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Call for Applications

DIGITAL EDITING AND THE MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPT ROLL

April 28th and 29th, 2017

Yale University

This graduate training workshop will cover topics in:

• Paleography and Cataloging of Medieval Manuscript Rolls
• Manuscript Transcription and Scholarly Editing 

• Introduction to the Digital Edition: Challenges and Best Practices 

• Collaborative Editing 

• XML, Text Encoding Fundamentals and the TEI Schema 

No prior paleography or encoding experience is required. 


The workshop covers the fundamentals of digital editing while tackling the codicological challenges posed by manuscript rolls. Practical sessions inform collective editorial decision-making: participants will undertake the work of transcription and commentary, and encode (according to TEI P5 protocols) the text and images of a medieval manuscript roll. The workshop will result in a collaborative digital edition. 

The workshop will run April 28th and 29th, 2017 (Friday-Saturday) 9.30am-4.30pm. This graduate-run workshop is free of charge, and lunches will be provided for participants. A limited number of small need-based travel bursaries are available for participants traveling to New Haven. The workshop will be limited to ten places – preference will be given to graduate students with demonstrated need for training in manuscript study and text encoding. 

An information booklet and syllabus can be found on the website – please read this document before applying, and apply online by March 15. Applicants will be notified whether they can be offered a place by March 28th. 
For more information, see the project website (digitalrollsandfragments.com/workshops), or email organizers at digitalmanuscriptrolls@gmail.com.

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Mary J. Carruthers, Professor of Literature Emeritus, New York University

Cognitive Geometries: Using Diagrams in the Middle Ages

Lecture Dates: March 20, 21, 23, 2017
All lectures begin at 5:30pm

Class of 1978 Pavilion
Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts
Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, 6th floor
3420 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, PA

Monday, March 20, 2017: “Geometry and the Topics of Invention”

Tuesday, March 21, 2017: “The Shapes of Creativity 1: Trees, Towers, Buildings”

Thursday, March 23, 2017: “The Shapes of Creativity 2: Hands, Spheres, Cubits”

Cognitive Geometries explores the close relationships in medieval creative practice among geometric shapes, meditation, and the human ability to create original works. Focusing on materials crafted in the twelfth century, chiefly on the basis of Biblical texts, and then disseminated widely during the thirteenth century, each lecture investigates the fundamental cognitive insight of medieval diagram makers: that shape and pattern not only envision what we already know but also invite us to discover surprising logical relationships that can provoke our thinking in new ways.

Mary J. Carruthers is the Remarque Professor of Literature Emeritus at New York University and a Fellow (Quondam) of All Souls College, Oxford University. She has written extensively on medieval literature, memory and the history of spirituality. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Yale University (1965) and a B.A. in English from Wellesley College (1961). Carruthers is the author of twelve monographs including her 1990 canonical study, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge). She is the author of numerous scholarly articles and the recipient of many academic honors. She was elected a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America in 1996 and a Corresponding Fellow of The British Academy in 2012. In 2003, Carruthers was awarded The Haskins Medal by the Medieval Academy of America for “the best book in the broad field of medieval studies during the past five years” for The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200 (Cambridge).

For more information: (215) 898-7088; dmcknigh@upenn.edu or jpollack@upenn.edu

To RSVP please visit: http://www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/lectures/rosenbachs.html

The Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies (SIMS) is now accepting applications for its 2017-2018 Graduate Student Research Fellowship. The fellowship has been established to encourage emerging scholars in the Delaware Valley area to engage with the rich manuscript resources at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries and in Philadelphia.

This year, SIMS is pleased to offer the Graduate Student Fellowship in partnership with the Free Library of Philadelphia and the University of Fribourg-based project Fragmentarium (http://fragmentarium.ms), an international scholarly social network that enables libraries, collectors, researchers, and students to upload medieval manuscript fragments and to describe, transcribe, and assemble them online. Working under the guidance of SIMS’s Curator of Manuscripts, Dr. Nicholas Herman, the fellow will be responsible for researching manuscript cuttings and fragments from the John Frederick Lewis Collection at the Free Library of Philadelphia and contributing the data to Fragmentarium.

The Free Library’s collection of over 2,000 European manuscript fragments, principally dating from the 11th to the 16th centuries, is one of the largest of its kind and remains relatively understudied. The fellow will have direct access to this extraordinary research material and the opportunity to engage in original scholarly research related to his or her field of study. Further, the fellow will become a participant in a major international digital humanities initiative while benefitting from extensive local expertise.

