use has not always been a perfect match for the ways it has been utilized over the years.79 For instance, to write “The Leper on the Road to Canterbury,” I combed CIM for medieval images of leprosy, treating it like a repository of digital manuscript images, not as a catalog to consult prior to on-­site analysis. When end user engagement does not line up with project mission, it is even more important for digital codicologists to understand what a digital manuscripts project was originally planned to be. The first fruits of the Survey of Illuminated Manuscripts—­t wo hundred manuscript descriptions accompanied by select digital images—­came online in July 2003 as the Digital Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts or DigCIM (eventually shortened to CIM), a joint venture of the British Library’s Department of Manuscripts and the University of London’s Center for Print and Manuscript Studies.80 Since then, CIM has been enhanced in several different phases, including by a series of external grants. It has also been supported from its inception by the British Library and the many departments and experts who work therein.81 For instance, Peter Kidd, curator of illuminated manuscripts at the British Library during some of the years of work on CIM, mentioned in an interview that between 2004 and 2006 he personally had scanned tens of thousands of 35mm Kodachrome slides and Ektachrome transparencies, using a scanner not terribly different from that used by Badke and Green to digitize their hard-­copy slides of Ms.Eng.1. Additional work scanning preexisting manuscript images was performed by Megan McNamee in 2006.82 In November 2006—­after more than ten years of prototyping, shelf surveys, retroconversion of legacy media, data entry, and performing new direct image capture—­work began on adding Harley 1766 to CIM.83 The resulting digital manuscript is something like a new media sammelbande, binding together a variety of different source media and earlier approaches to imaging medieval books (fig. 3.4). Differences in framing, focus, and color are not accidental variations introduced by digitizers running on autopilot: they are documen-

Figure 3.4  The Fall of Princes, © British Library Board. London, British Library, Harley MS 1766. Screenshot showing the first nine thumbnail images as they appeared within the Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts in late 2021. Original analog source media created by a variety of in-house photographers employed by the British Library, ca. 1970s–90s. Digital scans of source media, direct image capture, and metadata creation performed by British Library staff, ca. 2000–2009. Reproduced with permission of the British Library.

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tation of each image’s distinct media history. For instance, the full-­page view of fol. 5r was created in the early 2000s, through direct capture.84 Reading the glimpse of the gutter and its facing page, as well as the neutral black background visible on three other sides, I would suggest that its patron and imaging specialists shared the same framing philosophy promoted by Digital Scriptorium from the late 1990s and by digital imaging specialists at the Huntington and Stanford Libraries in 2014. But the half-­page view of fol. 5r that immediately follows is shaped according to different principles. That second view does not seem particularly interested in showcasing the hard-­copy exemplar’s bookish body, suggesting that it was created for a researcher who had other scholarly commitments, perhaps before representing “bookishness” became a major disciplinary concern. Coupled with the heavy black border and the relative fuzziness of fine details in the image, these features suggest not just different disciplinary interests or philosophies of copying at play; they suggest an entirely different imaging program, occurring in a different decade, using different tools. This is, in fact, what the underlying data attest. The detail-­view digital image of Harley 1766, fol. 5r is sourced from an undated Kodachrome slide; its relative fuzziness, heavy black four-­sided border, and other details that make it so distinct from the full-­page view of the same leaf are features of that earlier slide—­evidence of the larger media history of manuscript reprographics in the later twentieth century, as well as signs of the various points at which Harley 1766 was considered worth copying well before the rise of digitization. The same rapid flickering between source media characterizes other thumbnail images in figure 3.4. The full page and close-­up views of fol. 11r were both created from direct image capture in the early 2000s, but their close visual twins—­the close-­up and full-­page views of fol. 13r—­are digital scans made from older Kodachrome slides. The close-­up images representing fols. 24r and 28r are digital scans of Kodachrome slides. But formal differences between the two close-­up images, in focus, shape, and framing, suggest that they too were made in different copying programs. Even images created by directly photographing the hard-­copy manu-

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script show traces of predigital media. The pairing of full-­page views with close-­ups of miniatures and other decorative features on the same page is a characteristic of slide creation popular in the early 1980s.85 This digital copy of Harley 1766, that is, is remediating slide photography and continues to do so for a significant period of time in the “digital age.” In short, the illustrative images of Harley 1766 in CIM bind together a compelling portrait of changing disciplinary norms, scholarly trends over decades of medieval manuscript scholarship, and continuities between predigital copying and direct digital image capture. Approach this digital incunable with ahistorical expectations honed on manuscripts produced after the era of the digital incunable and this early copy of Harley 1766 might seem to fall short. For the strictly progress-­minded, Harley 1766 in CIM might even seem like it could be weeded and taken down, since Harley 1766 has now also been made available as a fully digitized manuscript via the British Library’s Digitised Manuscripts program. But localizing and contextualizing this copy of The Fall of Princes precisely within its long project history helps us recover CIM’s transformative vision and, through it, a more capacious history of manuscript digitization. As Kathleen Doyle (now the lead curator of illuminated manuscripts at the British Library) wrote in her 2009 comments on the addition of the Harley manuscripts to the Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts: “The catalogue descriptions and newly commissioned digital images of Harley manuscripts have revolutionized access to the extraordinary riches of the Harley collection, making them easily accessible for the first time to scholars and the general public alike.”86 That easy accessibility has continued to reach beyond the project’s initial mission. CIM may be fundamentally a finding aid. But it has also become the raw data of research: both the kind of earlier research practice I confessed to at the start of this chapter and the source for creative work likely unanticipated by the project’s creators. Melissa Range’s Scriptorium: Poems weaves together poetry about Old English words, life in modern rural Appalachia, and the making of medieval books. Scriptorium, which won the 2016 National Poetry Series, cites CIM as a key source.87

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Rosenbach MS 439/16 and Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis

Philadelphia, the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Rosenbach MS 439/16 was copied ca. 1465–­75, perhaps in the greater London area. Today, it is made up of 212 parchment leaves, although stubs at the start of book 8 show that leaves have been removed.88 The text was copied by a single scribe whose name is known. Ricardus Franciscus did not explicitly sign his name to Rosenbach 439/16; however, it is indisputably his, “signed” through the flamboyant flourishes and ornamental initials decorated with religious commonplaces and mottoes that characterize his work.89 In its current form, Rosenbach 439/16 contains seven miniatures. These miniatures and the manuscript’s inhabited initials are the work of at least three different artists whose names we do not know, although one is sometimes given the scholarly moniker of the “Quadrilogue Master.”90 Like many medieval scribes and book artists, the limners of Rosenbach 439/16 are known only by the work of their hands. “Their separate identities,” as Victoria Kirkham puts it, “emerge in three different styles of forming the illuminated chapter initials.”91 The digital manuscript of Rosenbach 439/16 was copied in spring 2017 at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries’ Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image (SCETI). This digitization occurred as part of Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis, a three-­year collaborative project of the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSAL). This project was funded by a grant for $499,086.00 from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) in its focus area “Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives: Enabling New Scholarship through Increasing Access to New Materials” and supported by the Mellon Foundation. The project mission of Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis was to create a comprehensive online library of medieval and early modern manuscripts held by PACSAL member institutions in eastern Pennsylvania and Delaware. As usual, the names of the digitization team are not bound into the digital manuscript’s publicly accessible paratexts. However, many of the workers involved in creating this new digital copy of Rosenbach 439/16 can be identified, in part because they are featured in news coverage by PACSAL member

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institutions, and in part because I interviewed members involved at various points of the digitization workflow when I observed the digitization of Rosenbach 439/16.92 Image capture took place on April 12, 2017. It was performed by Andrea Nuñez, an in-­house photographer employed by SCETI who specializes in cultural heritage imaging of three-­dimensional objects. Nuñez’s methods for photographing Rosenbach 439/16 in 2017 were similar to those employed by Smith on M0379 in 2014 at Stanford, with some variations. Nuñez, like Smith, photographed the entire manuscript back to front, rectos, and then front to back, versos, and the resulting images were bound into the same order as the hard-­copy book in postproduction processing. But Smith and Nuñez used subtly different tools to do this work. For instance, where Smith used low-­tech, modular supports for M0379 during imaging, Nuñez supported Rosenbach 439/16 on a ready-­made Linhof imaging cradle. Where Smith used a hand trigger to take photographs, Nuñez alternated between a foot pedal and a hand trigger to ease repetitive stress injury. Image capture was completed in under five hours—­an almost unfathomable difference from the 12–­20 minutes it took in the mid-­1990s to digitize a single existing transparency, or the 8–­10 minutes it took in the late 1990s to take a digital photograph of a manuscript through direct image capture, or the weeks it took to fully digitize Ms.Eng.1 in 1999–­2000 at the University of Victoria. A larger difference between the digitization of M0379 and Rosenbach 439/16 is where image cropping occurred in the workflow: for Smith, cropping and deskewing were a distinct step of postprocessing generally performed by someone else; for Nuñez, cropping was part of her image capture workflow, with Nuñez herself cropping the image immediately after taking each photograph. Quality assurance and quality control (QA/QC) was performed by Jordan Rothschild. The hard-­copy book was freshly cataloged by scholars working in the Schoenberg Institute of Manuscript Studies at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries; Amey Hutchins and Nicholas Herman (who together with Dot Porter led the cataloging efforts) described this group of contributors as an “ad hoc team of those will-

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ing, interested, and able to work on manuscripts.”93 The label “ad hoc” comes from the fact that new descriptive metadata were not originally part of the “Digitizing Hidden Special Collections” grant, which had focused on the creation of digital image creation and necessary structural metadata. The plan had been for the new digital manuscripts to be wrapped in their existing descriptive metadata, a common enough practice and one followed in the digitization of M0379. Reusing existing manuscript descriptions, however, carried significant potential drawbacks for a consortial database: manuscripts held by institutions that had written different styles and amounts of metadata would be showcased side by side in Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis. Uneven metadata (as discussed in chap. 4) can inhibit discovery and lead to unfair and incorrect comparisons. The movement of the analog manuscripts to SCETI for imaging gave catalogers working in the same building the opportunity to do more systematic metadata creation than had been initially planned. In our interview, Hutchins and Herman were careful to acknowledge that this recataloging process was a unique opportunity, dependent on an unusual alignment of the stars (resources, management, funding, and cataloger expertise and availability) that could not be counted on to come again—­either for PACSAL and Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis or for other digitization programs. At time of writing, I can access the digital copy of Rosenbach 439/16 in at least four different ways. The Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis project supports access via three points: through OPenn (fig. 3.5), through a custom-­built BiblioPhilly searchable interface (fig. 3.6), and through the Internet Archive (fig. 3.7).94 Should I choose, I can also use the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) manifest for Rosenbach 439/16 in the Internet Archive as an entry point to create my own personal copy, by feeding the IIIF manifest of Rosenbach 439/16 into any software or viewer (such as Universal Viewer or Mirador) that speaks IIIF. Via any of these entry points, this digital manuscript copy of The Fall of Princes is a set of files stored on a server, a fact that is true of all digital manuscripts but easy to lose sight of. That we encounter those files bound correctly

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into bookish form relies on work performed by Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis project developers Doug Emery and Jessie Dummer. Emery designed and built OPenn, a server and website where the University of Pennsylvania Libraries’ and partner institutions’ data live and are freely accessible under Creative Commons licenses as “complete sets of high-­resolution archival images” accompanied by “machine-­readable TEI P5 descriptions and technical metadata.” Emery also designed and built the data ingestion system that feeds into OPenn. Dummer does the day-­to-­day management of data ingestion.95 That is, she oversees the automated conversion of MARC records or spreadsheets holding the manuscripts’ metadata into TEI P5 and the hosting of that transformed metadata, and its images, on OPenn. For readers less versed in organizing data, coprincipal investigator of Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis Dot Porter suggests the analogy of a well-­stocked refrigerator.96 OPenn is the fridge. The data it contains are raw ingredients. The BiblioPhilly searchable interface is one particularly elaborate meal built from some of those ingredients—­a celebratory buffet of more than 450 entrées, appetizers, salads, and soups. The Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis content in the Internet Archive is another enormous meal built from those same ingredients. The digital copy of Rosenbach 439/16 is one entrée that can be selected from either buffet, and its technical metadata are the recipe that binds files on the server into their proper bookish form. Extending this analogy, Doug Emery is the person who designed, built, and to some extent maintains the fridge, and Jessie Dummer the person who makes sure ingredients get into the fridge without getting dropped or smashed, and who keeps the fridge from breaking and spoiling the data. All of this work and members of the digitization team are directly supervised by Michael Overgard, head of SCETI, and ultimately supervised by William Noel, then director of the Kislak Center and the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies. These different points of entry, the reliable existence of this digital copy, the fact that I can download the manuscript data and do with it whatever I wish, all rely on the physical and intellectual labor—­and the collective expertise—­of all the workers involved,

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Figure 3.5  The Fall of Princes, Philadelphia, Rosenbach Museum and Library, Rosenbach MS 439/16. Screenshot showing the first image of the digital manuscript, as it appeared in OPenn in late 2021. Digitization by a team at Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image; image capture performed by Andrea Nuñez, April 12, 2017. Courtesy of the Rosenbach, Philadelphia.

Figure 3.6  The Fall of Princes, Philadelphia, Rosenbach Museum and Library, Rosenbach MS 439/16. Screenshot showing the first image of the digital manuscript, as it appeared in the custom BiblioPhilly viewer in late 2021. Digitization by a team at Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image; image capture performed by Andrea Nuñez, April 12, 2017. Courtesy of the Rosenbach, Philadelphia.

Figure 3.7  The Fall of Princes, Philadelphia, Rosenbach Museum and Library, Rosenbach MS 439/16. Screenshot showing the first image of the digital manuscript, as it appeared in the Internet Archive in late 2021. Digitization by a team at Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image; image capture performed by Andrea Nuñez, April 12, 2017. Public domain Mark 1.0. Courtesy of the Rosenbach, Philadelphia.

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including those who this simplified workflow and project description have not managed to name explicitly. All this is also reliant on a range of technologies utterly unlike what was available twenty years earlier, when the true digital incunables in this chapter were being created: from cameras, to image processing software, to the cradle that supported the manuscript during image capture, to eastern American urban internet infrastructures in the later 2010s. On OPenn, I can access 442 digital images representing the full content of Rosenbach 439/16 (including stubs, binding, flyleaves, and fore-­edges). All 422 images are available in three different image sizes: • a “thumbnail JPEG that is 190 pixels on its longest side,” each of which might be 3.0–­5.5 KB; • a “standard all-­purpose JPEG intended for web use, that is 1800 pixels on its longest side,” generally in the 340–­360 KB range, although some may be as large as 390 KB and binding images may be as small as 88.8 KB; and • a “full-­sized, archival image, typically a TIFF image, 400 ppi or better” of 137.8 MB, although images of the binding may be as small as 55.7 MB.97 In 2001, Badke wrote that his 15 MB TIFF images of Ms.Eng.1 were “not usable directly by Web browsers.”98 In some ways, his statement remains true: the TIFFs of Rosenbach 439/16 are not viewable in a browser. In OPenn, when I click on a link to a thumbnail JPEG or a web-­display-­sized JPEG, it will open and can be used in my browser. But when I click on the link to the TIFF, it does not open but downloads to my machine. Therein lies a key difference between the late 1990s and the late 2010s. If “use” is just looking online, then JPEGS are fine and TIFFs—­whether 15 MB (as Badke and Green’s images of Ms.Eng.1 are) or 138 MB (as Nuñez et al.’s images of Rosenbach 439/16 are)—­are unnecessary and unusable. But if “use” means being able to download, share, and reuse in any number of forms, then TIFFs are essential. In that latter understanding of “use,” TIFFS are now entirely usable via

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web browsers. That usability depends on levels of average bandwidth almost unimaginable at the turn of the millennium. BiblioPhilly officially began in 2016, although work on planning and grant applications began earlier. According to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), that same year the median available broadband speed in the United States was 39 MB per second. The FCC’s report, however, also cautions that “actual speeds experienced by individual consumers may vary based on location and may vary during each day.”99 Two points need to be understood simultaneously. First, in the year that BiblioPhilly officially launched, average customers in the United States had approximately 696.4 times more bandwidth than what was available to the first users of DS in the late 1990s. Second, the same rural-­urban divide and demographic disparities reported in the earlier case studies persist. In 2016, “around 36% of the US rural population lacked access to fixed broadband at the FCC standard of 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload speeds, while 4% of the urban population lacked service at those standards.”100 I write these words in a town that technically meets the FCC’s definition of urban (more than 50,000 people), and at a time of day outside what the FCC defines as peak hours of internet use (7 p.m. to 11 p.m.), wherein higher traffic may lead to lower download speeds. This morning, it took me 7.35 seconds to download the 137.8 MB TIFF of Rosenbach 439/16, fol. 146v, or about 19 MB per second. This is below the FCC’s 2016 standard. But it still feels adequate for my purposes—­and it is worlds away from the speeds experienced by the graduate students in that 1998 experimental DS manuscripts seminar. Practicing comparative digital codicology helps reveal how much what a digital manuscript can be, in the moment of its creation and the layered moments of our ongoing reuse, depends on technology and internet infrastructures.

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Access and Project History: How Much Do You Know What You’re Working With?

Writing this chapter has been something of an act of penance, a counter to my earlier ahistorical approaches to digital manuscripts. It has also been a process of deeply rooted curiosity—­an experiment at discovering what extending codicological rigor to digital manuscript projects can show us about the specific concrete steps that underlie umbrella terms like “the era of the digital incunable” and “the rise of digitization.” In the case studies in this chapter, I hope that I have shown how generative it is to approach digital manuscript projects like this. One thing my analyses have generated is a cautionary tale for scholarly end users who rely on digital images of medieval books. In 2000, Andrew Prescott warned, “the ease with which digital images can be manipulated, altered and integrated, without obvious indication about the transformations that have occurred, is in many ways quite disturbing.” To what extent, Prescott asked, do these quiet manipulations and enhancements need to be recorded? 101 At least two of the digital incunables analyzed in this chapter have undergone some degree of image alteration. In postproduction image processing, Plimpton 255 underwent editing for rotation and alignment, and also color matching “by the digital values rather than by eye.”102 On the one hand, this description sounds like the color balance work that Smith performed at the open and close of each session digitizing M0379 in 2014. On the other, we do not know what modes of intervention and standardization were performed in 1998 by the Southern California digital photography company. Could they have engaged in a similar kind of Photoshop-­enhanced sharpening that Badke and Green report using on the scanned slides they created of Ms.Eng.1? By contrast, because I was there and studied the workflow, I know that the 2017 digital images of Rosenbach 439/16 have not been adjusted. This is not an evolutionary narrative, from the grim early days of undocumented image intervention to a more enlightened age of authentic representation. For one, there is still the question of whether a photograph that shows lively reflective gold as dull brown is an authentic or

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truthful copy. For another, the noninterventionist policy of BiblioPhilly grew not from abstract philosophies about “truth in copying” but from the project mission and pragmatic realities of time and labor. Seeking to photograph at least five hundred pages per day, this studio—­for this time and this project—­prioritized speed, quantity, and quality above time-­consuming, stylized, image-­enhancing work. Another digital manuscripts project, even one performed at the same imaging studio and by the same workers, might include image alteration—­when such alterations are a better fit for that other project’s mission. What I want to highlight, thus, is not an evolution of standards but a lack of clarity. In all of these case studies, in the publicly accessible descriptive metadata, there are neither statements identifying image enhancements nor declarations like “no images were altered in the making of this book.” Of course there are not. Across more than a quarter-­century of digital manuscript projects, the descriptive metadata describe the analog manuscript exemplars, and any postproduction image processing or enhancement is not part of that hard-­copy book. But just because it is not obviously labeled does not mean it has not occurred. To what degree, Prescott asked, do end users need to be aware that image interventions have taken place? 103 Technically, all of this information is accessible: to uncover which manuscript images have been enhanced, which have not, and which may have been, I have drawn on published scholarship, on new blogs and old project notes, and reached out, repeatedly, to curators, librarians, project managers, and digital imaging specialists. But particularly in the case of early digitization projects, the information is not easily accessible. With the exception of Badke’s bespoke 2001 website of Ms.Eng.1, all of the early digitized manuscripts float free of their project data—­including key details like whether or not images have been manipulated, sharpened, or otherwise enhanced. In raising the realities of Photoshop and postproduction image processing, I seek not to nurture paranoia about the supposed infidelities of digitized books. Rather, I seek to foster more clear-­eyed understanding of the digital cultural heritage upon which so much research, teaching, and public outreach depend. I also want to suggest that end

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users must be in the habit of not just accessing images and descriptive metadata. If you want to know what you are working with, you need to look into the underlying technical data, which should include information on whether the images you use for paleographical study, for instance, have been touched up. As Prescott also urged, more than twenty years ago, “in using digital images of manuscripts, we cannot be wholly reliant on the advice of technical experts, but must attempt to acquire some basic understanding of the way in which the technology works. For those new to digital images, talk of dpi or different types of file compression can seem quite daunting.” Nevertheless, it is “essential for scholarly users to become involved in discussions of these issues.”104 One persistent concern I have heard voiced about digital manuscripts is but what if they—­it is unclear in these complaints who “they” might be—­are messing with the images I use? My answer is that they are. Or might be. And if so, they likely have good, mission-­oriented reasons for doing so. If you want and need to know, you can, and should, find out. The Broadening of Scholarly Community

Writing this chapter has also been a rediscovery of what different manuscript projects in the incunable age of digitization actually meant when they talked about “access.” New technologies are often celebrated with sweeping claims of democratization—­the digitization of medieval manuscripts and creation of digital manuscript catalogs are not exceptions.105 Digital image capture has been described as “a revolution that makes medieval documents accessible to everyone.”106 Digitization has likewise been described as a “valuable access tool that allows archives, libraries, and other cultural heritage repositories to make items in their collections available to a worldwide, Internet-­connected audience from anyplace at any time.”107 Digital catalogs are celebrated in similarly effusive terms: “With online manuscript catalogs, anyone who can connect to the Internet can have access to these invaluable resources. Not only does this enhance everyone’s knowledge, but it also has the possibility of adding to the scholarship of manuscripts.”108 Yet, as the historical contexts for each of these case studies show, “access” is not an either/

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or; it is a spectrum—­and one that is highly dependent on an individual end user’s ability to obtain adequately functional hardware, sufficiently strong bandwidth, a large-­enough data plan, and a host of other necessary material supports. Once the realities of internet access are part of the conversation surrounding digitization, we have to admit that these resources are not accessible to everyone. But that is something that these early digital manuscript projects already knew: it is just that we have lost sight of those narrower, more nuanced understandings of digital access. Recovering them, I suggest, could help us better understand the real revolutions at the heart of these digital manuscript projects. For instance, even though I—­and many other end users, probably—­ have used the images in CIM as digital surrogates for hard-­copy manuscripts, the creators and curators behind the Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts never meant online access to their catalog entries to replace hands-­on research performed on analog books. Instead, CIM was made to facilitate a more foundational access to the British Library’s medieval manuscript collections. Before CIM, the British Library’s manuscript collection was, in Michelle Brown’s words, “an unexcavated treasure house.” Beyond a small sample of well-­studied “select” manuscripts, many less famous manuscripts “languish[ed] owing to inaccessibility.”109 It is not that researchers were forbidden access to these books; rather, the understudied manuscripts that were not the subject of citations or published reproductions tended to fly just below the limits of visibility. Basic knowledge is the entry to advanced study. Before you can lay hands on a manuscript, you must first know that it exists. You have to also know enough about it to be able to determine if its contents are worth studying—­not in the abstract sense that any medieval manuscript is a piece of shared cultural heritage and therefore worth studying in a general way, but in the targeted sense of whether or not a particular text is relevant to your immediate line of inquiry. Before CIM, that level of access was extremely limited, and it is precisely that level of access that Doyle is invoking when she writes in 2009 that “the catalogue descriptions and newly commissioned digital images of the Harley manuscripts have revolutionized access to the extraordinary

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riches of the Harley collection, making them easily accessible for the first time.”110 For the Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts, “access” was defined in terms that are at once simple and revolutionary—­to make available online the facts of these manuscripts’ existence and share information about their contents, in hope that more people, researchers and the general public alike, will be inspired to engage more deeply with all of the books Brown named “unexcavated treasures.” This is no small thing. In the popular imagination, medieval manuscript collections are haunted by a reputation for gatekeeping with elaborate rituals and locked doors holding would-­be researchers at bay. But that reputation may reflect less the presence of strict, local institutional rules and more the lack of an adequately detailed digital catalog that helps end users know that these collections are, in fact, open and available for study.111 Eric Ensley’s question about access to on-­site library resources holds just as true for digital access through online catalogs and finding aids: “Even sometimes when we say there’s access, if people don’t know it’s there, what’s the good?”112 It is this problem in access that, at every stage, across decades, CIM sought to solve. Making and maintaining a comprehensive, well-­illustrated digital catalog made it possible for a much wider variety of would-­be users to know what is there, know what is open for study, and use that knowledge as a foundation for their own, new work. Knowledge of a book’s existence and the ability to determine how it might be relevant for one’s own work are one part of “access”: training is another. Once you know that a manuscript exists and may be relevant to your specific research project, you have to know how to study it, analyze it, read it, transcribe it. For students who do not have access to that kind of “gateway” training, more advanced levels of manuscript study remain out of reach. In its first grant proposal, DS makes the case for pedagogical training as central to its project—­perhaps not as the single sun around which the project circles, but certainly as one half of a binary star system, in which research and teaching revolve around a shared gravitational center: “The grant hopes to democratize scholarship by providing the opportunity to conduct high-­level research and sophisticated graduate and undergraduate instruction at

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institutions far removed from major research libraries.” The “opportunity to conduct high-­level research” is very much aligned with more recent, sweeping declarations of digital access, as is the language of democratized scholarship. But those familiar claims are paired with a commitment to fostering “sophisticated graduate and undergraduate instruction”—­particularly at institutions that do not possess their own major research collection of analog medieval texts (a project mission that resonates powerfully with Wilkie and Denny-­Brown’s statements about why the Huntington’s Middle English manuscripts needed to be digitized). Admittedly, there is in DS’s early project description something of a substitutionary theory in play, a nod to how digital access might offer options other than expensive in-­person travel. But the overarching emphasis is on comprehensive training to open up hands-­on study to more students in rare book reading rooms. On that early cross-­ continental, collaborative graduate seminar, Mary Kay Duggan reports that reliance on digital images whetted students’ appetites to work with what Duggan calls “the actual manuscripts” as opposed to “an image of a leaf of that book.” Rather than standing in for, or taking the place of, hard-­copy analog manuscripts, “the manuscript image repertory encouraged use of the manuscript book.”113 The analog manuscript was the foundation of the digital copy, which was the foundation of deeper, better-­trained interest in the analog original. DS’s theory of what “access” means was twofold: to create 1) a gateway to new modes of research impossible to perform in analog reading rooms, and 2) a supplemental teaching collection that could open the doors of reading rooms to students who had trained almost anywhere. In addition to creating entries to foundational knowledge at multiple levels, in these early case studies “providing access” can also mean access to people, resources, opportunities to lead their own research and do their own creative digital work. As a student-­led boutique digitization project, Ms.Eng.1 is an outlier in these case studies—­but it is an important one. Badke and Green were not the students that the creators of Digital Scriptorium were thinking of when they argued for the importance of creating accessible digital teaching collections. In the late 1990s, the University of Victoria Libraries already possessed a manu-

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script collection that supported hands-­on course work using analog manuscripts. The current digital copies of Ms.Eng.1 exist because two undergraduates had access to those analog manuscripts as well as to the financial and technical resources and social supports needed to build something new themselves. Rather than being consumers of projects created by other people, or laborers doing the grunt work on someone else’s digital project, the student project-­leaders who created the digital copy of Ms.Eng.1 show how quickly pedagogical training can metamorphose into original research. Badke and Green’s digital incunable shows what can happen when students get to be more than consumers of or contributors to other people’s digital projects—­when they get to be the people doing the new kinds of digital manuscript research envisioned by the creators of Digital Scriptorium. More broadly, several of these early projects present “digital access”—­again—­not as a stand-­in for in-­person manuscript study but as an entrance into previously closed-­off scholarly conversations. Historically, manuscript studies has been the purview of a limited number of researchers; scholars who had not personally seen and touched the manuscripts being discussed could not easily verify, or question, that elite group’s findings.114 Writing in the early 2000s, Maureen Jameson argued that digitization—­in which she includes digital manuscript catalog projects like DS—­ democratizes the study of these texts by making source materials visible to people who could never have seen them first-­hand in the British Museum or the Bibliothèque de France, and fundamentally changes the status of the editor or paleographer . . . whose judgments are now exposed to wider scrutiny.115 The online sharing of digital manuscripts, she contends, demonstrates nothing less than a total transformation of “scholarly practice in the humanities”: The images dramatically increase access to source materials, reduce the power of the scholar as “gatekeeper,” expose the scholar’s judgments to wider scrutiny, and make it more likely that read-

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ers or users will actually collaborate in the work of perfecting the state of scholarship. This turn towards the collaborative is itself a sea change for the humanities, where single author publications have been the hallmark of serious scholarship for generations.116 More than fifteen years later, humanities scholarship still struggles with properly crediting collaborative, multiauthor publications and digital work. Digitization alone has not yet achieved Jameson’s dream of humanities transformed. But in tracing these case studies in the rise of digitization, it is my hope that the past can be prelude. In the “decade of digitization,” digital “access” was not developed as some bait-­and-­switch, telling certain kinds of end users that they ought to content themselves with just looking at photographs and descriptive metadata displayed on modern screens. Nor has it always been meant as a replacement for researchers bodily traveling to reading rooms—­although it sometimes has been used in this way, and will likely continue to be so to some extent and for some projects. Rather, “access” was seen as a series of tiered tools through which larger and more diverse populations of end users could become more involved in the work of book history: reading, touching, and building things; verifying with their own eyes inherited editorial wisdom; and subjecting claims to sustained, communal scrutiny.117 Ultimately, recovering these older understandings of “access”—­as the intertwined abilities to make, read, explore; to engage; to weigh and agree, or disagree and critique—­ shows a different past to digital manuscript projects. It also suggests a different future. Rather than quibbling over whether research done using digital manuscripts is or is not real, rigorous work (that horse has left the barn and cannot be returned: people are using digital manuscript projects as sources for their scholarship), we might synthesize and revise this constellation of older, more focused definitions: to have access to information about whether something exists, to have access to the training to do the work we feel called to do, to have the ability to participate and lead as well as consume and follow, to be able to collaborate, critique, and work together to see old things anew.

