 My name is Eric Johnson. I'm the curator for early books and manuscripts at the Ohio State University Libraries, basically in charge of everything prior to 1700. Most of my life is, in a very real sense, spent in the 12th through 15th centuries. So this step into the CNI environment is a little bit new for me. What I'd like to do today is talk about a project called Manuscript Link that I am co-directing with a colleague who unfortunately couldn't be here today. His name is Professor Scott Guara. He's a professor of English and an international medieval manuscripts expert down at the University of South Carolina. I'd like to just really bring his name into this because without Scott, this project would not exist. So I'll do my best to answer questions that he might be better suited to ask. But what I'd like to do today is really provide an overview of what Manuscript Link is by talking a little bit about the concept of fragmentology and fragmentation, what that means, why we should care about it. Give you a little overview of, really at this stage, only some drawings and mock-ups of what we expect the site to not necessarily look like in the final product, but can give you a sense of where we're trying to go with it in terms of look and functionalities. Talk a little bit about our goals and what we hope to achieve with this, and then delve a little bit into possible future DH applications that might come out of this, might make new ways of exploring the world of medieval manuscripts possible for those of us who live in that world. So before I can really talk about what Manuscript Link is, I've kind of got to define why we're doing it. So what is fragmentology and why should we care about it? Fragmentology, it's a relatively new word. If you want to even call it a word, I kind of hate it. But some people have started using this in a sense. And basically, fragmentology is the study of medieval manuscript fragments. You could extend it to anything, Ostraca, early modern leaves and cannabular leaves, really anything. But in Manuscript Link's particular context, it is the study of really any and all medieval manuscript fragments produced from, say, the 5th century up through the 16th century. Why should we care about it? A lot of people ask me this question. I am self-defined as a fragmentologist. This is somewhat by nature of where I work, Ohio State. We've got actually a very nice medieval manuscript collection compared to, say, some of the IVs, though, and some of the European libraries when it comes to complete manuscripts. We are somewhat complete Codex poor. We've got around, I'd say, around 30, which is a good number for a place like us. But where we're strong is in fragments. We have over 1,000 fragments in OSU. So by necessity, I have to teach a lot with fragments, and I research a lot with fragments. And basically, by looking at these fragments, we can learn a heck of a lot about particular aspects of medieval book culture, intellectual culture, religious culture, its history, so on and so on. Fragments exist for a whole bunch of reasons. There are thousands upon thousands of complete Codeses or relatively complete Codeses that survive, but fragments are far more numerous. Books have basically been destroyed since the day after books were invented. There's all sorts of reasons for this, a typical one. We all probably have that favorite paperback that we've literally read to death. You can have medieval manuscripts literally disintegrating because of a process like that. More typically, though, we tend to think of deliberate acts of destruction. So say, for instance, the dissolution of the monasteries in the second quarter of the 16th century in England witnessed political and religious motivation behind destroying an entire cultural patrimony in terms of manuscripts related to the monasteries in England. So it's a deliberate destruction. We think there's probably fewer than 5% of liturgical manuscripts that were used and produced prior to that point that still survive. Most of those that do survive in fragmentary state. In addition to that, we have, well, repurposing. I almost never go anywhere without actual medieval manuscripts. But when I talk about repurposing, a lot of people like to get a sense of what that is. So here we have actually a liturgical manuscript that's been repurposed in the 18th century to create a document folder. This is a text that is no longer useful. It's become textually or liturgically obsolete. So parchment's too good to waste. Let's fold it up and create something new. In a similar vein, you'll find things like this 12th century manuscript leaf. You can actually see these letter thongs through here. This was repurposed at some point in the 16th century folded in half to create the binding for a letter book. There are literally thousands upon thousands of fragments like this that are out there, either independent that have come loose from the books that they have become a part of, or another part of this project down the road, perhaps, recovering those fragments that are still in situ in the bindings of old books, principally from the Middle Ages up through the 17th century. The other big popular motivation behind medieval fragments is, of course, greed. One of my big research projects is trying to put