Introduction

This project arose from an interest in doing more with manuscripts in digital humanities than just digitization. Today’s technology offers nearly limitless options for giving new life to old manuscripts, using digital annotations to make them interactive and educational. Such projects are already common in DH mapping, and efforts to do the same with manuscripts include the digital library of Annotated Books Online or the Canterbury Roll from the University of Canterbury. Annotated digital editions can include elements like translation; information about the mise en page and writing/printing; and analysis of illustrations and illuminations, all within a few clicks.

For this project, I went a step further and worked with a page of music from Harley 978, a miscellany from the 1260s now held in the British Library. A music manuscript was a natural choice since they have formed such a big part of my academic and career interests, and the audio element adds another level of interactivity. I picked this song, “Sumer Is Icumen In,” because it is familiar to me and generally well-known within the discipline, and there is a lot to explore on the manuscript page. This is not a dense musicological project but rather a fun and educational way of exploring a popular medieval tune and the manuscript that kept it safe for us for nearly 800 years.

Neatline proved to be a solid tool for what I was going for, especially with the ability to embed Omeka items in annotations and thus have the words, translations, and music for each line easily accessible for cross-reference. 

Books are meant to be interactive objects: to be held, opened, thumbed through, and read. Rather than reducing them to images on screens, I believe that digitization and the toolkit of a digital humanist are only the next step in the evolution of this outstanding piece of communication technology. What an exciting time for the study of the book!