 Good morning everybody, thank you for being here at 9 a.m. this morning and this lovely San Diego day I'm resisting all that lovely weather outside that we can't currently see. So I'm here today to talk about the Digital Library of Medieval Manuscripts that we have been developing at Johns Hopkins University. I'm Tamsin Mahoney-Steel and I've been working on this with Sai Chowdhury over there and also with Mark Patton, John Abraham's and Cynthia York who are not with us today. Unfortunately Steve Nichols was unable to join us today but I have some really interesting information about how he's been using this in a scholarly manner so I'm going to share some of his information there as well that we've been talking about. So over the past few years we've done several presentations on the development of the Digital Library of Medieval Manuscripts here at CNI. I'm going to just give you a little bit of background and recap. The library was born out of combining two projects the Ramon de la Rose Digital Library there in its old instantiation and the Christine de Pisan Digital Scriptorium. This has resulted in a platform that will be suitable for many further projects that either display medieval manuscripts or provide further information or analysis tools for their content. So here is the the new front page for the Digital Library of Medieval Manuscripts combining both of those projects which can be visited at the dlmm.jhu.edu. At the winter meeting at the end of last year our team from the Digital Research and Curation Center demonstrated the implementation of the new International Image Interoperability Framework or AAAF viewer. So you would have if you were there you would have heard a little bit about more about the technical side of this and I'm going to be talking some more about the scholarly applications that we can we can get out of this new version of the the websites. So this project began over 20 years ago when Professor Stephen Nichols approached the staff at the Milton S. Eisenhower Library at Johns Hopkins University with the idea of digitizing manuscripts for teaching purposes. His belief was that students were missing a fundamental aspect of studying medieval texts by not being able to appreciate them in their original context and so the Rose Library was born. As it grew it became apparent that as Steve says the value of an interest in examining different copies of a single text held in various repositories and not always easily accessible was immediately clear to both scholars and the general public alike. And this was not just because it was financially prohibitive for scholars to visit manuscripts held in such far-flung repositories but because being able to view in an internet browser such a range of manuscripts that contained versions of the same narrative has given scholars a clearer sense of the longitudinal development and transmission of texts. Furthermore the digital library gives free access to these beautiful cultural artifacts to anyone who wishes to view them thus democratizing access. So today I'm going to be talking a bit more about the latest iteration of the project that began with the Romanda La Rose Digital Library and now finds itself as the digital library of medieval manuscripts. The DLMM as I will shorten it to in this presentation with its new triple IF viewer is ready to launch and some scholars have been beta testing it to see how the new functionality not only improves the experience of accessing digitized manuscripts but also furthers their scholarly and pedagogical aims which is of course the the big ticket there. Developing this resource comes with a certain amount of anxiety. We have been successful in serving our community for over 20 years and statistics demonstrate our success and popularity. Since 2008 alone nearly 332,000 people have visited the Rose Digital Library. This is equivalent to 130 people per day and those people hail from 135 different countries. Now we want to continue to serve this user community with the level of quality we always have but we also want to provide new functionality and attract new audiences as well. I'm going to present two current use cases demonstrating how scholars are using the DLMM and one proposed use case that will set out how we might develop the current functionality further. So use case one. This was offered to me by Professor Stephen G. Nichols and it has a very interesting premise. So this is a course that Steve has actually developed over the last semester and I'll just read you the rationale behind that course. Medieval churches embodied by French Romanesque and Gothic edifices have an unexpected status in modern culture. They are visible as monumental reminders of the medieval past but their true role is little understood. In fact they were vibrant creators of culture and politics in their own time and the origin of a dynamic cultural meme in the modern world. Misunderstanding of medieval culture began in the Renaissance. Unlike the term Romanesque, a term that was invented at the beginning of the 19th century, Renaissance writers coined this word Gothic as a pejorative descriptor for medieval architecture which was considered barbarous. A term that quickly came to designate medieval culture in general. Only during the Bourbon Restoration from 1814 to 1830 when French thinkers sought to reconstruct a heroic past to repair the rupture with French history wrought by the revolution did the Gothic Middle Ages experience revival and respect. Historians like Michelin Guiseaux, writers like Hugo Chateaubriand Vigny, philosophers like Cousin Roya Collade and Birain conceived new ways of looking at French history where the Middle Ages inspired a new hybrid called medievalism. Medievalism enabled the transformation of Gothic into the modern meme goth with its overtones of apocalypse and mysticism and this seminar that Steve created traces the culture, history and politics underlying the evolution of Romanesque and Gothic from the 11th to the 14th centuries. This medieval scenario then serves as a backdrop against which to view the politics history and culture of the Bourbon Restoration when the reinvention of the Middle Ages by history and