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CHAPTER 4 I N T E R O P E R A B L E M E TA D ATA AND FAILING TOWARD THE FUTURE

M E T A D A T A M A K E D I G I T A L M A N U S C R I P T S . W I T H O U T sufficient data about your data all you have is a pile of undiscoverable photographs. With it, you have a searchable collection. Metadata can also help connect digital manuscripts across collections. Much of the history of digitization is of objects and collections produced as discrete projects. Ideas, tools, techniques, and people move between institutions, but the data have largely remained “siloed.”1 Thus, at time of writing, when I wish to compare the digital copies of Victoria, University of Victoria, Ms.Eng.1; London, British Library, Harley MS 1766; and Philadelphia, the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Rosenbach MS 439/16, I do so by opening different windows and positioning them like tiles on my monitor. While this juxtaposition allows for comparison, the digital books themselves remain locked in their unique collections, each functioning according to the rules of their local infrastructures. One of the enduring goals

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of digital manuscript studies is to get all of our manuscripts discoverable, viewable, and even annotatable within a single, shared system. A major challenge to this is legacy data. New projects can (and should) be designed to adhere to emerging best practices supporting interoperability, including interoperable metadata—­but what about projects that already exist? What about the digital incunables made in the 1990s, or the more recent projects of the mid-­2010s? How can they also be included in the sought-­for universal manuscripts aggregator of the future? In 2013, I was hired into the role of Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Medieval Studies at Stanford University, a hybrid position hosted partially in the English Department and partially in Stanford University Libraries, within the Digital Library Systems and Services Department (DLSS). The position was created by Elaine Treharne and Benjamin Albritton, who served as coprincipal investigators and my direct supervisors. Some CLIR postdoctoral fellowships have postdocs determine local needs and then self-­assign core projects as part of their fellowships.2 This was not one of those positions. Instead of having to invent its own program, it was clear from the initial job ad that the holder of this position would be slotted into existing expert teams working on ongoing digital manuscript initiatives. One particular task would come to obsess me for the two-­year duration of the postdoc and long after: “the Fellow will apply and test the methods and technologies being developed in SUL’s interoperable initiatives  .  .  .  , focusing on Stanford’s growing corpus of medieval resources, faculty research and pedagogical objectives, and his/her own field of expertise.”3 Broadly speaking, “interoperability” means “the ability of two or more computer systems or pieces of software to exchange and subsequently make use of data.”4 In digital libraries, it means the “potential for metadata to cross boundaries between different information contexts.”5 In DLSS, it meant, among other things, joining the team working on the Mellon-­ funded Digital Manuscripts Index project (DMS-­Index), an ongoing experiment measuring the level of effort required to build a manuscript

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aggregator that could draw together legacy data from existing digital manuscript repositories, and testing what these approaches to metadata aggregation might cost—­both in terms of initial conversion from legacy formats and indexing and in long-­term sustainability.6 The postdoc would contribute, particularly, by “curating data sets by identifying, aggregating, transforming and integrating resources from multiple sources.”7 That is, get access to the item-­level descriptive metadata of hundreds of manuscripts digitized by institutions around the world, and then copy and transform those data sets into a single, shared metadata schema, with the goal of achieving mutual discoverability. This chapter provides a personal narrative of what I did and learned as part of the DMS-­Index team. I begin with what I have argued is best practice in digital codicology—­grounding specific digital projects in time and space. To properly contextualize manuscript metadata, we need to understand not just the immediate project and its recent history but some of the deeper history of each encoding standard. Thus, the first section of this chapter offers short accounts of the metadata schemata that most influenced the work I contributed to DMS-­Index: MAchine-­Readable Cataloging (MARC), Dublin Core (DC), the Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS), and the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Next, I trace the processes of transforming metadata sets shared by three of DMS-­ Index’s contributors: the Walters Art Museum’s Digital Walters, Parker on the Web, and e-­codices: the virtual manuscripts library of Switzerland. In each, I highlight how my growing coding skills changed what I could do with the different data sets and therefore what descriptive metadata could be added into the manuscripts aggregator—­to show how the story of digital manuscripts is still a narrative of human copyists in a constant state of evolving skills, tools, and best practices, even in backend, largely unseen work like XML-­tagging and metadata transformation. In multidecade digital manuscript initiatives, all project revisions and best practices will outlast any worker or contributor, making it extremely difficult to make accurate final assessments about what a

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project means, its successes, failures, impact, and afterlives. In the final section of this chapter, I thus explore the urge by end users to declare different digital medieval projects successes or failures, in the context of my own grapplings with particular iterations of this project narrative. In 2015 and early 2016, I felt I could declare DMS-­Index a success, a shining path into the future of digital medieval manuscript studies; by 2019, I felt I had to declare that shining path a failure and frame it as a cautionary tale to be mined for lessons for future projects and studies. Ultimately, this chapter shows the limits of both of my earlier assessments, and it maps out one key disciplinary schism between end users located in traditional academic departments and maintainers of digital manuscript collections working in museums and libraries. I will suggest that the familiar “publish or perish” criterion of academic assessment is too narrow and short a metric for understanding the time frames in which large-­scale digital manuscript projects actually work. Instead of trying to fit digital manuscript projects into modern scholarly expectations of success/failure, publish/perish, we might do better to align digital manuscript projects with the time scales that produced analog manuscripts in the first place—­the slow-­building, multidecade rhythms of accretion, revision, and communal reuse. Putting Metadata Schemata in Time and Space

One of the first things I remember, early in my postdoc, is my libraries supervisor Benjamin Albritton emphasizing that one of the biggest challenges we faced with DMS-­Index is that manuscript studies, as a field, is not interoperable with itself. For example, we have no universally accepted term for the processed animal skin upon which many Western European manuscripts are written. Some modern researchers and catalogers treat “parchment” as a generic term that can describe any writing support made of animal skin.8 Others use “parchment” to describe writing supports made of goat or sheep skin only and reserve “vellum” for writing supports made of calf.9 Still others use “parchment,” “vellum,” and “membrane” interchangeably.10 Moving across different traditions is, to use M. J. Driscoll’s excellent analogy,

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a bit like when as a youth one first has dinner at someone else’s house and discovers that not everyone does everything in exactly the same way. It could be a small detail, such as how the table is set or the napkins folded, but it could also be something fairly major, like the order and composition of the courses: although pretty much everybody has their pudding last, some people eat their salad before, others with, and still others after the main course (but before the pudding, naturally)—­and then of course there are those who don’t eat salad at all. . . . [W]hile there is quite clearly a single tradition for the description of (western) manuscripts, one with its roots in antiquity, there is also a great deal of variation within that tradition, and the majority of us are brought up and remain within one regional variety.11 But in a digital manuscript aggregator, all these regional varieties would coexist side by side. Entries that, correct to local cataloging practice, call one type of writing support “parchment” would appear beside entries that, just as correct to their own cataloging practice, call the same material “vellum.” Additional challenges could be caused by different, specifically digital, cataloging conventions. One institution used “parchment” in its metadata, while another used “Parchment” and still another the shorthand “parch”—­and even small variations like these can fragment the data. Albritton showed me an earlier iteration of DMS-­Index, which retrieved records for 118 manuscripts on “parchment,” 14 more on “Parchment,” and a further 394 on “parch”—­as well as 392 manuscripts on “Vellum” and 2 more on “vellum.” Yet despite these challenges, he emphasized that variations in metadata were not insurmountable barriers to manuscript interoperability. Hand-­curation of data sets, transforming and standardizing metadata across institutions, might offer a viable option for an interoperable manuscripts index. Metadata are “structured information that describes, explains, locates, or otherwise makes it easier to retrieve, use, or manage an information resource.”12 Jeffery Pomerantz explains, “In the modern era of

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ubiquitous computing, metadata [have] become infrastructural, like the electric grid or the highway system,” and, just like the electric grid and highways, metadata fade “into the background of everyday life, taken for granted as just part of what makes modern life run smoothly.”13 The National Information Standards Organization identifies three distinct categories of metadata: administrative metadata (which can be segmented into rights management metadata and preservation metadata), structural metadata, and descriptive metadata.14 This last is the most familiar for end users of digital manuscripts, because it is what makes discovery possible. Descriptive metadata is what lets researchers search for manuscripts containing works by John Lydgate, or miniatures of St. Margaret of Antioch, or manuscripts still in their original bindings. For a computer to find and retrieve the digital manuscripts that fit researchers’ needs, this information cannot just be represented in images of the book: it must be part of the manuscript’s descriptive metadata. At the time I was beginning to contribute to the DMS-­Index project team, an accepted good practice for supporting search and discovery was to wrap key terms in XML tags, encoding human-­friendly manuscript descriptions in a machine-­readable form. As Albritton noted early in my training, there is a world of difference between “Chaucer” as author of a book, “Chaucer” as subject of a book, or “Chaucer” as largely irrelevant reference buried deep in a works cited list. Wrapping a phrase in an XML tag enables targeted searching in categories that general keyword searches run together: “Chaucer, Geoffrey, -­1400” as opposed to Landrum, Grace W. “Chaucer’s Use of the Vulgate.” PMLA. 39 (Mar., 1924): 75–­100.. Different metadata standards may use different tags, but how XML tagging renders information resources discoverable remains largely the same. There is no single, universal metadata standard that fits all projects. New standards are always being invented; new iterations of existing standards are in ongoing development; new best practices are constantly emerging—­all driven by community need.15 In my work on DMS-­Index, three metadata schemata emerged as particularly favored by digital manuscript communities the team was working with: the

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Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), Dublin Core (DC), and the Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS). Johanna Drucker has argued that metadata schemes must be read as models of knowledge, as discursive instruments that bring the object of their inquiry into being, shaping the fields in which they operate by defining quite explicitly what can and cannot be said about the objects in a particular collection or online environment. Analysis of metadata and content models, then, is an essential part of the critical apparatus of digital humanities.16 Haidy Geismar similarly contends “metadata becomes another word for epistemology.”17 Building on Drucker and Geismar, I situate TEI, DC, and MODS as “models of knowledge” created by specific intellectual communities, each with their own recoverable history, all of which came together to shape what I could and could not do as a nascent data curator working as part of the DMS-­Index team. MARC: MAchine-­Readable Cataloging

Before TEI, MODS, and DC, there was MARC. In 1965, the Library of Congress hired Henriette Avram to “design and implement the procedures required to automate the cataloging, searching, indexing, and document retrieval functions” within the library.18 Avram was a mathematician and computer programmer with previous experience working at the American National Security Agency; she had no formal library training. Supported by a grant from the Council on Library Resources (in 1997, renamed the Council on Library and Information Resources; the same group that funded the postdoctoral fellowship I held 2013–­15 and the digitization of Rosenbach 439/16 in 2017), Avram led a team developing “a standard vehicle for the communication of bibliographic data” that would move the Library of Congress’s cataloging system beyond hand-­t yped card catalogs.19 They named their program MARC, for “MAchine-­Readable Cataloging.” The MARC pilot project included sixteen libraries beyond the Library of Congress, representing a range of library types: state, government, university, public, and special, pri-

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marily in the United States but with the University of Toronto extending the project’s reach into Canada.20 By 1967, the work of Avram’s team was gaining greater international attention: The interest expressed by the British National Bibliography (BNB) in mounting a UK/MARC Pilot Project and the many visits from foreign librarians directed thinking toward a standard communications format suitable for interchanging bibliographic data, not from one organization (LC) to many, but among organizations, perhaps crossing national boundaries.21 Concurrently, another library-­based initiative in data sharing was being launched. In 1967, the presidents and library directors of several Ohio colleges and universities formed the “Ohio College Library Center” (OCLC), a nonprofit dedicated to “develop[ing] a computerized system in which the libraries of Ohio academic institutions could share resources and reduce costs.”22 In particular, the founders of the OCLC sought to share the labor of cataloging across member institutions. When it came time to select a cataloging standard for the OCLC, they chose MARC. But their choice raised challenges: in the late 1960s, terminals “that could display a character set as large as the complete MARC character set were simply not commercially available.”23 Confident that MARC was nevertheless the right choice for large-­scale library data standardization, the head of the OCLC’s Research and Development, Philip Long, invented a new terminal, fully capable of displaying MARC records.24 In 1971, the OCLC debuted “the first, successful online, real-­time bibliographic system” with MARC as its cataloging standard. The result of the combined power of these two data-­sharing/data-­standardization initiatives was staggering. Focusing on the networking power of the OCLC, S. Michael Malinconico explains, “In the early 1970s, with the exception of airline reservation systems and defence-­related systems, very few systems employed as extensive a communication network, maintained direct access files as large or handled as many transactions in unit time, as OCLC did.”25 Focusing on MARC, Roy Tennant writes in similarly ringing phrases:

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Without question, the development of the Machine Readable Cataloging (MARC) standard (www​.loc​.gov​/​marc​/ ​) in the 1960s was a revolutionary advancement in modern librarianship. It formed the foundation for moving libraries into the computer age by providing a common syntax for recording and transferring bibliographic data between computers. In association with the Anglo-­American Cataloging Rules (AACR), MARC allowed libraries to share cataloging on a massive scale, and thus greatly increase the efficiency of the cataloging task as well as set the stage for the creation of centralized library databases . . . which are now major worldwide resources.26  MARC moved libraries into the nascent computer age. It streamlined cataloging labor by letting libraries share records in a vast communication network—­on par with ARPANET. It laid the groundwork for WorldCat and other global library databases. But for all of MARC’s revolutionary cataloging data standardization in the 1970s, it was designed in, and for, an earlier age of computers. It was not an easy fit with the growing internet in the 1990s. Nor were its number-­based tags an easy fit with the language-­based tags favored by HTML and XML. From the perspective of what computers have become capable of since the 1960s, MARC—­“machine readable”—­is a misnomer. Although the numeric codes that preface each entry in a record may appear to nonlibrarians as though they are readable by a computer, they are not (fig. 4.1). Those numeric tags function as “content designators (tags, indicators, and subfield codes)” but those codes are read by human metadata specialists and not computers.27 Computers can exchange and share MARC files. They can “read” MARC records and spit the information back out at the user. But they cannot understand or analyze the content of those files.28 Making content at least minimally readable—­in the more modern sense of “understandable”—­for computers is the field of markup languages. Markup languages such as GML (IBM’s Generalized Markup Language) and its extension SGML (Standard Generalized Markup

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Figure 4.1  Screenshot showing the MARC record for Binghamton University Libraries, Binghamton, New York, BS2275.N 53 1340, Postilla Litteralis Super Epistolam ad Hebraeos, by Nicholas of Lyra, as it appeared in late 2021. Record created by Rachel B. Turner, Interim Head of Cataloging/Metadata. Used with permission of Binghamton University Libraries as the original creator of the record.

Language) were being developed in the 1960s and 1970s, but they did not experience significant uptake by the library cataloging community until the rise of the commercial internet. By the mid-­1990s, library catalogs suddenly could—­and needed to—­go online, but they could not do so in standard MARC form. It was not enough to put exclusively human-­readable content online: for it to be connected meaningfully to other online objects and websites, it had to become truly machine-­ readable as well. Like GML and SGML, XML (eXtensible Markup Language) made content more readable for computers by wrapping phrases in language-­based tags that told the computer about the content between those tags. A computer could not understand anything about the content “100 0#$ Christine, $de Pisan”—­but wrap the phrase in tags like Christine de Pisan and the content becomes something the computer can engage with on a minimal level. It still may not know who “Christine de Pisan” was, but it will know whatever is between those tags is classified as “author.” Writing in the early 2000s, Tennant draws a sharp line between what MARC could do for the information needs of the later twentieth

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century and what it could not do for the emerging information needs of the early twenty-­first: The technical environment has completely changed from the first days of MARC. When MARC was created, computer storage was very expensive—­so expensive that every character was treasured. Very few people had access to a computer—­not at work, and most certainly not at home. The Internet was no more than an idea. XML was decades away from being an idea.29 At the turn of the millennium, however, Tennant declared that library communities had new needs and different ambitions: We require computer systems, policies, and procedures that allow libraries to create bibliographic metadata, ingest bibliographic metadata from others, make enhancements to it, output it in both complex and simple forms, and do all of this and more with facility and effectiveness. We require a bibliographic metadata infrastructure that likes any metadata it sees, and can easily output simple records when needed, or complex records when called upon to do so.30 MARC is still very much in use for cataloging to this day and its influence is hard to overstate. But librarians seeking to make their content discoverable online needed to find new ways of making information understandable to computers. On the foundations of MARC, DC and MODS were built. DC: Dublin Core

By 1994, approximately half a million objects were online, but they were not yet mutually comprehensible and discoverable. To address this problem, in 1995 the OCLC and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications held a joint workshop in Dublin, Ohio.31 Participants there developed a “standard set of 15 interoperable metadata elements designed to facilitate the description and recovery of document-­like resources in a networked environment.”32 The founders named this set of elements Dublin Core (DC) after their meeting place.33 These fifteen

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elements were designed to match a “lowest common denominator,” that is, provide basic descriptive information that could accurately fit millions of online resources. As Pomerantz puts it: Designed to allow description of literally any networked resource, by necessity, it’s agnostic as to the format of the thing being described. Someone who creates a painting is called a painter; someone who creates a book is called an author, someone who creates a movie is called a filmmaker, someone who creates a dance is called a choreographer, etc. Many names exist for individuals who engage in different forms of creation, and these names are meaningful in natural human language. But these shades of meaning are irrelevant for lowest common denominator description. Dublin Core simply collapses all of these forms of creation into one single category: Creator.34 The reception of Dublin Core has been mixed. On the one hand, uptake has been remarkable. It was the original supporting metadata schema for Omeka, a free exhibit-­building and digital collections management platform beloved in digital humanities circles, and for ContentDM, the OCLC’s proprietary digital collections management system, which at time of writing is the management system for several of the digital library collections in this book.35 DC remains one of the “most used descriptive metadata standards in the library domain.” It plays a foundational role in the Open Archives Initiatives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-­PMH), “which supports metadata sharing and interoperability.” At least as late as 2013, the OAI-­PMH mandated Simple Dublin Core “as its lingua franca, or lowest-­common-­ denominator XML metadata grammar.”36 In other words, if a library or institution believed in the broader mission of the Open Archives Initiative, and wanted all content in its repository to be interoperable with the enormous network of repositories participating in the OAI, they had to do at least part of their metadata according to the constraints of Simple DC. On the other hand, DC is not universally accepted as the best tool for moving library catalogs online. This is in part because, as the creators

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of DC explain quite clearly in their early publications, DC was never intended to replace MARC.37 It is also because within cataloging and metadata communities, “there has historically been some tension between supporters of a minimalist view, who emphasize the need to keep the elements to a minimum and the semantics and syntax simple,” and “supporters of a structuralist view, who argue for finer semantic distinctions and more extensibility for particular communities.”38 The same concision and lowest common denominator approach that make DC such a useful tool for sharing basic metadata across institutions limit its usefulness for more advanced, more granular description. But those granular, detailed descriptions contain key search terms for researchers of complex objects—­like medieval manuscripts. In short, DC fit some community needs beautifully, but it was not a panacea for all metadata needs. Working on the DMS-­Index team, I encountered DC primarily in the top-­level descriptive metadata of e-­codices, in the capacity of lowest common denominator wrapping around key terms for basic search. MODS: The Metadata Object Description Schema

Around the turn of the millennium, discussions proliferated about whether MARC was a misfit for the digital age (most notably, Tennant’s “MARC Must Die” in 2002). But MARC persisted—­both in the millions of catalog entries created according to MARC standards since 1971 and as a still-­useful tool employed in ongoing cataloging.39 Revisiting his polemic in 2004, Tennant concluded that it was not that libraries needed to kill MARC but rather that they could not rely on MARC as the key to all library metadata: If for no other reason than easy migration, we must create an infrastructure that can deal with MARC (although the MARC elements may be encoded in XML rather than MARC codes) with equal facility as it deals with many other metadata standards. We must, in other words, assimilate MARC into a broader, richer, more diverse set of tools, standards, and protocols.40 Work on this was already underway. In 2002, the Library of Congress’s Network Development and MARC Standards Office had published two

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different updates to MARC: MARCXML, which provided “a lossless conversion from MARC in the ISO 2709 structure to an XML syntax” and the Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS), “an XML schema that includes a subset of data elements derived from MARC 21.” MODS provided solutions for several community needs: it was “a simpler MARC that uses language-­based, rather than numerical, tags”; it was “particularly applicable to digital library objects that require rich descriptions compatible with existing ones in library catalogs”; and it was “not as complex as full MARC, and thus easier and quicker to create.”41 According to Rebecca S. Guenther, one of its chief architects, MODS was not a replacement for MARC so much as it was an extension of MARC for emerging digital environments. Comparing MODS to DC and MARC, Cole and Han explain: Rich description of electronic resources is a particular focus of MODS, which provides some advantages over other metadata schemes. MODS elements are richer than the Dublin Core; its elements are more compatible with library data than . . . Dublin Core standards; and it is simpler to apply than the full MARC 21 bibliographic format.42 MODS, that is, helped translate, update, and streamline MARC into XML while simultaneously giving libraries a richer set of elements and attributes than the fifteen elements of Simplified DC. In the timeline of evolving metadata standards, this places the creation of MODS after the creation of Dublin Core, with its fifteen elements, but before the 2012 creation of Qualified Dublin Core, now with fifty-­five elements. MODS offers more opportunity for fine-­grained details than original DC, but that granularity and flexibility come at a cost. As Cole and Han caution, “MODS records from different institutions and different projects tend to be less consistent at this time.”43 MODS was the foundation for all of my work on DMS-­Index, for reasons that had to do with institutional best practices and power hierarchies far above the position I held. To begin with, Stanford Library’s Digital Object Registry represented its descriptive metadata in MODS. Moreover, Stanford Libraries and the Walters Art Museum

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entered into a data-­sharing agreement shortly before I began work as Treharne and Albritton’s data curation postdoc. This data-­sharing agreement included the provision that Stanford Libraries would make the Walters’s digital manuscripts discoverable through the Stanford online Searchworks catalog. To make the Walters digital manuscripts discoverable through Searchworks, their descriptive metadata had to be translated into Stanford’s local implementation of MODS. Along with enhancing and transforming metadata for Stanford manuscripts from EAD XML into MODS, transforming the Walters’s manuscripts’ metadata was one of the first projects I was given as a brand-­new data curation postdoc. Since MODS was the markup for my first major data sets, Albritton determined that MODS should be the metadata schema standard I used for my contributions to the larger interoperable manuscripts experiment. TEI: The Text Encoding Initiative

Broadly speaking, TEI is significantly more than a metadata schema: it is a set of standards for representing text in digital form, including encoding novels, plays, and poetry in machine-­readable form.44 Humanities researchers (particularly those involved in the TEI community) argue for its applicability beyond traditional humanities disciplines.45 But among library and metadata communities, TEI is sometimes seen not as a tool of library infrastructure and metadata but as a resource of targeted utility—­primarily supporting humanities research.46 TEI was established in 1987, in response to the rapid growth of a wide variety of technologies and humanities projects, which were “dominated by mutually incompatible formats.”47 Lou Barnard explains how these differing formats created “serious technical obstacles even to the simple transfer of data files from one machine to another, to say nothing of the difficulties posed by mutually incompatible and proprietary file formats.” As a corrective, the founders of TEI sought to create “practical recommendations as to how an extensible set of guidelines consistent with the goal of a universal text-­encoding scheme might be achieved.”48 A first public draft of TEI guidelines was released in July 1990 as “TEI Proposal Number 1” (or TEI P1), with a corrected reprint

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(TEI P1.1) released in November 1990.49 “Starting in April 1992, the TEI began publishing in electronic fascicles various chapters of the second public draft, TEI P2.”50 In May 1994, a finalized version was published as Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange (TEI P3).51 In 2002, TEI P4 was published. In November 2007, TEI P5, which included a module on the description of medieval manuscripts as physical objects, was ratified and published. Revisions and additions are ongoing. The digital projects that beta-­tested the TEI guidelines in the late 1980s and early 1990s are impressively broad in humanities discipline, national location, and temporal interest. They did not, however, include early encoding projects dedicated to medieval texts or textuality.52 Nor was TEI initially designed to serve the needs of book historians, codicologists, and other researchers interested in books as objects.53 Yet the extensibility of TEI and its potential usefulness in fulfilling the needs of manuscript researchers were almost immediately evident. In the conclusion to their 1995 history of TEI, Nancy M. Ide and C. M. Sperberg-­McQueen highlight manuscript description as an important area of future development.54 In 1996 and 1997, the working groups MASTER (Manuscripts Access through STandards for Electronic Records) and TEI Medieval Manuscripts Description (TEI-­MMSS) were formed with the shared goal of developing standards for describing medieval manuscripts as material artifacts. The attendees of their subsequent meetings represent a roll call for many significant turn-­ of-­the-­millennium digital manuscript projects: Peter Robinson of The Canterbury Tales Project, Hope Mayo from the Electronic Access to Medieval Manuscripts (EAMMS) Project, the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library (HMML), and Digital Scriptorium, as well as “representatives from major manuscript holding institutions in Britain, France, The Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Italy, together with experts on MARC, the Berkeley Finding Aids project, the Text Encoding Initiative, and the Dublin Core.” The MASTER and TEI-­MMSS working groups ultimately developed rather different methods for marking up information about medieval manuscripts.55 A special task force reconciled the TEI-­MMSS and MASTER tagsets and in 2002 a single standard was published in TEI P4.56

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TEI markup was popular with several of the institutions that shared their metadata for reuse in DMS-­Index, and so, as part of the DMS-­Index team, I worked with TEI in multiple forms. But each partner institution used TEI differently. Librarian-­authored scholarship on MODS warns that its flexibility may inhibit interoperability—­but MODS is strict compared to the adaptability of TEI. TEI’s limber encoding standards are a response to the variation in methods of manuscript description that exists within the field of manuscript studies.57 From the viewpoint of individual projects, and the long history of variation within manuscript studies, TEI’s flexibility is a strength: it allows each project to use TEI’s elements in the way that makes most sense locally. But from the viewpoint of a shared global manuscripts index, that same suppleness could be a serious challenge to easy metadata interoperability. It bears repeating that none of these cataloging and metadata standards were developed specifically for medieval manuscripts. But all are important players in digital manuscript metadata. When digitized and put online, manuscripts become “document-­like resources in a networked environment,” which makes DC a logical fit in some instances. Similarly, when a manuscript is digitized, the resulting copies are “electronic resources”—­the great strength of MODS. Unlike DC and MODS, TEI was not created to standardize and share bibliographic data, but its goal of creating “an extensible set of guidelines consistent with the goal of a universal text-­encoding scheme” is close kin to the goal of a universal, interoperable digital manuscript aggregator. As the different communities that developed these metadata schemata have moved into manuscript digitization, they have carried their needs, practices, and metadata schemata with them. And the forms their metadata take determine how shareable, discoverable, reusable—­how interoperable—­ these digital resources really are. Moving Metadata between Schemata: Crosswalks and Transforms

There never will be a single, universal metadata standard appropriate to all digital projects and objects, and so libraries, archives, and other cultural heritage institutions have developed best practices for taking

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information expressed according to one metadata standard and remaking it according to the rules and constraints of another. This begins with creating a “crosswalk.” As explained by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), a crosswalk is a mapping of the elements, semantics, and syntax from one metadata scheme to those of another. A crosswalk allows metadata created by one community to be used by another group that employs a different metadata standard. The degree to which these crosswalks are successful at the individual record level depends on the similarity of the two schemes, the granularity of the elements in the target scheme compared to that of the source, and the compatibility of the content rules used to fill the elements of each scheme.58 Tennant describes crosswalks as “algorithms for translating metadata from one encoding scheme to another in an effective and accurate manner”; they are often represented as a table or chart, showing “equivalent or nearly equivalent metadata elements or groups of metadata elements within different metadata schemas.”59 The phrase—­“nearly equivalent metadata elements”—­might seem to suggest a close fit. But in reality, different standards may mark up the same information in very different ways (table 4.1). For instance, for the Dublin Core metadata standard, the element is defined as “an entity primarily responsible for making the resource.”60 For an illuminated manuscript the tag could, thus, be used to give credit to not just the author(s) for works bound within that manuscript but also all the translator(s), limner(s), and/or scribe(s) because long-­standing custom in manuscript studies treats all of these people as “entities primarily responsible for making” the manuscript. By contrast, the TEI P5 guidelines offer the more targeted element for crediting the creator/composer of a text’s original content:

Premierfait, Laurent de, -­1418 61

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100 0#$a Boethius, $d–524.

