Abstract
Digital humanities and medieval studies share a long history, beginning with one of
the first large-scale digital humanities projects, which was carried by Father
Roberto Busa using IBM’s Literary Data Processing Center. Why then, do many scholars
of historically-minded fields consider digital humanities to be a “helping
discipline” instead of a full-fledged area of study in itself? Beginning with the
above question, this paper explores the ways in which scholars need not use the
digital humanities to update historical disciplines or vice versa. By examining the
pre- and post-print histories of the book, and interrogating the ways in which
reading technologies and interfaces link the past and future of the book together,
the past and present histories of reading coalesce and offer scholars novel ways of
approaching many different disciplines that engage with the digital humanities.
Men louen of propre kynde
newfangelnesse
(
Chaucer, The Squire's Tale
[Chaucer 2008, 610]
)
Here, there are no longer any forms or
developments of forms; nor are there subjects or the formation of subjects. There is
no structure, any more than there is genesis
(Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
[Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 266]
)
Medievalists have always loved innovation. Perhaps because the discipline is so
far-removed from the present cultural moment, medievalists continue to embrace
academic change. The first large-scale project in the digital humanities was
undertaken by a medievalist. Using IBM’s Literary Data Processing Center in Gallarte,
Italy, which opened in 1956, Father Roberto Busa completed a concordance on “every one of the thirteen million words
written by Aquinas,” a daunting task for even the most hardy of scholars
[
McDonough 1967, 46].
[1] The Literary Data Processing Center made this
type of work feasible and started a wave of concordances and compilations by Busa and
other early digital humanists.
[2] By the 1960s, medievalists, and scholars in other disciplines as well,
began to meet and discuss the ways in which computers could impact their field of
study and the humanities in general.
[3]
Indeed, by the 1980s the digital humanities became the new “helping discipline”
for literary scholars, giving them a means to an end in the rush to give people
easier access to hidden archives, hard-to-find editions, and almost-forgotten poets.
I call the digital humanities a “helping discipline” and it will be helpful to
define what this term has meant elsewhere in the field of medieval studies.
[4] In his essay
“Latin Palaeography since Traube,” esteemed book
historian Julian Brown described Ludwig Traube’s influence in helping to change
paleography from a
Hilfswissenschaft, or helping discipline, to
one that gave scholars insight into larger cultural movements [
Brown 1993, 17]). Traube’s contribution to the study of paleography
was groundbreaking due to the fact that, after his scholarship, paleography became
not just a means-to-an-end but a full-fledged area of study that has since yielded
major contributions in the ways we think about medieval literary culture and book
history. Although researchers in the digital humanities, new media, and electronic
literature continue to produce scholarship that changes the way scholars think about
the technologically-mediated world, it is only in the past decade that the field has
become more than a “helping” discipline at most universities.
In the 1990s, books dealing with the digital humanities were rife with heady essays
exclaiming the discipline-changing power of computers for humanists that promised to
update and renew historical disciplines for the new digital era. Take, for example,
the edited collection “Hypermedia and Literary Studies,”
published in 1991. In the introduction, its editors, Landow and Delany, exclaim
“hypertext thus presages a potential
revolution in literary studies”
[
Delany and Landow 1991, 6]. The essays within the book’s covers echo the
editors’ initial utopic claim, and extol the digital humanities’ potential for
fundamentally changing the way research is carried out by literary scholars. This
particular book is divided into three sections, with the last focusing on
applications, which highlights a number of early digital humanities projects. Most of
these examples deal with pre- and early modern literature and history, including
Biblical Studies, Classics, Shakespeare studies, and early modern emblem
books.
[5] The rhetoric
surrounding many of these projects is one that seeks to “update” historical
texts for the present moment (as if the historical sources need the digital
humanities’ intercession to maintain their importance for a new generation of
reader).
Indeed, one need only look to the names of recent exhibitions and books to find the
history and future of the book tied together.
From Gutenberg to
Google
[
Shillingsburg 2006] and
From Parchment to
Pixel (British Library 2009) are two examples of titles that, at least
alliteratively, connect these two historical moments.
