Tuesday, 10 February 2009

Medievalists can now be as lazy as Americanists.

Via Jeremy, I learn that the UCLA-based Catalog of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts went live recently. 

“Searching for medieval manuscripts gets you millions of hits, most of which have nothing to do with manuscripts, and when they do, they usually feature only images of a single page rather than the entire book,” said Matthew Fisher, an assistant professor of English at UCLA.

Fisher set out two years ago to remedy the situation. With the assistance of two graduate students in English, a computer developer from UCLA’s Center for Digital Humanities and Christopher Baswell, a former UCLA professor of English, Fisher decided to collect links to every manuscript from the eighth to the 15th century that had been fully digitized by any library, archive, institute or private owner anywhere in the world.

Medievalists with a paleological or codicological approach now have their own Google Book Search.  (And Carl Pyrdum now has more grist for his award-winning mill.) When I started the dissertation, Google Book Search was in its infancy and practically useless; by the time I filed, I could check variant editions of the novels I discussed in my first two chapters.  But even before the final rewrites, I’d found myself forever indebted to some anonymous lackey at the University of Michigan: my third chapter turned on the sudden availability of every word Silas Weir Mitchell via Google instead of ILL, and my fifth wouldn’t have been completed had I not been able to skip from one edition of Pudd’nhead Wilson to the next.  (The differences aren’t significant.  I’m simply paranoid.)

I’d say more, but I’m off to hunt monkeys.

(Full disclosure: I’m married to someone who works with someone involved in this.)

(x-posted.)

Feb 10, 2009 6:45:22 PM | Literature

6 Comments

Karl Steel

Ah, but the contents themselves aren't searchable. We medievalists need something like the Index of Xian Art, but, you know, free, for those of us working at institutes [CUNY] that don't have the $ to pony up for the good databases. I need, for example, a handful of images of pig slaughter from the 14th c., ideally Insular, + a handful of images of people being executed w/ axes [same century]. God bless UCLA and the glorious Chris Baswell, but this ain't gonna cut it. However, medievalists, this is very cool, and, yes, does allow for a certain kind of laziness [although I prefer the word 'efficiency']

Posted by: Karl Steel | Tuesday, 10 February 2009 at 06:55 PM

Matthew Fisher

Cheers for the write-up, whatever your indirect involvement may be. A touch of dissonance, as I've lightly followed your blog for a while, so finding my project mentioned here was quite unexpected. The project is a long way from Google Book search, and quite a bit closer to rifling through a very large collection of microfilms in a dusty drawer in a sunless library basement. Having finished my dissertation without Google Book Search at all, it's certainly fundamentally changing the process of transforming it into a book...

Karl - I agree that searchable content is a major desideratum, and even agree that this project has rather fundamental limitations, but before we get to iconographical databases and full-text search, we need to sort out the abysmal state of manuscript catalogues, and the complete lack of cooperation between digital projects. I'm hoping to use this project (which is ultimately just a collection of links) to force libraries to play more nicely with each other, and with us as those who use their collections both physical and digital.

Posted by: Matthew Fisher | Wednesday, 11 February 2009 at 11:18 AM

Andrew R.

Part of me is delighted by this, but the unhappy cynical part of me notes that the vast and overwhelming majority of manuscripts are not digitized, and probably won't be for a while. And why would they be? As it stands, the British Library can charge me $197.00 for a scan of ten folios, and the Bodley can charge over three pounds per scan for electronic reproductions of manuscripts. The more manuscripts these folks put on the web, the more they're killing the goose that lays the golden egg, and they know it.

So we'll see manuscripts with the prettiest pictures gradually go on line, but the vast majority of codices are going to stay hard to reach.

Posted by: Andrew R. | Wednesday, 11 February 2009 at 05:36 PM

Karl Steel

Matthew, I should have said: excellent work, manuscript project! Searchable text of manuscripts is just as easy as editing each manuscript...so I'm not really complaining. I just grousing because I can't easily do the thing I need to do....

Andrew: or they'll go online in a subscription package available only to the most well-endowed (and generous to medievalists) institutions. Maybe we need another dissolution of the monasteries.

Posted by: Karl Steel | Thursday, 12 February 2009 at 08:11 AM

Matthew Fisher

Karl - complain away! It's precisely not being able to do what we wanted to do that prompted Chris and myself to get this rolling, get the funding, and get it out there.

Andrew - as someone who works on ugly books, I very much understand where you're coming from. The BL and Bod rates for digitization are horrifying, but so are the prices they charge for photocopies - this is cultural, rather than, I think, intentionally punitive. The reproductions business really doesn't offer all that much of an income stream for the less photogenic books we work on, but the inflated prices strike me as a legacy of an outdated photographic services model. I think it's precisely the prettiest books we won't see available in their entirety - the Ellesmere Chaucer, for example. The Huntington sells postcards, small color facsimiles, even a large black and white facsimile, and don't seem terribly interested in making the MS more easily available. On the other hand, the NLW got the Hengwrt Chaucer on the web early, although they subsequently retracted it from the web (as the BL did with the Beowulf MS) and are trying to sell it on CD. More generally, though, yes, books will remain hard to reach. The 1000 the Catalogue currently offers up, and the 3000-5000 I hope to have included by the end of this academic year, is better than nothing....

Posted by: Matthew Fisher | Thursday, 12 February 2009 at 05:02 PM

Karl Steel

Far far better than nothing; and one might hope that if scholarship explodes on the manuscripts your project helps make available, the BL and Bod might want to join on the fun. It's a dream, but who knows?

Posted by: Karl Steel | Thursday, 12 February 2009 at 11:08 PM

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