Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Modern Medieval at Kalamazoo 2014

And so it comes around again, Spring, when medievalists long to go ... to Kalamazoo. The blog has been a bit quiet of late, but as you can see from the run-down below, we've all been very busy! We're organizing, presiding, and presenting like crazy over here!


Matthew Gabriele

The Exegetical Turn: Exegesis as a Paradigm for New Understandings of the Middle Ages
Thursday 3:30 p.m. Schneider 1320
Sponsor: Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Virginia Tech  
Organizer: Matthew Gabriele, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State Univ.
Presider: David M. Perry, Dominican Univ.
Kissing Christ: Judas’s Mouth as Biblical Exegesis
Rabia Gregory, Univ. of Missouri–Columbia
The Exegetical Diplomas of King Philip I of Francia (1060–1108)
Matthew Gabriele
Read! Think! Engage! How Luther’s Exegesis of Genesis Exhorted People out of the Cloister and into Family and Society
Jennifer Hockenbery, Mount Mary Univ.

Writing the Middle Ages for Multiple Audiences (A Panel Discussion)
Friday 3:30 p.m. Fetzer 1045
Sponsor: CARA (Committee on Centers and Regional Associations, Medieval Academy of America)
Organizer: Michael A. Ryan, Univ. of New Mexico
Presider: James M. Murray, Western Michigan Univ.
A panel discussion with David M. Perry, Dominican Univ.; Ellen F. Arnold, Ohio Wesleyan Univ.; Matthew Gabriele, Virginia Tech; and Laura Saetveit Miles, Univ. i Bergen.

 Rick Godden
Disability Studies and the Digital Humanities (A Roundtable)
Friday 3:30 p.m. Schneider 1155
Sponsor: Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages
Organizer: Joshua R. Eyler, Rice Univ. 
Presider: Tory Vandeventer Pearman, Miami Univ. Hamilton
A roundtable discussion with John P. Sexton, Bridgewater State Univ.; Cameron Hunt McNabb, Southeastern Univ.; Jonathan Hsy, George Washington Univ.; and Richard H. Godden, Tulane Univ.

#;()@?”:—*! (A Roundtable)
Saturday 1:30 p.m. Fetzer 1005
Sponsor: BABEL Working Group 
Organizer: Eileen A. Joy, BABEL Working Group
Presider: Richard H. Godden, Tulane Univ.
Seeing Spaces
Chris Piuma, Univ. of Toronto
The Divorce of Punctuation and Diacritics
Meg Worley, Colgate Univ.
, (A Breath)
Joshua R. Eyler, Rice Univ.
D’oh: A Brief History of Misusing the Apostrophe and Why Its So Annoying
David Hadbawnik, Univ. at Buffalo
: Interrobanging Chaucer
Corey Sparks, Indiana Univ.–Bloomington
* 
Robert Rouse, Univ. of British Columbia
&
Jonathan Hsy, George Washington Univ.

Medieval Literary Ethics
Sunday 8:30 a.m. Schneider 1350
Organizer: Emily Houlik-Ritchey, Univ. of California–Santa Barbara
Presider: Emily Houlik-Ritchey
“Doctrine by ensample”: Literature’s Ethical Problem and Spenser’s Aesthetic Solution
Maria Devlin, Harvard Univ.
By Writing Amended: The Ethics of Interpretation in Hoccleve’s Series
A. Arwen Taylor, Indiana Univ.–Bloomington
The Virtues and the Will in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls
Sarah Powrie, St. Thomas More College
Prosthetic Neighbors: Enabling Community in The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle
Richard H. Godden, Tulane Univ.


Brandon Hawk
New Methods in Anglo-Saxon Homiletics
Thursday 10:00 a.m. Schneider 1325
Sponsor: Society for the Study of Anglo-Saxon Homiletics (SSASH)
Organizer: Brandon W. Hawk, Univ. of Connecticut
 Presider: Stephen Harris, Univ. of Massachusetts–Amherst
“It maie be Alfricus for al my conninge”: Authorizing Ælfric in the Long Seventeenth Century
R. Scott Bevill, Univ. of Tennessee–Knoxville
Ut quidam perverse opinantur: Bede’s Criticism of Unnamed Sources
Damian Fleming, Indiana Univ.-Purdue Univ.–Fort Wayne
People of the Bread and the Book: Ecclesiology and the Eucharist in Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies
Rae Grabowski, Cornell Univ.