literature inspired a trajectory of national consciousness from objection to the sublime. So that sounds like a really fascinating course and it's been very successful with the with the students this semester. So this overall idea that Steve had to reexamine the concept of Gothic literature and appreciate not only the renaissance and 19th century takes but to understand the role of medieval literature as the original place of the Gothic. Steve Nichols wants the students to consider what what does Gothic literature mean when applied not to Stoker or Bronte for example but to actual medieval literature. What can we see in those literary structures that gave rise to the 19th century imagination? So for Nichols the DLMM is a rich site of exploration for his students and the new IIIF viewer has enormous potential for aiding his students in their understanding of medieval literary construction. To understand medieval literature we cannot merely read an addition. To illustrate what I mean here I'm going to take you in a little journey back in time to the presentation we actually gave three years ago with myself Saeed and Steve Nichols. I'll show you a couple of slides from that presentation. And this is to explain the difference between the medieval manuscript and modern editions and highlight the importance of having resources such as the Romantula Rose Digital Library. And then I'll turn to how this new functionality is aiding the vision of exploring and teaching the medieval manuscript. So the current slide shows an addition of the Romantula Rose which is based on a particular manuscript. The critical apparatus at the bottom of the page tells us about variants in other manuscripts and any adjustments that the editor has made to the text. Fairly standard for a critical edition. Now the next slide tells a much fuller and more complex story. These are just a fraction of the rose manuscripts available to editors. There are in fact around 300 extant manuscripts of this tale and over 130 of them on the Romantula Rose website. Each is unique both in its visual presentation and contents. Many manuscripts have additions or cuts to the text so each one is very very different. Getting to know the text as a medieval text means understanding these kinds of variation. Something that a mass produced critical edition cannot capture but which a library of digitized images can help us to get a closer understanding of. Here we can see at a glance the radical contingencies of what Steve Nichols calls the manuscript matrix. This is an example from a Christine de Pisan manuscript that is included in the Christine de Pisan digital scriptorium. We can see the work of many hands here, author, scribe, illuminator, parchmenter and also the implied hands of patrons and readers. So this was the testimony that Steve gave to his teaching experience. I have used the DLMM this semester when teaching the rose. It was amazingly successful in opening the eyes of the students to the complexity of the work. They first read the critical edition and could not understand how I could argue for the contingency of the text and its multidisciplinary nature. Once I began to show them different manuscripts using the DLMM and especially showing manuscripts from different moments, early 14th century, late 14th century, 15th and early 16th century, as well as interpolations and emissions from one manuscript to another, the students were in shock at the difference between the real thing and the critical edition. They morphed from passively dutiful, we read it but it doesn't do anything for us, to excited and wanting to do more. They loved the functionality that allowed them to drill down on details etc. This experience, Steve says, gave me new ideas for pedagogical presentation of the material. Now where the new layout helped was in several ways. While the old layout has much to offer, access to details about the manuscript and transcriptions was actually less user friendly than the new interface. In the new layout, such details are more intuitively accessible. We can also move more easily through the manuscript images using the thumbnail scroll bar along the bottom and furthermore the ability of AAAF to allow multiple images with their details side by side makes it far easier not just to compare manuscript images but to compare transcriptions and manuscript details. So you can see on the right hand side it's very easy to bring that that paint up. In terms of Steve's teaching experience, the viewer has even more to offer. In looking for Gothic structures, the students were examining not only literary structures in relation to architecture but also the very mise en page comparatively. The performance of a medieval text is bound up with its performance on the page, hence the Gothic structures that the students were investigating were to be found in the visual and comparative experience of looking across several different manuscript images. The kind of comparative experience that the DLMM provides allows students to see how these literary and visual structures developed but also how they changed across time enabling them to see in turn how these notions were shaped into the idea of the Gothic in the 19th century and also how some medieval structures were also forgotten in that revival. Now I mentioned a short while ago of transcriptions leads us nicely to the next use case scenario which involves the use of the transcriptions themselves as well as the search functionality and this is based on conversations I've been having with some other scholars that have been using the DLMM. These have proven really invaluable for a number of scholars who have worked on the transmission of the rose text even though we actually have a relatively few number of transcriptions at the moment but we hope to add to the collection of transcriptions in the future with a view to having a full set for longitudinal comparison of transmission. Now as I showed in the previous example the side-by-side comparison of manuscripts and ease of access to the transcriptions in the viewer are very helpful pedagogically. Naturally the benefits of research of seeing the transcriptions in this manner are great. What