Applications are due April 1, 2017. For more information and how to apply, go to https://schoenberginstitute.org/graduate-student-research-fellowship-2/.

In partnership with the Center for Italian Studies in the School of Arts and Sciences, the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies is pleased to announce the following lecture:

Francesco Marco Aresu, Assistant Professor of Italian and Medieval Studies, Wesleyan University

Giovanni Boccaccio’s Teseida: Composition—Circulation—Reception

Thursday, February 16, 2017, 5:00-6:30PM, Class of 1978 Pavilion, Kislak Center, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center, 6^th floor

This talk will explore the editorial and intertextual relations between Giovanni Boccaccio’s autograph of the Teseida (preserved in Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Acquisti e doni 325) and two exemplars of the poem: Philadelphia, UPenn Codex 254 and Cambridge, Houghton, Typ 227. It will investigate to what extent the material configuration of these exemplars comply with the hermeneutic guidelines materially embedded by Boccaccio in his autograph in order to control the reception and interpretation of the poem. This compliance will be described in terms of Boccaccio’s successful editorial project of inscribing his literary production within the canon of authoritative texts. The rich paratextual apparatus with which Boccaccio furnishes his autograph is at the basis of the affirmation of the Teseida as a classic and of the proliferation of comments and accretions around the text of the poem. By conducting this study under the aegis of material philology, the intent is to show how the interpretation of a text needs to be accompanied by an inquiry into the material conditions of its composition, dissemination, and consumption. The purpose is to show a paradigmatic example of the basic coincidence of textual datum and material unit, of content and medium, of verbal-iconic message and physical support.

Registration for this talk is free and appreciated! Please RSVP HERE

Registration is now open for the Futures of Medieval Historiography conference at Penn!

Read more and register for free online at https://www.english.upenn.edu/conferences/futures-medieval-historiography

Update: Due to a family emergency, Professor Alessandro Guetta has had to postpone his fellowship and consequently this lecture. His talk will be rescheduled at a later time.

In partnership with the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies and the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania, the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at the Penn Libraries is pleased to announce the 2016-2017 Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies & the Herbert D. Katz Center Distinguished Fellow’s Lecture in Jewish Manuscript Studies:

“Just for fun”: Making and Reading Hebrew-Italian Translations of the Early Modern Period

Presented by Professor Alessandro Guetta, Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Paris,

and the 2016-2017 Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies & the Herbert D. Katz Center Distinguished Fellow in Jewish Manuscript Studies

Wednesday, February 8, 2017, 5:15-6:30 PM

Lecture sponsored by the Jewish Studies Program

Professor Guetta will consider the significance of the 16th-century phenomenon of translation of Hebrew texts into Tuscan, the literary language of Italy. What motivated this small and largely unstudied endeavor, one not seen in other European Jewish communities of the time? Was it “just for fun,” as one of these translators declared? Or, given that Tuscan would become a vital element of cultural and national cohesion, did it belong to a strategy of acculturation?

For more information and to register, go to http://www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/guetta.html

The doctoral students in The Program in Medieval Studies at Princeton University invite abstracts for the 24th Graduate Conference on “Vulnerability in the Middle Ages,” which will take place on Friday, April 28, 2017.  Sharon Farmer (UC Santa Barbara) will deliver the keynote lecture this year.

Vulnerability in the Middle Ages

At a moment that has brought economic, political, and physical vulnerabilities (new and old) abruptly to the surface, we invite papers on the topic of vulnerability and insecurity in the Middle Ages. Recent scholarship in medieval poverty, gender, disability, and racial difference has greatly enhanced our sense of the variety of vulnerable experiences, and we seek to connect these conversations through their shared perspective on power. We welcome proposals from a variety of disciplines on vulnerability and the concepts that surround it, including weakness, insecurity, injury, disability, and difference. Papers might consider both the portrayal and the experience of the vulnerable life, as well as the systems that lead to vulnerability. We are interested both in the conditions that made individuals vulnerable within communities, and in those that threatened communities within larger polities. In a period where vulnerability typically precluded creating and maintaining records, unfamiliar readings of familiar sources are especially necessary, as are approaches that access vulnerable experiences in imaginative ways. Such approaches might challenge more conventional relationships between scholars and their objects of study, and ask how scholarship itself can perpetuate, create, or mitigate vulnerabilities in the past and present. 