Universal Saints Located in Anglo-Saxon England
Thursday 7:30 p.m. Bernhard 204
Organizer: Kevin R. Kritsch, Univ. of North Carolina–Chapel Hill
Presider: Bryan Carella, Assumption College
An Old Testament Saint? Judith in Anglo-Saxon England
Brandon W. Hawk, Univ. of Connecticut
How to Read a Saint: Agatha and Interpretation
Ann D’Orazio, Univ. of New Mexico
Univ. of New Mexico Graduate Student Prize Winner
Using Swedish Fragments to Shed Light on the Anglo-Saxon Marian Conception Feast
Sean Dunnahoe, Royal Holloway, Univ. of London
How Was Bartholomew Killed? Apocryphal Traditions of Saint Bartholomew in Anglo-Saxon England
            Kevin R. Kritsch

Medievalists and the Social Media Pilgrimage: The Digital Life of Twenty-First- Century Medieval Studies (A Roundtable)
Sunday 8:30 a.m. Schneider 1280
Sponsor: Massachusetts State Universities Medieval Blog
Organizer: Kisha G. Tracy, Fitchburg State Univ. 
Presider: Kisha G. Tracy
A roundtable discussion with John P. Sexton, Bridgewater State Univ.; Peter Konieczny, Medievalists.net; Brandon W. Hawk, Univ. of Connecticut; Andrew M. Pfrenger, Kent State Univ.–Salem; Joshua R. Eyler, Rice Univ.; and M. Wendy Hennequin, Tennessee State Univ.

Jennifer Jordan 
Irrationality as a Fruitful Methodology (A Roundtable)
Sunday 8:30 a.m. Schneider 1220
Sponsor: Heroic Age: A Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe
Organizer: Deanna Forsman, North Hennepin Community College
 Presider: William Schipper, Memorial Univ. of Newfoundland
A roundtable discussion with Deanna Forsman; Jennifer Jordan, Stony Brook Univ.; Richard Scott Nokes, Troy Univ.; Larry Swain, Bemidji State Univ.; and Silas Mallery, North Hennepin Community College.

Larry Swain
Of the Same Bone and Blood: Anglo-Saxon and Other Germanic Literature in Comparative Perspective
Saturday 3:30 p.m. Schneider 1155
Organizer: Larry Swain, Bemidji State Univ.
Presider: Larry Swain
It’s All in Your Mind: The Power of Intellect, Psychology, and Choice in the Vatican Genesis and Genesis B
Mary Breann Leake, Univ. of Connecticut
An Examination of Queens and King Slaying in Germanic Society
Sarah Barott, Bemidji State Univ.
A Moment Left Unwritten: Problematizing “Caedmon’s Hymn” and Moving Towards a Better Understanding of Early English Christianity through the Lens of Continental (and North) Germanic Literature
David Carlton, Univ. of Victoria

Community in Anglo-Saxon England: A Multidisciplinary Approach
Sunday 10:30 a.m. Fetzer 2030
Organizer: Deanna Forsman, North Hennepin Community College
Presider: Deanna Forsman
Community Matters: Burial Practices and Religious Identity in Conversion-Era England
Mark Alan Singer, Luther College
Re-membering Community: Mortuary Ritual as Social Strategy in Early Anglo- Saxon England
Heather Flowers, Minnesota State Univ.–Mankato
Bede’s Multiple Textual Communities in Anglo-Saxon England
Larry Swain, Bemidji State Univ.


Saturday, February 1, 2014

Share and Share Alike

A while back, I was at a conference and a fellow conference attendee made a really important observation. Now, the truth contained in this oberservation is one we all know, especially those of us working in Digital Humanities and using the Web for scholarship and pedagogical needs. But his comment really made me realize both how widespread this is and how problematic it has become. The Web is empty.


Ok, so that's not how my colleague put it. And of course it is not literally true. The Internet is full of all sorts of things. But what it now lacks and once had in abundance is the activity of scholars and teachers. Once not long ago, it was common for professors and instructors to upload syllabi, course exercises and materials, articles and thoughts in progress. Truly, the amount of material we all shared regularly with one another and the world was mind boggling. Now, however, our universities encourage and sometimes require us to use Blackboard, D2L, and similar content management software to run classes, upload materials, and so on. Of course, these are all proprietary. They discourage sharing, worry about firewalls, and generally put materials out of reach. Most faculty no longer have a personal web page. Not even me, in my case because the university has it so buttoned down that it is impossible to use. Point is, we no longer share.