[6] The teleological evolution “from” one state “to” another in
both these titles emphasizes a tacit progression, which places the past at odds with
the present. What I have highlighted here are two different sides of the same coin.
On one hand, medievalists and other scholars use the digital humanities as a way to
provide access to one-of-a-kind manuscripts and engage with the digital humanities as
only a
Hilfswissenschaft, or helping discipline; on the
other, practitioners employ digital humanities tools to “update” a discipline.
Rather than using the digital humanities to update the medieval period or vice versa,
I would like to suggest another approach to studying these periods. Instead of
writing this paper as a medievalist or as a digital humanist, I come at this paper as
a hybrid of both worlds, always Janus-faced in the ways that I see each discipline.
As a scholar of manuscript studies and the digital humanities, I cannot help but talk
about the future of reading and books as I research the past — some might say, the
beginning — of books. With this approach in mind I wish to explore some of these
commonalities in this paper. Part of my aim here is to give the digital humanities
equal space with medieval studies instead of using one discipline to enlighten and
enliven the other and, as Jessica Brantley points out, to interrogate the “systems of thought that are both revealed
and created by the physical structures through which ideas are expressed”
[
Brantley 2009, 632]. Rather than pitting the medieval period
against the digital humanities or vice versa, this paper seeks to further link these
two periods together through the lens of the history of reading and books.
[7]
Jessica Brantley’s article “The Prehistory of the Book,”
focuses the ways in which the discipline of book history eschews non-printed material
— specifically medieval manuscripts. She takes issue of Robert Darnton’s definition
of book history as “the social and
cultural history of communication by print”
[
Darnton 1990, 10] and asks that the definition of the book be
broadened to “the material support for
inscribed language, a category that includes rolls and codices and even monumental
inscription, both written by hand and printed by many different mechanisms, and
also a wide variety of digital media”
[
Brantley 2009, 634]. Although her article is not about digital
media per se, Brantley touches upon an important point for this argument: if the book
as it is defined by many book historians is really a history of print, where, then,
does that leave the study of medieval manuscripts and the study of
electronically-mediated texts?
[8]
In her introduction to the book
New Media, Old Media,
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun cautions against arguments that “concentrat[e] on the remarkable yet over determined
similarities between entities now considered media” and claims that “any such argument must grapple with the ways
that mediums have changed”
[
Chun 2006, 3]. While giddy declarations as to the commonalities
themselves do little to further our knowledge of digital humanities or “old”
media, it is more useful to postulate
why medieval manuscripts and
electronically-mediated texts have so much in common. When the printed page is no
longer the dominant means of transmitting data, how do we understand the concept of
the book? To put it yet another way, this paper will study the “book ends” of
book history and examine the reading technologies of the pre- and post-print eras in
the same breath.
Writing on the Body: Skin as Interface
If we put aside the printed words’ dominance from book history and concentrate
instead on the ways we might define books in the pre- and post-print eras, the most
telling commonality is one of interface. In the Middle Ages, reading is always, in
its most literal sense, an embodied process. Medieval manuscripts are made out of
sheep or cow skin, which has been scraped and processed until it is milky-white and
smooth to the touch. Even so, in most cases, it is easy for a reader to determine
which is the “hair side” or the “flesh side” — that is, if hair follicles
are visible to the reader on a recto, the verso will have a creamier appearance due
to the fact that it was on the inside of the cow or sheep. In some cases, the reader
can see a difference in the parchment’s quality as the page nears what would have
been the animal’s haunch — asking the reader to imagine the animal as a living
entity. This embodiment is more than a visual process, but a haptic one as well: as a
reader turns a page in a medieval manuscript, she touches skin — sometimes brushing
against stray hairs — always aware that the reading interface is, in fact, a body
itself. “For when I open a medieval manuscript, and
this is different from opening a printed book,” comments Michael Camille:
I am conscious not only of the
manu-script, the bodily handling of materials in production, writing,
illumination, but also how in its subsequent reception, the parchment has been
penetrated; how it has acquired grease-stains, thumb-marks, erasures, drops of
sweat; suffered places where images have been kissed away by devout lips or holes
from carious eating animals. [Camille 1997, 41–2]
Camille’s observation — that reading a medieval manuscript is also an embodied
process for a modern reader — is a salient one. Like a palimpsest, each reader leaves
a mark on the manuscript, whether it is a marginal notation, emendation to the
textual unit, or a new binding.