has proven particularly helpful and has been remarked upon by our users is the ability to use the search functionality within the viewer panes. This makes it far simpler to pursue a research lead when you notice something in a manuscript so you can see there we can actually open that search functionality right alongside search for something and get those results right in that pane next to the manuscript image and you can actually once you have those up you can click and bring up that particular folio in the viewer or you can right click on it or control click on it and actually choose to add another pane and if we have time later maybe I'll have the chance to show you give you a little bit of a demonstration of that. So as I say this makes it far simpler to pursue a research lead when you notice something in a manuscript this might be within a transcription but can also be including image descriptions. For example some researchers wish to look at the positioning of images in relation to text and would like to delve further into that investigation with these windows open. Access to the search functionality within the actual viewer the viewer panes simplifies the process of moving between manuscript folios. For example I may wish to see at what point in a debate between two characters in the in the narrative of the remandala rose and illumination of the debating is actually placed. I can easily search for this within the viewer pane and move to another manuscript image that also contains a similar illumination. For those manuscripts with transcriptions I am able to find results of pages very quickly that have both illuminations and transcriptions relevant to the search. So you can actually see that in the search results on the right hand side there you can see illustration transcription character name so it's bringing up these different factors right in that viewer window and this allows me to focus in on the data I need very swiftly. As we increase the number of transcriptions over time this of course can only improve. As you can see in the image the results are collected first by by relevance or number of hits on each folio and then listed by manuscript shelf mark and by folio number. We can see very easily that the results pertain to images and transcriptions as I just said and these capabilities are proving very popular with users. Some scholars have found that having downloadable transcriptions would be very helpful. Now at the moment we can supply a word or text document on demand but the indication is that as we move forward this is a functionality that would be very desirable. So moving from those two use cases I'm now going to talk about a future use case scenario that can build on this functionality. I've constructed a number of use case scenarios for the development of the Rose Digital Library and many of these are created around the idea of creating user communities with logging capabilities to do things like create annotations either public or private and save notes on their work under their profiles. So I'm going to give an example that I'm using in my forthcoming book which is actually about the concept of digital annotation and medieval manuscripts and how these two things might work together to support understanding of medieval literature and culture. So if you're interested in that you can look out for it. Note to Benay making digital marks on medieval manuscripts which will be out later this year and there's also if you're interested in delving further into this interaction between the digital and the medieval I have another edited book coming out with Matthew Evans Davis and AJ Turner Circle meeting the medieval in the digital world. So a little plug there I apologize. So for today I'm going to look at one particular case of annotating manuscript images in order to construct a web of information around a manuscript image that can benefit users in researching teaching and learning about a literary and musical community of the 14th century. I'm taking this example from the forthcoming book and here I'm going to look in depth at one case study that looks at the interconnections between the rose narrative and one motet by Guillaume de Machaud called amour qui a la poire, fausse en blanc madassieu and vididominum otherwise known as motet 15. This motet and its relationship to the rose narrative has been explored in depth by Kevin Brownlee and I'm going to summarize what's going on here the intertextual relationships that he perceived first before proceeding to envision how a researcher interested in these relationships might use and benefit from an annotated digital environment such as the one that we are developing for the digital library of medieval manuscripts. Now Machaud's motet 15 finds its literary foundations in the opposition between two key allegorical figures associated with the medieval courtly love tradition. They are called amour love or the god of love and fausse en blanc, fausse seaming so love and fausse seaming are these two important characters. For Brownlee this opposition can be placed against the broader literary context of the rose since the French vernacular literary work served as the point of departure for virtually all late medieval courtly poetry. As Brownlee notes his methodology is to view the meaning of a particular lyric or lyrical musical composition as in part determined or conditioned by a variety of narrative contexts which constitute the tradition in which it is situated against which it is meant to be read. This is in essence the investigative methodology of many current researchers of medieval music and literature including myself who appreciate the deeply citational nature of medieval artistic production and see how this could actually be captured in the digital realm. Like Brownlee we acknowledge that not all links represent a precise intertextual dependence of one work upon another. Nonetheless we acknowledge the myriad ways in which the tradition of poetic culture in late medieval France displayed interdependencies and conventions, many of which stem from the popularity and reception of the Romand de la Rose. So just to give a very brief overview of what I'm talking about