This is not the first time we have seen this corporatization, this clamping down on things once freely available. Back in the day, between the “internet” being shared with universities by the DOD, and the explosion of the web, we had BBS, bulletin board services. Folks programmed all kinds of things: games, office software, communication software, and shared it all on the BBSes, delivered of course over dial up (thank heaven for smart modems!). Of course, that has all but become a thing of the past as companies have gobbled up smaller companies and rolled over the individual developer. Rare is a Linus Torvalds or even a Zuckerberg who develop a program and make it free to use. No, the phenomenon is not non-existent; but it is becoming more and more rare.


Someone might point out the various open source projects. Or ResearchGate, Academic.edu, and other such sites where scholars are sharing their materials. And that's true! I don't disagree. But too few are sharing, and most are sharing pre-publication versions of papers, a few will add conference papers, fewer add materials prepped for the classroom or just plain materials not really suitable for publication but very good research tools or data-mined material.


Anyway, the point is, 12-16 years ago when the web was new, we shared things. Now, we don't share as much. Some of this is simply that our home institutions discourage it by making everything go onto Blackboard and like sites. We've seen this before. It hasn't in the long run done us any good other than push up prices, require a constant round of updates, a culture of "let's see if we can X corporation's locks" rather than "let's see who can create the best product."  And so it goes.

 Point is, it is just too easy to give in to the corporatization of our work. We're encouraged to. Just put it all on the university's subscribed site, D2L, Blackboard, something else. And that's fine to a degree; but it does rob a larger audience of your work, of shared community resources, of useful information that we once upon time as medievalists gladly gave one another and our students.


So this is an appeal. I hope to encourage people to once again share more of their work, in particular class materials, freely online. There are multiple ways of doing so for free: a web page, Academia.edu, ResearchGate, Linkedin, etc. Even (but beware the dangers) Dropbox and Google Docs. In the long run, our field would be better off, our students would be better off, and it shows the world just how vibrant and exciting our field is.

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Exploring Wellcome Library Manuscripts

Another win for open access to special collections holdings is making the news: the Wellcome Library has made over 100,000 high-resolution images of items in their collections available to the public, all under Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY 2.0) licenses. For good reason, this news is getting due attention. What struck me was the number of medieval treasures now available--especially manuscript images.

In the cases of some of the Wellcome manuscripts, images provided are just the inside pages with modern descriptions (so hopefully more images from these items will appear in the future). In other cases, there are images of full pages. Many of these are fascinating witnesses to medieval scientific practices, such as an unidentified eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon manuscript with Old English medical recipes that Stewart J. Brookes discussed on the DigiPal blog.

I highlight a few others to give a sense of the Wellcome holdings.*

Some of the manuscripts contain astronomical lore, such as this Arabic Horoscope of the Mongol Prince Iskandar, grandson of Tamerlane, showing (according to the description) "the positions of the heavens at the moment of Iskandar's birth on 25th April 1384" (Or MS PER 474).



This horoscope, from The Book of the Birth of Iskandar, is a good witness to the holdings of Arabic items in the Wellcome collection. For example, searching for "Iskandar" with date range between 0 and 1500 calls up 392 results; searching for "Arabic" between the same date range calls up another 83 results.

A few particularly nice images, in fact, are from Arabic books (MS Arabic 421, 437, and 458), showing the bindings of different codices that are instructive for looking at the materiality of these objects:




Other manuscripts contain medical knowledge mixed with other traditions, like the following three images, from a manuscript of the Apocalypse of John (MS 49, c.1420-30): the first, from the Apocalypse; the second, a diagram for urinomancy; the third, a diagram of bloodletting techniques within a zodiac.




For those interested in 15th-century English texts, the Wellcome Images hold a selection of scientific writings from the period. A few good examples: first, a collection of English and Latin scientific tracts (MS 411/3), with the image here from a text "On Unlucky Days"--a particularly fascinating genre of astronomical lore; and, second, a manuscript of the Pseudo-Galen Anathomia in English (MS 290).