back together an early 13th century Bible that was deliberately destroyed in 1981 to take advantage of tax laws and to sell individually on piece by piece basis to give you a sense of what kind of greed I'm talking about. The book was purchased for a total of $23,100, or roughly, this is 81, so roughly about $55,000 to $57,000 in today's money, based on market research that I've done on individual fragments that I've turned up in recent years. If we wanted to try to rebuild that manuscript leaf by leaf today, from leaf one to leaf 440, we'd be looking at having to spend close to $900,000. That's not a very conservative estimate. So manuscripts nowadays, and really for the last 200 years, one of the main reasons they've been destroyed has been simply to capitalize them on them as pieces of individual art. Why do we need to care about this? We need to recover lost textual evidence. We have to remember that each individual leaf was once part of a larger contextual and textual whole. As a material object, as a textual object, and a lot of us in the world of medieval manuscripts are now starting to really get behind the effort to reconstruct a lot of these. And this is where Manuscript Link comes in. There are all sorts of digital manuscript projects that are out there. Digital Scriptorium is probably the biggest one and the most recognizable, a fantastic resource. However, Digital Scriptorium only aims to kind of do representational samples of manuscripts. This is the first project that is deliberately setting out to try to recover textual integrity and codecological integrity for manuscript leaves that have been dispersed around the planet over the last several centuries. So with that in mind, just go into some goals. Goal one, construct the virtual medieval library. As I said, we're not the only digital project out there. There are plenty of other digital libraries like Ecotasease based in Switzerland, which is a virtual library of pretty much every medieval manuscript codec still in Switzerland. Fantastic resource. But again, I just want to stress what we're trying to do is create collective collections. We're drawing on the holdings of libraries all over the world to create a resource that is going to resurrect texts. We're not talking about texts that survive. We're bringing things back to life and that's the basis of the library we hope to put together. Goal two, establish a worldwide network of partners. So far, let's see, we publicly announced to the beginning of this project. In late November 2013, we started with, I think it was 49 founding partners. We're still not live in terms of being an active site, but since late November, we've added a number of other partners. We're up to 72 international partners at this stage who are going to be contributing their manuscript leaves to us. And it's a diversity of collections. There are the big places to target, like Ohio State with over 1,000, places like Cornell, they're another partner. But we're looking for manuscripts everywhere. They really are everywhere, especially when we're talking about the United States. Collecting culture in the 19th and early 20th centuries and throughout the 20th century has seen manuscripts dispersed far and wide. So, while most of our partners tend to be institutional libraries, college and research libraries principally, we have art museums both large and small. And then we go all the way down to one particular small parish church in a small Ohio town that has, I think it was four or five leaves, and a small town public library in Ohio that has 14. So, a lot of this is trying to dig out those hidden manuscripts that no one, I wouldn't say that no one cares about them. No one knows what they are. No one interacts with them, trying to bring those to light. Goal three, we need to approach this project flexibly. And I like the word liminal with this because fragments within the context of manuscript link really aren't individual pieces. They're also not complete codices. We need to recognize that they're both. They're both static and dynamic. We need to be flexible in our approach in this project because different scholars are gonna come at this out of different reasons. What I've got here, these are actually six leaves from the Bible that I mentioned earlier that I'm trying to reconstruct. We could conceivably have an art historian in Belgium who's only interested in one particular illumination on one leaf within that collection. However, we might get people like me who are more interested in the textual evolution of the Bible. So I want to get as much of this back as I can so I can start to see the changes in the textual packaging and the textual content of the Bible in the early 13th century. So we need to really be conscious of different approaches and not try to turn this into really basically just kind of a flip through individual fragment site where you can go and look at pretty images or for that matter, something that is gonna prioritize the complete codex. Although I think by default, we probably do that a little bit because we're actively engaged in reconstruction, but we wanna recognize that a lot of people are gonna approach using our site solely to look at individual examples and not a reconstructed text. And goal number four is to create a resource