Crosswalking the concept “author” Boethius, –524

Dublin Core (DC)

Boethius, –524

Text Encoding Initiative (TEI P5)

Table 4.1  Simplified crosswalk, mapping the concept of “author” across MARC, DC, MODS, and one possible markup option in TEI P5.

MAchine-Readable Cataloging (MARC21)

Metadata Schema

Boethius, –524

author



Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS)

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During my time as a data curator, TEI did not have a dedicated element. But manuscript researchers needed to be able to search by scribe. Answering this need, metadata for digital manuscripts from the Walters Art Museum used the element (statement of responsibility):

scribe Mubārakshāh ibn Quṭb 62 To encode the contributions of authors and scribes, e-­codices adapted a different element and attribute to achieve the same precision: Christine de Pisan63 Jean.64 All of these contributor types are acknowledged in a different way in MODS (table 4.2). Tennant cautions, “Where record formats have fields not found in other formats, or that have metadata that are of a different granularity . . . there will be problems”: an excellent summary of my experience as an entry-­level data curator joining the established DMS-­Index team.65 Haslhofer and Klas describe interoperability as being able “to exchange metadata between two or more systems without or with minimal loss of information and without any special effort on either system,” but—­for me—­combining different institutions’ descriptive metadata into a single searchable manuscripts index was neither seamless nor effortless.66 After a crosswalk is written, the data still have to be transformed. Working as part of the DMS-­Index team, I did this by writing one custom XQuery script for each institution’s digital manuscript collection, using the program Oxygen. Each institution got only one script, which would be run simultaneously on tens, hundreds, sometimes more than a thousand individual metadata files. That script would make new copies of each metadata file, now marked up according to the formal rules of the MODS metadata schema. This process changes neither the

187







Crosswalk for the concept “author”

Crosswalk for the concept “scribe”

Crosswalk for the concept “artist”

Crosswalk for the concept “translator”



artist



translator



artist

translator





scribe



author

AND ALSO

MODS, interpreted by Stanford University Libraries

TEI P5, interpreted by e-codices

scribe

TEI P5, interpreted by Walters Art Museum

Table 4.2  Sample crosswalk, mapping ways of encoding author, scribe, artist, and translator across e-codices DC, Walters Art Museum TEI P5, e-codices TEI P5, and Stanford University Libraries MODS.

Simplified DC, interpreted by e-codices

Metadata Standard, and local interpreter, c. 2013

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original digital manuscript nor that manuscript’s metadata. Transforming the metadata creates a new copy of the manuscript description, in the new schema. Ideally, this new copy will lose or change as little of the original content as possible. These are the ideals of interoperability, but the challenge also felt deeply personal. For me, especially at the start of my postdoc, losing content felt like a personal failure—­a betrayal both of my duties as a new contributor to the decades-­long quest for interoperability, and of my duties as a medievalist steeped in centuries of destruction and loss. I felt enormous pressure to do right by these books. The Walters Art Museum: Change Is Inevitable

When I began my postdoc and joined the ongoing experiments with DMS-­Index, I did not know the histories of cataloging, metadata, and data standardization. Instead of being steeped in library and information studies, I was a newly minted English PhD steeped in late medieval English poetry. Particularly in the early months of my postdoc, I leaned heavily on my supervisors, my more experienced colleagues in DLSS, and at Stanford Libraries more broadly. I also turned to medieval authorities for guidance on my work. When I considered the very real possibility that I would change the manuscripts’ metadata in the act of copying, I feared being seen by scholarly end users of DMS-­Index as a latter-­day Adam Scriveyn, disfiguring the texts which I had been asked to help copy and preserve. (Admittedly, my fears were naive: end users of digital manuscripts may praise or critique decisions made by librarians, curators, and digitization specialists. But even if the data I was curating for the experimental manuscripts index had ultimately been published, the kind of unsigned backend metadata work I was doing is rarely visible enough to be the target of the kind of pointed professional critiques that I feared.) When I considered the need to preserve content, I turned to the poetry of John Lydgate. Writing on Lydgate, David Lawton offers that one of the poet’s “most impressive characteristics” is that he is “no trimmer.”67 Although Lawton’s praise of Lydgate’s expansiveness is shadowed with irony, my engagement with Lydgate’s curatorial practice was decidedly straightforward. As a translator and

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transmitter of inherited literary traditions, Lydgate was no trimmer; as a beginning data curator, it turned out neither was I. The Walters metadata were marked up according to TEI P5, chapter 10 guidelines.68 At times, I found it easy to adhere to my vision of data-­ curator-­as-­perfect-­and-­faithful-­copyist and copy the Walters’s local interpretations of TEI directly into matching elements in Stanford’s local interpretations of MODS. For instance, the Walters’s TEI

al-­Qurʿān

69 could be crosswalked directly to the Stanford MODS element al-­Qurʿān with no metadata changed or lost. But as the granularity and richness of the TEI-­encoded manuscript descriptions increased, the ability of MODS to contain that data lessened. There were no elements in MODS that directly match TEI P5’s specialized tags for writing support, foliation, collation, signatures, catchwords, layout, hand description, and decorations. But, focused on what I felt were my twin duties—­to the analog medieval manuscripts whose metadata I was practicing on and to the scholarly end users who might one day use my work—­I wanted to correctly and fully copy it all. In my efforts to transform everything without fail, I stretched MODS elements into scarcely recognizable shapes, relying heavily on elements modified by the attribute @displayLabel (table 4.3). Even with this kind of heavy use, or abuse, of MODS, I could not maintain the full granularity of the Walters metadata. One challenge lay in the elements nested inside elements. The creators of the Walters’s manuscripts drew distinctions between different types of notes: , , and .70 In theory, I could copy all of these into equally granular MODS elements. However, if I did, I would need to create separate elements for each type: the Walters TEI could be matched to a Stanford MODS , and the Walters TEI could be matched to a Stanford MODS . But should it? If this project was merely about duplicating one institution’s data, such a solution might be feasible. But my project supervisors advised me to not think of the crosswalk I was drafting like that. As I worked with the Walters metadata, they reminded me, I was also designing “metadata envelopes” that could be subsequently reused for every other institution that shared metadata with DMS-­Index. And if I was laying a foundation for a multi-­institution, interoperable manuscript index, I could not design transforms with just the Digital Walters in mind. Consider the distorting effect on readers if they were viewing metadata of a Walters manuscript alongside metadata for a manuscript held by the Lund University Library in Sweden. The Walters uses meticulous subtypes of notes within notes to highlight different information. To achieve a similar effect, the Lund Library uses a single element within each and uses a child-­element

to indicate subject breaks within individual note entries. Both institutions use different TEI tags to serve similar goals, but the formal properties of their XML were not commensurate. If I preserved all the Digital Walters’s separate subtypes of and simply matched them to the Lund’s singular , Lund’s metadata might look less meticulous in comparison simply because the Walters had many categories to the Lund’s single, overarching information unit. Alternately, the effect might be that the Walters’s notes could appear fragmented when read against the Lund’s unitary vision of what a should be and do. Neither would be true: my metadata would be participating in a kind of suggestive untruth, pushing readers to see difference rather than showcasing coherence across continents, countries, and libraries. The solution, developed in close consultation with my supervisors, was to create a single MODS

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Digital Walters TEI

Stanford University Libraries MODS





and also







and also







and also

Digital Walters TEI

Stanford University Libraries MODS

Table 4.3  Sample crosswalk, mapping how the MODS element @displayLabel might be used in MODS to contain manuscript description elements originally marked up in the Digital Walters TEI.

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to contain all of the Walters’s elements. Doing so created a form that might better serve all partner institutions equally. But it also failed to perfectly copy the existing metadata without introducing variation or change. Whatever my desires or fears as a data curator, I rapidly came to see that I could not not be Adam Scriveyn. Parker on the Web: Curation Is Not the Same as Hoarding

After transforming the Walters metadata, I moved on to curating descriptive metadata created by Parker on the Web. What this means is that, in terms of digitization projects and metadata versioning, I was also moving back in time. Funded work on Parker on the Web began in 2005—­three years before the Walters Art Museum received its first NEH grant to begin digitizing its medieval manuscript collections (2008, Islamic Digital Resource Project; 2010, Parchment to Pixel; 2012, Imaging the Hours), and two years before the official ratification and release of the TEI P5, chapter 10 guidelines that shaped the Walters’s descriptive metadata.71 In other words, the good practice followed in the Walters digitizations did not exist when Parker on the Web was being planned and created.72 Parker on the Web was one of the last TEI P4 manuscript projects, and the Parker metadata I encountered came in the form of a TEI P4 XML-­encoded version of M. R. James’s Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Corpus Christi College Cambridge (vol. 1, 1909; vol. 2, 1912), with some additions, changes, and customization.73 The Parker on the Web TEI-­encoded metadata were thus structured very differently from the Walters Art Museum’s TEI-­ encoded metadata. The Walters TEI metadata is in short phrases and sentences nested along regular Xpaths, maintained with remarkable consistency across more than 350 manuscript descriptions: by contrast, I encountered the Parker on the Web metadata as marked-­up prose—­ long paragraphs of manuscript description punctuated with TEI tags, for more than five hundred manuscripts. Because I wrote only one final crosswalk and transform for each contributing repository, my transforms necessarily focused on copying data in predictable Xpaths recurring across the majority of manu-

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scripts in that repository. As a genre, manuscript descriptions tend to follow a set form: in TEI X ML encoded prose, this formal predictability translated into a set of identifiable Xpaths. For instance, James’s manuscript descriptions often include a heading for Decoration Notes, which in the marked-­up catalog appeared consistently along the Xpath /TEI/text/body/msDesc/p[@ function=“Decoration”]/decoNote After identifying this, I would write a command such as {for $f in $y/text/body/msDesc/p[@ function=“Decoration”] return {data($f/ fn:normalize-­space())}} which instructs Oxygen to take whatever information it finds along the Xpath /TEI/text/body/msDesc/p[@function=“Decoration”] and copy it into the space between the MODS start-­tag and end-­tag . But this command would not retrieve decoration information appearing outside this exact path, and decoration information in James’s catalog did not always appear just on the /TEI/text/body/msDesc/p[@function=“Decoration”]/ deco​Note Xpath. For example, Corpus Christi College Cambridge, Matthew Parker Library MS 153 had nothing at /TEI/text/body/msDesc/p[@ function=“Decoration”]—­but had two elements retrievable at the Xpath /TEI/text/body/msDesc/p/decoNote. Decoration notes for Corpus Christi College Cambridge, Matthew Parker Library, MS 304 appeared not at /TEI/text/body/msDesc/p[@function=“Decoration”] but instead at /TEI/text/body/msDesc/p[@function=“Research”]/q/deco​ Note. Even after working with the Walters metadata and coming to accept that some data change was inevitable, I chafed at the idea of losing important information about manuscripts’ decorative elements as the Parker metadata were copied over into DMS-­Index. The Parker on the Web metadata also raised larger challenges for the curatorial skills and principles I had been slowly growing as the

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newest member of the DMS-­Index team. Some of the information framed by granular tags was of no value extracted from its original setting. For example, in Parker on the Web’s original TEI, the descriptive metadata for MS 304 has eight extractable along the Xpath /TEI/text/body/msDesc/p[@function=“Research”]/q/decoNote (table 4.4). The first extractable statement is of undeniable value to end users—­a clear and complete sentence describing the large capitals on the first leaves and accompanying decorative borders. Beyond that first note, though, I had trouble seeing how the latter seven would be of much value outside Parker on the Web. Perhaps there were expert end users of DMS-­Index who would be able to make sense of the short phrases that I could grab: “in the same fancy capitals,” “in large fancy capitals,” “in black,” “in red,” “in red.” But I had trouble imagining them. Moreover, although the TEI P4 markup made perfect sense in its tagged-­prose original setting, pulled from its original context and copied into a new location, the metadata might lead less experienced end users to draw incorrect conclusions. Take, for example, table 4.4, row 2. The surrounding prose in the TEI P4 markup makes it clear that the phrase “the same fancy capitals” is referring to a specific style, size, and script used in two texts: the preface to a text by Iuuencus and in verses composed by St. Isidore. But in the transformed MODS, M. R. James’s complete sentences became tidy bullet points, so that the phrase “the same fancy capitals” might seem to point to the fancy capitals in the note immediately above: the 11-­line capitals, enclosed within a decorated border. Iuuencus, his preface, and its similarity to text by St. Isidore would not be visible in my drafted version of the metadata in MODS. Without realizing it, I had stumbled upon the problem that John Unsworth had explained a few years earlier in his 2011 essay on interoperability, sustainability, and digital aggregators: Once you start to aggregate these resources and combine them in a new context and for a new purpose, you find out, in practical terms, what it means to say that their creators really only envisioned them being processed in their original context. . . . It’s as

The three preliminary leaves are ornamentally written in large capitals (11 lines to a page), within borders, the first and last pages being enclosed in an arch, the rest within rectangular borders in the same fancy capitals

in large fancy capitals

in red in red

The three preliminary leaves are ornamentally written in large capitals (11 lines to a page), within borders, the first and last pages being enclosed in an arch, the rest within rectangular borders.

on the opposite page the text of Iuuencus begins without any rubric, the first preface being written in the same fancy capitals as the verses of St Isidore

4v) Iohannis fremit ñ misteria uitae | caluetii : ||aquilini : | : siue iuuenci : so far in large fancy capitals, then immediately in ordinary uncials: Immortale nihil ñ

then at once in larger capitals: sapientissimi uiri Iuuenci: xpiani : euangeliorum liber primus: explicit Incipit liber secundus caluetii ~ aquilini ~ Inde philippus ait >>> these last words are in red but in ordinary uncials

the 2nd book ends, and the 3rd begins thus (67 a67r ): turbasque reliquit. Explt Incpt liber tertius (in red)

in red

quartus ? feliciter ? ( in red ). Talia ñ The MS. breaks off book IV, verse 733

Table 4.4  Sample crosswalk, mapping how marked up content in Corpus Christi College Cambridge, Parker Library, MS 304, TEI P4 markup would have appeared in DMS-Index-style MODS. For ease of reading in the TEI P4 markup, the tagging and its content have been bolded. Surrounding manuscript description, which would not be carried over into MODS, is italicized.

in black

Incpt eiusdem liber . . ( in black )

the 3rd book ends, and the 4th book begins (93b 93v): hominum seletio fiet: Euangeliorum liber tertius explct ( in in red red )

content extracted and copied into DMSIndex MODS—as it would appear to end users (XML tagging not visible)

tagging in original Parker on the Web TEI P4 markup (with XML tagging visible)

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though the data has suddenly found itself in Union Station in its pajamas: it is not properly dressed for its new environment.74 Faced with data that I could not bring, properly dressed, into its new environment, I set aside my earlier motto—­“ be no trimmer”—­and embraced a new motto, in the form of a reminder from Albritton in one of the project meetings: “curation is not the same as hoarding.” Instead of trying to copy over absolutely everything, regardless of its utility in the new environment, I needed to focus on preserving what would be most useful for the greatest number of eventual end users. That said, there are data that cannot be lost. A digital index would be of very little use if researchers could not do a faceted search for manuscripts by “date created.” In his 1907–­12 print Catalogue, James dates the Parker Library manuscripts in charmingly idiosyncratic phrases—­and in roman numerals. In Parker on the Web these date notes are tagged in the marked-­up catalog prose, much like the tagging described above. This helps human researchers compile a list of dates, but it does not help a computer tasked with finding manuscripts from a certain century—­the computer reads the tag but not the numbers nested within that frame. By this time, I had learned how to work with XQuery functions, which allowed me to help machine applications focus on standardized data within idiosyncratic human phrasing. In the Parker transform, I had planned on using fn:contains to pull the date’s data from within James’s shifting human-­friendly words and copy them into a more standard, machine-­ friendly form. But the logic of roman numerals defied my proposed solution: after all, “xiii” contains “xii,” “xi,” and “x.” Over the last two decades, numerous other digital projects have addressed this sort of problem. But as a trained literary-­historian-­turned-­beginning-­data-­ curator on a massive digital manuscript project that both predated and outlasted my short-­term, soft-­money position, I did not know them. Nor, since one of the goals of this project was to see if by the end of my two years I could add to DMS-­Index the descriptive metadata of 10,000 digitized texts, did I feel I had the time to pause my work and learn those deeper skills.75

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My postdoc supervisors and the skilled technologists I was working with in DLSS taught me how time spent learning new skills to pursue the particular challenges of one institutional data set was useful—­but only to a point. Beyond that, it becomes a field of diminishing returns, and spending excessive time on any one data set was taking time from the next step of the larger project. Eventually, I had a duty to push on with the work I had been given, using what I did know. My supervisors gave me a set period of time to experiment with solutions, after which I moved forward with the skills I had at the moment. Working closely with Albritton, I ceased trying to pull dates from the TEI markup of James’s catalog and instead pulled the dates from Parker on the Web’s online HTML. Our solution reminded me of medieval copying practices combining parts from different exemplars to create a single, improved copy. In particular, I felt echoes of Thomas Hoccleve’s Series, in which the eponymous narrator “Thomas” combines content from two different exemplars to make a new, more complete translation of a story from the Gesta Romanorum.76 Neither Thomas nor the character known as “The Friend” are troubled by Thomas’s failure to make perfect copies of his exemplar(s)—­because precise reproduction of one earlier iteration is not the point. Combining the best parts of multiple earlier iterations in order to create a better copy is. In much the same way, by drawing dates from the Parker HTML and everything else from the TEI P4 markup, we made a “better,” more accurate digital object. There are no downsides here. The dates in the growing DMS-­Index data sets became more correct, which in turn would make the manuscripts more discoverable and usable. But over the months of my postdoc work, both my skills as a copyist and my understanding of the kind of copying I was supposed to be doing were evolving. I no longer saw data curation as a duty to strictly preserve inherited documents of the past. Instead, my duty was to create new versions of those older documents, versions that I sometimes had to deliberately change so they could be truly useful to end users present and future.

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e-­codices: The Inevitability of Compromise

e-­codices, the digital medieval manuscript library of Switzerland, draws together the digitized manuscripts of more than eighty libraries and private collections into a single, unified, searchable collection. During the time that I was experimenting with approaches to interoperable metadata aggregation, e-­codices was engaged in its own experiments in data sharing and interoperability. To do this, e-­codices used two different metadata schemata. Top-­level descriptions were marked up in DC, compliant with the Open Archive Initiative (OAI:DC); longer descriptive metadata were marked up according to the project’s local interpretations of TEI P5. Initially, I thought that what we had done with the Parker metadata could be extensible here—­creating a single improved metadata file by drawing from multiple sources. But there was one problem. At that time, the top-­level DC-­encoded metadata were available in English. However, the extended TEI P5 descriptions, which included a full statement of contents, detailed decoration descriptions, and provenance information, were written in four languages: some in German, some in Italian, some in French, and some in English. Technically, I had the skills to combine top-­level metadata in DC with enriched manuscript description in TEI. But what kind of descriptions would this create for the eventual end users of DMS-­Index? Cologny, Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cod. Bodmer 174 is a fifteenth-­ century manuscript of Laurent de Premierfait’s French translation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium. Like the other thousand manuscripts in e-­codices, Cod. Bodmer 174 had a short English manuscript description in DC. It also had an extended manuscript description in TEI containing richer and more granular information akin to the metadata from the Walters Art Museum and Parker on the Web. The DC was in English. The TEI was in French. I could combine the from the English-­language DC with the richer description in French-­language TEI description, but should I (table 4.5)? With adequate time, and a large enough, linguistically skilled team, each of the descriptions for the more than one thousand manuscripts in e-­codices could have been translated into multiple languages. Indeed, e-­codices has since translated all the DC metadata, so that top-­level de-

Ecriture bâtarde. Une seule main.

Foliotation récente au crayon de 10 en 10. Les deux feuillets de garde, au début et à la fin, sont contemporains du manuscrit. Le feuillet 338v° est blanc.

Traduction par Laurent de Premierfait exécutée en 1409. Ce manuscrit ne comporte pas le premier prologue de Laurent de Premierfait (dédicace de sa traduction).

This ethical work by Boccaccio, originally written between 1353 and 1356 and expanded in 1373, addresses the subject of the unevenness of fate. Manuscript copies of the work were frequently made; it was issued in print and translated into many languages. It enjoyed great popularity in Europe. The French translation by Laurent de Premierfait for Jean de Berry was equally popular, as evidenced by the 68 manuscript copies of this text still in existence.

English-language DC and French-language TEI combined in DMS-style MODS, as end users might see it (without XML tags)

Table 4.5  Sample crosswalk, showing the macaronic manuscript description that would be made by combining e-codices DC and TEI into a single DMS-Index MODS record.

Ecriture bâtarde. Une seule main.

Foliotation récente au crayon de 10 en 10. Les deux feuillets de garde, au début et à la fin, sont contemporains du manuscrit. Le feuillet 338v° est blanc.

Traduction par Laurent de Premierfait exécutée en 1409. Ce manuscrit ne comporte pas le premier prologue de Laurent de Premierfait (dédicace de sa traduction).

This ethical work by Boccaccio, originally written between 1353 and 1356 and expanded in 1373, addresses the subject of the unevenness of fate. Manuscript copies of the work were frequently made; it was issued in print and translated into many languages. It enjoyed great popularity in Europe. The French translation by Laurent de Premierfait for Jean de Berry was equally popular, as evidenced by the 68 manuscript copies of this text still in existence.

