Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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level of storage <strong>in</strong>frastructure, a byte is a byte and a terabyte a terabyte) but it underscores the
fact that there is an <strong>in</strong>creas<strong>in</strong>g convergence of what it is that is analyzed by humanities scholars
and scientists: data (Choudhury and St<strong>in</strong>son 2007).
The authors noted that manuscripts represented the richest sets of data for their day because they
<strong>in</strong>tegrated texts and images and <strong>in</strong>cluded user annotations, as well as vast numbers of <strong>in</strong>tertextual
allusions and references.
While not specifically a “discipl<strong>in</strong>e” of classics, manuscript studies <strong>in</strong>forms the work of many classical
discipl<strong>in</strong>es. The majority of classical texts—whether studied for philological analysis or as a source of
ancient history—that form the basis for the modern critical editions upon which many scholars rely,
are based off of medieval manuscripts. In addition, as was seen <strong>in</strong> the section on digital editions and
textual criticism, access to images of manuscripts and transcriptions is an essential component of
cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure for classics. This subsection addresses some of the challenges of creat<strong>in</strong>g digital
libraries of manuscripts and exam<strong>in</strong>es <strong>in</strong>dividual research projects <strong>in</strong> detail. Some of the projects
discussed have received fuller treatment <strong>in</strong> other discipl<strong>in</strong>ary sections of the paper.
Digital Libraries of Manuscripts
The past 20 years has seen a volum<strong>in</strong>ous growth <strong>in</strong> the number of digital images and transcriptions for
manuscripts that have become available onl<strong>in</strong>e. As <strong>in</strong>dicated by the Catalogue of <strong>Digitized</strong>
Manuscripts, there are both large collections of digital manuscripts at s<strong>in</strong>gle <strong>in</strong>stitutions 382 and many
<strong>in</strong>dividual manuscripts that have been digitized by <strong>in</strong>dividual libraries, museums, or cultural
organizations. 383
One of the largest exemplary collections is “Medieval Illum<strong>in</strong>ated Manuscripts,” 384 a website provided
by the Kon<strong>in</strong>klijke Bibliotheek and the Museum Meermanno-Westreenianum (Netherlands). This
website serves as an extensive database of research <strong>in</strong>formation about illum<strong>in</strong>ated medieval
manuscripts. 385 More than 10,000 digital images of decorations taken from manuscripts are provided,
and they may be browsed by subject matter (<strong>in</strong> English, German, or French) us<strong>in</strong>g the ICONCLASS
classification system, which was created for the classification of art and iconography. For example, a
user may choose “Classical Mythology and Ancient History” and then choose “Classical History” that
then takes her or him to a f<strong>in</strong>al selection of options, such as “female persons from classical history.”
Select<strong>in</strong>g one of these options takes the user to a list of manuscript images (with high-resolution and
zoomable images available) where pick<strong>in</strong>g an <strong>in</strong>dividual image also provides a full manuscript
description and a bibliography of the manuscript. A searchable database is also provided.
Two projects, the Digital Scriptorium 386 and Manuscriptorium, 387 have been created to br<strong>in</strong>g together
large numbers of digital manuscripts onl<strong>in</strong>e, or essentially to create virtual libraries of digital
manuscripts. 388 Each project has taken a different approach to this common problem.
382 For example, see “Digital Medieval Manuscripts” at Houghton Library, Harvard University,
http://hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/houghton/collections/early_manuscripts/
383 http://manuscripts.cmrs.ucla.edu/languages_list.php
384 http://www.kb.nl/manuscripts/
385 Some recent research has explored <strong>in</strong>novative approaches to support<strong>in</strong>g more effective scholarly use of illum<strong>in</strong>ated manuscripts through the
development of user annotation tools and a l<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g taxonomy Agosti et al. (2005).
386 http://www.scriptorium.columbia.edu/
387 http://beta.manuscriptorium.com/
388 Other approaches have also explored develop<strong>in</strong>g large data grids or digital <strong>in</strong>frastructures for manuscripts; see Calanducci et al. (2009).