that facilitates a whole bunch of different approaches to research and medieval books. So without going into specific details on every last thing in the next few slides, I'll just put up a few examples. This is yet another medieval Bible that I'm trying to reconstruct at OSU. And by doing this, originally about 550 leaves, we're up to about 130, 140 leaves. We can learn a lot about book history, paleography, codecology, the study of ancient handwriting, the study of the material book. By amassing a whole bunch of these fragments, we can start learning a lot about particular scriptorium practice, different scribal practices. We can do comparative analysis of handwriting, things like that. So by re-aggregating, we can get much more complete pictures of how books were made, how they were used, how they were transmitted, how they were received. Textual and literary criticism, these are two fragments from two different Bibles at OSU. Both of them with these starting off, and these are both from the beginning of the prologue to the book of Daniel. And I actually use this in the medieval manuscript studies course. We do textual editing exercises based on this. And they're basically the same text, but there's a heck of a lot of differentiation, and they're ranging from small accidental scribal mistakes to inverted word orders to entire words not being there. So this is a really valuable potential tool for textual editors to get a better understanding of textual transmission in the Middle Ages. Art and historical criticism, again, two Bibles, one mid-12th century, one circa 1220. Different books in the Bible, but we in both cases have large illuminated initial Ps here. And people might want to do comparative analysis of different types of illumination in order to see what they can determine about the iconographical evolution of the Bible or any other manuscript that includes decoration like this. And finally, getting to the really small, and we're talking 15 centimeters by three or four centimeters. If you take fragments like this, you can tell a heck of a lot about a manuscript, even with the smallest parts. Basically, these fell out quite literally, fell out of a 15th century binding into my lap about a year and a half ago while I was using the book. And just based on the brief pieces of text that have been preserved here, actually learned a heck of a lot about where this manuscript came from. Early 12th century, mid-12th century, Southern Germany or Northern Switzerland within a Cistercian context and the particular Antiphon or Sung text that's preserved here. Only survives in nine other known manuscripts today. Those nine manuscripts, seven of them also come from Southern Germany. So we can link these up with those seven. We now have eight and this gives us a better picture of kind of devotional practice and practice in Southern Germany and Switzerland. And like I said, this is a remarkably small fragment with which to work. But if we can find more pieces, there's no telling what you can put together. So what exactly does manuscript link look like? I have a couple that are just drawings and then I have a few slides that show some functionalities in more professionally done mock-ups. But basically this is a pretty typical home interface. Some things have already changed on this just since I put this together late last week. But basically we're looking at a bisected kind of two-functionality folk-eye homepage. On this side it's basically informational. On this side it's functional. So we'll have kind of an abbreviated mission statement in here and this look is gonna change quite a bit but we're gonna incorporate news blog video tabs on the homepage. So here news for instance, news about the latest manuscripts to be contributed or new partners or other breakthroughs in fragmentology research blogs. We envision the blog to be basically something that the co-directors run and we will solicit input from other people. But descriptions of longer descriptions and engagements with manuscripts that are being re-aggregated on the site to help draw some interest in particular things there. And video we're not quite sure yet but we do envision actually we are in the process of at least tentatively planning conference sessions and things like this based on this project. So hopefully we could post things like that there. In terms of the functional side, the search button will take you to the search page which we'll get to in a second. And then we've envisioned a whole bunch of different browse categories to give people the opportunity to engage right off the bat with different manuscript fragments in terms of both standard kind of bibliographical things like title, author, date, that kind of stuff, artist and codicological things like writing support, paper, parchment, papyrus, language script, provenance history, the dimensions of the manuscript leaves and initially I think we'd envisioned this as being kind of a pop-up window but I think we're maybe leaning a bit more to having a push menu that comes in where you can start to get lists of these things as they pop up. On the top, this is gonna change a fair bit but the basic banner things are all there. We like the idea of redundancy for searching so we've got a search link. The about is gonna be a pretty