English-language DC and French-language TEI combined in DMS-style MODS, with XML tags visible

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scriptions are now available in German, Italian, and French as well as in English.77 But individually translating more than a thousand metadata files was far beyond the scope of this iteration of DMS-­Index. While a translation team could have been assembled (that is one of the great beauties of large-­scale collaborative digital projects: projects are not limited to one contributor’s skill sets), that level of metadata transformation was not part of our project mission. And I was still reluctant to lose data that could be copied. So I toyed with the idea of macaronic metadata. Medieval writers, I reminded myself, wrote macaronic verse: in my home discipline of later medieval English literature, writers slide from French to Latin, Latin to English, English to French with relative ease: John Gower, perhaps most famously. But also Hoccleve, writer of both Middle English verse and The Formulary, an enormous “office reference work” in Latin and French prose preserving model documents for other clerks of the Privy Seal.78 When I looked (selectively) to modern medieval scholarship, I found further reasons to consider macaronic metadata: the recovery of medieval multilingualism was then and remains now an important and fast-­growing area of scholarly inquiry. But when I approached this potential data set not like a trained medievalist, with required language proficiency hardwired into my doctoral training, but as a digital worker hoping to make data engaging to a wider array of end users, my elaborate rationale collapsed. “Who,” my supervisors asked, “is the likely audience for this?” The most likely audiences I could identify were other scholarly users: manuscript scholars and textual editors, medievalists, art historians, historians, language specialists. However, much like Wilkie, Denny-­Brown, and Furnivall in chapter 2, when I imagined the future of DMS-­Index, I did not want our project to serve only advanced scholars. While I knew that the majority of our users would likely be experts, I hoped that DMS-­Index could also perhaps help build a broader, more inclusive medieval studies. Sitting in my cubicle in the sunny shared workspace in DLSS, I wanted to create something that was not just useful for professional scholars, postdocs, and graduate students but also for undergraduates, practic-

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ing book artists and calligraphers, and hobbyists with any number of interests. Imagining this broader audience clarified the limits of what I could define as “usable” metadata. The formal language of manuscript description already carries a high cognitive load for nonspecialists, a point which my students in book history and manuscript studies courses reteach me each term. Asking our new recruits to also engage with formal manuscript descriptions that slid from English into Italian, German, and French, I thought, could push that cognitive load beyond the breaking point. Accessibility does not just mean putting photographs of manuscripts on the web. Nor should it mean wrapping digital manuscripts exclusively in the jargons of traditional codicology and bibliography. It means surrounding digitized manuscripts with information that can act as a doorway in for new users. Words, as Geoffrey of Vinsauf puts it in his Poetria Nova (1208–­13), should render difficult ideas accessible: “Regard not your own capacities, therefore, but rather his with whom you are speaking.”79 Guided by questions posed by my postdoc supervisors and other members of the project team, and a favorite thirteenth-­century rhetorical treatise, I abandoned my vision of a macaronic, multilingual catalog. I wrote a transform that copied out all the DC (English-­language) top-­level metadata for all the e-­codices manuscripts. But I only combined that DC metadata with TEI written in the same language. If the DC was in one language and the TEI was in another, the rich TEI was left out. The end result was that e-­codices digital manuscripts with both levels of metadata written in English received lavish descriptions in DMS-­Index, while digital manuscripts with only the top level of metadata in English received much shorter shrift. In seeking to solve one problem of the lack of diversity in the academy, my data curation contributed to another. I saw, clearly and uncomfortably, how I was fostering a broader and more diverse group of end users for DMS-­Index within the English-­speaking world at the expense of reifying the problematic state of English as a default language for international scholarship.80 As I wrote the transform and pushed the data through, I thought again of poetry by Geoffrey Chaucer—­not, this

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time, of the hapless copyist in “Adam Scriveyn” but of the concluding lines of “The Parson’s Prologue” in The Canterbury Tales. But nathelees, this meditacioun I putte it ay under correccioun Of clerkes, for I am nat textueel; I take but the sentence, trusteth weel. Therfore I make protestacioun That I wol stonde to correccioun.81 I hoped, fiercely, that in the next iteration of DMS-­Index a new, more skilled contributor would come along to correct my errors and improve my work. Success, Failure, and the Temporality of Digital Manuscript Projects

The Stanford University Libraries Postdoctoral Fellowship in Data Curation for Medieval Studies concluded in the summer of 2015, and I left California for a new position in upstate New York. That fall and early winter, I wrote the first iteration of a project narrative, analyzing some of the work that I had done as an entry-­level contributor to DMS-­Index. This was eventually published in 2018 as “Adam Scriveyn in Cyberspace” in Meeting the Medieval in a Digital World. That project narrative concluded in a triumphant, future-­predictive mode. Sure, my work had been slow-­going, especially at the start, and I had ultimately made ideologically suspect choices, privileging the needs of English-­ language users in ways that still haunted me. But we had (I thought) proved that it was possible to do this—­to make and massage new copies of old metadata and therefore render different digital manuscript collections discoverable within the same interoperable index. Especially in the conclusion, that essay is written with clear confidence that there would be future, ever-­better iterations of DMS-­Index. But as Meeting the Medieval in a Digital World came closer to print, problems with my narrative were emerging. At one point, its editors asked if I could include an illustration showing some of the metadata I had worked on

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published in DMS-­Index. That was how I learned that DMS-­Index had been officially shuttered the year after my postdoc concluded. Prickling with embarrassment, I wrote back to the editorial team: no, the requested figures and links could not be included, because DMS-­Index was no longer publicly visible. Beneath my embarrassment there lay a deeper fear: the majority of the transformed metadata that so consumed me had not been published. If I could not point to something published and say, Do you see this marvelous thing? In some small way, I helped make that, what did my work even mean? Digital manuscripts are products of the time, place, and intellectual cultures that produce them; so too are digital manuscript project narratives. In 2019 I returned to my earlier celebratory project narrative. Since learning that DMS-­Index had been shuttered, I had become increasingly aware of calls for publications dedicated to digital project failures. Shawn Graham’s Failing Gloriously and Other Essays (2019) was freshly published, as was Joris van Zundert’s “On Not Writing a Review about Mirador: Mirador, IIIF, and the Epistemological Gains of Distributed Digital Scholarly Resources” (2018). A. S. G. Edwards’s “The Digital Archive, Scholarly Enquiry, and the Study of Middle English Manuscripts” (2018) offered examples of digital manuscript project successes (he names Digital Scriptorium) and failures (he names the Middle English Brut project). Van Zundert led me to Quinn Dombrowski’s “What Ever Happened to Project Bamboo?” (2014) and to John Unsworth’s “Documenting the Reinvention of Text: The Importance of Failure” (1997). My own intellectual meanderings brought me to Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure (2011). The whole constellation of thinkers, the urgency of that particular moment, pointed my thoughts in a new direction. When Halberstam wrote of the “whole archaeological strata of forgotten subcultural producers who lie hidden beneath the glittering surface of market valued success,” it felt like an invitation to think through, and honor, the labor and expertise of the much larger digital project team I had briefly worked with, all largely unseen producers working behind the scenes on a range of digital medieval manuscript

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projects—­some of which were being heralded as glittering successes and others quietly shuttered.82 Unworth’s declarations, likewise, struck a chord with my 2019 reassessments of my 2013–­15 work: Our successes, should we have any, will perpetuate themselves, and though we may be concerned to be credited for them, we needn’t worry about their survival: They will perpetuate themselves. Our failures are likely to be far more difficult to recover in the future, and far more valuable for future scholarship and research.83 In van Zundert’s invocation of a missing “graveyard” of medieval manuscript transcription projects and his lament that “failed projects almost never get proper epitaphs or eulogies . . . which is a pity because such eulogies would be highly informative,” I thought I had found a way forward, revising my earlier thinking, in ways that could be more timely and disciplinarily on trend.84 To be clear, my radical reassessment of the work I had performed for the experimental Digital Manuscripts Index was not just a matter of strategically matching the latest “of the moment” trend by pivoting from celebrating success to thinking through failure. In the intervening years, I had come to believe that I had failed in my work on DMS-­ Index. Worse, I feared that my personal weaknesses and failings (what if they had hired a better, more skillful, more experienced postdoc?) had somehow been the catalyst that brought about catastrophic project failure. This was all myopically self-­centered—­the belief that project success is a shared, collaborative endeavor but the weakness of one low-­ level short-­term worker could somehow make or break a successful, long-­running multi-­institution project. But it was also a belief deeply rooted in the new work culture I had entered after the conclusion of my postdoctoral fellowship. I was no longer working as a data curator but as a tenure-­track professor in a research-­oriented institution, no longer housed within a digital library working collaboratively on digital medieval manuscript projects but within a traditional academic department. Not all, but many academic departments—­pushed by things

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like the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the United Kingdom and tenure (albeit for a minority of academics) in the United States—­ are in the habit of assessing scholarly labor strictly and according to a neat binary: success or failure. Success, in that mind-­set, seems to be defined as 1) finishing something of sufficient quality, complexity, and rigor, and then 2) successfully publishing it. (Publishing in this metric carries an expectation of stability and longevity. It is an article of faith that even when a book goes out of print or a journal closes, published, finished work will remain available somewhere in the world, accessible through in-­person consultation and Interlibrary Loan.) Failure, by contrast, is the unfinished thing. The thing that has been labored over, perhaps for years, but which ultimately goes unpublished. This is also why, by 2019, I couldn’t imagine my work on DMS-­Index as anything except a failure. Bad enough that I left my labors “unfinished,” transforming metadata records for a little more than a fifth of the 10,000 we had aimed for. How much worse that most of the metadata made by the transforms I had completed was not published anywhere I could point to, quote, or say, “Do you see these unsigned elements? They are, at least in some small part, the fruits of my labors.” Thus, in my revised project narrative (submitted in September 2019 as part of an earlier iteration of this book), I wrote that the bulk of my labors as a postdoc sat “on a server somewhere, unpublished and likely futureless, a footnote to the ongoing quest for an interoperable, global manuscripts hub.” I labeled DMS-­Index a failed experiment and argued that it was good to dwell on its failure because (to quote from my second iteration of this project narrative), “at the very least, writing up failures with rigor and introspection may help prevent additional, future resource waste. A perennial refrain in digital archives and digital humanities is the need to stop reinventing the wheel. Besides enhanced search and discovery, that is the great, sought-­after gift of interoperability: if we could stop burning new investments reinventing the same things in new locations, we would have so much more to apply to other, under-­ tended needs. Publicly analyzing project failures can help stop the continued reinvention not just of ‘the wheel’ but of broken wheels.” But

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while these larger sentiments may be correct, at least in broad sweeps, they are ultimately an incorrect assessment of the lessons and legacy of DMS-­Index. As a postdoc, I had become narrowly fixated on whether or not I would achieve a particular number, transforming metadata drawn from 10,000 manuscripts digitized at institutions around the world. After my postdoc, I had become equally fixated on a very narrow, traditional academic definition of success and failure: Is it finished: Yes or no? Is it published—­in a stable form and a place I can point to: Yes or no? But these fixations revealed a misunderstanding of the deeper project mission of DMS-­Index and larger community efforts at manuscript interoperability. Beyond the numbers of metadata files and the trial site, Digital Manuscripts Index was an experiment working toward a better understanding of what discovery might look like in an interoperable, that is, an IIIF, environment. Thus, more than exact (impressive) numbers of manuscript metadata files transformed or even the publication and ongoing maintenance of an outward-­facing manuscripts hub, the project goals were about measuring the level of effort required to build a manuscript aggregator, and testing—­by having me try them out—­what these particular approaches to metadata aggregation might cost, in initial conversion and in long-­term sustainability. Where I wallowed in feelings of failure, my supervisors saw our shared project as a success. The stage of the experiment that I had contributed to had ultimately helped identify for the much larger digital manuscripts community some of the pitfalls for granular crosswalks. It had identified key elements needed for cross-­repository discovery. It had provided a model for production systems to follow. And production systems had followed—­just not hosted at Stanford Libraries. At time of writing, the “next generation” digital manuscripts aggregator is maintained by the Biblissima team (https:​/​​/​iiif​.biblissima​.fr​/​collections​/ ​). It builds on, revises, remixes, and extends some of the same approaches pioneered with the Stanford manuscript index—­but with more robust institutional support to accommodate the scales at which it is now working. I had simply lost sight of all of these successes, because they worked at

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scales of collaboration and time that I, in my new position of academic end user, frankly struggled to see. Large-­scale digital manuscript projects move at at least two time scales: there is the swift-­moving “time’s winged chariot” of short-­term grant funding, but there is also a much more long-­term and accretive process—­much more like the multiyear, even multidecade, gradual building up of analog medieval manuscripts than the swift “finish and publish” production cycles familiar to modern academic faculty. A short, timed “publish or perish,” “success or fail,” assessment may be the familiar paradigm for many scholarly end users. But the multidecade view offers a more accurate understanding of the realities of how large-­scale digital projects actually work, as well as a more rigorous way of assessing the true impact of large-­scale cross-­institutional, collaborative projects. For example, as part of the work on the Survey of Illuminated Manuscripts, the British Library’s Department of Manuscripts developed a set of SGML-­tags for manuscripts’ descriptive metadata. After initial investment in this complex metadata tagging system, curators determined that the system they had invented was too labor-­intensive to be scalable for the task at hand.85 If we were to assess this project solely in the narrow, temporally and institutionally bounded terms of “success” or “failure” (is it finished? is it published? is it published somewhere stable with our name on it?), then the original tagset might be glossed as an expensive, unpublished “digital manuscript failure.” But that is only the first part of the story. Although it was not put in use for the Survey of Illuminated Manuscripts, curators at the British Library shared their SGML tagset with librarians at the Bodleian. There it became “the basis for a more comprehensive set of tags for full descriptions of manuscripts at a level of detail not required for the Survey.”86 In the later 1990s, when the Bodleian joined in much larger community conversations about the need for “common standards of description for medieval manuscripts,” they carried their manuscript description tagset into the international meetings that eventually grew into the MASTER and TEI-­MSS working groups, and ultimately into TEI P5,

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chapter 10. From this longer-­term, cross-­institution, collaborative perspective, the SGML tagset developed but not used at the British Library is not an expensive digital failure but a foundation for one of the great successes of digital manuscript metadata. The fate of the British Library’s SGML tagset is an extravagant example, but it is not so unusual. The Middle English Brut manuscripts project that was used as an example of an unfinished, shuttered, “failed” project in 2018 has taken on new life as “Re-­Imagining History,” part of the Remix the Manuscript Project at Dartmouth.87 Similarly, the first iteration of the Production and Use of English Manuscripts, 1060–­1220, digital project (directed by Mary Swan, Elaine Treharne, Orietta da Rold, and Jo Story, with Takako Kato as the research associate, and supported by funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council) began on May 1, 2005 and ended on August 20, 2010; at time of writing, the first iteration’s project website is still maintained.88 A second iteration, hosted by Stanford University, now exists as EM1060 2.0, bringing together a digital archive of the original site with new and updated manuscript descriptions.89 The temporality of digital projects is hard to pin down, especially when data may be taken up, updated, remixed, and remade in new projects, at new institutions, serving new audiences and new ends. Standing as individual humans in one time and place, influenced by disciplinary norms and work cultures, it may be tempting to declare some projects drifting failures and to lavish on others the crown of success. But although end users exist in one moment in history, one institution, or one disciplinary perspective, many large-­scale digital manuscript projects do not. Given this much larger time-­frame in which digital manuscripts now move, and the clear pattern of closed projects being reopened or reused to serve new and evolving community goals and needs, the familiar narrow scholarly measurements of “failure” and “success” may no longer be entirely useful or accurate. A refrain expressed by several members of the team I interviewed as part of my study of the digitization of Rosenbach 439/16 was that they hoped someone would use the manuscript images and metadata they created to make things that the digitization team could not pre-

I nteroperable M etadata and   F ailing   toward the F uture

dict: from t-­shirts and tea towels, to multimedia installations and video games, to things they could not yet imagine. We might do well to think of all digital manuscripts and larger digital manuscript projects in the same way. Our projects are our immediate data, but they are also masses of raw materials that are passed on to the future, an archive of labor, into which someone may yet breathe new, unexpected life.

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CODA GLITCH

of Chantilly, Musée Condé, 0297, fols. 53v–­5 4r are upside down (fig. C.1). In the copy of London, British Library, Harley MS 1766 available via the Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts, the detail view of fol. 5r is scanned backward so that the banderole identifying the poet-­monk reads “etagdyl nohj nad” rather than “dan john lydgate” (fig. C.2). These copying irregularities are products of modern reprographics. They are glitches that can only occur in digitization. Other digital copying errors are recognizable extensions of medieval scribal copying practice. Dittography, accidental repetition, easily translates into digitization, except instead of repeated words or phrases, you get repeated leaves. Haplography also transitions into digital imaging—­but rather than skipped words or phrases, entire openings may go missing. In the digital copy of Austin, University of Texas, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, MS 143 both modes of medieval-­style copying error occur (table C.1). I N T H E C U R R E N T D I G I TA L CO PY

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Figure C.1  Chantilly, Musée Condé, Bibliothèque du château, 0297, fols. 53v–54r. Upsidedown opening as it appeared in the Bibliothèque virtuelle des manuscrits médiévaux’s instantiation of the Mirador viewer in late 2021. Digitization by an unknown team. Date of digitization unknown. Date of screenshot, 2021. Used with permission from the Musée de Chantilly.

Figure C.2  The Fall of Princes, © British Library Board. London, British Library, Harley MS 1766. Screenshot of fol. 5r, scanned backward, as it appeared within the Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts in late 2021. Original analog Kodachrome slide created by unknown in-house photographer employed by the British Library, ca. 1970s–1990s. Digital scan of source media and metadata creation performed by British Library staff, ca. 2000–2009. Reproduced with permission of the British Library.

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Manuscript Location

Error

Error Classification

images 8–9/628

skip fols. 3v–4r

haplography

images 103–110/628

repeat fols. 51v–53r

dittography

images 135–138/628

repeat fols. 65v–66r

dittography

images 139–141/628

repeat fols. 66v–67r

dittography

images 151–152/628

repeat fol. 71v

dittography

images 222–223

repeat fol. 106v

dittography

Table C.1  The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, the Brut Chronicle to 1449, Siege of Thebes by John Lydgate, Austin, University of Texas, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, MS 143. Sample imaging errors, as they appeared in late 2021. Digitization by an unknown team. Date of digitization, 2009.

Reading through a case of digital dittography, the effect on readers is of narrative caught in an eddy, an unexpected glitchy loop. But digital haplography can significantly change the narrative. For instance, in the current digital copy of HRC 143 the image numbers of the digital copy move smoothly forward from image 8/628 to image 9/628, but the literary text leaps from line 348 of the “General Prologue” of The Canterbury Tales to line 429—­grafting the first half of the Franklin’s Portrait onto the second half of the Physician’s, and entirely skipping the descriptions of the Haberdasher, Carpenter, Weaver, Dyer, Tapestry-­maker, Cook, and Shipman. I do not foreground these digital copying errors from the perspective of coolly judging outsider, but as someone who is personally responsible for at least a few mistakes in digital copying. For instance, for many years the digital copy of Stanford, Stanford University Libraries, Department of Special Collections, Manuscript Collection, MSS Codex M0379, which I helped make in November 2014, skipped an opening. Despite the care with which image capture was performed, and my efforts in postproduction at providing excellent quality assurance and quality control (QA/QC), fols. 71v–­72r were—­ until shortly after May 2021—­simply not there. Copying errors and their correction highlight a fault line at the heart of digital codicology. If we apply the traditional tools of codicology to digital manuscripts as unique objects in their own rights (rather

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than pale reflections of out-­of-­reach hard-­copy medieval books), then copying errors are evidence of a bookish life lived digitally—­data to be preserved. However, the reality of digital medieval manuscript research is that, for the majority of end users, digital manuscripts are not the primary objects of study themselves but tools through which researchers may engage with their “real” objects of study. Given that reality, how much should the errors in digital manuscripts be treated as unique evidence of the digital book’s making, worthy of preservation? And how much should they be treated like coding bugs, glitches to be fixed, erased, overwritten? Under their pragmatic surface, these boil down to an ontological question: What is a digital manuscript—­is it a book? a computer program? something else entirely? Common practices for addressing digital copying errors do not follow best practices for rare books or for software updates, but I will argue here that they—­that we—­should. Medieval Copying Errors: Analog and Digital

I love copying errors in analog medieval manuscripts. There are defensible, scholarly reasons I could offer for this: in the study of hard-­ copy medieval manuscripts, errors can serve as valuable data for book historians, paleographers, editors, and textual scholars. But like many other manuscript researchers, I also have affectively charged reasons. In spotting minor mistakes, my relationship with the manuscript is momentarily transformed. I come to focus not just on the codex as a material, multisensory object or as a particular container of one version of a text. Encountering a scribal error—­particularly one that has been visibly corrected—­feels like catching a glimpse of the book’s long-­ dead creators. It can feel almost as though I am, briefly, peering over their shoulders as they work, encountering them not as some kind of premodern human copy machines but as real, once-­living, beautifully fallible coworkers. One of my favorite manuscript copying errors is in New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Library, MS 493, fol.1r, where serendipitous medieval content and the jargon of modern manuscript and textual studies

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conspire to create an extremely nerdy pun, approximately five hundred years in the making. Beinecke 493 was copied, on paper, in the third quarter of the fifteenth century. It collects together poems by both of Chaucer’s early fifteenth-­century self-­proclaimed heirs: it starts with the full text of Thomas Hoccleve’s Series, then a copy of John Lydgate’s Dance of Death, and concludes with Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes. “My Compleinte,” the first poem within the longer Series, opens with a meditation on mutability, weaving together seasonal change with human mortality: After that hervest Inned had hise sheves, and that the broune season of myhelmesse was come, and gan the trees robbe of ther leves That grene had bene and in lusty fresshnesse, and them in-­to colowre / of yelownesse hadd dyen / and doune throwen vndar foote, that chaunge sanke / into myne herte roote. for freshely browght it / to my remembraunce, that stablenes in this worlde is ther none; ther is no thinge / but chaunge and variaunce; how welthye a man be / or wel be-­gone, endure it shall no / he shall it for-­gon. deathe vnder fote / shall hym thrist adowne: that is euery wites / conclusyon.1 That, at least, is how the lines appear in Frederick J. Furnivall’s edition (revised by Jerome Mitchell and A. I. Doyle and reprinted in 1970). But in Beinecke 493, there is a noticeable gap in line 9 after “That stablenes” and before “in þis world is þer none”—­as though a very short word, like “is” or “in,” was written there and then scraped off later, in what we might think of as a round of medieval postproduction QA/QC (see fig. C.3). A second error and correction also appears in the next line on Beinecke 493, fol. 1r. Line 10 originally said “Ther no thyng bot chaunge

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Figure C.3  Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 493. Close-up view of fol. 1r, second stanza of “My Complaint” by Thomas Hoccleve, as it appeared in Yale Library’s digital collection viewer in late 2021. Digitization by Beinecke Digital Services Unit; date of digitization, May 2015. Reproduced with permission of the Beinecke Library.

and variaunce,” but the unclear phrase has been visibly fixed by adding in a missing word: “Ther ^is no thyng bot chaunge and variaunce.” Part of my delight in this pair of errors and corrections is how they occur in the very first lines of the manuscript. Seeing and reading them, I get a burst of sympathetic fellow-­feeling with the long-­dead anonymous medieval copyist: Isn’t that just how it goes with a major project, erring as soon as one gets out of the gate? But another part of my pleasure in this error lies in the fact that, for modern manuscript and textual scholars, “variance” from Bernard Cerquiglini’s Éloge de la variante: Histoire critique de la philologie (1989) is (along with Paul Zumthor’s “mouvance”) a key term in our shared vocabulary for theorizing medieval textual

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instability.2 Variance, changeableness, is what Hoccleve writes of in these lines: it is also what the intervening copyist has done quite visibly to Hoccleve’s text in Beinecke 493, dropping, adding, and moving words around as they worked at creating an accurate and pleasing copy. Notably, despite these errors sprinkled through the first lines of the Series, the anonymous scribe responsible for this manuscript has been described by Barbara Shailor as paying “careful attention” to the text, its presentation, and minor ornamental features.3 In these and other, similar error/correction pairs, modern manuscript scholars habitually find traces of the personalities of medieval copyists. For example, the analog manuscript of HRC 143 is the work of two main copyists known in scholarship as “Scribe A” and “Scribe B.” Scribe B makes few errors or changes—­introduces little variance—­into the passages they copy, and has therefore been described as precise and cautious: “a faithful copyist who preserved the forms of the exemplar as [they] found them.”4 By contrast, Scribe A slips up with marked frequency and has come to be profiled as a copyist who “took liberties”: or, as Daniel W. Mosser puts it, Scribe A “gradually impressed more and more of [their] own personality on the book”—­through spelling variations, changed words, and their frequent, small error-­correction pairs.5 More lavish medieval error/correction pairs have been similarly psychologized. The two earliest extant manuscripts of Thomas Hoccleve’s The Regement of Princes, London, British Library, MSS Arundel 38 and Harley 4866, are famously enlivened with drawings of little lasso-­ wielding correctors. Approximately 2500 lines after Hoccleve makes a point about scribes needing to possess almost superhuman powers of concentration, the copyist of Arundel 38 missed a stanza, on fol. 65r. The missing stanza is crammed into the margin and then adorned with a drawing of a small man in pink tunic and hose, straining to move the missing lines to their proper place. A similar figure appears in Harley 4866, fol. 62r—­although there the clothing, hair, and placement of the lasso’s circle are slightly different.6 Writing of the two Regement manuscripts, Daniel Wakelin emphasizes the distinctiveness of the effort and expense put into visibly highlighting the “error” of misplaced texts and

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subsequent correction.7 By adding the drawings of the little workers to both manuscripts, Wakelin suggests, the manuscripts’ anonymous professional copyists make themselves briefly visible to readers, thus ensuring “that the patrons are conscious of the poet’s and scribes’ effort in their service, their meticulousness and their wit.”8 Like the more workaday errors of Beinecke 493 and HRC 143, these “mini-­but-­mighty editors” (as Sonja Drimmer names the little man in Arundel 38) are also read as hinting at the personalities of long-­dead anonymous book artists: funny, self-­aware, adept at turning mistakes into opportunities for self-­promotion and rollicking aesthetic play. Similar rope-­wielding correctors enliven the margins of Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, MS W.102, a book of hours created in England ca. 1300.9 On fol. 33v, the scribe skipped a line in the psalm they were copying. After the error was discovered, the missing line was copied into the bottom margin of the same leaf—­and then adorned with not one but two laboring bodies who show readers where to add the missing text (fig. C.4). On fol. 39r, another line skipped in the main text has been written into the top margin—­and decorated with two more little workers who gesture and drag the missing line to its proper place (fig. C.5). All four workers have oversized, manicule-­like digits, making it tempting to read much into the fact that, on both leaves, textual content involves blessings and protections for laboring hands: on fol. 33v, “You shall eat the labor of your hands: you shall be happy, and it shall go well for you” [Labores manuum tuarum quia ma(n)-­/ -­ducabis: beatus es (et) bene tibi erat] and on fol. 39v, “The lord is your keeper, the lord is your protection upon your right hand” [Dominus custodit te dominus protet-­/ -­tio tua. Sup(er) manum dexteram tuam]. Building on the insights of Wakelin and Drimmer, I sometimes want to speculate that these flamboyant error-­correction pairs are deliberate, playfully foregrounding the physical labors of bookmaking in order to emphasize its material and spiritual rewards. Of course, I have no solid proof. But neither do the modern theorists of digital media who read in the visible traces of digitizers’ hands in Google Books “a form of digital ‘signature,’” hinting at the “dynamic relationship between the people who

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Figure C.4  Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, MS W.102, fol. 33v. Error and correction in Psalm 128, highlighted by the addition of two laboring figures. Image capture performed by Walters Imaging Department; date of digitization, 2010. © 2011 Walters Art Museum, used under a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/.

Figure C.5  Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, MS W.102, fol. 39v. Error and correction in Psalm 121, highlighted by the addition of two laboring figures. Image capture performed by Walters Imaging Department; date of digitization, 2010. © 2011 Walters Art Museum, used under a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/.

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work in digitization factories and the machines and materials of their labor.”10 Ultimately, whether intentional introductions or happy accidents, small and typical (like the errors of Beinecke 493 and HRC 143) or flamboyant and unusual (like the errors in the Regement manuscripts and W.102), what makes all of these error-­correction pairs remarkable, and a fascinating challenge to how we might approach digital copying errors, is that the error and labor of correction are all still visible on the manuscript page. One way of approaching error is to seek not just its correction but its erasure. Another is to stare into the error, treating it as a window into what infrastructure theorists Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell call “mess”—­the fundamental imperfection inherent in all technology: We want to suggest that the practice of any technology in the world is never quite as simple, straightforward, or idealized as it is imagined to be. For any of the infrastructures of daily life—­ the electricity system, the water system, telephony, digital networking, or the rest—­the mess is never far away. Lift the cover, peer behind the panels, or look underneath the floor, and you will find a maze of cables, connectors, and infrastructural components, clips, clamps, and duct tape.11 The full range of scribal errors and corrections—­from the small, common, and quotidian to the large, flashy, and rare—­give us opportunities to see and take seriously the “mess” that underlies any idealized notion of straightforward, effortless copying. Errors and corrections preserved in hard-­copy medieval manuscripts invite us to consider, even enjoy, the company of “its human ghosts,” the long-­dead creators and readers who have, as Elaine Treharne evocatively puts it, “wandered and wondered through before us.”12 Thus, schooled by modern infrastructure theory and medieval scribes and their still-­visible errors large and small, one way of approaching copying errors in digitized medieval books might be to embrace all glitches as invitations to look behind the shining surfaces of our screens—­to see the very real and ongoing labor, and laborers, involved in making and maintaining digital copies of medieval books.