[9] Thus, medieval
manuscripts become a living history: from the original flock of sheep and the
craftsmen who constructed the manuscript to all of its subsequent readers and
writers.
It would be easy to assume that the reading interface in new media would be one that
eschews bodies altogether for a completely virtual reading experience. Rather, many
electronically mediated texts revisit a medieval practice and create a multi-sensory
reading experience, or, as Mark Hansen suggests, these works signal a “redemption of embodied experience”
[
Hansen 2004, 2]. This avowal of an embodied interface corresponds
to a reading process that involves sound and touch, which signals a paradigm “shift from a dominant ocularcentrist
aesthetic to a haptic aesthetic rooted in embodied affectivity”
[
Hansen 2004, 12]. This more tactile experience of gaining unique
meaning from touch and sound questions the primacy of the visual altogether and,
indeed, asks us to redefine our definition of a text to one that encompasses a world,
soundscapes and bodily understanding.
Sound is especially important in many works of electronic literature, and often goes
hand-in-hand with haptic response as a way to create added layers of narrative
meaning. In Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’ Flash-based electronic poem, "
Dakota," the reader hears a
musical phrase that is quietly repeated as the screen slowly flashes from black to
white (Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries nd). Suddenly the music changes to a loud,
frenetic drum solo by Art Bailey as the first words and numbers flash across the
screen like a strobe light, matching Bailey’s rhythmical pattern. In this poem, the
flashing words and percussive music mirror the motion of the poem’s subject matter,
as the first words of the narrative announce: “FUCKING / WALTZED ØUT TØ THE CAR.” The pulse of the
words follows the pattern of the drum, creating haptic feedback as the drums blast
through the reader’s speakers and the letters vibrate in time to various drumbeats.
As the reader’s eyes quickly scan the word-images as they flash across the screen
rapid-fire, she cannot help but read
sotto-voce to keep up with
the fast-moving text. This blend of visual, aural, and haptic feedback have much in
common with medieval reading practices, “Reading for the medieval literate was charged with [...] associations that made
every turn of the page an act of intense interpenetration and one resonant with
sensations,” comments Michael Camille; “from the feel of the flesh and hair side of the parchment
on one’s fingertips to the lubricious labial mouth of the words with one’s throat
and tongue”
[
Camille 1997, 41]. Reading in the Middle Ages was a tactile and
sonorous experience, asking the medieval reader to interact with the textual unit in
more than a strictly visual sense. Unlike print media, both medieval manuscripts and
works of electronic literature are — as Anna A. Grotans writes regarding medieval
reading practices — “intended as much for
the ears as for the eyes, and authors wrote them with this reception explicitly in
mind”
[
Grotans 2006, 19]. Sonority and haptic feedback create a reading
experience for both medieval and contemporary readers that, insofar as they are able,
mirror each other in the ways that works were produced for a multisensory
experience.
Ice-Age Reading and the Embodied Medieval Text
Both electronically mediated texts and medieval manuscripts ask their readers to
negotiate complex reading interfaces — these embodied experiences are not singularly
tied to the user experience, but also to the metaphorical structures within the works
themselves. Mapping prognostications onto the human body and using body parts to
mimetically guide a reader was a common practice in medieval didactic texts. One
example of this type of device is the “Zodiac Man,” which
was often found in the scientific manuscripts.
[10] In these illustrations, the human body serves as the reader’s
interface, performing a narrative and visual function as it guides the reader down
various paths.
