Digital Resource for Palaeography
Posted on 07/12/2010
Prototype of the Digital Resource
Dr Peter Stokes, Research Fellow at the Centre for Computing in Humanities at King’s has received a prestigious Starting Grant from the European Research Council as part of the EU’s 7th Research Framework Programme (FP7).
His project will bring new methods in Digital Humanities to the study of medieval handwriting, including a new online resource which will allow scholars, students and the broader public to manipulate, view and interpret these materials as never before.
The ERC Starting Grants allow early career top researchers to carry out ground-breaking research in any field. With awards worth up to €2 million each, they support the best researchers of any nationality, helping to bring the best minds to Europe and to develop sustainable growth through innovation.
The new digital resource will apply the latest techniques in Digital Humanities to palaeography, the study of medieval manuscripts and handwriting.
Dr Stokes says, ‘Palaeography is fundamental to our understanding of the past and therefore of our world today. Manuscripts and written documents tell us most of what we know about our history, our literature, our language, and much more. If we want to understand these then we must understand the documents that preserve them. But palaeography is much more than that. It is also the study of what may be the most important technologies in society today: the book, and the alphabet.’
‘Everywhere we look, we see writing; almost everything we do, we do with writing. Even the way we think is influenced by the way we write. Computers may have reduced the amount we write by hand, but writing is still fundamental to our lives, and even e-books are still based very firmly on the book itself which has been in use for some 2,000 years. In this respect, it’s hard to imagine a field of study that is more relevant to us now.’
‘I am very grateful to the European Research Council for its generous financial support. It gives a very welcome opportunity to go the next step beyond digitising manuscripts, instead demonstrating how computers and the Internet can bring material together and then enhance it in ways that will support scholars of palaeography and medieval studies, as well as students and the public all over the world.’
The new project will bring digital technology to bear on scholarly discussion in new and innovative ways. It will combine digital photographs of medieval handwriting with detailed descriptions and characterisations of the writing, as well as the text in which it is found, and the content and structure of the manuscript or document as a whole. It will incorporate different ways of exploring and manipulating the information, such as annotated images, dynamic maps and timelines and image-processing as well as more conventional text-based browse and search. It will therefore allow scholars to apply new developments in palaeographical method which have been discussed in theory but which have proven difficult or impossible to implement in practice. This opens up new possibilities for more precisely dating and locating scripts, scribes and manuscripts.
Its focus is not only on the scholar, however, but also on students and the general public. As Dr Stokes notes, ‘Medieval manuscripts are part of our heritage and contain some of our best works of art from Europe and beyond. Treasures such as the Book of Kells in Dublin or the Lindisfarne Gospels in London receive hundreds of thousands of visitors a year, as do sumptuous examples of calligraphy in Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese and more.’
Endorsing the project, Michelle P. Brown, Professor of Medieval Manuscript Studies at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study, said, 'The digital environment offers exciting ways of extending and enhancing traditional methodologies and enriches our perspective on how we communicate across time and space. This project will make a valuable contribution to the interface between past, present and future.'
Emeritus Professor Dame Jinty Nelson of the Department of History at King’s added, ‘What Peter Stokes brings to the project is a quite exceptional combination of theoretical grasp and extensive knowledge of scribal practices and manuscript materials.’
[Image: Prototype of the Digital Resource showing detail of Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 419, p. 40. Manuscript image reproduced by permission of the Master and Fellows, Corpus Christi College Cambridge.]
Notes to editors
About the Centre for Computing in the Humanities
The Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH) is an academic department in the School of Arts and Humanities at King's College London with emphasis on research. The primary objective of the CCH is to study the possibilities of computing for arts and humanities scholarship and, in collaboration with local, national and international research partners across the disciplines, to design and build applications which implement these possibilities, in particular those which produce online research publications. CCH offers undergraduate modules and programmes at the MA and PhD levels, hosts seminars, conferences and colloquia, has an active programme for visiting fellows and welcomes collaboration of all kinds in the digital humanities.
The ERC’s press release can be found at <http://erc.europa.eu/pdf/ERC_Press_release_StG2010_results.pdf
King’s College London
King’s College London is one of the top 25 universities in the world (2010 QS international world rankings), The Sunday Times ‘University of the Year 2010/11’ and the fourth oldest in England. A research-led university based in the heart of London, King’s has nearly 23,000 students (of whom more than 8,600 are graduate students) from nearly 140 countries, and some 5,500 employees. King’s is in the second phase of a £1 billion redevelopment programme which is transforming its estate.
King’s has an outstanding reputation for providing world-class teaching and cutting-edge research. In the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise for British universities, 23 departments were ranked in the top quartile of British universities; over half of our academic staff work in departments that are in the top 10 per cent in the UK in their field and can thus be classed as world leading. The College is in the top seven UK universities for research earnings and has an overall annual income of nearly £450 million.
King’s has a particularly distinguished reputation in the humanities, law, the sciences (including a wide range of health areas such as psychiatry, medicine, nursing and dentistry) and social sciences including international affairs. It has played a major role in many of the advances that have shaped modern life, such as the discovery of the structure of DNA and research that led to the development of radio, television, mobile phones and radar. It is the largest centre for the education of healthcare professionals in Europe; no university has more Medical Research Council Centres.
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