Some themes might include, but are not limited to:

• Contradictory perspectives on vulnerability (sympathy/revulsion, admiration/contempt)
• How difference (racial, gender, physical, economic, geographic) contributes to vulnerability
• Vulnerabilities specific to catastrophes, including war, famine, disease, and panic
• The relationship of systems of power to vulnerability
• The experience and portrayal of physical vulnerability
• The treatment (medical or otherwise) of vulnerable conditions
• Religious practices and perspectives on weakness
• “Vulnerability” in other words, such as vernacular translations and terminologies
• Documenting vulnerability and (materially, philologically, hermeneutically) vulnerable documents
• Populations vulnerable to scholarship, via origin or identity myths, institutions, and ideologies

Please submit your abstract (250 words) for a fifteen-minute presentation to the conference organizers (medievalvulnerabilities@gmail.com) by February 15th, 2017.

All abstracts should be in English, and include your name, contact information, and academic affiliation.

MAKE _YOUR_ EDITION:
MODELS AND METHODS FOR DIGITAL TEXTUAL SCHOLARSHIP

Call for applications: Summer 2017 NEH Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities

DEADLINES: Applications are due Tuesday, February 28, 2017. Applicants will be notified of acceptance by March 15, 2017.

INSTITUTE DATES: July 10-29, 2017

Synopsis

The University of Pittsburgh is pleased to invite applications to an NEH Advanced Institute in the Digital Humanities for summer 2017 entitled _Make YOUR edition: models and methods of digital textual scholarship_. The target audience for this workshop is digital textual scholars who are already comfortable editing their texts (in TEI XML or comparable alternatives); the goal of the Institute is to assist them in moving beyond textual editing to imagining, creating, and publishing research-driven, theoretically and methodologically innovative digital editions.

Rationale

Digital humanists already have access to workshops and tutorials to help them learn to transcribe, edit, and tag a text in preparation for publishing a digital edition. These training resources play a vital role in empowering editors to formalize and instantiate their interpretations as markup, so as to make them available for subsequent analysis. Nonetheless, sophisticated markup expertise alone is not enough to make an edition, and learning nothing more than tagging may leave scholars staring at their angle brackets and wondering what to do next. For some a solution like TEI Tapas provides an adequate next step, but for those who wish to ask new types of questions of their documents, and to produce new types of editions that enable new types of research, an
understanding of how to turn a set of tagged texts into a customized edition that meets individualized research goals is crucial. Digital humanists cannot build editions that break new methodological ground solely on the basis of solutions prepared largely by others, and the focus of this Institute is on the creation of digital editions motivated by project-specific research questions and implemented from a perspective driven first by theory of edition, second by editorial methodology, and necessarily but less importantly by specific toolkits. In this respect we foreground not learning a particular programming language or technology or framework, but learning to think and act digitally about the process of creating a digital edition. Because tools and technologies come and go, the Institute emphasizes learning to translate original digital thinking about editions into implementations of those editions, rather than on “tooling up” in the context of currently popular frameworks. In this respect, the Institute recognizes thinking digitally in ways driven by project-specific research goals as the most important feature of _sustainable Digital Humanities training and education_.

Program

The Institute will introduce textual and manuscript scholars to a powerful and broad-reaching skill set of digital methods and technologies, grounded in a context that prioritizes a research-driven theory of edition. The course moves in a three-week succession from novice to experienced level, and from base textual data to full digital publication of scholarly editions. The Institute assumes that participants will have meaningful prior experience in digital editing (in TEI XML or a comparable framework), but it makes no other assumptions about prior knowledge or skills.

–   An optional first-week _boot camp_ establishes basic infrastructure skills (operating comfortably at the command line, handling files, navigating file systems, sharing resources and code responsibly, running Python programs from the command line, etc.).

–   The second week allows participants to practice and advance their basic skills when they start combining digital textual scholarship theory (e.g., McGann 2004[1], Andrews 2012[2], Siemens 2012[3], Robinson 2013[4], Haentjens et al. 2015[5]) with standard (e.g., XML, Python, Jupyter Notebooks) and advanced digital technologies (e.g., StemmaWeb, CollateX, Neo4j, Tinkerpop, eXist-db).
–   By the end of the third week, participants will be able to conceptualize from theory a perspective on digital textual scholarship and digital scholarly editions. They will also know how to go about planning and implementing such an edition by engaging programmatically and algorithmically with digital data, handling it computationally, and querying, analyzing, and transforming it into visualizations that transcend the digital translation of a text as a codex.