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Digital media theorists also argue for the beauty—­the necessity—­of letting errors remain visible. “What one needs to learn from mistakes,” Peter Krapp argues, “is not to avoid them but something else altogether: to allow for them; to allow room for error.”13 Musician and music journalist Phillip Sherbourne puts it similarly, “Errors and accidents crystallize. The pearl is an error, a glitch in response to purity. The error is the aura.”14 Errors, Sean Cubitt writes, ultimately return to digital images a sense of history, time, and realness. A digital image pretends to absolute autonomy from its making and its passage through time. By excluding itself from history and divorcing itself from life, it aspires to the purity of a wholly rational existence. But if it were possible for digital images truly to separate themselves so absolutely from time, they would be empty. . . . Glitch denies to digital artifacts the autonomy that would destroy them.15 Digital manuscripts are too often separated from the histories of their own making. Seen in this light, modern copying errors bring these digital books back into history, back into time. Both medieval manuscripts and media studies seem to suggest that there might be value in not overwriting or destroying the moments where the seams and “mess” show through, because those glimpses of mess reveal the effort-­filled performance that is always lurking behind our modern screens. Through deliberately preserving visible errors and glitches, digital manuscripts might better reveal how they—­like their analog exemplars—­are always touched by humans and shaped by unseen hands. And yet, as much as I may sometimes be tempted to argue that even routine errors in digital imaging should be preserved for posterity, I cannot. Idealistic, playful theory here is at war with pragmatic, daily practice. If we only ever celebrate modern copying errors in digital medieval manuscripts, we risk pouring finite resources into preserving errors that inhibit the usability of digitized objects. Since the primary project mission for most digital manuscript collections is to provide different modes of access to their holdings, preserving modern copying errors that hinder full access is unacceptable as a disciplinary good

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practice. But ideally, it should also be unacceptable to leave no visible public record of when, where, and what changes have been made. Michael Camille laments how modern digital manuscripts are not as penetrable as their analog exemplars—­but the larger problem may be that digital manuscripts are actually more penetrable, and more invisibly changeable, than their analog predecessors. Since first encountering it in Aliza Elkin’s “Hand Job: A Zine about Mass Digitization, Labor, Error, and Art,” I have been fascinated by the 2006 digital copy of Henry Noel Humphreys’s Specimens of Illuminated Manuscripts (1853), especially plate 7—­in large part because of the multiple images the digital copy contained showing its digitizer’s hand at work (see fig. P.1). In late February 2020, I visited the Albany Institute of History and Art to examine their analog copy and assess exactly how much color distortion and variance had been introduced through digitization. But in early March, I awoke to find the digital copy profoundly changed. On March 3, 2020, the copyist’s hand was “corrected” out of existence (fig. C.6). That change is evidence of a profound disciplinary difference. In the blurry glimpses of the digitizer’s hand, I had seen a medieval scribe’s modern heir, deserving of the same awe and gratitude manuscript researchers habitually lavish on premodern copyists. I had seen data about digitization and the multicentury history of copying manuscripts across media, and I had firmly believed that all of it was worth preserving. But the crawling algorithms of Google had not seen a person or valuable data—­they had seen a glitch, an error in need of correction, updating, erasure. “New media live and die by the update,” Wendy Hui Kyong Chun writes, and updates “often ‘save’ things by literally destroying—­that is, writing over—­the things they resuscitate.”16 This is the case for the digitizer in the Google Books scan of Humphreys’s mid-­nineteenth-­century copy of a sixteenth-­century manuscript book. She has been “upgraded” into invisibility, corrected out of existence—­in Google Books, as well as in HathiTrust, the Internet Archive, and other digital repositories that depend on Google Books data.17 In the accompanying metadata in Google Books, there is no sign that anything has changed: not the erasure of the digitization spe-

Figure C.6  Henry Noel Humphreys, Specimens of Illuminated Manuscripts of the Middle Ages, from the Sixth to the Sixteenth Century. A Series of Twelve Plates from Richly Illuminated Manuscripts, Executed in Exact Imitation of the Originals (London, 1853), plate 7. Digitized by an unnamed employee of Google’s ScanOps division, August 28, 2006. Most recent update, March 3, 2020; copyist’s hand “corrected” out of existence. Public domain, Google-digitized, courtesy of HathiTrust. Hard-copy exemplar owned by the University of Michigan.

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cialist’s hands, not the number of total pages in the book (which also, weirdly, changed as part of the March 2020 upgrade). One digital copy has been substituted for another—­markedly different—­copy, as though those transformations do not truly matter. The copy in the HathiTrust is slightly better: there at least there is a note that the book was changed “2020-­03-­03 12:38 UTC,” accompanied by a pop-­up window with the boilerplate message that accompanies all such corrections: “This is the date when this item was last updated. Version dates are updated when improvements such as higher quality scans or more complete scans have been made.” I want to be clear about what is at stake: it is not just that I miss seeing the traces of the unnamed digitizer responsible for the 2006 digital copy of Specimens of Illuminated Manuscripts—­although I do miss her. It is that, as Paul Conway has suggested, this instability, the invisible changes wrought on digital books’ bodies, create a crisis of authenticity for users of digital texts.18 Silent corrections like these are cautionary tales for the end users, creators, and maintainers of digital manuscript collections. At any point, the errors with which I began this coda might be corrected out of existence, with no mention of manuscripts changed or record of what used to be there—­indeed, some already have. By November 2021, the missing leaves I noted in M0379 had been rephotographed and “tipped in,” completing the digital copy. Version Control for Digital Manuscripts

I dream of digital collection management systems that would allow for correction while also preserving some version of those errors, creating both better digital manuscripts and a visible record of the multitemporal community that reaches across days, years, and decades to sustain and care for shared digital cultural heritage. I have sometimes imagined this as a shiny new version of familiar medieval scribal practice: leaving visible layers of caret insertions, scraped out and rewritten words, paratextual “read the second page before the first” notes, perhaps even with occasional incidents of extravagant whimsy, like those painted figures with straining ropes, highlighting copying errors even

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as they enact the fix. But there is a more familiar, sensible, modern name for digital systems that allow for the coexistence of old errors and new updates: version control. For software development, version control, version management, or more simply versioning, dates back until at least the 1970s: particularly well-­known version control systems (VCSs) today include Git, Bazaar, and the revision history pages of Wikipedia. As Martina Bürgermeister explains, “version control software tracks the iterations or changes made to the files at each step of this iterative process providing access to each version of the file. Each version has a timestamp and an author.” At minimum, version control allows participants in the project “to identify who changed what and when.”19 It helps us quickly and reliably answer questions like “which files were changed? Who made the change? What did the files contain before the change?”20 More maximalist version control can let users “revert selected files back to a previous state, revert the entire project back to a previous state, compare changes over time, see who last modified something that might be causing a problem, who introduced an issue and when, and more.”21 Versioning acts like “an unlimited and all-­powerful ctrl-­z” or “a project-­wide time machine.”22 While it may not, itself, visibly layer errors and corrections over each other like the medieval copying errors described earlier, this kind of VCS could allow for modern digital copying errors and corrections to coexist as parallel versions of the same project, offering deliberate snapshots of the ongoing, multiyear project of digital assembly—­the way historical photographs of a building can usefully document specific stages of construction and renovation. Doing digital codicology demands that we change our mind-­set in multiple ways: to consider the digital copy as an object distinct from its analog exemplar, to consider digitization projects in their own points in history and how they connect to much longer media histories of copying. It also demands that we understand our projects’ place in larger digital ecosystems. I might personally be obsessed with an undigitized late fifteenth-­century manuscript copy of The Fall of Princes and wish it were fully freely available online, but that is the

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desire of a single researcher. The people working at the manuscript’s holding institution must serve much more than my idiosyncratic research interests: they have to balance finite local resources with the needs and wishes of many more stakeholders. Applying this principle to copying errors in digital manuscripts means admitting that I may be one of the only end users interested in preserving multiple iterations of a single digital manuscript: salvaging the copy with the upside-­down opening or backward leaf, even as pages are reimaged and digital photographs corrected. Is dedicating the server space to preserving complete copies of every earlier iteration, each correction, a reasonable use of the limited resources of the digital manuscript community? I suspect not. Server space is finite. Curation is not the same as hoarding. Not everything can—­or should—­be saved. Many digital copying errors will be corrected out of existence—­and for much the same reasons that early modern owners of medieval manuscripts sometimes would hand-­copy and add in missing pages, and eighteenth-­century facsimilists were hired to “complete” damaged books, and early twentieth-­century librarians experimented with “correcting” fragmentary rare volumes by inserting Photostat replacement pages. My objection is less that updates happen, or even that updates overwrite earlier copies: it is the silence with which these updates occur. That I would argue is the real risk to authenticity posed by digital manuscripts. It is not that digital manuscripts somehow chip away their hard-­copy exemplars’ unique auras or destroy some underlying foundation of the “real.” It is not even that institutions and experts can enter into a digital manuscript and alter its structures and content: that’s been happening to analog manuscripts for as long as analog manuscripts have existed. It’s that when changes are made to digital manuscripts, they should not be invisible. They should be accompanied by a public, visible, and detailed record of what those changes were, when and why they occurred. Particularly when a digital repository does not have a versioning control system that lets end users revert back to earlier iterations, it’s important that there be an accessible public record of changes made.

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Paul A. Broyles has argued that digital editions need version numbering, and that “the same considerations might apply to many kinds of digital scholarly resource.”23 I agree wholeheartedly: using formal conventions of semantic versioning to track changes made to digital manuscripts as they are added to and corrected over time would be incredibly useful for end users. As Broyles has argued about digital editions, version numbers for digital manuscripts would “offer a simple and practical method not merely for identifying a state of a resource, but for communicating something of its history and the relationship among its states.”24 We already gesture toward this when appending “2.0” to the title of a large-­scale digital manuscript project to indicate a major project transformation. I propose we might take up the kind of versioning gestured at the project-­sized scale in names like “DS 2.0” and systematically extend it to document updates made to individual digital books. We could borrow from programming the conventional three-­part version number to identify what changes—­and what size changes—­have been made: shelfmark (or URI or PURL) x.y.z, with x = a major, irreversible change made to the digital copy, y = a more minor change, and z = a patch, a minor bug fix that does not fundamentally change the digital manuscript for end users. Applying this method to the versioning history of Stanford, Stanford University Libraries, Department of Special Collections, Manuscript Collection, MSS Codex M0379 might look something like this. M0379 1.0.0 is the version created and published in November 2014. When it was first published, all images were automatically assigned image numbers: image 1, image 2, image 3. One of the tasks I performed as an assistant on the project was to change those automatic image numbers into researcher-­friendly foliation: fol. 1r, fol. 1v, fol. 2r, etc. If we wanted to be very specific in our versioning numbers, that very slight update could be named M0379 1.0.1. Between November 2014 and May 2021, I know of no additional changes made to the digital object. But in May 2021, I pointed out that the digital copy that I had helped make almost seven years earlier, and upon which I had performed QA/QC prior to publication, had two missing images. This happens in digitization. In-

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stitutions can only fix what they know about and are often glad hear from users if there is something that can be corrected in one of their digital books. The copying error I was responsible for was fixed in a matter of months. This updated version could be labeled M0379 1.2.0 (if the local standards determine that tipping in two missing digital leaves should be defined as a minor versioning change). The published copy of M0379 current in November 2021 has reverted to the automatically assigned image numbers and has not yet been refoliated. Once the foliation numbers are added to the updated digital copy, the version number might be M0379 1.2.1. In addition to the numbers indicating which update end users are working with, documentation is a central part of the versioning process. Ideally, if applied to digital manuscripts, all changes and the dates of updates might be briefly noted in the manuscript’s descriptive metadata and/or local documentation explaining the what, when, why, and who of changes made. This last portion is particularly important for giving credit where it is due. In chapter 1, when I write about the digitization of M0379, I name the team involved in the 1.0.0 2014 version: Astrid J. Smith, Micaela Go, Selina Lamberti, Doris Cheung Wu, Wayne Vanderkuil, Benjamin Albritton, and John Mustain. A different team of workers are responsible for the 2021 update: Benjamin Albritton (now Rare Books curator at Stanford University Libraries) requested the digitization of the missing leaves, Wayne Vanderkuil performed image capture, and Chris Hacker did the postprocessing and re-­uploading.25 There are at least two distinct payoffs for implementing version control as a standard part of cultural heritage digitization. First, doing so would give end users a clearer and more stable record of the digital objects upon which we depend. In current practice, when I publish on the Google Books copy of Humphreys’s Specimens of Illuminated Manuscripts of the Middle Ages, from the Sixth to the Sixteenth Century or the copy of Harley 1766 in the Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts, there is no easy way for me to indicate which version I have used, nor is there an easy way for my readers to go and check what I wrote about those

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digital manuscripts—­because you cannot have perfect confidence that what you see on your screen is the same, unchanged digital object that I worked with as I wrote. Standardizing version control in digital manuscript collections fixes that instability and uncertainty, helping work on digital objects maintain greater rigor and accuracy—­even as the digital objects we study continue to be corrected, augmented, and changed. Second, it could properly credit all contributors (or, rather, all contributors who consent to being named) involved in the creation and ongoing care of a digital medieval book—­both the team involved in its creation but also anyone who has stepped in—­like Scribe B for Scribe A in HRC 143—­to provide a more complete, more accurate digital copy. In doing so, this kind of public versioning might also help preserve a record of the very real “mess” of manuscripts, foregrounding across the centuries, media, and versions the vast interconnected communities of human contributors and showcasing how the maintenance and care work for digital manuscripts are ongoing. Robust versioning could ultimately create a space in which people involved in digitization might, if they wish, address their readers directly—­like medieval scribes before them—­and remind end users what we own them and how we might begin to repay our debts. The liveliness of medieval manuscripts comes not only in their radiant materiality, the long centuries they have survived, the lives they have brushed up against. It is also in traces left to us by the manuscripts’ creators, the scribal notes that tell readers how the book’s copyists want to be remembered, how they want their stories to be told. Manuscript studies—­and humanities research, teaching, and outreach more broadly—­have all been transformed by the labors and expertise of unseen digitization specialists. I am not arguing for forced visibility. But a robust versioning system that allowed contributor comments could be one place where those specialists who wish to might follow the paths carved out by their predecessors and write themselves into the present and future of medieval books. For decades, end users have habitually overlooked the labor of making and maintaining the digital books that we use daily. Moving

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forward, I challenge us to embrace a greater level of rigor and precision than we have thus far. Ultimately, the models to best achieve that rigor do not need to be invented anew. They already wait for us in the existing best practices of codicology and bibliography; in long-­standing best practices honed across decades by experts in museums and libraries; in version control systems and other software good practices; and preserved in the pages—­analog and digital—­of medieval books.

APPENDIX D O I N G D I G I TA L CO D I CO L O G Y A Manifesto

studies have been drawn almost entirely from the late medieval period and from a narrow strip of western Europe. My methods, however, are transferable: to medieval texts created earlier or later, to manuscripts created outside my field of geographical study, to texts and objects created well outside the traditional borders of the medieval period. Here, I propose a set of formalized recommendations—­a manifesto in seven theses—­that readers may apply to their own work. Thesis 1: Digital objects are not the same as their analog exemplars. They are not transparent, nor even heavily scratched, windows to their hard-­copy originals. Using digital manuscripts should therefore mean looking at, rather than looking through, those differences, acknowledging the digital objects we rely on as objects in their own right. Doing so THROUGHOUT THIS BOOK, MY CASE

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requires applying the same principles and critical questions commonly asked of analog codices. For instance: When was this thing made? by whom? using what tools? • Imaging tools used and relevant sources of funding. The digital equivalent of “written on parchment of low quality in oak-­gall ink” is naming the hardware and software used in digitization. Likewise, the equivalent of “made by the Limbourg brothers for Jean, Duke de Berry” is “made by X-­digitization team or Y-­digitization studio, with support from the NEH or the AHRC.” Although this information is not always tied to individual digital manuscripts, it will likely be in “Read Me” documents attached to digital collections, in “About the project” webpages, in publications (print and online), and available by inquiry to the correct people and departments at the holding institution. • Date(s) of creation of the digital image set. Analog manuscripts are often created in multiple stages, with additions made at even later dates—­and all of those dates are relevant to understanding the book as a whole object. So too with digital manuscripts. Although information about the date of digitization is rarely included in the descriptive metadata bound to individual digitized manuscripts, it is vitally important for end users to know this, helping us to more rigorously historicize the digital manuscript distinct from its analog exemplar and from previous print and digital copies of the same book. Do not trust that the image set is stable and will not be changed. • Date(s) of creation of descriptive metadata. Images and metadata are only sometimes the same age. In addition to knowing the age of your image set, you want to know the approximate age and source of the metadata. In instances where metadata is reused, seek to discover its source. Understand also how descriptive metadata may be an aggregate of information accumulated across decades, with specific discoveries and phrases not always clearly credited to individual contributors. A ninety-­year-­old bookseller’s catalog

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is very different from metadata made from the content of a single printed descriptive catalog written by an expert researcher, and both are very different from a compilation and distillation of the findings of a larger collection of scholarly reports. In all cases, seek to understand what constraints and local labor conditions—­in the 1930s, the 1960s, the 1990s, the 2020s—­made reusing older object descriptions (rather than paying for entirely new cataloging) the right call for that project mission, in that moment. Do not rely on publicly available descriptive metadata not to change. • Date(s) of creation of the interface. Like the bindings of analog books, interfaces may not be the same age as either the digital images or descriptive metadata they contain. Interfaces may be significantly newer than the digital manuscripts they hold, like a 1980s binding wrapping a 1480s text-­block. They may also be older than the digital images they contain, as when a new library joining an existing consortium fits digital manuscripts made in the early 2020s into a framework planned in the late 1990s. Seek to understand when and where an interface comes from: whether it is a boutique product made for a particular set of manuscripts or is a commercially available digital library system. Do not mistake a date on the interface for the date of digitization. Do not trust an existing interface not to change. In cases where this information cannot be recovered, either from recourse to the publicly available descriptive metadata or by speaking with experts at the holding institution, do not gloss over that absence. Use your description of the digital object to mark the gaps in information, in the same way that skillful descriptions of analog objects mark absence as well as presence, what is unknown as well as what is known. Thesis 2: Download and document early and often. Don’t assume the digital resource you are using will persist unchanged. In cases where download is not possible, take and carefully file high-­quality screenshots. Your case study one day may vanish. It may be updated or corrected out of existence. Its funding may end. It may reach the end of its

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data lifecycle. Preserve the data you depend on, before it is lost, erased, or changed. Thesis 3: Understand your project’s place within its larger institutional ecosystems. There can be a persistent mismatch between institutional and individual academic value. Something you desperately wish were digitized may not be available at the time you wish it. It may be available online only in a taste of digital scans of earlier slides. It may never be part of the digitization queue. While I take great personal and scholarly pleasure in Glasgow University Libraries, MS Hunter 5, a massive late fifteenth-­century copy of Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, I understand that I am peculiar in my loves: of Lydgate, of this poem, of this exact manuscript. I understand also that the holding institution has audiences and priorities beyond me. Resources are finite and allocated thoughtfully. Understanding a manuscript’s—­and my own—­ place within larger digital ecosystems means accepting that there are other, bigger audiences whose needs may exceed the boutique desires of individual, specialist researchers. Thesis 4: Give credit where credit is due. Credit librarians, archivists, curators, catalogers, and other library and museum workers—­ including digitization specialists and others involved in the digitization workflow. Where this myriad of contributors wish to be named, do so. When you cannot uncover the names of the digitizers and other workers to whom you are indebted, seek to understand why. Consider, especially, specific institutional contexts. Some erasures, like the erasure of the woman who digitized Humphreys’s Specimens of Illuminated Manuscripts (1853) for Google Books, are part of much larger, well-­known patterns of secrecy and exploitation and may be framed as such. But it is also true that libraries and museums have their own credit cultures in which it might be carefully considered policy for individual contributors to go unnamed. For instance, the Photographic Unit at the University of Glasgow prefers all work to be credited to that unit, which, the head of the unit told me, is a more accurate record of the collaborative nature of digitization. Expect institutional standards to change. When I began work on this in 2013, the Walters Art Museum had a policy of crediting digitiza-

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tion team members by name and with individual entries, using the TEI element (Statement of responsibility). Around 2019, they were moving away from crediting staff photographers and digitizers in standard institutional credit lines—­but contributors’ names continued to be included in image headers and embedded in the metadata that are publicly available on their manuscript sites.1 As I revise again, in late 2021, they are continuing to explore accessibility in new ways, revising their earlier revision, and are in the process of moving back to crediting contributors by name.2 Ultimately, the end result of all three practices may seem the same—­ the names of individual contributors are not always firmly attached to their work—­but the reasoning, context, and community ethics are very different. Understanding and addressing those differences is key. Thesis 5: Pass the Caswell Test. Read scholarship from library and information studies, digital imaging, and digital archiving with the same commitment you extend to other scholarly disciplines. Include librarians, curators, and digitizers in your publications’ acknowledgments, main text, footnotes, and citations. Thesis 6: Understand your position and how your personal and disciplinary biases fit into larger, interdisciplinary communities that intersect in digital environments. Digital research is inherently interdisciplinary; understand how your own locations and positions influence your values, but understand also how other locations and positions support different disciplinary best practices. Thesis 7: Cite rigorously and honestly. If we agree that using a digital copy is not the same as studying its physical original, then users of digital objects need to be able to cite the copy that we actually study. Each article that asserts that digital copies cannot support rigorous scholarship drives other writers further into the citational closet. It does not make it so they (we) do not use digital manuscripts; it just encourages them (us) to lie about and hide their (our) use. But honesty in our sources supports better, more authentic scholarship. This is also about strategy and funding. When we cite the digital objects upon which our research depends, we give the institutions that create and maintain those digital collections hard evidence that they

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can use to make the case for ongoing funding—­to expand digitization programs and to keep existing data migrating onto new platforms. If you depend on digital manuscripts and you do not cite them, you are working against future funding and withholding data that institutions need to make a case for their continued existence. By contrast, when you use digital manuscripts and you cite them honestly, you are helping make a case for present and future investment, for the ongoing maintenance of the digital collections upon which your—­and our—­collective work depends.

NOTES

Preface 1. Color confirmation of hard-­copy original made by Frank Stratikis, Buhr Shelving Facility staff, University of Michigan Library, personal communication, February 12, 2020. I have also examined an analog copy held by the Albany Institute of Art and History and can confirm that the colors in that copy are close kin to what Stratikis described. 2. I’m indebted to Frances Sands, curator of drawings and books, Sir John Soane’s Museum, for this identification. 3. Morrison, “Master of the Soane Hours,” 444. Introduction 1. Warner, “Scribes, Misattributed,” 55–­100; Hanna, Introducing English Medieval Book History, 132–­65; Roberts, “On Giving Scribe B a Name,” 247–­70; Edwards, “Ellesmere Manuscript,” 59–­73; Mooney, “Chaucer’s Scribe,” 97–­138. 2. Edwards, “Back to the Real?” remains a key piece in these debates. See also Werner, Studying Early Printed Books, 139–­4 0; Treharne, “Fleshing Out the Text,” 465–­78; Nolan, “Medieval Habit, Modern Sensation,” 465–­76; Echard, “Containing the Book,” 96–­118, and her coda to Printing the Middle Ages. 3. There is a tenacious narrative about how the invention of print in the

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fifteenth century rapidly and totally replaced manuscripts. It is incorrect: manuscript culture persists for decades, even centuries, following the rise of the movable type printing press in western Europe—­in the value still placed on handwritten texts over printed ones. Many of us still live, at least to some extent, in a manuscript culture, with handwritten signatures still acting as a stamp of authenticity beyond mere typed names. By saying “nonprint” instead of “postprint,” I also seek to hold space for that wider range of bookmaking cultures that did not find type a useful medium for their needs, and to acknowledge that print is neither the best nor only advanced book technology. 4. See, e.g., Warren, Holy Digital Grail; Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age, ed. Albritton, Henley, and Treharne; Endres, Digitizing Medieval Manuscripts; and van Lit, Among Digitized Manuscripts; Bamford and Francomano, “On Digital-­Medieval Manuscript Culture,” 29–­45; Mak, “Archaeology of a Digitization,” 1515–­26. 5. Oxford English Dictionary (hereafter OED), s.v. “manuscript, adj. and n.” 6. These metadata are partially based on Dutschke, Guide to Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, 41–­51, but are not an exact copy of that catalog’s contents. Vanessa Wilkie, interview with the author, October 22, 2021. 7. Woodward, “New Ellesmere Chaucer Facsimile,” 5–­8. 8. Pettitt, “Media Dynamics,” 53–­72. 9. Parikka, Geology of Media, 2–­3 . 10. Treharne, introduction to Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age, 6. 11. Orlemanski, “Philology and the Turn Away from the Linguistic Turn,” 158; Warren, “Philology in Ruins,” 60; Taylor, “Getting Technology,” 131–­55; Turner, Philology, 386; and Wenzel, “Reflections on (New) Philology,” 12. 12. Lee, Digital Imaging, 3. 13. Terras, “Digitisation and Digital Resources,” 47–­4 8; Deegan and Tanner, Digital Futures, 34. 14. Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, 56. 15. Weiser, “Computer for the 21st Century,” 94. 16. Wakelin, Scribal Correction, 13–­14. 17. For example, Shep, “Digital Materiality,” 386–­9 6; Geismar, “Defining the Digital,” 254–­63; Drucker, “Performative Materiality”; Cameron, “Beyond the Cult of the Replicant,” 49–­75; Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms, throughout. 18. Drucker, SpecLab, 147. 19. Blanchette, “Material History of Bits,” 1043–­4 4. 20. Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” 21. Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms, 135. 22. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 5, 8–­9.

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23. Ballatore and Natale, “E-­readers and the Death of the Book,” 2379–­9 4; Muri, “Twenty Years after the Death of the Book,” 115–­4 0; Laptham, “‘New Age’ Scholarship,” 411–­26; Donaldson, “Destruction of the Book,” 1–­8; Eisenstein, “End of the Book?” 541–­55. 24. Ballatore and Natale, “E-­readers and the Death of the Book,” 2390. 25. Robinson, “New Methods of Editing”; Andrew Prescott, “Electronic Beowulf and Digital Restoration,” 186–­9 6; Duggan and Lyman, “Progress Report on The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive.” 26. University of Aberdeen, “Project Background: The Aberdeen Bestiary.” 27. Original grant proposal, quoted in Duggan, “Teaching Manuscripts,” 154. 28. Wiggins, “About: The Auchinleck Manuscript Project.” 29. Pagels, Review of “e-codices,” 594. 30. Codex Sinaiticus, “Codex Sinaiticus: Experience the Oldest Bible,” and Codex Sinaiticus, “About the Project”; Albritton, introduction to Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age, 10, 11. 31. Camille, “Sensations,” 33–­5 4. 32. Camille, “Sensations,” 45. 33. Camille, “Sensations,” 38. 34. Camille, “Sensations,” 46. 35. Segler, “Touched for the Very First Time,” 42–­43. 36. Treharne, “Fleshing Out the Text,” 469. 37. Mittman, “Touching the Past,” 46. 38. Birnbaum, Bonde, and Kestemont, “Digital Middle Ages,” S33. 39. Benton, Gillespie, and Soha, “Digital Image-­Processing,” 40. 40. Prescott, “Electronic Beowulf and Digital Restoration,” 188; Kiernan, “Digital Image Processing and the Beowulf Manuscript,” 21–­22. 41. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts,14–­15, and McKenzie, “What’s Past Is Prologue,” 272–­73; Drimmer, Art of Allusion; Wakelin, Scribal Correction; Ethan Knapp, “Poetic Work and Scribal Labor,” 209–­28. 42. Whearty, “Invisible in ‘The Archive’”; Tansey, “Archives without Archivists,” and Tansey, “Tansey Test.” 43. Caswell, “ ‘The Archive’ Is Not an Archives,” para. 28. 44. Ozment, “Rationale for Feminist Bibliography,” 168. 45. Also known as the Bechdel-­Wallace Test or, more simply, “The Rule” from the comic where it first appeared. Bechdel, “The Rule,” 27. 46. Edwards, “Digital Archive, Scholarly Enquiry.” 47. Edwards, “Digital Archive, Scholarly Enquiry.” 48. Bair and Steuer, “Developing a Premodern Manuscript Application Profile,” 2–­3 .