The Zodiac Man, usually part of a “Physician’s Calendar,”
advises medieval doctors as to which body part is ruled by a certain astrological
sign; based on the image and the accompanying text, a medieval doctor could avoid
bleeding or operating on that part of the body depending on the moon’s position [
Harley MS 5311].
In this particular example, the parchment is folded into three sections and
would have attached to the physician’s belt so that he could easily refer to it when
he was visiting patients [
Glick 2005, 263]. This image places the
body in the middle of the three sections of parchment, echoing a Christian triptych.
The human body serves as the background while the astrological symbols crowd on top
of the body, vying for the reader’s attention. When engaging with this image, the
reader must first traverse the human body and then navigate to the appropriate
astrological symbol. Once the reader has found the appropriate sign, she must then
navigate the accompanying textual unit in order to read the supplementary warning
about each body part.
The same type of embodied and symbolic navigational process is suggested by Stephanie
Strickland’s hybrid print and electronic world
Vniverse.
[11] This poetic project self-consciously connects the modern
reader with, what Strickland calls the “Ice Age” reader; as Strickland and
Lawson state in the essay that accompanies the web-based portion of the project:
“V is haunted by similarities
between the nomadic Ice Age task of reading and 21st-century reading”
[
Strickland and Lawson 2003]. For the web-based portion of
Vniverse, the reader navigates a starry sky. As she mouses over various
stars, constellation-like patterns connect the stars together and short poems, or
“triplets,” appear on the screen. Strickland encourages the reader to
interact with the text using multiple senses and paths, but the fundamental method of
traversing the starry sky is by touch. The reader can touch the night sky (using the
mouse in place of a hand) in a shape that is not dictated by linearity or by the
pages of a book, gesturing back to a nomadic reader who would have read the night sky
to plot a course. At its heart, this nomadic reader is one who navigates differently
than a modern one, who negotiates time, affect, and images in a fundamentally
dissimilar way. In Strickland’s words, this reader performs “a type of reading closer to seeing, one that
problematizes the see/read difference, thus involving both sides of the
brain” [
Strickland and Lawson 2003]. The medieval physician, like Strickland’s “Ice Age” reader,
would navigate through the Zodiac Man in much the same fashion. The human body at the
center and background of the illustration serves the same canvas-like purpose as the
night sky in Strickland’s poetic world. The constellations of
Vniverse, which guide the reader to poetic “triplets,” mirrors the
navigational process of the medieval reader, as she traverses each representational
animal and reads the corresponding text and finally remaps the entire process onto a
human body.
Navigating Viscera and Axial Structures
The Vein Man serves as the same sort of prognosticatory guide as the Zodiac Man, and
is often found side-by-side with the Zodiac Man in medieval manuscripts.
These illustrations tell a physician which vein to bleed in order to
relieve an illness in a particular part of the body. In this example, red
“veins” point outwards from various body parts and lead to brief, explanatory
footnotes [
Egerton MS 2572]. Like the blood flowing through each vein, the
reader’s eye follows the path from the body to the narrative — each vein tying the
body and narrative together. The body itself is carefully sketched in lead while the
veins are painted bright red, highlighting their function as visual paths for the
reader and, at the same time, underscoring the function of the veins themselves.
Here, the body serves as a conduit, or, to take George Landow’s phrase, it forms an
“axial structure” with the torso serving as the main channel through the
visual narrative [
Landow 2006, 70].
[12] Landow uses the axial model as a model to visualize “hypertext corpora that employ a single text [...] as an
unbroken axis off which to hang annotation and commentary”
[
Landow 2006, 70]. For the medieval audience who read the images
along with the accompanying text, the body becomes the main narrative access with the
red veins flowing to the textual “corpus.”
The opening image in Shelley Jackson’s
Patchwork
Girl
, one of the most celebrated pieces of electronic fiction, is eerily similar
to the medieval vein man. The first image the reader sees on screen is an image of a
nude woman, her arms spread out in a Christ-like pose; and, like the vein man, her
wide-armed stance implores the reader to view her body as she stares blankly across
the screen back to the reader [
Jackson 1995]. Dotted lines traverse the
image-woman’s body, inviting the reader’s eye to follow each line and participate
cutting the woman’s body apart. Jackson challenges the notion of the body as a closed
system with this image, as she tacitly suggests that — at least in her text — the
navigational system is the patch-worked body itself:
The body is a patchwork, though the stitches might not show.
