Johnston and Van Dussen 2015

Johnston, Michael and Michael van Dussen, eds. The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015.

Martin Foys, "Medieval manuscripts: media archaeology and the digital incunable," 119-139

“Scholarship surrounding a manuscript is often inflected with a teleological desire for the artifact’s original or near-original state. But medieval manuscripts also lead long lives, ones that continue to change and now range far beyond the original media form of a handwritten codex.” (119)

“The large-scale reproduction of medieval manuscripts as digital media has the potential to challenge and change how such works are studied and understood. But digital resources for manuscript study are still relatively immature, and largely have not realized their own methodological and technological logic.” (120)

example of Cotton Tiberius B. V. — is no “one” manuscript of it today, has multiple reproductions and documentary records

“Tiberius is thus an artifact in two ways. It is a human product from the past, but it is also a product in the present, still subject to alteration through external processes: the augmentation and modification of its original form, critical treatments in printed facsimiles and scholarship, and most recently, rearticulation in electronic and digital media.” (120)

On how to reproduce many different states — requires detective work

“Tiberius becomes a work that is now a network, located both within its various historical forms, and the subsequent media that continue to reproduce and transform it.” (123)

“Digitization increasingly has the poten- tial to network parts of individual items directly together through linked associations. This digital record of these materials does not reproduce all of them (though they could theoretically do this, too), but it does trans- form them, presenting them together within the same medium, and sig- nificantly, linked within the same temporal moment.” (124)

“digital media also have the potential to better realize the long media history of a medieval manuscript, producing a representational archive of versions of the object’s content and form across time and media, where specific moments of any of these versions may be targeted and linked to related moments in similar archives of other historical objects.” (131)

“Unlike markup initiatives, large-scale digitization projects primarily present digital [images?] of manuscripts as image content only, with a minimum of metadata associated with each codex and folio.” (132)

“Most early digital resources tended to suffer from two limitations: taxo- nomic rigidity and siloing.” (132)