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49. Greene and Meissner, “More Product, Less Process,” 208–­63. 50. Among digitizer-­authored publications, I strongly recommend Phelps, “Photographed by the Hand of a Sinner”; and Stanford, “Booksquashing.” 51. My practices thus brush up against digital ethnography. See, e.g., Abdin and Seta, “Doing Digital Ethnography.” 52. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, 12–­13. 53. Callaci, “On Acknowledgments,” 127. 54. Callaci, “On Acknowledgments,” 129. 55. Brodeur, Maclachlan, and Parrott, “The CLIR Postdoctoral Fellowship,” 30. 56. Quotation from the original job ad, on file at CLIR in November 2021. 57. Wilcox, “Introduction: The Philology of Smell,” 3. 58. Dahlström, “Critical Editing and Critical Digitisation,” 87. 59. Bryan is particularly eloquent on how print biases contaminate scholarly readings of medieval books; see Bryan, Collaborative Meaning, xi, 5–­20. 60. See Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 5. 61. Chaucer, Book of the Duchess, Riverside Chaucer, lines 1324–­3 4. All quotations from Chaucer, unless otherwise noted, come from The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed. 62. Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, bk. 5, lines 1793–­9 6. 63. Da Rold, “Textual Copying and Transmission,” 41. 64. Connolly, “What John Shirley Said about Adam,” 81–­100; Warner, “Scribes, Misattributed,” 55–­100; Edwards, “Chaucer and ‘Adam Scriveyn,” 135–­38; Gillespie, “Reading Chaucer’s Words to Adam,” 269–­83; and Mooney, “Chaucer’s Scribe,” 97–­138. 65. This transcription, including punctuation, follows Connolly, “What John Shirley Said about Adam,” 84. 66. Middle English Dictionary (hereafter MED), “scal(le) n.” 1a–­b. 67. Roberts, “On Giving Scribe B a Name,” 250; Warner, “Scribes, Misattributed,” throughout; Parkes, “Their Hands before Our Eyes,” 43, 43n68. 68. Drimmer, “Manuscript as an Ambigraphic Medium,” 178; Watt, Making of Hoccleve’s Series. 69. Hoccleve, Regement of Princes, lines 988–­92. 70. MED, “gram(e) n.)” 1a, 2, 3a. I build here on Brown, “Scratching the Surface,” 199–­214; Schiegg, “Scribes’ Voices,” 129–­47; McCollum, “The Rejoicing Sailor and the Rotting Hand,” 67–­93; and Gameson, The Scribe Speaks? 71. Hoccleve, Regement of Princes, lines 1016–­29. 72. “Quia qui nescit scribere laborem nullum extimat esse. Nam si uelis scire singulatim nuntio tibi quam grabe est scripture pondus. oculis caliginem facit. dorsum incurbat. costas et uentrem frangit. renibus dolorem inmittit. et

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omne corpus fastidium nutrit.” Córdoba, Archivo Capitular, MS 1, fol. 4r. Both the original Latin and English translation are from Brown, 205–­6. 73. Ward provides an excellent overview of this tradition in “ ‘We Wish He Had Been a Better Poet and a Manlier Fellow,’” 103–­16. 74. MED, “anoi” (n.) 1a–­b, 2. 75. MED, “anoi” (n) 2b. 76. MED, drīen (v.(1)) 1a–­7; and drīen (v.(2)), 1–­3c. 77. Watt, Making of Hoccleve’s Series, 4, emphasis in original. 78. Summit, Memory’s Library, 20; Ebin, John Lydgate, 7. 79. Ebin, John Lydgate, 7. 80. Gillespie, “Bookbinding,” 154. 81. Lydgate, “Complaint of the Black Knight,” John Lydgate: Poems, lines 194–­9 6. 82. Lydgate, Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, vol. 1, bk. 1, lines 9–­27. 83. Nichols, “Materialities of the Manuscript,”26–­58, and Nichols, “An Artifact by Any Other Name,” 186–­98; Terras, “Artefacts and Errors,” 43–­61; Boon, In Praise of Copying. 84. Liu, “Ways of Reading, Models for Text,” 3. 85. Ide and Véronis, “Introduction,” 4. 86. Johnson, “American Medievalists and Today,” 854. 87. For instance, Shapin, “Invisible Technician,” 554–­63. 88. This and the following points are deeply indebted to my anonymous first reader. 89. Most publications on digital manuscripts discuss how to name them. Here, I build most closely on Porter, “Is This Your Book?” Dot Porter Digital (blog), July 16, 2018, http:​/​​/​w ww​.dotporterdigital​.org​/​is​-this​-your​-book​-what​ -di​gi​ti​zation​-does​-to​-manuscripts​-and​-what​-we​-can​-do​-about​-it​/​ and Porter, “The Uncanny Valley,” Dot Porter Digital (blog), October 31, 2018, http:​/​​/​w ww​ .dot​por​ter​di​gi​tal​.org​/​the​-uncanny​-valley​-and​-the​-ghost​-in​-the​-machine​-a​-dis​ cussion​-of​-analogies​-for​-thinking​-about​-digitized​-medieval​-manuscripts​/​. 90. McNamer, Red Rover, 36. 91. Conway, “Digital Transformations,” 52; Grycz, “Digitising Rare Books and Manuscripts,” 34. 92. OED, “avatar,” draft addition, September 2008. 93. Schwartz, Culture of the Copy; Boon, In Praise of Copying. 94. Boon, In Praise of Copying, 41–­42. 95. Manoff, “Materiality of Digital Collections,” 322; Geismar, Museum Object Lessons, xviii; Treharne, introduction to Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age, 1, 4. 96. See McCrea, “Creating a More Accessible Environment,” 7–­18; Walker

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and Keenan, “Do You Hear What I See?” 69–­87; Wymer, “Why Universal Accessibility Should Matter.” 97. Dictionary of Archives Terminology, s.v. “Access, n.” Society for American Archivists, most recently accessed May 27, 2021, https:​/​​/​dictionary​.archivists​ .org​/​entry​/​access​.html; Dictionary of Archives Terminology, s.v. “Accessibility, n.” Society of American Archivists, most recently accessed May 27, 2021, https:​ /​​/​dictionary​.archivists​.org​/​entry​/​accessibility​.html. 98. Mario Einaudi, digital respository manager, Library Division, Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, personal communication, March 19, 2021. 99. Debra Cashion, “News from Digital Scriptorium,” newsletter, July 23, 2020. 100. Baron, What’s Your Pronoun?, 39–­78. Chapter 1 1. Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, MS W.168 is a book of hours created in two distinct stages in the fifteenth century. There is no colophon or extant record preserving the names of copyists and artists responsible for the texts and decorations. The complete digital copy of W.168 was created after 2012, through “Imaging the Hours,” a grant awarded to the Walters Art Museum by the National Endowment for the Humanities. “Walters Digitization Initiative Project Description,” 2015, document shared by Kimber Wiegand, digitization specialist, Department of Photography and Digital Imaging, Walters Art Museum. Personal correspondence, March 29, 2018. 2. In the strict definition, I follow Christopher de Hamel, Making Medieval Manuscripts, 111. Used more casually, the term may refer to any elaborate decoration. 3. Comparisons between scriptoria and digitization labs appear in Widner, “Toward Text-­Mining the Middle Ages”; Nichols, “ ‘Born Medieval’”; Pidd and Stubbs, “From Medieval Manuscripts to Electronic Text,” 58–­59. 4. Dahlström, “Critical Editing and Critical Digitisation,” 88. 5. De Hamel, “Reflexions on the Trade in Books of Hours,” 32–­3 3. 6. Irregular capitalization in the original. Personal correspondence with Timothy Edward Noakes, head of Public Service, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries. 7. “Good practice” and “best practice” are project management terms I encountered for the first time working within academic libraries. As I understood them and as used in these contexts, “best practice” refers to superior, best possible methods, while “good practice” can refer to either methods that

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support sufficiently good work or to a previous best practice that has become a naturalized, standard part of a project workflow. 8. In what follows, I am indebted to interviews and conversations with Astrid Smith and Benjamin Albritton, and to Hughes, Digitizing Collections; Lee, Digital Imaging, esp. 90–­91; and Besser, Introduction to Imaging. 9. Lee, Digital Imaging, 90; Besser, Introduction to Imaging, 33–­3 4. 10. Besser, Introduction to Imaging, 33, 34. 11. Lee, Digital Imaging, 90–­91. More broadly, see 83–­85. 12. Lee, Digital Imaging, 90. 13. An excellent visualization of this process is found at Lee, Digital Imaging, 91. 14. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, 15. 15. Hughes devotes the first two chapters of Digitizing Collections to these topics. See also Besser, Introduction to Imaging, 31–­32. 16. See Watson, “Illuminated Manuscript,” 137; and Beavan, Arnott, and McLaren, “Text and Illustration,” 66. 17. “Sturdy and unexceptional” comes from Watson, “Illuminated Manuscript,” 137. “Indifferent” from Beavan, Arnott, and McLaren, “Text and Illustration,” 66. 18. Starting in 2005, the Mellon Foundation’s annual reports offer an overview of years of interinstitutional digitization collaborations prior to the systematic digitization of Stanford’s own bound codices. See especially the president’s annual reports and “Priorities for the Scholarly Communications Program” reports. 19. I am indebted to Astrid Smith for this point. Ann K. D. Myers, Christy Smith, and Timothy Edward Noakes (all of Stanford University Libraries) supplied these numbers, with the important caveat that the data here may not include texts that have not yet been fully cataloged. Personal correspondence with the author, February 20, 2019. 20. Estimate attributed to Christopher de Hamel, in Albritton et al., “SharedCanvas,” 3. 21. Prescott, “Making the Digital Human.” 22. “De facto digital canon” comes from Burrows, “Medieval Manuscripts and Their (Digital) Afterlives,” 159. 23. My thinking on social class and manuscript reproduction is influenced by Camille, “The ‘Très Riches Heures.’” 24. I am grateful to Sonja Drimmer and Patricia Loveatt for their help diagnosing M0379’s gold work. 25. These critiques thread throughout the essays gathered in Kim and

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Stommel, Disrupting the Digital Humanities, and in Prescott, “Making the Digital Human.” 26. Prescott and Hughes, “Why Do We Digitize?” 27. Bourg and Sadler, “Feminism and the Future of Library Discovery,” para. 21. 28. See Lachance, “Care of Quality at Every Moment.” 29. See, e.g., Mittman, “Touching the Past”; and Segler, “Touched for the Very First Time.” 30. I am indebted to Dot Porter, Keri Thomas, and Johanna Green for these observations. Personal correspondence, February 27, 2018. 31. Lee, Digital Imaging, 83. 32. OED, s.v. “black box, n.” 2. 33. GTI Munsell neutral gray, in adherence with the “ISO 3664:2009, Graphic Technology and Photography Standards Catalogue,” produced by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO): https:​/​​/​w ww​.iso​.org​/​ standard​/​43234​.html. 34. OED, s.v. “platen, n.” 3a. 35. OED, s.v. “platen, n.” 3b. 36. Woodward, “New Ellesmere Chaucer Facsimile,” 9. 37. Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative (hereafter FADGI), “Technical Guidelines,” 22. 38. See FADGI, 22, 20. 39. Astrid Smith, personal correspondence, May 27, 2019. 40. Astrid Smith, personal correspondence, May 27, 2019. 41. Lee, Digital Imaging, 83. 42. FADGI, 69. 43. In “The Leper on the Road to Canterbury” I argued that because “dpi” refers to the density of small dots of color printable per inch, its use suggests images taken “with printers, and not screens, in mind” (246). That argument was incorrect: “in common usage, PPI and DPI are used interchangeably,” FADGI, 69. 44. For unbound manuscripts and other rare materials, see FADGI, 23. For bound manuscripts and other rare materials, see FADGI, 18. For microfilm, see FADGI, 51. 45. Anderson, “Item Driven Image Fidelity (IDIF).” 46. FADGI, 68. 47. Scorcioni, “Distortion in Textual Object Facsimile Production?,” 122. See also Rambaran-­Olm, “Advantages and Disadvantages of Digital Manuscript Reconstruction,” para. 38–­39; Terras, “Artefacts and Errors,” 52–­53.

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48. Scorcioni, “Distortion in Textual Object Facsimile Production?,” 122. 49. For example, Curt F. Bühler, keeper of printed books at the Pierpont Morgan Library (1934–­73), briefly notes his color blindness and comments on how it impacted his scholarship in The Fifteenth-­Century Book, 68. 50. FADGI, 16. 51 Hoccleve, Regement of Princes, lines 985–­87. 52. See MED, s.v. “unbuxom, adj.,” a–­c. See also MED, “buxom,” 1–­2; “unbuxomhed”; and OED, s.v. “unbuxom, adj.,” 1. 53. On the habitual stooping of copyists, see also Hoccleve, Regement of Princes, line 1014. 54. Gillespie, “[Review] Thomas Hoccleve,” 452. 55. See Hawley, “Reflections on the Meanings of Objects,” 5; and Harris, “Printers’ Diseases.” 56. Hoccleve, Regement of Princes, lines 1021–­22. 57. Camille, “Sensations,” 42. 58. Camille, “Prophets, Canons, and Promising Monsters.” 59. See, e.g., Green, “Digital Manuscripts as Sites of Touch”; and Shailor, “Otto Ege,” 19. 60. Wayne Torborg, personal communication, February 20, 2019. 61. Barrett, “Photography at the Bodleian”; Stanford, “Booksquashing.” 62. Prescott, “Representing Texts,” 27. 63. Prescott, “Representing Texts,” 27. 64. Tanselle, “Reproductions and Scholarship,” 41. 65. Society of American Archivists Glossary of Archival and Records Ter​​ w ww2​.archivists​.org​ minology, s.v. “fidelity,” accessed March 30, 2019, https:​//​ /​glossary​/​terms​/​f​/​fidelity. 66. See this book’s “Coda” for discussion of the error that made it through. 67. Astrid Smith, personal interview, November 2014. 68. Institutions are rarely forthcoming on this kind of personnel information. To my knowledge, there is no publicly available dataset comparing information on the wages and benefits earned by different members of digitization teams. 69. Translation by Omid Ghaemmaghami, personal correspondence, September 10, 2019. 70. Walters Art Museum, W. 537, online description © 2011 Walters Art Museum: http:​/​​/​w ww​.thedigitalwalters​.org​/ ​Data​/ ​WaltersManuscripts​/ ​html​/​ W537​/​description​.html. On Armenian colophons, see Sirinian, “On the Historical and Literary Value of the Colophons in Armenian Manuscripts”; and Sanjian, Colophons of Armenian Manuscripts.

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71. Translation from Walters Art Museum, W.537, online description. 72. Translation from Walters Art Museum, W.537, online description. 73. Beit-­Arié, “How Scribes Disclosed Their Names.” 74. Richler, Beit-­Arié, and Pasternak, Hebrew Manuscripts in the Vatican Library, 350; Marmorstein, “New Material for the Literary History of the English Jews.” 75. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 27. 76. On the duty to “get the dead right,” see Searle, “Possible History,” 779. Chapter 2 1. For example, IBM’s use of a portrait of the fifteenth-­century scribe Jean Miélot and Xerox’s wildly successful Brother Dominic advertisements; see Jones, Roberto Busa, 125–­27; and Foys, “Remanence of Medieval Media,” 11–­15. 2. A foundational work here remains Bolter and Grusin, Remediation. 3. Porter, “Using VisColl to Visualize Parker on the Web.” 4. For the sake of clarity, throughout this media history I refer to this manuscript by its current institutional call number, even though prior to 1923 it had been known by other shelfmarks, call numbers, and names. 5. Here and in what follows I build on Yin Liu’s remarkable “Ways of Reading, Models for Text.” 6. Pichler, “Transcriptions, Texts and Interpretation,” 690–­91, emphasis in original. 7. These metadata are partially based on Dutschke, Guide to Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, 144–­47. They are not, however, an exact copy of that catalog’s contents. Like the data for any digital project, the Huntington Digital Library data are subject to change over time, due to later researchers’ additions and corrections, and alterations in digital display. Vanessa Wilkie, interview with the author, October 22, 2021. 8. Miller, “One-­To-­One Principle.” 9. Mario Einaudi, digital repository manager, Library Division, Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, personal communication, March 19, 2021. 10. In what follows, I am indebted to interviews, meetings, and correspondence with Andrea Denny-­Brown, Mario Einaudi, John Sullivan, and Vanessa Wilkie. 11. For a more extensive history of Digital Scriptorium, see chap. 3. 12. Vanessa Wilkie, interview with the author, April 27, 2021. 13. Vanessa Wilkie, interview with the author, April 27, 2021. 14. Andrea Denny-­Brown, interview with the author, April 27, 2021. 15. Andrea Denny-­Brown, personal communication, March 22, 2021.

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16. I build here especially on Chen, “In One’s Own Hand,” and Hess, “ ‘This Living Hand’: Commonplacing Keats.” 17. The desire to digitize books as the double-­page opening is in line with scholarship in the early 2010s that saw reproducing the full opening as an important act of copying fidelity. See, e.g., Grycz, “Digitising Rare Books and Manuscripts,” 41. 18. Benjamin Albritton, personal communication, January 14, 2015. 19. Vanessa Wilkie, interview with the author, April 27, 2021. 20. Vanessa Wilkie, interview with the author, April 27, 2021. 21. Vanessa Wilkie, personal communication, December 3, 2021. 22. Andrea Denny-­Brown, interview with the author, April 27, 2021. 23. Andrea Denny-­Brown, interview with the author, April 27, 2021. 24. Watt, Making of Hoccleve’s Series, 22; Burrow and Doyle, Thomas Hoccleve: A Facsimile, xx. 25. Burrow and Doyle, Thomas Hoccleve: A Facsimile, xxi. 26. Shuffelton, “John Carpenter, Lay Clerk,” 442n33. 27. In addition to early modern Chauceriana, there is a brief hiccup of visibility in 1614 when William Browne prints one of Hoccleve’s Gesta Romanorum translations in The Shepheards Pipe. But The Shepheards Pipe is not dedicated Hoccleviana: Hoccleve is presented as an interesting old poet worth remembering and remixing, but he is not printed as a stand-­alone author. On Browne, see Edwards, “Medieval Manuscripts Owned by William Browne of Tavisock.” 28. Burrow and Doyle, Thomas Hoccleve: A Facsimile, xxiii; Burrow, “An Eighteenth-­Century Edition of Hoccleve”; “SDBM_178061,” Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts. 29. Mason, preface to Poems by Thomas Hoccleve, Never Before Printed, 24. 30. Matthews, Making of Middle English, 9, 44; Review of Scottish Songs, 495. 31. Review of Poems by Thomas Hoccleve, Gentleman’s Magazine, 757. 32. Review of Poems by Thomas Hoccleve, Critical Review, 115. 33. Review of Poems by Thomas Hoccleve, Monthly Review, 345–­4 6. 34. Review of Poems by Thomas Hoccleve, British Critic, 604, 605. 35. Ritson, Bibliographia Poetica, 62–­63. 36. Burrow and Doyle, Thomas Hoccleve: A Facsimile, xxiii. 37. “SDBM_178061,” Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts. 38. Mosley, “Technologies of Printing,” 192. 39. Mosley, “Technologies of Printing,” 181; Raven, “The Industrial Revolution of the Book.” 40. Talbot, “XXXVII. Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing,” 201.

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41. Talbot, “XXXVII. Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing,” 199, emphasis added. 42. Schaaf, “Sleuthing in a Library’s Davenport”; and Harvard Law School Library, “Nova Statuta.” 43. Grove Encyclopedia of Materials and Techniques in Art, ed. Gerald Ward (Oxford University Press, 2008), s.vv. “Photogenic drawing” and “Photography.” 44. Grove Encyclopedia, s.v. “Photography.” 45. Burrows, “History and Provenance,” S39. 46. Burrows, “Manuscripts of Sir Thomas Phillipps,” 307–­8. 47. Burrows, “Manuscripts of Sir Thomas Phillipps,” 319. 48. Schaaf, “ ‘Splendid Calotypes,’” 29. 49. Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Phillipps-­Robinson e. 370 ff. 7v–­7 7: Document number: 5696, The Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot Project. Last updated February 15, 2013; most recently accessed May 10, 2021. See also Munby, Formation of the Phillipps Library, 39–­4 0. 50. Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Phillipps-­Robinson c.496, ff. 163–­4 : Document number 5708, The Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot Project. Last updated February 13, 2013, most recently accessed May 10, 2021. See also Munby, Formation of the Phillipps Library, 40. 51. On key differences between photogenic drawing and calotypes, see Maimon, Singular Images, Failed Copies, 223n2. 52. I am indebted to Toby Burrows, David Ganz, and Sarah Gilbert for this identification; personal communications, April 10, 13, and 14, 2021. 53. McKitterick, “Knowledge of Canon Law,” 105. 54. McKitterick, 105; Lowe, “Berlin Phillipps 1745+Leningrad F. v. II. 3,” 12. 55. Beavan, Arnott, and McLaren, “Text and Illustration,” 66. 56. Furnivall, “Lydgate and Occleve Society.” 57. Furnivall, “Lydgate and Occleve Society,” 330. 58. Furnivall, “Lydgate and Occleve Society,” 331. 59. Furnivall, “Lydgate and Occleve Society,” 333. 60. Spencer, “F.J. Furnivall’s Six of the Best,” 618–­19. 61. Furnivall, Hoccleve’s Works, 1:xlix. 62. Furnivall, Hoccleve’s Works, 1:xlviii. 63. Munby, Dispersal of the Phillipps Library, 17, 16–­17, 18, 66. 64. Furnivall, Hoccleve’s Works, 1:63. 65. See Buckland, “Lodewyk Bendikson, 1910–­1943,” 101, 100. 66. William Symington McCormick, “Occleve (Or Hoccleve), Thomas (1368–­1450?),” Encyclopedia Britannica (1911), vol. 19. 67. McCormick, “Occleve (Or Hoccleve).” 68. Vanessa Wilkie, personal communication, April 28, 2021.

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69. For that project, see Greetham, “Normalisation of Accidentals in Middle English Texts”; Greetham, “Challenges of Theory and Practice”; and Greetham, “Uncoupled: OR, How I Lost My Author(s)”; and von Nolcken, “[Review] Burrow, J.A., Thomas Hoccleve’s Complaint and Dialogue.” 70. Patterson, “ ‘What Is Me?,’”437. 71. Burrow and Doyle, Thomas Hoccleve: A Facsimile, xi. 72. Echard, “House Arrest,” 189. 73. Burrow and Doyle, Thomas Hoccleve: A Facsimile, xxii. 74. Edwards, “[Review] Thomas Hoccleve: A Facsimile,” 307. 75. Meyer-­Lee, “[Review] ‘My Compleint,’” 405. 76. Pearsall, “[Review] Thomas Hoccleve: A Facsimile,” 135. 77. Gillespie, “[Review] Thomas Hoccleve,” 453; Meyer-­Lee, “[Review] ‘My Compleint,’” 405; Pearsall, “[Review] Thomas Hoccleve: A Facsimile,” 135; Edwards, “[Review] Thomas Hoccleve: A Facsimile,” 307. 78. Helen Spencer and Daniel Wakelin, personal correspondence, March 11, 2021. 79. Doyle’s nondigitized papers at Durham may also provide another possible path for future research focused on recovering more of the facsimile’s specific project history. I am indebted to J. D. Sargan for this point; personal correspondence, March 22, 2022. 80. Daniel Wakelin, personal correspondence, March 11, 2021. 81. Mason, Life of Richard Earl Howe, 90. 82. “Printing,” Supplement to the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in supplement to vol. 6 (Archibald Constable and Company, 1824), 369–­71; “Printing, Typographica,” in Cyclopaedia; or, Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Literature, with the Assistance of Eminent Professional Gentlemen, vol. 28, POE–­PUN, ed. Abraham Rees (Longman, Hurst, Reese, Orme & Brown [etc.], 1819, hard copy lacks pagination), Roworth is referenced on image #531; Hansard, Typographia, 421; Patents for Invention 22; Goebel, Frédéric Koenig et l’invention de la presse méncanique, 45–­47; Moran, Printing Presses, 44; Mosley, “Technologies of Printing,” 190. 83. Furnivall, foreword to Hoccleve’s Works, 1:xlvii; Galey, Shakespearean Archive, 28–­29. 84. Furnivall, foreword to Hoccleve’s Works, 1:xlix. 85. Burrow and Doyle, introduction to Thomas Hoccleve: A Facsimile, xi. Chapter 3 1. Davis, “Content Is Not Context,” 95–­9 6. 2. Chun, Updating to Remain the Same, 1. 3. The phrase is rooted in McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy, 153. Desmond

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Schmitt traces the phrase’s origins to Dahlström, “Drowning by Versions,” 7–­3 8. Earlier descriptions of digital media as “incunabular” also exist in Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: see 28, 66, 93–­9 4. 4. Liu, “Where Is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?” 5. Ceruzzi, History of Modern Computing; Abbate, Inventing the Internet; Rosenzweig, “Wizards, Bureaucrats, Warriors, and Hackers.” 6. Feenberg, “Introduction: Toward a Critical Theory of the Internet,” 4. 7. Rosenzweig, “Wizards, Bureaucrats, Warriors, and Hackers,” 1549–­50. 8. Ceruzzi, History of Modern Computing, 195. 9. Hoffman and Novak, “Bridging the Racial Divide on the Internet.” See also the series of reports “Falling Through the Net” published by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, US Department of Commerce, 1995–­2000. 10. Bertot and McClure, Moving toward More Effective Public Internet Access, 7. 11. James-­Maddocks, “Illuminators of the Hooked-­g Scribe(s),” 169; Mooney and Mosser, “Hooked-­g Scribes and Takamiya Manuscripts,” 186; Edwards, “A Missing Leaf from the Plimpton Fall of Princes.” 12. See Mooney and Mosser, “Hooked-­g Scribes and Takamiya Manuscripts” and Mooney and Mosser, “Case of the Hooked-­g Scribe(s)”; Horobin, “ ‘Hooked G’ Scribe”; Edwards and Pearsall, “Manuscripts of the Major English Poets.” 13. In what follows, I am indebted to interviews with Consuelo Dutschke and Debra Cashion, as well as Mary Kay Duggan, “Teaching Manuscripts,” 153–­5 4; Dutschke, “Digital Scriptorium: Ten Years Young”; Cashion, “Cataloging Medieval Manuscripts.” 14. Consuelo Dutschke, personal correspondence, September 10, 2020. 15. Columbia University Libraries, “Imaging History (1997–­1998).” 16. Stephen McCann, head of the Photographic Unit, University of Glasgow, interview with the author, June 11, 2019. 17. Columbia University Libraries, “Imaging History (1997–­1998).” 18. Michael Ester, president of Luna Imaging, project notes embedded within Columbia University’s larger Digital Scriptorium “Imaging History (1997–­1998).” 19. “About DS,” Digital Scriptorium, accessed September 1, 2019, http:​/​​/​ www​.digital​-scriptorium​.org​/​about​/​. 20. Lynne Grigsby, head of library IT, University of California, Berkeley, personal communication, October 25, 2020, and April 17, 2022. 21. These percentages are calculated as 6 images out of a total of 108 images

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possible in the extant hard-­copy fragment Plimpton MS 255 and out of a total of 112 images possible for the full, combined Plimpton/Takamiya/Lewis fragment set. If the original codex was 150 to 160 leaves, a total of 300 to 320 photographs would be needed to image it fully. 22. McPherson, “Why Are the Digital Humanities So White?” 23. Original grant proposal submitted by Charles Faulhaber (director, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley) and Jean W. Ashton (director, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University), quoted in Duggan, “Teaching Manuscripts,” 154. 24. Duggan, “Teaching Manuscripts,” 154. 25. Bertot and McClure, Moving toward More Effective Public Internet Access, 8. 26. Bertot and McClure, 8. 27. Bertot and McClure, 8n21. 28. Dutta-­Roy, “Overview of Cable Modem Technology,” 82. 29. Charzinski, “Web Performance in Practice,” 37. I build also on Young, “Speed Matters.” 30. Take, for instance, Dot Porter (@leoba), “The number of hours I spent waiting for the huge jpegs of Junius 11 to appear on my screen in the years from 1998 to 2001 I don’t even know, so many hours.” May 3, 2021, https:​/​​/​t witter​ .com​/ ​leoba​/​status​/​1389286089882472451. 31. Duggan, “Teaching Manuscripts,” 153. 32. Dutschke, “Digital Scriptorium as a Construction Site,” 288–­89n17. 33. Columbia University Libraries, “Contributing Images to DS.” 34. Echard, “House Arrest,” 201, emphasis added. 35. Echard, “House Arrest,” 201, emphasis added. 36. These are the core stakeholders addressed in Dutschke, “Digital Scriptorium: Ten Years Young,” and Dutschke, “Digital Scriptorium as a Construction Site.” 37. Dutschke, “Digital Scriptorium as a Construction Site,” 288. In praise of these limitations, see Edwards, “Digital Archive, Scholarly Enquiry.” 38. Edwards, “A ‘Lost’ Manuscript Found,” 176, 177. 39. Shortly after its purchase in 1977, the manuscript’s badly damaged seventeenth-­century binding was removed as part of its preservation. Consequently, at the time of digitization, more than two decades later, no binding existed to be included in its digital avatar. 40. David Badke, personal correspondence, July 8, 2018. 41. Badke, “Digitization of the Lydgate Manuscript.” 42. Badke, “Digitization of the Lydgate Manuscript.”