This is just a small selection of some of the images that jumped out at me. Certainly the collection is worth much more extensive exploration, and can lend much to bringing medieval artifacts into the classroom.


* On a side note, a few frustrating issues make navigating the site difficult. One is a lack of clear browsing abilities--for example, to browse just manuscripts, or to limit by time or geography. Another is the lack of permalinks for items, making it difficult to cite individual images or item entries in the collection. For this reason, I've provided the low-resolution images here, though high-resolution images are available to download from the Wellcome site.

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

New Year's End

And so we come to the end, again. Always again, or at least always until the end. Endings have been inescapably on my mind these last few days, especially provoked by Karl’s excellent post at ITM. And, as I'm sure everyone is aware, we are at year's end, with all the existential (and financial and personal and…) accounting that that entails. But, endings are opportunity for beginnings, and so there is some hope for optimism. Or is there? What does it mean to make a new beginning? Does the beginning of a new year mean anything outside of our collective agreement to mark this as the time in which we begin a new sequence of months?

It's also about time for all of us to begin making new resolutions as we look forward to the promise of a new year. In addition to Karl’s ruminations on plucking the grain from the little clergeon in Chaucer’s “Prioress’s Tale” (the dead body of the boy is miraculously singing, and he will only be quiet and restful once the grain is pulled from his tongue), I am mindful of another medieval text: Piers Plowman. More specifically, I’m thinking of D. Vance Smith’s reading of the poem in his Book of the Incipit. Smith gives us a way to grapple with the repeated new beginnings of Langland’s poem -- the poem can’t seem to quite fashion an end, but it continuously fashions new beginnings. Smith observes
the crucial importance of beginnings to the formal structure, theology, and political phantasmatics of the poem suggests the powerful presence of what might be called, rather, an inceptive animus, the epiphenomenon of beginning—the anxiety of beginning that is manifest indirectly as indirection itself, as the reluctance to make closure, or as the irrepressible remnant of what comes before the beginning, which is made to end. (19)
During New Year’s, we’re often possessed of such “an inceptive animus.” Already I’m seeing New Year’s Resolutions, both sincere and glib, all over my various social media feeds. The New Year's Resolution (NYR) is a curious speech act: through it we attempt to call forth a better tomorrow by attempting to dissolve the past. Common and recurring resolutions for myself include the desire to “get more work done” or “be better organized” or “write more,” etc. In each case, the hope for better future behaviors is predicated upon a negative evaluation of past behavior. 

Smith again: “beginnings are a privation of the past in a larger sense: as the annulment of history, of what must become the outside, the exterior, of an event to make the event unique—which is to say, intelligible, initiating, and historical” (21). To make sense of this moment as new, to decide to make it different, we often attempt to annul the moments that gave birth to it.

Unlike Langland’s insistent re-beginning of the poem, we don’t necessarily have the same “reluctance to make closure.” Instead, the NYR expresses a deep desire for closure, but only as a way to redress and make right past experience. “Sure, I screwed up last year, but this year, this year, I’ll fix it all and be better.” 

Inevitably, though, we make the NYR only to break it, often sooner rather than later. The past we seek to annul is indeed an “irrepressible remnant,” always ready to haunt us. We can't fully annul the past, and any gesture to do so only confirms it. 

But, I want to be clear here: I’m not saying that the lazy are always lazy, or the overindulgent always so. Rather, I just think it would be good to remember that while 2014 is a new year, with all the promise that suggests, mostly it’s just the next year, another item in a series whose ultimate length we can’t know. 

So, don't treat your New Year's as some new, final beginning. Remember that it's just one of many. Instead of conjuring away our past selves with futile speech acts, let's just go on, incrementally, with lots of small new beginnings. 

Happy New Year's. So it goes. Etc. 

Sunday, December 22, 2013

Review of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts Maps

Over the past few days, medievalists have been abuzz about a new resource for manuscript study in the digital age: the folks at Sexy Codicology (a team made up of Giulio Menna and Marjolein de Vos) launched the Digitized Medieval Manuscripts Maps website. I have been personally eager for this launch for several weeks now, since versions of some maps already appeared on Twitter (Giulio Menna first conceived of the maps in July 2013), as teasers for the main launch this week. If the emergence of digitized manuscripts has caused a major sea-change the field of medieval studies, Digitized Medieval Manuscripts Maps is a rising star to help with navigation.

