A panel on digital manuscripts this morning! First, some students working on music manuscripts and neumes, a medieval notation for plain chants.
They're creating a searchable digital edition of one such medieval manuscript.
#medievalmastodon #historodons #academia #Kzoo2018 #medieval #history #music #manuscripts
(I'm going to do the thing of tooting as a reply thread to avoid having to repeat the tags).
These guys have developed a system called "Virgapes" for semantically encoding neumes.
Virgapes is a 4 number system, with no of pitches, ID number, episema (note lengthener mark) and liquescence (a curvier notation variant of uncertain meaning). Latter 2 are binary/set to zero or one. Can deal with both the neumes proper and the regular letters used as a style guide.
Their system also has a system for lining up parallel documents to the syllable level, allowing the chant text to be easily aligned with neumes.
Now we're onto what else they can do briefly - including analysis of patterns and frequencies among neumes by running algorithms across the digitised Virgapes text.
Second talk is on links between digital editions of texts and the provenance/movement of manuscripts.
#history #historodons #academia #Kzoo2018 #medieval #digitalhumanities
Traditional ways of recording manuscript provenance done as a simple textual recording, much like for art gallery items. This of course doesn't then allow analysis of manuscript *travel*, hence search for new models.
Even within manuscript banks that already exist, issues of wildly different models used for records. Much still to be done on developing systems consistent enough to allow for the extremely international nature and flows of manuscript ownership in the last two centuries.
Huge impact of small numbers of super wealthy collectors perhaps one of the main things to take from that - our knowledge of the medieval passing very much through the cogs of early c20th high capitalism.
Now we have @omniadisce on medieval medicine texts :)
#beforemoderntimes #history #medicine #medievalmastodon #historodons
@omniadisce many medicine texts are often still read in sixteenth century editions without pagination let alone search.
Computational tools like Stemmaweb (on which I work!) can help improve editing, though traditional skills still vital.
@omniadisce Discussion of De Oculis, a text in one medieval writer's corpus which has some odd differences to other works in the same corpus.
Using analysis of word clusters and components visualises some of these differences and allows views of how significant they are. Not a secure way of analysing authorship, however - writing styles not always consistent and later editing can wipe out individual original writing quirks.
Also oops I didn't mean to keep tagging Brian.
Starting to build a project repository of digital STEM sources will allow analysis on a much wider corpus. Unusual latin STEM terms used very rarely can be more easily disambiguated by being able to compare their use across a corpus.
Tracing medical terms, often pulled from and mangled between Arabic, Greek, and Latin, can be done with spreadsheets but unwieldy - neater visualisation/analysis tools will improve this. Analysis that grabs text blocks and compares can help compare influence from one text to another. Issues with this regarding half quotes where lexicon tweaked to fit another corpus though.
@JubalBarca Amazing, what a journey!
Intro discussing one bible belonging to one of medieval crusading Kings, later found in the hands of a Persian Shah where additional captions added, probably lost from Persia in the eighteenth century, found in Cairo in the late nineteenth, brought to collectors in Europe and then an industrialist in the US before reaching a museum.