It's run by committee, a loose aggregate of entities we can't really call human,
but which have what look like lives of a sort. [...] The body is not even
experienced as whole. We never see it all, we can't feel our liver working or
messages shuttling through our spine. We patch a phantom body together out of a
cacophony of sense impressions, bright and partial views [Jackson 1995].
Both the exposed veins of the Vein Man and the dotted lines traversing Patchwork
Girl’s body hint at the interworkings and viscera that are usually hidden underneath
the body’s skin, and Jackson’s accompanying essay, “Stitch
Bitch,” playfully highlights the bodily assemblage of the image-woman and
of the vein man as well [
Jackson1997].
Jackson’s work also highlights the concept of a fragmented, non-linear text. In
Patchwork Girl, the narrator ironically muses
when I open a book I know where I am, which is
restful. My reading is spatial and even volumetric. I tell myself, I am a third of
the way down through a rectangular solid, I am a quarter of the way down the page,
I am here on the page, here on this line, here, here, here. [Jackson 1995]
When reading Patchwork Girl and the Vein Man, navigation
becomes a process that challenges our conceptions of linear reading and invites the
reader to view reading as an embodied process. The reader of both texts must
negotiate the body — and most importantly, its viscera — in order to progress through
the narrative.
Entrances and Exits: Rhizomatic Reading Strategies
In some cases, navigating a text becomes significantly less straightforward in both
the pre- and post-print world. If a text has no clear entrance, where does the reader
begin? This question, and the works that engage with this concept, are much harder
for theorists to define. George Landow gives a visualization of, what he calls, the
“network structure” of some hypertext works [
Landow 2006, 70].
[13]
Perhaps a more engaging description of Landow’s “network structure” is Deleuze
and Guattari’s description of a rhizome. In their work, Deleuze and Guattari abandon
a traditional informational structure of a tree for a model with significantly less
linearity:
the rhizome is reducible neither
to the One nor the multiple [...] it has neither beginning nor end, but always a
middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it over-spills [...] the rhizome is
antigenealogy. It is a short-term memory, or antimemory. The rhizome operates by
variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots [Deleuze and Guattari 2004].
The rhizome encapsulates models of literary and artistic output that defy traditional
and structural definitions. Unlike the “rooted tree” or axial structure, this
type of hypertext has no directionality, that is to say a reader can enter and exit
at any point in the text and have any number of reading experiences depending on the
reader’s path through the text.
Visualizing complex and rhizomatic structures on a single page posed a challenge for
many medieval scribes.
This image, from a 12th century manuscript of Boethius’
De Institutione Musica, attempts to visualize musical theory
through mathematical ratios [
Harley MS 5237]. The representational image
is so complex and full of paths and intersections that it is difficult to determine
the underlying concept. As a reader, there is no clear point of entry or exit, and it
is difficult to determine where to begin the viewing and reading process. There seems
to be an axial or tree-like structure that horizontally organizes the diagram, but
the number of secondary paths differentiates this image from a traditional structure
of a tree. In this image, the only obvious place for the reader’s eyes to rest is the
horizontal middle, although as Deleuze and Guattari hint, the middle generates
multiple middles so there is no final resting place.
While the previous figure is particularly emblematic of a rhizomatic model, it is
somewhat anomalous as far as medieval diagrams are concerned. Diagrams with a
cohesive visual metaphor are more common in even the most intricate of medieval
diagrams, suggesting a highly complex process of reading and integrating images and
text, much like the blend of text and images found on web-pages and advertisements.