What are the Digitized Medieval Manuscripts Maps? Most simply, they present interactive visualizations of thousands of digitized medieval manuscripts in hundreds of libraries geographically plotted on world maps. The maps and data are presented in four basic forms. On the "Standard" map (built on GoogleMaps), each point represents a library, which can be clicked on for more information about the institution, its digitized holdings, and a link. The Heatmap (also based on GoogleMaps) presents a visualization of the concentration of digitized manuscripts across geography--the more manuscripts in a location, the more concentrated the visualization; the heatmap is currently presented as a series of static images, with promises of future developments. The "Fancy" map (built on MapBox) is the most fully developed, an improvement on the "standard" map and heatmap. While it is still in development, the "fancy" map is fully usable and fully interactive, and the creators promise future capabilities that will encompass those of the other maps on a single platform. Finally, the creators give full, open access to the original data used to construct the maps--a complete list of libraries that have put digitized manuscripts online.

Little needs to be said about the quality of these maps, since users can see for themselves that the maps are a useful addition to the field. Instead, I want to focus on three foundational characteristics of the project that make this project excellent. First, although this launch presents some already great resources, the project is not complete but in a state of development. While this may seem to be a drawback for those focused on long-term sustainability and other related issues, for this project it suggests much potential for future improvements. In relation to sustainability and quality, my second assessment relates to the use of already well-established tools. The site itself is built on the all-purpose WordPress platform, while the maps are built on GoogleMaps and Mapbox--all apt choices that have been tested and well met in digital humanities work. Third, the entire project is fully open, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. The project creators' laudable openness and willingness to share is already evidenced by the posting of complete data sets, as well as the use of other software devoted to open access (notably, WordPress and Mapbox). It is hoped that other projects associated with digitized manuscripts will follow this same path.

If there is any drawback to the project--a review must have its quibbles, and mine are both minor and hopefully remedied in the future--it is the lack of stable funding. Unfortunately, this does affect the "fancy" map, since the creators are only able to use the free version of Mapbox to create it, and are limited in the amount of space for the maps. Thus, the "fancy" map is limited in numbers of monthly views (currently at 3,000) as well as functionality for zooming in and out on the map. Moreover, the lack of stable funding hinders the overall progress; although the creators seek to improve the "fancy" map, they admit that their efforts at this point must go toward the "standard" map and heatmap. (If you do want to help defray costs, the creators suggest checking out the Sexy Codicology store.) With these concessions, however, it should be acknowledged that the project team has already achieved extraordinary feats without formal financial support. This fact in itself should speak to the potential for still greater accomplishments.

There is no doubt that the launch of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts Maps is already a success. Yesterday the project blog reported that "In just 48 hours, the website was visited around 3,000 times." With such positive response, and still more to come from the Sexy Codicology team, the future of medieval manuscripts online seems a bright one indeed.

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Briefly noted -- Accessus: A Journal of Premodern Literature and New Media

Readers of Modern Medieval will want to go take a look at the inaugural issue of Accessus, a publication of the Gower Project. This excellent-looking first issue includes the following essays that bring together disability studies, medieval studies, manuscript studies, and new media:
  • "Blind Advocacy: Blind Readers, Disability Theory, and Accessing John Gower"                  Jonathan Hsy
  • "Blindness, Confession, and Re-membering in Gower's Confessio"                                            Tory Vandeventer Pearman
  • "The Trentham Manuscript as Broken Prosthesis: Wholeness and Disability in Lancastrian England"                                                                                                                                Candace Barrington
  • "Civility and Gower's 'Visio Anglie'"                                                                                          Lynn Arner
In the "Introduction," Editors Georgiana Donavin and Eve Salisbury describe the work of Accessus and of this volume as follows:
Inventive theoretical approaches and the use of current technologies in interpreting Gower’s poems have been part of The Gower Project since its inception. To en-vision, re-vision, and see things anew is something of a leitmotif among the several essays presented here, all of which enable us to engage actively in contemporary concerns and at the same time recognize how the writings of the past encourage us to embrace such opportunities.
Hopefully next week I'll have a review up of these four essays, but for now, some finals week(s) reading for all of you. Also, see Bruce Holsinger's take over at Burnable Books.
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