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43. David Badke, personal correspondence, August 2, 2018. 44. David Badke, personal correspondence, July 8, 2018. 45. David Badke, “Photography”; further developed via personal correspondence with David Badke, July 8, 2018. 46. Badke, “Digitization of the Lydgate Manuscript.” 47. Badke, “Digitization of the Lydgate Manuscript.” 48. Middleton and Sorenson, “How Connected Are Canadians?,” 464; Crowley, “Where Are We Now?,” 470–­71. 49. Crowley, “Where Are We Now?,” 470. Frieden, “Lessons from Broadband Development,” 605. 50. Middleton and Sorenson, 465–­6 6. 51. Frieden, “Lessons from Broadband Development,” 597. 52. Heather Dean, personal communication, April 15, 2021, and November 22, 2021. 53. Heather Dean, personal communication April 15, 2021. 54. Miller, “One-­To-­One Principle,” 150–­51. 55. I am indebted to Heather Dean for her help with this point. 56. Jonathan Bengtson, university librarian of the University of Victoria, personal communication, August 13, 2020. 57. See, e.g. the publications and community of the Maintainers, themaintainers.org. 58. Boyer, The Undying, 55. 59. Mortimer, John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, 22–­23n96. 60. A key document on this is the “Collaborators’ Bill of Rights.” See also di Pressi et al., “A Student Collaborator’s Bill of Rights”; and the Postdoctoral Laborers Group, “Postdoctoral Bill of Rights.” 61. Keralis and Andrews, “Labor,” para. 4. See also Keralis, “Disrupting Labor in Digital Humanities.” 62. Lydgate, Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, 4:28; Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts 1390–­1490, 2:302, item 110. 63. Pittaway, “ ‘In This Signe Thou Shalt Ouercome Hem Alle,’” 1. 64. In noting the difficulty of dating composite books, I build on Prescott, Brown, and Masters, “Survey of Illuminated Manuscripts,” 140. 65. “Communications Market: Broadband Digital Progress Report.” 66. As a starting point, see Philip, Cottrill, and Farrington, “ ‘Two-­Speed’ Scotland.” 67. Kidd, Manuscripts Group Newsletter, 5. 68. Terras, “Rise of Digitization,” 13. 69. Prescott and Hughes, “Why Do We Digitize?”

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70. Carpenter with Izard, “St Pancras Treasures Digitisation Project,” 73. 71. See Carpenter with Izard, 80–­81. 72. Carpenter with Izard, 80. 73. Prescott, Brown, and Masters, “Survey of Illuminated Manuscripts,” 130–­3 3. 74. Prescott, Brown, and Masters, 133. 75. Jefcoate with Ford, “Portico,” 201–­2. 76. Prescott, Brown, and Masters, “Survey of Illuminated Manuscripts,” 134. 77. Prescott, Brown, and Masters, 134. 78. Sarah J. Biggs, personal communication, June 11, 2015; also cited in Whearty, “Leper on the Road,” 247. 79. Peter Kidd, personal communication, September 20, 2020. 80. Kidd, Manuscripts Group Newsletter, 5. 81. These points are indebted to Peter Kidd and Kathleen Doyle, who read drafts of this chapter. For more details on the CIM’s history, see British Library, “About: Background.” 82. Peter Kidd, personal correspondence, September 20, 2020. 83. Kathleen Doyle, personal correspondence, June 12, 2018. 84. In the current interface, using Google Chrome, users can right-­click a thumbnail image to see the image URL, which preserves notes on the type of source media: NOF means that the image was created through direct image capture through the “New Opportunities Fund” in the early 2000s, BLCD links the digital image to a different early 2000s in-­house digitization project, Kslide stands for Kodachrome slide, and Ekta stands for Ektachrome transparency. I am grateful to Eleanor Jackson for teaching me this. Eleanor Jackson personal correspondence, July 23, 2018. 85. See Kelly and Ohlgren, “Bodleian Library Slide Collection,” 6. 86. Doyle, “AMARC Summer Meeting,” 4. 87. Range, Scriptorium: Poems, 71. 88. Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts 1390–­1490, 320, item 119. 89. Drimmer, Art of Allusion, 189; Kirkham, “Decoration and Iconography.” 90. Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts 1390–­1490, 321; Kirkham, “Decoration and Iconography,” 301–­2. 91. Kirkham, “Decoration and Iconography,” 301. 92. Shepard, “Penn Brings Philadelphia’s Rare Manuscripts to the World”; White, “Digitizing Medieval Manuscripts.” 93. Amey Hutchins and Nicholas Herman, interview with the author, April 12, 2017.

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94. OPenn: Primary Digital Resources, “OPenn: Read Me.” 95. Dot Porter, personal communication, May 7, 2021. 96. Dot Porter, personal communication, May 7, 2021. 97. Rosenbach Museum and Library, MS 439/16 Fall of Princes, online description: https:​/​​/​openn​.library​.upenn​.edu​/ ​Data​/​0028​/ ​html​/​ms​_​439​_​016​.html © 2017 The Rosenbach Museum and Library, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license: http:​/​​/​creativecommons​.org​/ ​licenses​/ ​by​/​4 ​.0. 98. Badke, “Digitization of the Lydgate Manuscript.” 99. Federal Communications Commission, “2016 Measuring Broadband America, Fixed Broadband Report.” 100. Strover et al., “Digital Inclusion Role of Rural Libraries.” 101. Prescott, “Representing Texts,” 13. 102. Columbia University Libraries, “Imaging History (1997–­1998).” 103. Prescott, “Representing Texts,” 13. 104. Prescott, “Representing Texts,” 8. 105. Winner, “Do Artefacts Have Politics?,” 121. 106. Nichols, From Parchment to Cyberspace, 1. See also Nichols, “Materialities of the Manuscript,” 26–­29; Weiskott, “Multispectral Imaging and Medieval Manuscripts,” 192; Camille, “Sensations,” 44–­45; Camille, “Prophets, Canons, and Promising Monsters,” 200. 107. Capell, “Digitization as a Preservation Method,” 235. 108. See Humphrey, “Manuscripts and Metadata,” 35–­36. 109. Prescott, Brown, and Masters, “Survey of Illuminated Manuscripts,” 130, 134. 110. Doyle, “AMARC Summer Meeting,”4. 111. I am indebted to Katharine Chandler for this point, made during the zoom-­chat for “The Ethical Dilemma of Collecting Manuscript Fragments: Loss, Gain, Opportunity, and Cost (A Panel Discussion),” International Medieval Congress, Kalamazoo, MI, May 11, 2021. 112. Eric Ensley (@Bookish_Eric) “This came from many people in town not realizing that they could access the library of the public university . . . ,” Twitter, May 12, 2021, https:​/​​/​t witter​.com​/ ​Bookish​_​Eric​/​status​/​1392491967687299078. 113. Duggan, “Teaching Manuscripts,” 154, emphasis added; 158, 157, 158. 114. This point is indebted to Horobin, “ ‘Hooked G’ Scribe,” 411. 115. Jameson, “Promises and Challenges,” 55–­5 6; See also Humphrey, “Manuscripts and Metadata,” 35–­36. 116. Jameson, “Promises and Challenges,” 56. 117. Jameson, “Promises and Challenges,” 56.

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Chapter 4 1. For an overview of these challenges, see Fisher, “Authority, Interoperability, and Digital Medieval Scholarship.” 2. Brodeur, Maclachlan, and Parrott, “The CLIR Postdoctoral Fellowship,” 30. 3. “Digital Medieval Manuscripts Fellow, Stanford University,” original job ad, from the archive maintained by the Council on Libraries and Information Resources. 4. OED, s.v. “interoperability, n.” 2. 5. Haslhofer and Klas, “Survey of Techniques,” 1. 6. Benjamin Albritton, personal communication, September 3, 2021. 7. “Digital Medieval Manuscripts Fellow, Stanford University,” original job ad. 8. Da Rold, “Materials,” 12–­3 3; Holsinger, “Of Pigs and Parchment”; Clarkson, “Rediscovering Parchment,” 5; “Hides & Skins,” “Parchment,” and “Vellum (Not Used for Indexing),” all in Library of Congress, Thesaurus of Graphic Materials. 9. On the terminology debates, see Ryder, “Parchment,” 392–­93; and Clemens and Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies, 9–­10. 10. De Hamel, Medieval Craftsmen, 8. 11. Driscoll, “P5-­MS: A General Purpose Tagset.” 12. National Information Standards Organization (hereafter NISO), “Understanding Metadata,” 1. See also Schmitt, “Towards an Interoperable Scholarly Edition”; Baca, Introduction to Metadata; Hodge, Metadata Made Simpler. 13. Pomerantz, Metadata, 3. 14. NISO, “Understanding Metadata,” 1. 15. Cole and Han, XML for Catalogers and Metadata Librarians, 96. 16. Drucker, SpecLab, 11. 17. Geismar, “Defining the Digital,” 258. 18. Avram, MARC: Its History and Implications, 3–­4 . 19. Rather and Wiggins, “Mother Avram’s Remarkable Contribution,” 856. 20. Avram, MARC: Its History and Implications, 13. 21. Avram, 14–­15. 22. Rosenheck, “OCLC: From an Historical Perspective,” 2. 23. Malinconico, “Librarians and Innovation,” 51, emphasis in original. 24. Tennant, “Bibliographic Metadata Infrastructure,” 175; Malinconico, “Librarians and Innovation,” 51. 25. Malinconico, “Librarians and Innovation,” 51. 26. Tennant, “Bibliographic Metadata Infrastructure,” 175.

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27. Avram, MARC: Its History and Implications, 15. 28. I am indebted to Rachel Turner, assistant head of Cataloging/Metadata at Binghamton University Libraries, for this point. 29. Tennant, “Bibliographic Metadata Infrastructure,” 175. 30. Tennant, 175–­76. 31. Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, “History of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative.” 32. Weibel, “Dublin Core,” 11. 33. Reitz, “Dublin Core (DC)”; see also NISO, “Understanding Metadata,” 3. 34. Pomerantz, Metadata, 76. 35. On the connections between the OCLC, Dublin Core, and ContentDM, see OCLC Research, “OCLC Research and the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative.” On why Omeka chose Dublin Core as its foundational metadata schema, see “Working with Dublin Core,” Omeka Classic User Manual. 36. Cole and Han, XML for Catalogers and Metadata Librarians, 98, 101. 37. See Weibel, “Dublin Core,” 9. 38. NISO, “Understanding Metadata,” 3. 39. Tennant, “MARC Must Die.” For similar proclamations about DC, see Beall, “Dublin Core: An Obituary.” 40. Tennant, “Bibliographic Metadata Infrastructure,” 176. 41. Guenther, “MODS: The Metadata Object Description Schema,” 139, 138. 42. NISO, “Understanding Metadata,” 5–­6. 43. Cole and Han, XML for Catalogers and Metadata Librarians, 111. 44. NISO, “Understanding Metadata,” 4. 45. See Ide and Sperberg-­McQueen, “TEI: History, Goals, and Future,” 6, 7. 46. NISO, “Understanding Metadata,” 4. 47. Burnard, “Evolution of the Text Encoding Initiative,” 3. See also Dean, “Shock of the Familiar,” para. 18–­19. 48. Burnard, “Evolution of the Text Encoding Initiative,” 3; see also Ide and Sperberg-­McQueen, “TEI: History, Goals, and Future,” 6. 49. Ide and Sperberg-­McQueen, “TEI: History, Goals, and Future,” 13; Bair and Steuer, “Developing a Premodern Manuscript Application Profile,” 7. 50. Ide and Sperberg-­McQueen, “TEI: History, Goals, and Future,” 13. 51. Ide and Sperberg-­McQueen, “TEI: History, Goals, and Future,” 6; Dean, “Shock of the Familiar,” para. 18–­19. 52. For a list of beta-­testers and collaborators, see Ide and Sperberg-­ McQueen, “TEI: History, Goals, and Future,” 13. 53. In 1998 Prescott, Brown, and Masters remark upon the exclusion of manuscript description from the early TEI Guidelines and predict future com-

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patibility between TEI and their own then-­SGML encoding of manuscript descriptions. See Prescott, Brown, and Masters, “Survey of Illuminated Manuscripts,” 144, 139. 54. Ide and Sperberg-­McQueen, 14. See also Brown, Masters, and Prescott, “Survey of Illuminated Manuscripts,” 139; and Driscoll, “P5-­MS: A General Purpose Tagset,” throughout. 55. Driscoll, “P5-­MS: A General Purpose Tagset,” para. 3, 5. See also Prescott, Brown, and Masters, “Survey of Illuminated Manuscripts,” 145. 56. Driscoll, “P5-­MS: A General Purpose Tagset,” para. 8, 20. 57. Driscoll, para. 31. 58. NISO, “Understanding Metadata,” 11. 59. Tennant, “Bibliographic Metadata Infrastructure,” 178; see glossary in Baca, Introduction to Metadata for “crosswalk” and “metadata mapping.” 60. See Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, DCMI Metadata Terms, for “term name: creator.” 61. This is a simplified view of the TEI for Walters Art Museum, W.315, Laurent de Premierfait’s first French translation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium. For the complete, original descriptive metadata in TEI, see http:​/​​/ ​w ww​.thedigitalwalters​.org​/ ​Data​/ ​WaltersManuscripts​/​ ManuscriptDescriptions​/ ​W315​_​tei​.xml. Accessed September 6, 2019. 62. This is a simplified view of the TEI for Walters Art Museum, W.559, a Qur’an completed 1323 CE. For the complete, original descriptive metadata in TEI, see http:​/​​/​w ww​.thedigitalwalters​.org​/ ​Data​/ ​WaltersManuscripts​/​Man​ u​script​Des​crip​tions​/ ​W559​_​tei​.xml. Accessed September 6, 2019. 63. This is a simplified view of the TEI for Genève, Bibliothèque de Genève, Ms. Fr. 180, a copy of Christine de Pisan’s Book of the City of Ladies, produced in the second half of the fifteenth century. For the complete manuscript description, encoded by Rafael Schwemmer on June 25, 2008, see https:​/​​/​w ww​.e​-co​ dices​.unifr​.ch​/​xml​/​tei​_​published​/​bge​-fr0180​.xml. Accessed September 11, 2019. 64. From the TEI for Cologny, Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cod. Bodmer 74, a gradual produced in 1071. For the complete manuscript description, encoded in XML by Tamara Picard, June 3, 2014, see https:​/​​/​w ww​.e​-codices​.unifr​.ch​/​ xml​/​tei​_​published​/​fmb​-cb​- 0074​_​Huot​.xml​. Accessed September 11, 2019. 65. Tennant, “Bibliographic Metadata Infrastructure,” 180. 66. Haslhofer and Klas, “Survey of Techniques,” 8. 67. Lawton, “Dullness and the Fifteenth Century,” 779. 68. Walters Art Museum, “Contents: Manuscript Descriptions,” ReadMe File, accessed June 15, 2019, http:​/​​/​w ww​.thedigitalwalters​.org​/​03​_ ​ReadMe​ .html#manuscript​_​descriptions.

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69. Walters Art Museum, W.559, online description: http:​/​​/​w ww​.the​di​gi​tal​ walters​.org​/D ​ ata​/ W ​ altersManuscripts​/M ​ anuscriptDescriptions​/ W ​ 559​_t​ ei​.xml​ . Accessed September 9, 2019. 70. Walters Art Museum, “Describing Manuscripts with TEI.” 71. “Walters Digitization Initiative Project Description, 2015” documentation shared with me by Kimber Wiegand, digitization specialist at the Walters Art Museum, March 29, 2018. 72. I am indebted to Benjamin Albritton for this point; personal communication, September 3, 2021. For a concise history of the Parker Project, see Albritton, introduction to Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age, ed. Albritton, Henley, and Treharne, 9–­14. 73. Parker Library, “About Earlier Phases of Parker on the Web.” 74. Unsworth, “Computational Work with Very Large Collections,” 4; see also Yasser, “Analysis of Problems in Metadata Records,” 57. 75. I am indebted to Elaine Treharne for this point; personal communication, August 30, 2021. 76. See Thomas Hoccleve, “Fabula de Quadam Imperatrice Romana” in Hoccleve, Hoccleve’s Works, vol. 1: The Minor Poems, lines 953–­980. 77. e-codices, “Manuscript Summaries.” 78. Riddy, Prestige, Authority, and Power, 98. 79. Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria Nova, 54–­55. 80. See, e.g., Bocanegra-­Valle, “ ‘English Is My Default Academic Language’”; Clavert, “Digital Humanities Multicultural Revolution.” 81. Chaucer, “Parson’s Prologue,” lines 55–­60. 82. Halberstam, Queer Art of Failure, 88. 83. Unsworth, “Documenting the Reinvention of Text: The Importance of Failure.” 84. Van Zundert, “On Not Writing a Review about Mirador.” 85. On this tagset and process, see Prescott, Brown, and Masters, “Survey of Illuminated Manuscripts,” 143–­4 4. 86. Prescott, Brown, and Masters, 144–­45. 87. Warren and Weijer, “Re-­Imagining Digital Things.”  88. Production and Use of English Manuscripts, 1060 to 1220, “About Us.” 89. I am indebted to Elaine Treharne for this point, personal communication, November 9, 2021. Coda 1 Hoccleve, “My Compleinte,” lines 1–­14 in Furnivall, Hoccleve’s Works, 1:95. 2. Interestingly, at least one early experimenter in medieval manuscript digitization, Stephen G. Nichols, credits Cerquiglini as a direct inspiration for

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and casual advisor to his digital manuscript project, originally the Roman de la Rose Digital Library, now part of the Digital Library of Medieval Manuscripts, hosted by Sheridan Libraries at the Johns Hopkins University. See Nichols, From Parchment to Cyberspace, 12–­13, 108–­12. 3. Shailor, Babcock, and Davis, Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, 476–­7 7. 4. Mosser, “Cardigan Chaucer,” 101. 5. Mosser, “Cardigan Chaucer,” 100. 6. Drimmer, “Manuscript as an Ambigraphic Medium,” 189. 7. Wakelin, Scribal Correction, 287. 8. Wakelin, Scribal Correction, 287. 9. Walters Art Museum, W.102, online description, https:​/​​/​w ww​.the​di​gi​tal​ walters​.org​/ ​Data​/ ​WaltersManuscripts​/ ​html​/ ​W102​/​description​.html. 10. Conway, “Digital Transformations,” 59. 11. Dourish and Bell, Divining a Digital Future, 4. 12. Treharne, “Fleshing Out the Text,” 477. 13. Krapp, Noise Channels, 92. 14. Philip Sherbourne, liner notes to Clicks and Cuts 2 (Mille plateaux, 2001), quoted in Krapp, Noise Channels, 68, emphasis added. 15. Cubitt, “Glitch,” 25. 16. Chun, Updating to Remain the Same, 2. 17. Conway, “Digital Transformations,” 64. 18. Conway, “Digital Transformations,” 64. 19. Bürgermeister, “Extending Versioning in Collaborative Research,” 174. 20. Hinsen, Läufer, and Thiruvathukal, “Essential Tools: Version Control Systems,” 84. 21. Chacon and Straub, Pro Git. 22. Tsitoara, Beginning Git and GitHub, 5; Hunt and Thomas, Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master. 23. Broyles, “Digital Editions and Version Numbering.” 24. Broyles, “Digital Editions and Version Numbering,” para. 6. 25. Benjamin Albritton and Chris Hacker, personal communication, December 1, 2021. Appendix 1. Elena Damon, digital imaging specialist, Walters Art Museum, personal communication, November 12, 2021. 2. Elena Damon, personal communication, November 12, 2021.

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INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate illustrative material. Manuscripts are indexed by their full shelfmarks. AACR (Anglo-American Cataloging Rules), 176 The Aberdeen Bestiary Project, 13, 106 access/accessibility: democratized, 32, 162, 164–67; and fees, 108–9; and internet connectivity, 125, 130–31, 138, 144–45, 159, 163; and language, 203; multiple access points, 154; to previously inaccessible texts, 82–83, 94–95, 106–7, 111–12, 116, 147, 151; as term, 38; and visibility of metadata, 86–87, 161. See also audience accidents. See copying errors affective responses, 14–15, 51–53, 217 Albritton, Benjamin, 23, 44, 169, 171,

172, 182, 198, 232 alterations, image, 67, 72–73, 74, 160–62 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 90, 130, 152 Aneirin (Llyfr Aneirin), 104–5 Anglo-American Cataloging Rules (AACR), 176 Arabic manuscripts, 77 Armenian manuscripts, 77–78 ARPANET, 125, 176 Ashton, Jean W., 255n23 The Auchinleck Manuscript Project, 13 audience: and aesthetic preferences, 100; beginners and students, 91–92, 93–94, 106–7, 111–12, 293

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audience (cont.) 116–17, 164–66; general public, 151, 162–64, 202–3; scholarly, 116–17, 133, 147, 151, 166–67, 202. See also access/accessibility; manuscript studies field Austin, Thomas, 119 Austin, University of Texas, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, MS 143, 213, 216, 216, 220 autograph manuscripts, 90, 91, 107, 108, 120. See also San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 111 avatar, as term, 37 Avram, Henriette, 174 Badke, David, 134–36, 138, 140, 142–43, 158, 166 Bair, Sheila A., 19 Ballatore, Andrea, 12 Baltimore, Walters Art Museum: MS W.102, 221, 222, 223; MS W.168, 41–42, 70, 77, 246n1; MS W.315, 261n61; MS W.537, 77; MS W.559, 77, 261n62, 262n69. See also Walters Art Museum bandwidth and speed (internet), 125, 130–31, 138, 144–45, 159, 163 Barnard, Lou, 182 Baudrillard, Jean, 24–25 Bazaar (version control system), 229 Bechdel Test, 18, 243n45 begging poem genre, 95–96 Bell, Genevieve, 224 benchmarking: overview, 46–47; color balance calibration, 61–65, 63; comparison of pre- and postprint methods, 53–54, 65; photographing technique assessment,

58–61; spatial resolution calibration, 61; studio setup, 54–57, 55 Bengtson, Jonathan, 141 Benjamin, Walter, 24 Benton, John F., 16, 17 Berkeley Finding Aids project, 183 Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz Phillipps 1745, 104 Berry, Wendell, 52 best practice: in early photography, 104; vs. “good practice,” 246– 47n7; variability of, 88, 89, 173 biblioclasm, 18, 101, 128 Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis project (BiblioPhilly), 152–59, 156, 157, 161 Biblissima, 208 bindings: conservation and preservation of, 5, 255n39; and digital rebinding, 74, 142; presence vs. absence in digitization, 5, 8, 84–86 Blanchette, Jean-François, 11 Boccaccio, Giovanni, De casibus virorum illustrium, 30, 200 bodily experience. See physical experience Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, 209. See also manuscripts under Oxford, Bodleian Library Bolter, Jay David, 11 book history. See manuscript studies field Boon, Marcus, 31, 37 Borghesi, Niccolò, Sanctae Catharine Senensis, 50 Bourg, Chris, 51–52 Boyer, Anne, 142 British Library: Digitised Manuscripts project, 124; The Elec-

I ndex

tronic Beowulf project, 12–13, 16, 145, 146; St. Pancras Treasures Digitisation Project, 145–46, 147; Survey of Illuminated Manuscripts, 146–48, 209–10. See also Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts British National Bibliography (BNB), 175 Bromley, Edward, 132 Brown, Michelle, 146, 163 Browne, William, 251n27 Broyles, Paul A., 231 Bürgermeister, Martina, 229 burnishing, digital, 70–73 Burrow, J. A., 95, 113, 114, 117; Thomas Hoccleve: A Facsimile of the Autograph Verse Manuscripts (with Doyle), 90, 113–17, 118, 119 Burrows, Toby, 104, 247n22 calibration: overview, 46–47; of color balance, 61–65, 63, 88; of spatial resolution, 61 Callaci, Emily, 21 calotypes and salt prints, 103, 104–6, 105 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, Matthew Parker Library: MS 153, 195; MS 304, 195, 196 Cambridge, Harvard University, Houghton Library: Horblit TypPh Album 30, Phillipps Ms. 20976, 103, 104; Horblit TypPh Album 51, Phillipps Ms. 23287, 104–5, 105 Camille, Michael, 13–14, 69–70, 226 Canadian internet infrastructure, 136–38

canonicity, and value, 49–51, 83, 132–33 The Canterbury Tales Project, 12–13, 183 Cardiff, National Library of Wales, Cardiff MS 2.81 (Llyfr Aneirin), 104–5 cardstock: for book and platen support, 57, 59–60, 65; mirror-board, 71 Caswell, Michelle, 17 Caswell Test, 17, 18, 20, 239 catalogs/cataloging. See metadata; metadata schemata Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts (British Library): Harley 1766 digitization, 124, 144, 147, 148–51, 149, 213, 215; launch, 13, 148; mission as finding aid, 147– 48, 151, 163–64; origins, 145–47 Caxton, William, 96 CD-ROM disks, 127, 135, 146 Cerquiglini, Bernard, 219, 262–63n2 Ceruzzi, Paul, 125 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 78 Chantilly, Musée Condé, Bibliothèque du château, 0297, 213, 214 Chaucer, Geoffrey: begging poem genre, 95; Hoccleve’s work misattributed to, 97; view of copyists, 25–27; works in manuscripts, 91; “Adam Scriveyn,” 26–27; The Book of the Duchess, 25; “The Parson’s Prologue,” 203–4; Troilus and Criseyde, 25–26 Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong, 122–23, 226 CIM. See Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts

295

296

I ndex

CLIR (Council on Library and Information Resources), 22–23, 152, 169, 174. See also DMS-Index clothing and accessory restrictions, 54–55 The Codex Sinaiticus Project, 13 Codices Electronici Sangalleses, 13. See also e-codices codicology, as field, 8–9 Cole, Timothy W., 181 collaboration dynamics, 45, 93, 141–42, 143, 153–55, 202, 206, 238 Cologny, Fondation Martin Bodmer: Cod. Bodmer 74, 261n64; Cod. Bodmer 174, 200 colophons, 21, 27, 68, 75, 77–79 colors: balance and alteration of, 61–65, 63, 88, 160; distortion of, xv, xvi, xviii; in facsimiles, 114 completeness checks (passive QC), 47, 74 compositing, of images, 71–73 conservation and preservation: of bindings, 5, 255n39; costs, 92; in preliminary digitization workflow, 45, 46, 92 ContentDM, 179 Conway, Paul, 228 copy/copyist, as term, 37–38 copying errors: analog medieval, 217–24, 219, 222, 223; digital, and version control, 228–33; digital, examples of, 213–16, 214, 215, 216; digital, preserving vs. correcting and removing, xvi, xvii, 216–17, 225–28, 227 Córdoba, Archivo Capitular, MS 1, 244–45n72 Corpus Christi College Cambridge, Parker on the Web, 13, 194–99, 197

correct and faithful representation, 26, 73, 84, 97–100, 111, 114, 251n17 cotton gloves, 60 Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), 22–23, 152, 169, 174. See also DMS-Index cradles/supports, imaging, 56–57, 59, 153 Cramer, Tom, 23 cropping/framing images, 74–75, 88–89, 134–35, 150, 153 crosswalks (between metadata schemata), 185–87, 186, 188 Cubitt, Sean, 225 Dahlström, Mats, 24, 43 Dartmouth College, Remix the Manuscript Project, 210 date(s) of creation, 87, 236–37 Davis, Matthew, 122 DC. See Dublin Core Dean, Heather, 138–40 “death of the book” trope, 12 Demco Inc. cartoon, 80–81, 81 democratized access, 32, 162, 164–67 Denny-Brown, Andrea, 90–94, 118 de-siloing, 115–16 deskewing/straightening/rotating images, 74–75 digital codicology, as field, 8–9 digital incunables, as term, 123 digital manuscripts: ahistorical view of, 121–22; “digitization” term, 9; dynamics of temporality and transformation, 38–39; and material-immaterial binary, 8, 10–15, 23; as primary vs. secondary sources, 36; recommendations for users of, 235–40; scholarship on, 2, 5, 8; terminology, 3, 37–38. See