“The medieval page is a hive of activity,”
suggests Graham Caie:
full of visual stimuli
with the text itself off-centre to make space for marginal illustrations and
glosses that parody or interpret text, and lemmata that guide the reader who
attempts to assimilate and synthesize what can only be called a multi-dimensional
visual experience. [Caie 2000, 31]
A 13th century illustration from William Peraldus’
Summa de
Vitiis, a manual on preaching and pastoral care, presents its reader with
a complex structure of links and nodes and corresponding allegorical images [
Harley MS 3244].
The image spans two pages and serves to comment on Peraldus’ text as a
whole as well as to illustrate and exemplify his message on sin. On the left side of
the page, the didactic diagrams illustrate the seven main vices as a number of
sub-vices, which are represented as dragons and worms and correspond to chapters and
sub-chapters in Peraldus’ narrative. The reader can take any number of paths through
the various sins and vices and negotiate through the word-image pairings, the path
echoing the message of Peraldus’ text itself: that once a person commits one sin,
more egregious sins easily follow.
The facing page responds to the sinful images — with the break between the pages
marking the distinction between good and evil — and instructs the reader as to what a
person can do to resist vices. A knight on horseback with the shield of faith, and an
angel opposes the horde of worm-like vices. The allegorical images in the diagram
from
Summa de Vitiis serve to expand the concept of
vices and virtues that Peraldus introduces in his tract and illustratively turn
virtues and vices into an epic battle between dragons and a knight on horseback. This
multi-dimensional experience of which Caie speaks shares many similarities with
Landow’s “network model” of hypertext. As Caie reminds us, the medieval page is
a “multi-dimensional visual
experience” that requires the reader to “read” images alongside text
[
Caie 2000, 31]. “New media change our concept of what an image is” asserts Lev Manovich;
“because they turn a viewer into an
active user. [...] The image becomes interactive, that is, it now functions as an
interface between a user and a computer or other device”
[
Manovich 2001, 183]. In the most complex types of medieval data
visualization, word and image are also inexorably tied together and, indeed, the
image becomes the interface that functions as a portal into the diagram or data.
A reader also encounters an interactive and multi-dimensional reading experience when
navigating through Mary Flanagan’s narrative,
[theHouse]
[
Flanagan 2006]. This narrative takes place in a 3-dimensional
environment and asks the reader to move through the story-space populated by cubes
that form house-like structures. Snippets of text are interspersed throughout the
cubes and the reader must navigate through the 3-dimensional architecture of the
space to explore the literary work itself. Like the illustration of Peraldus’ work,
the interface mirrors the work itself, with Flanagan playing on computer architecture
and the structural design of a building itself. The connections continue as the
reader explores the few lines of text that are readable and soon realizes that she
must engage with the 3-dimensional space in order to read more of the narrative,
which revolves around a troubled relationship between two people. There is no clear
beginning or end to Flanagan’s text, indeed the reader feels as though she eavesdrops
in the middle of an argument — as if she floats above the action and watches the
scene from below. Unlike the embodied navigation of Jackson’s
Patchwork Girl, this narrative is more reminiscent of the spatiality of
Strickland’s
Vniverse. Flanagan’s text, however, fully
immerses the reader in a world that is at once architectural and symbolic at the same
time.
Conclusion
The digital humanities has quickly generated new ways of thinking about reading
technologies and continues to inform and change entire disciplines. While it may have
started as a
Hilfswissenschaft, the digital humanities has opened
up book history to a world beyond the printed page, and medievalists have been there
since the beginning. What I proposed in this paper is that instead of examining book
history from the print to the digital era, we instead concentrate on the ways in
which reading technologies from the pre- and post-print eras anticipate the same sort
of reader and share similar reading experiences. The first, and perhaps the most
significant, commonality between medieval and digital reading technologies is a
simple one, but it is often overlooked: neither digital nor pre-modern books use the
linear flow of the printed book as their primary means of storing data. This may seem
incidental, but because of the dominance of the printed book, we forget it is a
technology altogether. As Kate Hayles comments: “five hundred years of print have made the conventions of
the book transparent to us”
[
Hayles 2000]. If we remove these conventions from the playing field
altogether, book history becomes something different altogether.
