Annotations, Scholarly Digital Editions, and Doing More with the Digital

Annotations, Scholarly Digital Editions, and Doing More with the Digital:
A Literature Review

Taking inspiration from digital mapping projects like the Virtual Mappa, I am interested in how annotation tools can be used to further explore medieval manuscripts in scholarly digital editions: interactive versions of manuscripts that go in-depth into details and connect works to their wider context. The semantics can get a bit confusing, but for the sake of this project I am less interested in developing a strict definition of a “scholarly” “digital” “edition” and primarily explore what is being done in this field. To simply matters, I use the term “annotations” or “annotated manuscripts” to refer to what some may call a digital edition: a digitized manuscript with additional information (translations, notes on bookbinding, analysis of illustrations, etc) presented through interactive annotations through tools like Neatline and Omeka.

This concept will be explored in four themes: digitization; digital editions; annotations; and educational resources that help scholars build these projects. Each theme has illustrative books, articles, projects, and other materials which illustrate the work being done by other digital humanists, and each is represented in my digital artifact, an annotated page of music from Harley 978, a manuscript held in the British Library.

THEME 1: DIGITIZATION, BROADLY

Just as critical digital editions begin with digitization, we start with a digitization project: The Book of Margery Kempe, which digitized and transcribed a 15th century autobiography. Besides the detailed transcription, this project does not give us anything “new” such as a translation or explanation of things on the page, but the inclusion of scribal details like the rubrication, large capitals, and marginal notes into the transcription is quite nice, preserving the experience of the original in a more readable font. As a fairly basic text comparison, it serves as a precursor to the more elaborate projects to come.

Any digitization project must also begin with careful consideration of the scope and processes involved. Tanner et al’s chapter in Research Methods for Creating and Curating Data in the Digital Humanities, “Choices in Digitisation for the Digital Humanities,” introduces the benefits of digitization to research, and the choices and consequences faced in digitization. Outlining the mechanisms, processes, and decisions that go into creating a digitized document, Tanner outlines the lack of neutrality implicit in any effort with so many choices, whether they focus on stakeholders, ethics, financial or legal considerations, or technological restrictions.

Cornelis van Lit’s Among Digitized Manuscripts introduces the connections between manuscript, print, and digital in Chapter 1 with an example of an item that could be all three: a slip of paper from a library designed on a computer and printed out for users to write down their “notes, catalog numbers and general doodles” (8). This is such a simple, yet effective, explanation of the connections between these three “worlds,” to use van Lit’s terminology. This immensely helpful framework gives each world its own rules, but things like the library slip or digitized manuscripts cross over into the different worlds.

Book Conservation and Digitization: The Challenges of Dialogue and Collaboration, edited by Alberto Campagnolo, concludes this theme. Looking at different aspects of the cooperation necessary for the large scale of digitization, Chapter 14, “Coda,” is of particular interest in its conclusion on digital surrogates. “To digitize is not to replicate an artifact in all its nature” (233) notes Campagnolo. “This kind of activity allows the observer to access a restricted number of features of the original object” (236). This suggests that digitization may wish to focus on creating something a little bit new rather than trying to replicate digitally a non-digital object; in van Lit’s framework, taking the best of each world to create a new one. While as a material culture person I would not dismiss the importance of the physical, it is undeniable that the digital can give us new insight.

THEME 2: DIGITAL EDITIONS

Campagnolo’s words provide an excellent segue to talking about more complex digital manuscripts. But first, three scholars discuss the semantics of what makes something a “digital” “scholarly/critical” “edition,” followed by an overview of the Petrarchive, a digital edition of Petrarch. In “What is a Scholarly Digital Edition?” Patrick Sahle outlines how digital editions can overcome the limitations of print—being able to easily hear the music as you look at the page is an example from my Harley 978 project. But how do we identify or define a scholarly digital edition? Sahle goes deep into the semantics, while my approach has never involved the need for a specific definition. (“What counts as medieval?” “What is classical music?” “What do we really mean by Celtic?” I’ve heard it all before, and quite frankly, definitions are not a priority. I’ll know it when I see it.) Nonetheless, he arrives at “critical representation of historic documents” as his definition of a scholarly digital edition, which is workable. Critical is the attitude and decisions about what is included: my critical edition will inevitably differ from yours. Representation is the transformation of a document into a new media: photographing a manuscript page, for example. Historic refers to that which cannot speak for itself anymore: explaining something lost to time. And documents are essentially artifacts: sometimes text-based, but not always. Sahle does not think a digitized edition is inherently a digital edition, and to an extent I would agree. If you are only replicating a manuscript electronically with absolutely no changes, I don’t know if I could call that a new edition. But is that even possible? Digitizing almost always makes some choices, whether in process or presentation, let alone in annotating or anything else that would not be possible on paper.