The Institute will meet at the main (Oakland) campus of the University of Pittsburgh from Monday, July 10, 2017 through Friday, July 28, 2017 and will draw on an international faculty of distinguished scholars, practitioners, and teachers of digital philology from several collaborating institutions. On Saturday, July 29, 2017 there will be an optional pedagogical review of the Institute, designed to assist participants in organizing and conducting their own workshops at their home institutions.

Instructors

–   Tara Andrews (Institute of History, University of Vienna)
–   David J. Birnbaum (Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures,
    University of Pittsburgh)
–   Hugh Cayless (Duke Collaboratory for Classics Computing [DC3], Duke
    University)
–   Ronald Haentjens Dekker (Huygens Institute, Royal Netherlands
    Academy of Arts and Sciences)
–   Na-Rae Han (Department of Linguistics, University of Pittsburgh)
–   Mike Kestemont (Department of Literature, University of Antwerp)
–   Leif-Jöran Olsson (Department of Swedish Language, University of
    Gothenburg)

The instructors will be assisted by Gabrielle (Gabi) Keane (Senior Undergraduate Institute Assistant, University of Pittsburgh).

Details

Applications are invited for the full three-week Institute or, in the case of those who are already comfortable with the types of first-week topics described above, for just the second and third weeks. Applicants should already be proficient with digital textual editing in TEI XML or similar technologies, and should be seeking guidance and training in how to move their texts into innovative digital editions that will enable them to explore project-specific research questions. Evidence of meaningful prior hands-on digital textual editing experience is required, but prior experience in programming for textual exploration and publication is not. Applicants who do not have prior experience with the Python programming language must agree to complete a recommended free online introductory Python course before the beginning of the Institute, for which the Institute will maintain its own support and discussion board. For budgetary reasons, preference will be given to applications from within North America.

Participants accepted to the Institute will receive a travel allowance, complimentary accommodation in single-occupancy dormitory rooms, and a complimentary meal plan in the University Dining Services in lieu of per diem. Access to the University libraries, computer labs, and networked digital resources will also be provided. Participants must bring their own laptops (Windows 7–10, Mac OS, or Ubuntu/Debian Linux). We welcome scholars at all career levels from advanced graduate students through senior faculty. Applications to the Institute should include the following:

–   A one- to two-page statement about how participation in the Institute will enhance the scholarly and professional goals of the applicant. This statement should describe the digital edition project that the applicant plans to pursue or undertake, with special attention to the research questions motivating the creation of that edition. Preference will be shown to applications that articulate a clear understanding of the textual research potential of digital scholarly editions.
–   A one-page description of the applicant’s experience with textual editing. Prior experience in programming for text processing is neither required nor expected, but those who have such experience should describe it here.
–   Brief CV (maximum of two pages), concentrating on textual editing and Digital Humanities experience.
–   Indicate whether you are applying for the full three weeks or only for the second and third, and in the latter case please describe your background in the areas related to those described above as part of the “boot camp” week.
–   Indicate whether you wish to participate in the optional one-day pedagogical review of the course on Saturday, July 29.
–   Participants are required to participate full-time in the Institute for the two or three weeks that they are in residence, and must confirm that they will not undertake other significant commitments during the Institute period.

All application materials should be submitted by email as a single PDF file to djbpitt+neh@pitt.edu. The deadline for applications is Tuesday, February 28, 2017, and applicants will be notified by March 15, 2017. Questions may be directed to djbpitt+neh@pitt.edu.

David J. Birnbaum, Institute Director
Professor and Chair, Slavic Languages and Literatures
Faculty Fellow, University Honors College
Email: djbpitt+neh@pitt.edu
_____

References

1.  McGann, Jerome, 2004. “Marking texts of many dimensions.” In Susan Schreibman, Raymond Siemens, and John Unsworth, eds. _A companion to
    Digital Humanities_. Oxford: Blackwell.
2.  Andrews, Tara L., 2012. “The third way: philology and critical edition in the digital age.” _Variants_ 10, pp. 61–76.
3.  Siemens, Raymond et al., 2012. “Toward modeling the social edition: An approach to understanding the electronic scholarly edition in the
    context of new and emerging social media.” _Literary and linguistic computing_, 27(4), pp. 445–61.
4.  Robinson, Peter, 2012. “Towards a theory of digital editions.” _Variants_ 10, pp.105–31.
5.  Haentjens Dekker, Ronald, Dirk van Hulle, Gregor Middell, Vincent Neyt, Joris van Zundert, 2015. “Computer-supported collation of modern manuscripts: CollateX and the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project”, _Digital scholarship in the humanities_, 30(3), pp. 452–70.