Reading technologies become multi-sensory when the stable, printed page is not
dominant. From the embodied reading practices involving parchment and vellum to the
haptic, forward motion of the drum solo from Dakota,
reading technologies in medieval and digital texts expand to incorporate sound and
touch. Bodies also become part of the metaphorical structure of the works themselves,
especially in the shared image-space of medieval medical diagrams and digital works
like Vniverse and Patchwork
Girl.
Once we look past the reading technologies themselves, the ways the reader engages
with the text is also another important feature in both medieval and digital texts.
Specifically, a rhizomatic structure encourages the pre- and postmodern reader to
approach a text that has neither a clear entrance nor exit. In diagrams explaining
mathematical approaches to music and illustrated battles between the vices and
virtues, the medieval reader had to search for complex visual meanings as they read.
The same types of reading strategies are evident in [theHouse], which introduces a world both complex and user-driven. The
spatiality involved in these pre- and postmodern texts also hearkens back to Vniverse and other works featuring an embodied reader.
Strickland asks us to be “Ice Age” readers when we approach Vniverse, which is to say, that we must try to approach her work without
the constraints of contemporary reading practices and not anticipate that Vniverse can be navigated as though it was a traditional,
printed book. Strickland’s caution is a salient one, especially as we look back and
research medieval reading practices and technologies. Another way of looking at a
Janus-faced approach to book history is to take a page from Deleuze and Guattari’s
more rhizomatic expectations and allow ourselves as critics to make critical as well
as temporal leaps as we study the history and future of the book.
Notes
[1] McDonough’s 1959 article “Computers and Classics” provides a good summary of these
early connections between Classicists and medievalists with computers [McDonough 1967]. [2] In addition to McDonough’s article, Susan
Hockey’s more recent work “The History of Humanities
Computing” describes these early projects [Hockey 2004]. [3] One notable meeting regarding the ways in
which computers could help medieval literary study took place at the University of
Colorado and resulted in the 1967 article “Computer Study of
Medieval German Poetry: A Conference Report”
[Beatie 1967]. [4] This
almost-pejorative term has also been leveled at the discipline of paleography —
the study of ancient scripts — and it is no coincidence that both paleography and
the digital humanities have since changed the ways that scholars understand books
and their place within medieval and contemporary cultures.
[5] For more information see: “Biblical Studies and
Hypertext,” by Steven J. DeRose (1991); “Ancient
Materials, Modern Media: Shaping the Study of Classics with Hypertext,”
by Gregory Crane and Elli Mylonas (1991); “The Shakespeare
Project,” by Larry Friedlander (1991); “The
Emblematic Hyperbook,” by David Graham (1991).
[6] The latter example is from
a recent British Library exhibit, “From Parchment to Pixel:
The Virtual Reunification of the Codex Sinaiticus,” which was part of a
larger initiative to digitize the entire codex [British Library 2009]. [7] For
this reason, I avoid terms such as “remediation,” which suggest that the
medieval period is somehow the genesis of digital literary developments. Instead,
I wish to examine how each of these periods anticipates a certain type of reader
through similar reading technologies. For more information on remediation, see
[Bolter and Gruskin 2000]. [8] Brantley’s article touches upon an interesting
point. Many works that seek to study the “beginnings” of new media begin with
print’s dominance as well, such as From Gutenberg to
Google
[Shillingsburg 2006] and New Media,
1740–1915
[Gitelman and Pingree 2004]. [9] This process of past embodiment and what it can
mean for contemporary readers was made especially clear to me when I researched
the Exeter Book (Exeter MS 3501), which houses the only copy of many
Old English poems. A previous reader mislaid a hot poker onto the manuscript and
burned through many pages; because of this careless reader, a number of Old
English poems have lacunae that will never be recovered.
[10] For a general overview of images
associated with medieval medical practices, such as the Zodiac Man, consult Astrology in Medieval Manuscripts, by Sophie Page
(2002).