Christoph Flüeler, on the other hand, argues more for the use of “digital editions” as scholarly and critical in his talk/blog post “Digital Manuscripts as Critical Edition.” He talks about the relationship between physical and digital manuscripts, a technological change bridged by print and microfilm facsimiles, and the need to “utilize the digital object as the basis for serious research.” His most relevant point to this project is that digital manuscripts “can and should” go beyond just a digital reproduction, showing “more than is visible or explicitly contained in the original,” including studies of illustrations, structural elements of bookbinding, the addition of annotations, comparison with other translations or the text, analysis of layout and writing, etc, as well as placing the manuscript within the context of “other related manuscripts and sources.” Something with this level of interactivity would doubtless be a scholarly digital edition. Agreeing with Flüeler’s points is Dot Porter, Curator of Digital Research Services at the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies. While Porter notes that she is not as preoccupied with labels and definitions, she explains that digital editions present “the same type of information as print editions” made interactive with hypertext and other digital technology. Maybe your research is focused on comparing two versions of a text, or you only want to look at illustrations. All of these are much easier to do digitally. Taking their cue from the heavily annotated manuscripts of the middle ages, all of these digital humanities projects that present text with interactive features, she argues, are their own editions.

A digital humanities project that explicitly calls itself a digital edition is the Petrarchive. In its own words, the project “proposes a corrected diplomatic edition and a new edition of Petrarch’s songbook, the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta,” with commentary, translations, and indexes of the work. No small feat. The archive comes with an extensive user guide and glossary, and the index shows which pages are still being encoded. Using the definitions, or lack of, provided by the above scholars, this is clearly a critical edition because it presents the original in a new context, with diplomatic and modern versions of the transcribed text (complete with coloured initials) alongside the original manuscript pages, offering a new way to understand Petrarch’s work.

THEME 3: ANNOTATIONS AND MARGINALIA

Annotations are a key part of the history and study of manuscripts. Just as modern digital annotations provide insight into a digitized manuscript, the original annotations and marginalia offered instructions to readers and commentary by the authors or scribes. Michelle Warren’s Holy Digital Grail tells the story of a 12th-century Arthurian manuscript all the way to the current day where it has a new digital life, examining the ties between medieval book and modern computer. Chapter 6 begins with the fantastic observation that “[t]he first medieval manuscript most people open is likely a web page,” noting the significant “new styles of engagement” with manuscripts that interactive digital tools can enable (238). Chapter 3 discusses ways in which manuscripts are marked over their lifetimes: instructions from the original scribe, marginalia from a later reader, digital annotations, and everything in between. Digitization “has brought these historical marking practices into dialogue with the networked ‘markup’ that defines how texts and images appear on websites and how users can interact with them” (113). Pre-digital text encoding, we might call it. This is particularly significant to the manuscript I annotated for my digital artifact, which comes with its own rubric detailing exactly how the song is to be sung.

While not a codex, the Canterbury Roll is probably the best example of an annotated manuscript project I have seen. Its scale alone is impressive—the original roll is five meters long, and the whole thing has been annotated and translated digitally. Clickable and interactive, it provides translations of the Latin text for this extensive genealogy of the kings of England. Information on some of these historic and mythical figures is found elsewhere on the site, but I would appreciate more of this analysis and context in the tool itself. The site itself is a bit hard to navigate and provides almost too much information on some very basic things (like an explanation of how a +/- zoom function works), but the project itself is a marvel.