I ndex

also access/accessibility; audience; copying errors; digitization projects; digitization workflow; labor/labors of copying/digitization; metadata; metadata schemata; specific manuscripts by full shelfmarks Digital Manuscripts Index. See DMS-Index digital resource unique identifier (druid), 75 Digital Scriptorium: DS 2.0, 39, 127, 128; establishment, 13, 130; and Huntington Library, 89; image sampling approach, 128, 131–33; imaging guidelines on cropping, 135; interface updates, 128; and internet connectivity, 130–31; mission as pedagogical tool, 164– 65; Plimpton 255 digitization, 126–30, 129, 132, 160; as “success,” 205; and TEI, 183 Digital Transitions R-Cam Reprographic camera system, 55 Digital Walters project (Walters Art Museum), 190–94, 192–93 Digitised Manuscripts project (British Library), 124 digitization, as term, 9 digitization projects: and accessibility of previously inaccessible texts, 82–83, 94–95; collaboration dynamics, 45, 93, 141–42, 143, 153–55, 202, 206, 238; and date(s) of creation, 87, 236–37; emergence of, 12–13; funding, 19, 91–92, 95–96, 131–32, 147, 152, 236; mission and audience as driving force behind, 45–46, 48, 83–84, 93–94, 131–33; success/failure

assessments, 204–11. See also specific projects digitization workflow: overview, 45–48; preliminary work, 45, 46, 92; project planning and value assessment, 48–51; time to completion, 75, 127, 135, 153. See also benchmarking; photography; postproduction image processing discoverability and searchability, 140, 143, 154, 173 dittography, 213, 216, 216 DLSS (Digital Library Systems and Services, Stanford University Libraries), 23, 49, 169, 181–82. See also DMS-Index DMS-Index (Digital Manuscripts Index): overview, 23, 169–70; and DC, 180; e-codices moved from DC and TEI P5 to MODS, 199–203, 201; interoperability challenges, 171–72, 187, 196–98; and MODS, 181–82; Parker on the Web moved from TEI P4 to MODS, 194–99, 197; shuttered, 205; success/failure assessment, 204–11; and TEI, 184; transformation of metadata, overview, 187–89; Walters moved from TEI P5 to MODS, 190–94, 192–93 Dombrowski, Quinn, 205 double-page opening vs. single-leaf view, 93, 251n17 Dourish, Paul, 224 Doyle, A. I., 95, 113, 114, 117, 218; Thomas Hoccleve: A Facsimile of the Autograph Verse Manuscripts (with Burrow), 90, 113–17, 118, 119 Doyle, Kathleen, 151, 163–64 Drimmer, Sonja, 221

297

298

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Driscoll, M. J., 171–72 Drucker, Johanna, 10–11, 174 druid (digital resource unique identifier), 75 DS. See Digital Scriptorium Dublin Core (DC): crosswalking, overview, 185, 186; development and application, 178–80; e-codices moved to MODS from, 199–203, 201; vs. MODS, 181; Qualified Dublin Core, 181; and TEI development, 183 Duggan, Mary Kay, 165 Dummer, Jessie, 155 Durham University Library, MS Cosin V.III.9, 107, 108, 113, 114–15 Dutschke, Consuelo, 131–32, 133 EAMMS Project (Electronic Access to Medieval Manuscripts), 183 Early English Text Society. See EETS Echard, Siân, 115, 132, 133 e-codices (virtual manuscript library of Switzerland), 13, 199–203, 201 Edmund-Fremund scribe, 143 Edwards, A. S. G., 18–19, 113, 116, 133–34, 205 EETS (Early English Text Society): Hoccleve’s Works, vol. 1: The Minor Poems, 106, 107, 109, 111; Thomas Hoccleve: A Facsimile of the Autograph Verse Manuscripts, 90, 113–17, 118, 119 Ege, Otto, 18–19, 102 Einaudi, Mario, 90, 93 e-incunable, as term, 123 Ektachrome transparencies, 148, 257n84

Electronic Access to Medieval Manuscripts (EAMMS) Project, 183 The Electronic Beowulf project (British Library), 12–13, 16, 145, 146 Elkin, Aliza, 226 EM1060 2.0 (Stanford University), 210 Emery, Doug, 155 emotional responses, 14–15, 51–53, 217 Encyclopedia Britannica, 112 English language, priority given to, 203, 204 Ensley, Eric, 164 erasure. See visibility errors. See copying errors ethnographic and autoethnographic research, 20–24 fabric drapes, in digitization studios, 66 facsimile: of HM 111 by EETS, 90, 113–17, 118, 119; as term, 37 failure-success binary, 204–11 faithful and correct representation, 26, 73, 84, 97–100, 111, 114, 251n17 Fall of Princes, The (Lydgate), 29–30; in Harley 1766, 143–44, 147, 148–51, 149; in HM 268, 91; in Ms.Eng.1, 133–36, 137, 138–43, 139, 160; in Plimpton 255, 126–30, 129, 132, 160; in Rosenbach 439/16, 152–59, 156, 157 Faulhaber, Charles, 255n23 FCC (Federal Communications Commission), 159 Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative (FADGI), 59, 61, 67 Fenwick, John, 108–9

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flashlights, in digitization studios, 71 Florentius, 28 Florus of Lyon, 104 flyleaves, 5, 8, 114–15 foam book support-wedges, 57, 59 framing/cropping images, 74–75, 88–89, 134–35, 150, 153 Fujichrome film (100 ASA), 134 full opening vs. single-leaf view, 93, 251n17 funding, 19, 91–92, 95–96, 131–32, 147, 152, 236 Furnivall, Frederick J., 86, 106–7; Hoccleve’s Works, vol. 1: The Minor Poems, 107–12, 110, 113, 118–19, 218 gendered labor, 17–18, 39 Genève, Bibliothèque de Genève, Ms. Fr. 180, 261n63 Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria Nova, 203 gilding, 41–42, 70–73 Gillespie, Alan R., 17 Gillespie, Alexandra, 29 Git (version control system), 229 Glasgow University Libraries, MS Hunter 5, 238 gloves, cotton, 60 GML (IBM’s Generalized Markup Language), 176–77 Go, Micaela, 44, 67, 74, 232 Golden Thread image quality system, 62, 63, 64 gold leaf, 41–42, 70–73 Google Books, xv, xvii, 221, 226 Gower, John, 202 Graham, Shawn, 205 gray paint, in digitization studios, 54, 248n33

Green, Nichole, 134–36, 138, 140, 142–43, 166 Groat, Greta de, 23 Grusin, Richard, 11 Guenther, Rebecca S., 181 Guppy, Amelia, 104 Gutenberg, Johannes, 96 gutter view, doubled, 74, 89 Hacker, Chris, 232 Halberstam, Jack, 205 Han, Myung-Ja K., 181 haplography, 213, 216, 216 Haslhofer, Bernard, 187 Hebrew manuscripts, 78 Herman, Nicholas, 153–54 Hewlett-Packard PhotoSmart slide scanners, 134 Hill Monastic Manuscript Library (HMML), 183 Hoccleve, Thomas: autograph manuscripts, 90, 91, 95–96 (see also San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 111); literary reputation, 112–13; view of copying, 27–29, 68, 79; The Formulary, 202; Gesta Romanorum translations, 199, 251n27; “My Compleinte,” 218–20, 219; Regement of Princes, 27–28, 68, 113, 218, 220; Series, 199, 218 Hooked G scribe(s), 126 HTML, 176, 199 Hughes, Lorna, 51 Humphreys, Henry Noel, Specimens of Illuminated Manuscripts of the Middle Ages, xv–xviii, xvi, 226–28, 227 Huntington, Henry E., 112

299

300

I ndex

Huntington Library, digitization program, 89–94. See also manuscripts under San Marino, Huntington Library Hutchins, Amey, 153–54 Ide, Nancy M., 35, 183 IDIF (Item-Driven Image Fidelity), 46–47 IHAC (Information Highway Advisory Council), 136 IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework), 86, 90, 92, 93, 154, 208 illumination: gold leaf rendering, 70–73; identity of limners, 143, 152; manuscript decorative initials, 41–42, 70; photography lighting setup, 42, 55, 71 image capturing. See photography image resolution, 61, 136, 248n43 Image Science Associates, 62 imaging supports, 56–57, 59, 153 Imaging the Hours project (Walters Art Museum), 194 immaterial-material binary, 8, 10–15, 23 immediacy, logic of, 11–12, 25–26 incunables, 123 Information Highway Advisory Council (IHAC), 136 International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), 86, 90, 92, 93, 154, 208 internet: bandwidth and speed, 125, 130–31, 138, 144–45, 159, 163; Canadian infrastructure, 136–38; historical overview, 125–26; United Kingdom infrastructure, 145

Internet Archive, 142, 154, 155, 157 interventions, image, 67, 72–73, 74, 160–62 invisibility. See visibility Islamic Digital Resource Project (Walters Art Museum), 194 Item-Driven Image Fidelity (IDIF), 46–47 James, M. R., Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Corpus Christi College Cambridge, 194, 196, 198 Jameson, Maureen, 166 Johns Hopkins University, Digital Library of Medieval Manuscripts, 263n2 Johnson, E. N., 35–36 Joseph (scribe), 78 JPEG images, 136, 158 Kato, Takako, 210 Keralis, Spencer, 143 Kidd, Peter, 148 Kirk, R. G., 119 Kirkham, Victoria, 152 Kirschenbaum, Matthew, 11 Klas, Wolfgang, 187 Kodachrome slides, 148, 150, 257n84 Kodak Royal Gold 35 color negative film, 126 Kontron medical cameras, 141 Krapp, Peter, 225 labor/labors of copying/digitization: anonymity vs. naming conventions, 75–79; collaboration dynamics, 45, 93, 141–42, 143, 153–55, 202, 206, 238; engaging with and crediting scholarship and indi-

I ndex

viduals, 19–22, 238–39; medieval perspectives, 25–32; pre- and postprint copying culture comparison, 42–43, 53–54, 65, 68–70; scholarship on, 23; visibility/invisibility in copying errors, xvii, 217, 219, 220–27; visibility/invisibility in the historical record, 15–18, 24, 75, 76–79, 118–20, 127–28, 136, 140–41, 142–43, 152–53 Lachance, Francois, 52 Lamberti, Selina, 44, 75, 232 language(s): metadata containing multiple, 200–203, 201; vs. numeric-based tags, 176–77; priority given to English, 203, 204 Laurent de Premierfait, 30, 200 Lawton, David, 189 Lee, Stuart, 33 lenticular logic, 128 library catalogs/cataloging. See metadata; metadata schemata Library of Congress, 174, 180 lighting: and color perception, 62–64; gold leaf rendering, 70–73; heat from apparatuses, 127; in photography studio setup, 42, 55, 71; and reflections, avoiding, 66; and wardrobe restrictions, 54–55 Linhof imaging cradles, 153 Liu, Alan, 123 Liu, Yin, 32 London, British Library: Arundel MS 38, 220–21; Harley MS 1766, 124, 143–44, 147, 148–51, 149, 213, 215; Harley MS 4866, 220–21 London, Sir John Soane’s Museum, volume 137 (Soane Hours), xvi, xvii–xviii Long, Philip, 175

love, behind digitization, 51–53 Luna Imaging, 127 Lydgate, John: “Compleynte of a Lover’s Lyfe,” 29; Dance of Death, 218; The Fall of Princes, 29–30 (see Fall of Princes, The); as “no trimmer,” 189; view of copying, 29–31; works in manuscripts, 91; works in print, 106–7 Lydgate scribe, 143 macaronic metadata, 201, 202–3 MAchine-Readable Cataloging (MARC), 174–78, 177, 180–81, 183, 186. See also MODS Machlinia, William de, 101 Magna Carta, 146 Malinconico, S. Michael, 175 manipulation, image, 67, 72–73, 74, 160–62 manuscripts: autograph, 90, 91, 107, 108, 120; copying errors, 217–24, 219, 222, 223; and material-immaterial binary, 8, 10–15, 23; persisting culture of, after rise of print, 96, 241–42n3; teachable, 90–91; as term, 2–3. See also digital manuscripts; specific manuscripts by full shelfmarks manuscript studies field: and democratized access to digitized texts, 166–67; and erasure of labor of digitization, 15–18, 24; interoperability challenges, 171–72; and material-immaterial binary, 8, 10–15, 23; scholarship on digital manuscripts, 2, 5, 8 MARC (MAchine-Readable Cataloging), 174–78, 177, 180–81, 183, 186. See also MODS

301

302

I ndex

MARCXML, 181 markup languages vs. numeric tags, 176–77 Mason, George, Poems by Thomas Hoccleve, Never Before Printed. Selected from a MS. in the Possession of George Mason, with a Preface, Notes, and Glossary, 97–101, 99, 118 MASTER (Manuscripts Access through STandards for Electronic Records), 183, 209 Masters, Richard, 146 material-immaterial binary, 8, 10–15, 23 McCann, Stephen, 127 McGlohon, Laney, 23 McKenzie, D. F., 20–21 McNamee, Megan, 148 McPherson, Tara, 128 McRae, Lynn, 23 media archaeology, 8, 9 mediation, erasure of, 11–12, 15, 115 Medieval Academy of America, 16, 35 Meir ben Elijah of Norwich, 78 Mellon Foundation, 90, 130, 152 memorandum drafting, 49, 50–51 Meshullam (scribe), 78 metadata: and date(s) of creation, 87, 236–37; defined, 172–73; interoperability, challenges of, 169, 171–72, 187, 196–98; macaronic, 201, 202–3; and physical-digital binary, 8; publicly accessible, 86–87, 161; reusing existing manuscript descriptions, 154; thin descriptive, 19–20; and visibility/ invisibility of laborers, 140. See also metadata schemata

Metadata Object Description Schema. See MODS metadata schemata: overview, 173– 74; crosswalks and transforms, overview, 185–89, 186, 188; Dublin Core development and application, 178–80; e-codices moved from DC and TEI P5 to MODS, 199–203, 201; and MARC, 174–78, 177, 180–81; MODS development and application, 181–82; Parker on the Web moved from TEI P4 to MODS, 194–99, 197; TEI development and application, 182–84; Walters moved from TEI P5 to MODS, 190–94, 192–93 Meyer-Lee, Robert, 116 microfilm, 113 Middle English Brut project, 205, 210 miniatures: close-up images, 144, 150, 151; lavish vs. rushed, 50 Mirador, 86, 93, 154 mirror-board cardstock, 71 mistakes. See copying errors Mitchell, Jerome, 218 Mittman, Asa, 15 MODS (Metadata Object Description Schema): crosswalking, 186, 187; development and application, 181–82; e-codices moved to, 199–203, 201; Parker on the Web moved to, 194–99, 197; Walters moved to, 190–94, 192–93 MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses), 91–92 Morrison, Elizabeth, xviii Mosser, Daniel W., 220 MS HM 111: analog manuscript, overview, 95–96; digital man-

I ndex

uscript, overview, 83–89, 85; digitization context, 89–94; digitization techniques, 58, 89, 134–35; EETS photographic print facsimile, 90, 113–17, 118, 119; Furnivall’s print edition, 107–12, 110, 113, 118–19; Mason’s print edition, 97–101, 99, 118; microfilm, 113; and selective reproduction in early print history, 96–97; Seymour’s print edition, 113; value assessments, 91, 105–6, 108, 111–12, 117 Mubārakshāh ibn Quṭb, 77 Munby, A.N.L., 108–9 Mustain, John, 23, 44, 232 Myrick, Leslie, 126 Natale, Simone, 12 National Center for Supercomputing Applications, 178 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), 77, 194, 246n1 National Information Standards Organization (NISO), 173, 185 National Science Foundation (NSF), 125 Navarrete, Tony, 23 New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Library: MS 493, 217–20, 219; Takamiya MS 79, 126 New York, Columbia University, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Plimpton MS 255, 126–30, 129, 132, 160 Nichols, Stephen G., 31, 262–63n2 Nikon F4 cameras, 35mm, 126 Noel, William, 155 Nova Statuta, 101

numeric- vs. language-based tags, 176–77 Nuñez, Andrea, 153 OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiatives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting), 179 OCLC (Ohio College Library Center), 175, 178, 179 Omeka, 179 OPenn, 154, 155, 156, 158 Overgard, Michael, 155 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 50 Oxford, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford: MS. Phillipps-Robinson c.496, 252n50; MS. Phillipps-Robinson e. 370, 252n49. See also University of Oxford, Bodleian Library Oxygen (XML editor), 187 Ozment, Kate, 17–18 PACSAL (Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries), 152 page display: full opening vs. single-leaf, 93, 251n17; gutter view, 74, 89; rulers and color-calibration targets, 88 Parchment to Pixel project (Walters Art Museum), 194 Parker, Miss, 119 Parker on the Web (Corpus Christi College Cambridge), 13, 194–99, 197 particulates (dust and dirt), 67 Patterson, Lee, 113 Pearsall, Derek, 116 Pentax cameras, 134

303

304

I ndex

Petter, Chris, 134, 135 PhaseOne P65+ cameras, 55 Philadelphia, Free Library of Philadelphia, Lewis T.15/487, 126 Philadelphia, the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Rosenbach MS 439/16, 152–59, 156, 157 Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSAL), 152 Phillipps, Thomas, 101, 102–6, 108 philology, 8–9 photogenic drawings, 101–2 photography: calibration, 46–47, 61–65, 63, 88; calotypes and salt prints, 103, 104–6, 105; compositing, 71–73; film-based vs. digital, 126–27; hand triggers and foot pedals, 65, 153; HM 111 print facsimile, 90, 113–17, 118, 119; image capturing process and challenges, 65–68, 71; microfilm, 113; photogenic drawings, 101–2; platen use, 57, 58–61, 65–66, 67, 89, 115; repeat photographs, 66; and reproductions as value detracting, 109; studio and lighting setup, 42, 54–56, 55, 71. See also postproduction image processing Photoshop, 71–72, 161 physical experience: and emotional responses, 14–15, 51–53, 217; labor of copying and digitization, 27–28, 68–70; material-immaterial binary, 8, 10–15, 23 Picard, Tamara, 261n64 Pichler, Alois, 84, 93, 100, 111, 116 The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, 12–13

platens, 57, 58–61, 65–66, 67, 89, 115 Pomerantz, Jeffery, 172–73, 179 Porter, Dot, 82, 153–54, 155, 255n30 Portico (British Library online information server), 146 postproduction image processing: overview, 47; cropping/framing, 74–75, 88–89, 134–35, 150, 153; gold leaf rendering, 70–73; interventions and alterations, 67, 72–73, 74, 160–62; quality assurance/quality control (QA/QC), 47, 74, 75, 153 (see also copying errors); saving files, 47, 75, 135; straightening/deskewing/rotating, 74–75 Prescott, Andrew, 49–50, 51, 72, 146, 160, 162 preservation. See conservation and preservation Primiano, Dwight, 126, 127 print: calotypes and salt prints, 103, 104–6, 105; of HM 111, EETS photographic facsimile, 90, 113–17, 118, 119; of HM 111, Furnivall’s edition, 107–12, 110, 113, 118–19; of HM 111, Mason’s edition, 97–101, 99, 118; of HM 111, Seymour’s edition, 113; industrialization, 101; manuscript culture persisting after rise of, 96, 241–42n3; photogenic drawings, 101–2; and selective reproduction, 96–97 Production and Use of English Manuscripts, 1060–1220, project, 210 Pryor, Mary Ruth, 113 QA/QC (quality assurance/quality control), 47, 74, 75, 153. See also copying errors

I ndex

Quadrilogue Master, 152 Qualified Dublin Core, 181. See also Dublin Core Range, Melissa, Scriptorium: Poems, 151 rebinding, digital, 74, 142 Remix the Manuscript Project (Dartmouth College), 210 Ricardus Franciscus, 152 Ritson, Joseph, 98, 100–101, 107 Robinson, Peter, 183 Rochfort Smith, Mary Lilian “Teena,” 118–19 Rogers, Mr., 119 Rold, Orietta da, 26, 210 Roman de la Rose Digital Library, 263n2 rotating/straightening/deskewing images, 74–75 Rothschild, Jordan, 153 Round, Horace, 119 Roworth, Charles, 97, 118 ruler bars, 62, 88 Ruskin, John, 101 Sadler, Bess, 23, 52 salt prints and calotypes, 103, 104–6, 105 Samuel (scribe), 78 San Marino, Huntington Library: MS El 26 A 13, 91; MSS El 26 C 9 (Ellesmere Chaucer), 1, 3–8, 4, 6, 7; MS HM 111, 95–96 (see MS HM 111); MS HM 140, 91; MS HM 142, 91; MS HM 268, 91; MS HM 744, 91, 108, 114. See also Huntington Library Sargis (priest-scribe), 78

saving files, 47, 75, 135 scanning, of preexisting images, 134, 145, 146–47, 148 ScanOps, Google (Scanning Operations), xv SCETI (Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image, University of Pennsylvania Libraries), 152, 153, 155 Schlosser, Robert, 8 Schneider Digitar 72mm lens, 55 Schwartz, Hillel, 37 Schwemmer, Rafael, 261n63 Scorcioni, Giovanni, 62 scribal complaint tradition, 27–28, 68 searchability and discoverability, 140, 143, 154, 173 Searchworks, 182 Segler, Angela Bennett, 14–15 sensory experience. See physical experience Seymour, M. C., Selections from Hoccleve, 113 SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), 176–77, 209–10 Shailor, Barbara, 220 SharedCanvas, 90, 92. See also IIIF Sherbourne, Phillip, 225 Shuffelton, George, 95 single-leaf view vs. full opening, 93, 251n17 Skeat, Walter, 119 Smith, Astrid J.: color calibration process, 62, 64; digitization studio setup, 54–57, 55; image capturing process, 65–66, 67, 71; platen use, 59–60; position and

305

306

I ndex

Smith, Astrid J. (cont.) projects at Stanford Libraries, 23, 44, 232; postproduction image processing, 71–72, 73, 74–75 Society for American Archivists, 73 softboxes, 55 Soha, James M., 17 spatial resolution, 61, 136, 248n43 Spencer, Helen, 107 Sperberg-McQueen, C. M., 183 Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), 176–77, 209–10 Stanford, Stanford University Libraries, Department of Special Collections, Manuscript Collection, MSS Codex, M0379: benchmarking for digitization, 54, 58, 59–62, 64; contents, 43–44; copying error, 216, 228, 231–32; digital image capturing, 65–67; final digitized product, 75–76, 88; postproduction of digital images, 71–72, 73–75, 134–35; value assessment for digitization, 50–51 Stanford University, EM1060 2.0, 210 Stanford University Libraries: Digital Library Systems and Services (DLSS), 23, 49, 169, 181–82 (see also DMS-Index); Digital Object Registry, 181 Steuer, Susan M. B., 19 Story, Jo, 210 Stowe, John, 114 St. Pancras Treasures Digitisation Project (British Library), 145–46, 147 St. Petersburg, Russian National Library, F.v.II.3, 104

straightening/deskewing/rotating images, 74–75 students: as audience for digitized manuscripts, 91–92, 93–94, 106–7, 111–12, 116–17, 164–66; digitization projects led by, 133–36, 137, 138–43, 139, 160, 165–66 success-failure binary, 204–11 Sullivan, John, 90 supports/cradles, imaging, 56–57, 59, 153 surrogate, as term, 37 Swan, Mary, 210 Talbot, William Henry Fox, 101–4, 106 Tanselle, G. Thomas, 73 teachable manuscripts, 90–91 TEI (Text Encoding Initiative): crosswalking, overview, 185–87, 186; development and application, 182–84; e-codices moved to MODS from, 199–203, 201; Parker on the Web moved to MODS from, 194–99, 197; recognizing innovators of, 35; Walters moved to MODS from, 190–94, 192–93 TEI Medieval Manuscripts Description (TEI-MMSS), 183, 209 Tennant, Roy, 175–76, 177–78, 180, 185, 187 Terras, Melissa, 31, 145 Thynne, William, The Workes of Geffray Chaucer Newlye Printed, wyth Dyuers Workes Whych Were Neuer in Print Before, 97 TIFF images, 135, 136, 158–59 Torborg, Wayne, 70

I ndex

Toronto, University of Toronto, Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, Bergendal MS 50, 141–42 “treasures” designation, 49, 51, 83, 104, 106 Treharne, Elaine, 15, 23, 169, 210, 224 Tyrwhitt, Thomas, 86 ultraviolet light, 115 United Kingdom internet infrastructure, 145 unit of imaging, 92–93 Universal Viewer, 154 University of California, Riverside, 90, 91 University of London, Center for Print and Manuscript Studies, 148 University of Oxford, Bodleian Library, 141, 209. See also manuscripts under Oxford, Bodleian Library University of Pennsylvania Libraries, Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image (SCETI), 152, 153, 155 University of Toronto, 175. See also Toronto, University of Toronto, Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, Bergendal MS 50 Unsworth, John, 196–98, 205, 206 usability and “use,” 158–59 USB drives, capacity of, 135 US Department of Defense, 125 US National Commission on Libraries and Information Science, 130 value, defining, 48–51, 83, 106, 108, 111–12, 117, 132–33

Vanderkuil, Wayne, 44, 232 Van Schaick, Henry, 51 Van Zundert, Joris, 205, 206 variance, in textual transmission, 219–20 Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Vat. ebr. 402, 78 Veronis, Jean, 35 version control, 228–33 Victoria, University of Victoria, Ms.Eng.1: 133–36, 137, 138–43, 139, 160, 165–66, 255n39 visibility: of laborers in copying errors, xvii, 217, 219, 220–27; of laborers in the historical record, 15–18, 24, 75, 76–79, 118–20, 127– 28, 136, 140–41, 142–43, 152–53; of metadata, 86–87, 161; of rulers and color-calibration targets, 88 visual echoes, 74 Wakelin, Daniel, 10, 220–21 Walters Art Museum: data-sharing agreement with Stanford Libraries, 181–82; Digital Walters project, 190–94, 192–93; Imaging the Hours project, 194; Islamic Digital Resource Project, 194; NEH grants, 77, 194, 246n1; Parchment to Pixel project, 194. See also manuscripts under Baltimore, Walters Art Museum Walton, John, 91 wardrobe restrictions, 54–55 Watt, David, 28–29 wedges, foam book supports, 57, 59 weights, cloth-covered, 57 Weiser, Eric, 10 Wikipedia, 229

307

308

I ndex

Wilkie, Vanessa, 90–94, 118 Wilsey, Laura, 23 women, and gendered labor, 17–18, 39 Wu, Doris Cheung, 44, 232 XML (eXtensible Markup Language): and discoverability, 173; MARC encoded in, 180, 181; vs. numeric tags, 176, 177. See also TEI XQuery, 187, 198

Zeidberg, David S., 90 Zumthor, Paul, 219

STANFORD

TEXT TECHNOLOGIES Series Editors

Ruth Ahnert Elaine Treharne –––––––––––– Michael Gavin Literary Mathematics: Quantitative Theory for Textual Studies Michelle Warren Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet Blaine Greteman Networking Print in Shakespeare’s England: Influence, Agency, and Revolutionary Change Simon Reader Notework: Victorian Literature and Nonlinear Style Yohei Igarashi The Connected Condition: Romanticism and the Dream of Communication Elaine Treharne and Claude Willan Text Technologies: A History

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