typical about thing where we're gonna have an extended kind of description of the project and the mission statement. We'll also include information about the co-directors and contact information, information about our institutional partners, a big thing. We're gonna have some kind of legalities in there. One of the challenges with this site is that right now we're drawing materials from 72 different collections. By nature, all of these things are not in copyright. However, every institution has its own rules that govern reproduction of those things and so we're gonna be having some sort of statement in there about fair use, about when you need to contact individual libraries in order to secure permission to say publish something. To facilitate that contact, we will have not just a list of the partner institutions but all the contact information for the one particular representative for each institution there. We are also, let's see, we've got a help link which we're now, I think, going to be embedding in the about link and I think the best way that we've decided to kind of approach that is to create a video screencast showing navigation through the page rather than have some long, it's a Belgian friend of mine, some long textual sausage that describes everything. Resources is really basically a bibliographical drop down menu. We want this to be a potential tool that other collectors, librarians, curators can use to help them identify things in their own collection. So in resources, we're going to have print and online bibliographies basically of the essential things that you need in order to help identify manuscripts. We're also probably going to include a section on blogs and other sorts of online manuscript and manuscript fragment presence. There's been a heck of a lot of growth in fragmentology circles in the blogosphere recently. A couple that come to mind right now, Eric Kwakal out of the Netherlands runs a really popular worldwide blog called Turning Over a New Leaf, Lisa Fagan Davis from the Medieval Academy of America is doing one called Manuscript Road Trip which is going all around the United States and exposing hidden collections of manuscript leaves. So creating a nice one-stop shop where people can find those information, those pieces of information. CISH is just a placeholder right now but basically it stands for citational shelf marks. I mentioned the big challenge of harvesting material from all sorts of institutions. Shelf marks for manuscripts can be long clunky things. And what we're trying to do with this is create a streamlined citational system that will only be used within manuscript length but it basically to allow us to maximize space on the webpage that when you're mousing over something or when you're looking at a page we'll look at in a minute and you have a manuscript image up it's not laden with this huge citational shelf mark. So this is basically going to be a link that will take you to a key that translates the abbreviated citation to the full shelf mark which will be there in all extended metadata for each item. The other big reason we're kind of doing this new shelf mark is because for instance, Ohio State, Oregon State, Oklahoma State we're all contributing things. We can all be OSU early manuscript seven. So we're developing a whole nomenclature for this that is gonna just be for our internal use. And login and register, we'll get a little more into that in a minute but basically you don't have to have an account to use this site but by logging in and registering with this site you'll be able to create your own library, the fragments that transports with you from session to session. This is also something that other manuscript resources are not doing right now. The search page, we can ignore the top here that's gonna change completely but basically again we have dual functionality here. All of this operates with Boolean. So you can do an incredibly simple search. You just wanna look for bibliographical things. I wanna look for Canterbury Tales. I wanna look for Jeffrey Chaucer. You can do that search and get everything that might be in the site from that. Or you can go the codecological route. You wanna find all manuscripts that consist of 42 lines per page. Believe me, there are reasons why people wanna do this. Page layouts, lines, columns, whether or not there's illustration, total number of folios, height and width of the actual leaf, height and width of the text block. And then you can do as many or as few of these as you want to create an incredibly refined search. And get into some of the more formal mock-ups. This actually is gonna be much, much smaller than what you're seeing here. But this is the bookshelf or the nav box and this is a semi-transparent navigational tool that is gonna follow the user from page to page. And basically you can use this bookshelf to launch most of the major functionalities in manuscript links. So give you a sense of how this might work. You're looking at a manuscript image. You single click on that manuscript image and it's gonna highlight it. You can click select and it's gonna dump that particular file into your nav box with the abbreviated shelf mark. And you can back up to four of these. And then the rest of these buttons will launch you into other functionalities. So