here the medieval motet. This is a very short piece of polyphonic music and these are most usually based on borrowed snippets of church music. That would form the bottom most line. In the case of Motet 15 it is founded on a Lenten response so something sung during the period of Lent which in turn finds its basis in the Bible text Genesis 3230 so already we have a network of connections there that we could expose and would be very useful to expose digitally. Motet 15 is a three-part motet. It has two upper lines which are called the motetus which is the the middle line marked as B there. This is a different motet from the the macho one but I'm just using this to demonstrate the structure and the triplum which is the uppermost line and in the macho motet these are these two lines one is entitled false seeming has deceived me and love who has the power so those are our two characters of false seeming and love who appear within this piece of medieval music and also appear within the romand de la rose narrative so we have that important connection there. As with many motets the sexual subject matter of the upper lines ostensibly contrast with the sacred sense of the tenor. Both the motetus and triplum tell a story of unrequited love from the point of view of the rejected lover but they are subtly different. In the triplum the top line as kevin brownlee explains love has the power to reward his servant by moving the lady in his favor but he has so far refrained from doing so. Meanwhile in the simultaneously sounding motetus line rather than complaining about love's lack of action on his behalf he presents himself as having been deceived by this character false seeming who has used the lady's appearance to draw in the lover and as kevin brownlee further notes this kind of contraposition typifies the relationship between the characters of amour and faux semblant as they are presented in the rose. Now if you're kind of thinking whoa that's a lot of information about medieval literature for nine o'clock on the Friday morning yes it is I apologize but also I don't because I love medieval literature but the point here is like it is very complex you have a complex piece of music that relates to a very long and complex narrative and in both cases we have the juxtaposition of two characters who are either literally debating against each other or being presented in the case of the piece of music in opposition to one another. Now if you're trying to get a student or even a fellow researcher into a headspace where they can understand all of these interrelationships it's quite a complex task to to teach this and explain this and this is where I think that the the digital platforms can be really rather wonderful in showing but in a very kind of clear and visual way where all of these kind of citational links are with using the annotation capabilities of something just like the triple if viewer. So as I say the relationship between machos and the rose narrative is one of great intertextual complexity. Macho wrote narrative D's inspired by the rose he he wrote one called the Didu versier which is the story of the the orchard and the D de la Rose the story of the rose so very kind of clearly inspired by the Romand de la Rose but his work is in general peppered with influence from this famous romance the Romand de la Rose with Motet 15 just being just one example the characters love and forth seeming Amour and Fossamblan have a complex relationship within the Romand de la Rose narrative and one that Kevin Brownlee views as central to the narrative structure they interact at the level of plot language mode and authority the plot sees them jousting verbally for an extended period around the midpoint of the narrative the exchange results in forth seeming perhaps surprisingly joining the army of love but not before he has affected repeated shifts in perspective as Fossamblan alternatively praises and condemns the code of hypocrisy adopting in term the viewpoint of anti christ and the viewpoint of god a very complex narrative structure going on here in terms of language while Amour's love represents courtly discourse which is elegant and sincere forth seeming Fossamblan embodies the Clarkley viewpoint while the latter's rhetoric is theological the off-changing position reveals the learned language which to be fundamentally deceptive so we basically beware of scholars the difference in mode and authority between two interlocutors resides in Amour's position loves position as representing the lyric mode and thus the authority that come from love poetry and narratives while his debating partner brings in contemporary history and politics yet while these two characters are seemingly at odds the thrust of the narrative demands their interaction Fossamblan for seeming eventually helps love to overcome jealousy's castle and secure secure the rose for the lover so the lover wins wins the love of the rose which is the kind of the the end point of the romantula rose narrative without necessarily using direct quotation this motet motet 15 evokes the extended dialogue of love and force seeming indeed what better forum than the motet to recall in limited time and space such an exchange we've got the two layers there the musical layers are actually sounding at the same time not just musically but the text as well are sounding against each other so it's a very kind of complex interaction going on there between the texts um so this polyphonic and polytextual nature of the motet puts the two voices in direct harmony and dissonance over the course of the piece of music demonstrating harmonically the inseparable nature of the two as well as placing two verbal discourses seemingly disparate but ultimately linked in simultaneous sounding so as kevin brownley says what is suggested by the motet and reinforced by the narrative context is that the language of amours and the language of faux samblans those superficially different are part of the same system the full and linguistic world of appearances of seeming in which courtly discourse the language of erotic love is ungrounded as it were by definition that is its truth value remains elusive and detached from its beauty