The library of Annotated Books Online is extensive, if not fancy, and is in principle exactly the kind of annotation work I am interested in. The annotations are primarily text-based, at least in the manuscript I looked at, a copy of Livy’s Romanae Historiae Principis from 1555. The annotations focus on marginalia and previous annotations, specific to this copy of the book, which was a good focus; what makes an individual book unique is in my opinion much more worthy of analysis and preservation than a text which can be found in multiple places. The project appears to be crowd-sourced, which is not a bad approach to a huge project but is perhaps not as successful as would be ideal, judging by the variations in what’s included and what’s annotated.

We conclude this theme by looking at two annotated DH projects that focus on the Romance of the Rose, a 13th-century courtly poem. The first, from the University of Glasgow, can be challenging to navigate, though all was forgiven when I found out it is almost 20 years old. This project uses Hunter 409, a Middle English edition of the Romance from the early 15th century held in the University of Glasgow Library, and compares it to a transcription (complete with clickable notes) and a 1532 printed edition. Not bad for 2003. This project has detailed images of some interesting features, like marginalia or damage, but the only way to access them is to blindly move one’s cursor over the image of the manuscript until it becomes clickable, and they have no notes; a real treasure hunt. Compare this, then, to the Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries’ Roman de la Rose Digital Library, an online repository of over 130 different manuscripts of the poem. The site provides background information, such as character names and details on the manuscripts included. Once you’ve read through all this information, visiting the manuscript viewer (a slightly out-of-the-way tab for its importance to the project) provides a list of all included manuscripts and how many IIIF images are included. Not everything is annotated, but some that are such as Albi Rochegude 103 provide interesting insight not on the text but on the illustrations. While both projects focus on the same text (indeed, the Hunter manuscript from the 2003 project is included in the Johns Hopkins collection), their approaches differ greatly in focus, methodology, and presentation, likely in part due to the resources available. 

THEME 4: EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES

We conclude by looking at educational resources on digital medieval/manuscript studies. The Rare Book School, based out of the University of Virginia, has offered “The Medieval Manuscript in the Twenty-First Century” for several years, co-taught by Dot Porter. The class teaches digital humanities specifically in the context of medieval manuscripts, discussing issues of digital surrogates/editions; best practices; and what tools are available for new research. New for the 2023 session of the Rare Book School is “Using Digitized Manuscripts,” also taught by Porter, a course that covers the processes, tools, opportunities, and limitations of digitization through discussions, lectures, tours, and a personnel manuscript project.

For those unable to attend in-person courses, many online resources exist including one from the Digital Editing of Medieval Manuscripts (DEMM) program. Their online course, Digital Scholarly Editions: Manuscripts, Texts and TEI Encoding, covers everything in the title and more. An accompanying textbook, Creating a Digital Scholarly Edition with the Text Encoding Initiative, has a particularly relevant chapter on facsimile editing by Elena Pierazzo which goes into the coding of how to embed annotations into images. While the coding of it is a bit beyond me, at least without having taken the course, the level of detail is unmatched. I particularly liked the “medieval post-it note” detailed on Page 19, a patch of parchment with a note on it sewn to the original manuscript page.

The opportunities of digitization are discussed in depth in an issue of The Journal of Interactive Technology & Pedagogy edited by Danica Savonick, Jojo Karlin, and Stephen Klein. In their introduction, they emphasize the “new opportunities for engaging primary sources” provided by digital technology. I am pleased to say that my research has already embodied some of these principles. In a course I took earlier this year on primary archival sources, I used ArtSteps, a VR exhibit creator, to explore ancient Libyan rock art in an interactive way. The gallery setup of the tool was a perfect way to explore cave art in a semi-realistic way, similar to how Neatline maps a manuscript as if you were reading it yourself, but with more information readily available.

PARTING THOUGHTS

Creating interactive digital editions of medieval texts is a wonderful way to engage with primary sources. We can provide multiple versions of texts for comparison, such as the Book of Margery Kempe and Petrarchive projects; trace the royal and mythical genealogy displayed on the Canterbury Roll; crowdsource annotations the way the Annotated Books Online library does; examine page damage and illustrations in-depth like the Romance of the Rose projects; or bring a medieval song to life. We can transform scans and photographs into scholarly works that give details so specific to a certain manuscript and link these to the wider body of extant manuscripts, all with a few clicks.