you can add things to your archive, go straight to the archive, hit the juxtapose and compare feature which I'll tell you about in a second. You delete it, add a new one and you can go straight into the codex feature. So now to go into those functionalities. The codex view, this is essentially what it's gonna look like. And here's that bookshelf box and that's movable. You can put it anywhere on the page. And you're going to be... These are not really from the same manuscript but they'll serve for this demonstration. These theoretically are from the same manuscript codex. You'll see they're displayed here. You've got the abbreviated shelf mark logged underneath. And this is essentially, we're all undoubtedly familiar with this by this stage. It's just basic page turner technology. Single arrow is gonna take you to the next image whether it's a missing leaf or whether it's actually an image of a manuscript in the database. If you do the double arrow, that double arrow will just pop you all the way to the next available file image. So this is also in codex view. You will see something like the missing leaf. You can minimize the bookshelf or nav box to get it out of the way if you want. We've still got our shelf mark. And then if you mouse over the actual image, you will get a pop-up box that gives you all of the abbreviated metadata for this particular image. So Breviary on vellum from Italy, Naples, the date, measurements, page layout, and when applicable, an artist's name or an author's name, things like that. So quick reference thing. The two features are the two functionalities that we don't yet have slides for. One is the Pan and Zoom feature. That's, we're all gonna be familiar with that as well. If you wanted to take a closer look at this, just simply double click on it. It will then launch into a separate Pan and Zoom page. The main things about this, one, you'll have that image centralized and you can get into incredibly close detail on this, which is really important for paleographers. And then along the left side of the screen, it's gonna have a line here and you will have four additional images here. They're gonna be the two images before that particular leaf, the two images after, and you can scroll up and down in there to navigate to different leaves. The other feature, and this is a little bit different than what you see with a lot of manuscript sites out there right now, is the juxtapose and compare feature. And if you recall, let me go back a couple real fast. In the nav box, you can select up to four leaves. You can launch straight out of juxtapose, or straight out of this in juxtapose and compare and basically what you get will be those four leaves or two or three, however many you want. Well, all be arranged on the same page. Each one of those images is gonna be manually movable so you can rearrange them any way you want. Each one is gonna have embedded pan and zoom and the image is dynamically resized so that they meet the needs of whatever you're looking at the site on. This is a big breakthrough in terms of comparing actual manuscript leaves because currently right now what the other resources out there allow us to do, we can compare individual manuscript leaves but we've gotta use different browser windows. It gets pretty clunky. So this is worth, we think, a pretty big advancement in terms of being able to compare disparate or similar fragments. And then the other major functionality is the archive. And the default view of what the archive will be is just gonna be these abbreviated shelf marks for every manuscript fragment that you've selected to include. By toggling on images, you can get thumbnails of the recto and verso of each leaf. You don't want them anymore, just toggle images back off. You can launch straight into codecs for any manuscript you've got in here. You can delete individual leaves. You can select all, get it all down here, clear the archive in one go. And if you select in here as well, you can select again up to four leaves to launch straight into juxtaposing compare. The other nice thing about this in terms of building your own personalized archive, you can export selections and print selections. What this is going to give you is the full metadata for every manuscript that you've included in here. So for instance, if you click on UT, Harry Branson Center MS Fragment 37, that's not only gonna give you the metadata on this image, it's also gonna give you shelf marks for every other leaf that is at another institution. So you can do a lot of kind of one-stop shopping in terms of tracking where this manuscript is. So expectations for possible digital humanities and applications, of course, we wanna reconstruct previously lost and dispersed texts. When I've spoken about this before, some people say, well, why do we really need another copy of the Bible? Why do we really need another copy of Gregory the Great's Honolies? Well, as I tell my students in manuscript studies all the time, a Bible is not a Bible is not a Bible. What we've got here is Bible from 1150, the Bible from 1250, and two more produced between that period. So we have a centuries worth of Bibles represented right here. Each one remarkably different than the next. So each one of these is a unique cultural and historical witness