or rhetorical power so this article by brownley offers both a clear demonstration of the importance of reading a set of medieval motet texts against a romance narrative using the discourse between love and full seeming in the rose to better comprehend the motet for this reason the his article makes a good basis for a case study in how we could annotate rose manuscripts with additional commentary and links and to show how marrying manuscript pages with this kind of scholarly information in a digital environment can allow us to appreciate more holy and enable our students to grasp more quickly an important set of cultural interactions from late medieval france and you know i i i say this with kind of the experience of having come to medieval studies as someone without a medieval studies background and having to learn all of these kind of citational and cultural interactions and it is a very kind of complex thing to come to terms with with how something that is very kind of historically and culturally removed from my own life having to appreciate all of those interactions and i think that digital annotations are a really great way of of showing the importance of of things within a manuscript and as you saw earlier in that image of the i'll just hop back to that image of the transcription you have all of that information just sitting there right next to the manuscript image so you have this kind of really much more in-depth and rich experience of that manuscript page when you're coming to it as a particularly as a newcomer but even as a seasoned scholar so teaching and learning will work such as the remandola rose it's a daunting albeit rewarding feat how to get to groups with or convey such a monumental work that runs the gamut of love social mores politics history and religion and yet throughout retains the narrative thread of an allegorical tale of pursuing true love when i teach the works of guillon de macho i of course give some time to the remandola rose since it has a such a strong influence on the work of both him and his contemporaries and under those circumstances i am necessitated to condense the rose into a week or two because i need to cover so much of macho's own effort the rose digital library has been an invaluable resource for showing my students images of the very manuscripts that macho himself may have seen and read from as he became familiar with the poem and the site also offers these transcriptions and divides the stories into useful narrative sections that link to manuscript pages and make the story easier to navigate in its original settings nonetheless i am often teaching students with minimal skills in paleography and middle french so their ability to appreciate what is on these manuscript folios is often limited to the more visual aspects such as the illuminations and the marginalia but i began to think about how helpful it will be both pedagogically excuse me and for research if our eyes could be opened not only to what was on the very page we were looking at but that web of invisible connections such as the ones to that motor i just discussed that the page made to so many other pages so whenever you look at a manuscript page it's always invoking other manuscript pages so this particular slide shows a folio 73 recto of the of manuscripts fr 3 18 the bibliotech nascine alder france the folio in which this particular manuscript the character of love amours begins his long discourse with false seeming as a result of the the barons in the story asking for seeming to join their number in storming jealousy's castle the pages thus alive with potential for annotation with scholarly commentary and links to articles and other manuscripts such as this motet that i mentioned which is the earliest known manuscript copy of mashos motet 15 now how exciting would it be to interact with the folio from this this manuscript in a visual and even tactile way to explore the interconnections via clicking on links or touching them on one's tablet screen throughout his article on motet 15's connections to the remandala rose brownly frequently references moments in the narrative that highlight his points now these could be easily annotated with quotations from the article and links to the full article oops i'm going in the wrong direction excuse me there we go and additionally the most salient junctures of intertextuality with motet 15 could be linked to the manuscripts containing the motet now the technology for the visualization of literary interconnections has been with us for a while now beyond the triple af viewer the electronic enlightenment correspondence visualization is a powerful example of viewing relationships in this case both the geographical connections between scholarly correspondence the amount of correspondence they generated david joseph rusley offers a number of geographical views on his website including the top place names mentioned in medieval literature a douglas do haim demonstrates how networks of influence and citation can be mapped to using the early english books online metadata currently the rose transcriptions are not marked up to indicate citation nor are they linked to the relevant manuscript folios how how we approach this cast will therefore be important as we want to generate data that can be easily used linked and repurposed for my part i believe this will involve a community of rose scholars and students inspired by a crowdsourced project such as transcribe bentham i envisage our user community enabling us to gather data about such things as the citational network of the rose narrative indeed some to some extent such work is already afoot since we have made a good deal of our data available for downloading and repurposing here's an example of where christin mates has begun to create some important visualizations based upon that data including a map of the geographic locations of the manuscripts hosted on our site now i'm going to stop there so we have time for some questions and possibly to demonstrate some of the capabilities of the triple af viewer if you would like but thank you ever so much for for listening to my excitement about medieval literature in a digital environment thank you