Digital annotations are a natural tool for understanding medieval manuscripts because they are only the latest iteration of an extensive history of marking up pages. When the original scribe of the page I analyzed from Harley 978 put in notes about how the music was to be sung, he was doing in principle the same thing I did 800 years later when I highlighted those passages in Neatline and provided my own audio recordings of the music. We both meant for viewers to understand the music better, and I think we both succeeded. The technology may be new, but the intent is anything but.

Works Cited/Discussed

“Annotated Books Online.” Accessed December 20, 2022. https://www.annotatedbooksonline.com/. 

Campagnolo, Alberto. “Chapter 14: Coda.” In Book Conservation and Digitization: The Challenges of Dialogue and Collaboration, edited by Alberto Campagnolo. Arc Humanities Press, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781641890540.

“Canterbury Roll.” University of Canterbury, edited by Chris Jones. Accessed December 20, 2022. https://www.canterbury.ac.nz/canterburyroll/.

“Digital Scholarly Editions: Manuscripts, Texts, and TEI Encoding.” Digital Editing of Medieval Manuscripts, accessed December 20, 2022. https://www.digitalmanuscripts.eu/digital-editing-of-medieval-texts-a-textbook/.

Flüeler, Christoph. “Digital Manuscripts as Critical Edition.” The Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, June 30, 2015. https://schoenberginstitute.org/2015/06/30/digital-manuscripts-as-critical-edition/.

“Petrarchive: An Edition of Petrarch’s Songbook Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta.” Indiana University Bloomington, edited by H. Wayne Storey, John A. Walsh, Isabella Magni et al. Accessed December 20, 2022. https://dcl.ils.indiana.edu/petrarchive/index.php. 

Porter, Dot. “What is An Edition Anyway?” Dot Porter Digital, September 24, 2016. http://www.dotporterdigital.org/what-is-an-edition-anyway-my-keynote-for-the-digital-scholarly-editions-as-interfaces-conference-university-of-graz/. 

“Roman de la Rose Digital Library.” Digital Library of Medieval Manuscripts, Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries. Accessed December 20, 2022. https://dlmm.library.jhu.edu/en/romandelarose/. 

Sahle, Patrick. “Chapter 2: What is a Scholarly Digital Edition?” In Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories and Practices, edited by Matthew James Driscoll and Elena Pierazzo. Cambridge, UK: Lightning Source for Open Book Publishers, 2016. https://books.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp.0095/ch2.xhtml#_idTextAnchor009.

Savonick, Danica, Jojo Karlin, and Stephen Klein. “Teaching & Research with Archives.” The Journal of Interactive Technology & Pedagogy, 14 (2019). https://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/introduction-issue-fourteen/.

Tanner, Simon, Laura Gibson, Rebecca Kahn, and Geoff Laycock. “Choices in Digitisation for the Digital Humanities.” In Research Methods for Creating and Curating Data in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matt Hayler and Gabriele Griffin. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781474409667-003/html?lang=en

“The Book of Margery Kempe.” Southeastern Louisiana University, edited by Joel Fredell. Accessed December 20, 2022. http://english.selu.edu/humanitiesonline/kempe/. 

“The Medieval Manuscript in the Twenty-First Century.” Rare Book School, 2015. Taught by Will Noel and Dot Porter. https://rarebookschool.org/courses/manuscripts/m95/.

“The Romaunt of the Rose.” The Digitisation of Middle English Manuscripts, University of Glasgow, edited by Graham D. Caie and David Weston. May 16, 2003. https://www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/library/files/special/Rose/default.htm.

“Using Digitized Manuscripts.” Rare Book School, 2023. Taught by Dot Porter. https://rarebookschool.org/courses/manuscripts/m105v/. 

van Lit, L.W.C. Among Digitized Manuscripts : Philology, Codicology, Paleography in a Digital World. Leiden: Brill, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1163/j.ctv2gjwzrd.

Warren, Michelle R. Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781503631175.