to a particular past, particular textual and codicological past. So we want that reconstruction to happen. However, we also plan, we don't quite have this up yet, but we've built in the capability within the database to capture all of the information that we would need to launch particular tools and displays, customizable interactive maps, timelines, graphs and charts, et cetera, that will allow us to say we wanted to look at origin points. I'm particularly interested in where antiphons, oh, let's just use antiphons, a real basic search category, where antiphonals or antiphons were produced throughout the course of the Middle Ages. You can type in antiphons, hit a map, and it's gonna start throwing up population densities for production points for these antiphons. We can get a real sense of where major production points, things like that, it's a real basic idea or sample of what I'm talking about there. Same thing with data period of production. Lot of codicologists and paleographers want to know more about the degree of say the appearance of one particular type of script or one particular type of book in one century or one decade or one quarter century period versus another. We can get really interesting comprehensive comparisons by building up different kinds of searches. One that I'm particularly interested in, given that I'm trying to reconstruct so many manuscripts physically, provenance histories and paths of ownership. We plan to capture within the metadata whenever possible complete provenance histories or as complete as possible for these manuscripts. So for instance, that early 13th century Bible that I'm trying to put back together, I can trace unfortunately its history only all the way back to about 1860. Nothing is known prior to that point because everything, its original binding, all of that stuff was destroyed and there are no markings, there are no ownership inscriptions from the Middle Ages written in it. But if I input all of that material and I wanted to see a graphical representation of the travels of this manuscript, I could watch it go from 1860 to 1981 from France to England, back to the continent, to the United States, east coast down to Texas, back up to New York in 1981 when it was purchased and then that night cut up into 440 pieces. Then by feeding in provenance information about each individual leaf, I can start to see where it's gone in the world. And I've tracked leaves to Australia, Oslo, England, various continental countries and all over the United States. You can get a really good sense of kind of the dispersal of these things from a historical sense. And then you can do all sorts of comprehensive and comparative displays of data based on geographical location, genre, styles of art and paleography, codecological bibliographical features. One of the examples I put in here or in my head is if you wanted to you could look for all breviaries produced in Northern Italy between 1450 and 1500 whose leaves measure 300 centimeters or excuse me, millimeters by 220 millimeters with a two column format of 31 lines each and a display like that could put up current locations for all of those things or conceivably could put up historic locations of origin points. These are big important questions for codecologists and paleographers to build up a better sense of how books were produced and how they've been dispersed through the years. So just to kind of tie things up, we're hoping we've got a lot of work left to do on this. Can't tell you how many conference calls I've had with the folks down in South Carolina. The Digital Humanities Center at USC is building this as we speak. And we're hoping for a late spring, early summer launch of the site. We're probably talking initially I don't have an exact account for you but by the time all of the partners submit their materials we'll probably have, I would think between 3,500 and 5,000 fragments maybe double that because we're gonna have a recto and a verso for each. So it's gonna be a sizable set of manuscripts to work with. But what we're hoping for out of this is that it will have a pretty wide impact. It's gonna have, from my kind of hybrid standpoint as a scholar of medieval manuscripts but also as a curator of medieval manuscripts I'm hoping that this is gonna have an impact not just on what people can learn about different manuscripts and their histories but how they go about actually asking questions. This re-aggregation thing is central. It's gonna completely change the way we think about approaching some of these things. Outside of the scholarly realm and in the library world I'm really hoping that this also might help libraries and curators in particular think in new ways about collection development, about promoting access to collections but actually using collections not just from medieval manuscripts but potentially for all sorts of different arts and humanities content. I think there are a lot of implications here that this could have on the way I and my colleagues in the special collections world do our work in a lot of different facets. So I'm just gonna end there. This is kind of my trademark image because I'm against all of these deliberate cutters and I'm happy to take any questions. Okay, well thank you for coming. I'm around the rest of the week. Thanks.