[11] I use Vniverse to refer to both the website and
accompanying print book, V: WaveSon.nets/Losing
L’una.
[12] Although Landow does not
make this connection, his axial model has much in common with tree structures from
mathematics and computer science. In particular, Landow’s axial model is
comparable to a “rooted tree” structure wherein there is one main “root”
from which any additional data is derived. In the case of Landow’s diagram, the
“root” is the literary work’s main narrative while the hyperlinks to
definitions and concordances would be the root’s “branches.”
[13] Along with the two models that Landow defines, he also provides
three guiding questions to consider: “1. Where does the reader enter the text? 2. Where does the reader leave the
text? 3. Where are the borders of the text?” which interrogate the
boundaries of each type of hypertext [Landow 2006, 70]. Works Cited
Beatie 1967 Beatie, Bruce A. “Computer Study of Medieval German Poetry: A Conference Report”.
Computers and the Humanities 2: 2 (1967), pp. 65-70.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/30203960.
Bolter and Gruskin 2000 Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000.
British Library 2009 Warning: Biblio formatting not applied. From Parchment to Pixel: The Virtual Reunification of the Codex Sinaiticus. British Library. July–September 2009.
Brown 1993 Brown, Thomas Julian. A Palaeographer's View: the Selected Writings of Julian Brown. Edited by Janet M. Bately Michelle Brown and Jane Roberts. London: Harvey Miller, 1993.
Caie 2000 Caie, Graham B. “Hypertext and Multiplicity: The Medieval Example”. In Andrew Murphy, ed., The Renaissance Text: Theory, Editing, Textuality. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. pp. 30-43.
Camille 1997 Camille, Michael. “
The Book as Flesh and Fetish in Richard de Bury's Philobiblon”. In The Book and the Body. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997. pp. 34-78.
Chaucer 2008 Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Riverside Chaucer. Edited by Larry Dean Benson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Chun 2006 Chen, Wendy Hui Kyong. “Introduction: Did Somebody Say New Media?”. In New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Chun and Keenan 2006 Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong, Anna Watkins Fisher and Thomas Keenan, eds. New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Crane and Mylonas 1991a Crane, Gregory, and Eli Mylonas. “Ancient Materials, Modern Media: Shaping the Study of Classics with Hypertex”. In Paul Delany and George P. Landow, eds., Hypermedia and Literary Studies. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991. pp. 205-220.
Darnton 1990 Darnton, Robert. Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History. New York: Norton and Company, 1990.
DeRose 1991 DeRose, Steven J. “Biblical Studies and Hypertext”. In Paul Delany and George P. Landow, eds., Hypermedia and Literary Studies. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991. pp. 185-204.
Delany and Landow 1991 Delany, Paul, and George Landow, eds. Hypermedia and Literary Studies. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.
Deleuze and Guattari 2004 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. New York: Continuum, 2004.
Egerton MS 2572 Warning: Biblio formatting not applied. Egerton MS 2572 London, Manuscript, British Library, Egerton MS 2572, folio 50.
Exeter MS 3501 Warning: Biblio formatting not applied. Exeter MS 3501 Exeter, Manuscript, Cathedral Chapter Library, MS 3501.
Flanagan 2006 Warning: Biblio formatting not applied. Flanagan, Mary. [theHouse]. The Electronic Literature Collection, 1. . Hayles, et al., eds. College Park: The Electronic Literature Organization, 2006. Web. 20 Sept. 2011.
Friedlander 1991 Friedlander, Larry. “The Shakespeare Project.”
Hypermedia and Literary Studies eds. Paul Delany and
George P. Landow, 257–271. Boston: MIT University Press, 1991.
Gitelman and Pingree 2004 Gitelman, Lisa, and Geoffrey Pingree, eds. New Media, 1740–1915. Boston: MIT Press, 2004.
Glick 2005 Glick, Thomas F., Steven John Livesey and Faith Wallis, eds. Medieval Science, Technology, and Medicine: An Encyclopedia. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Graham 1991 Graham, David. “The Emblematic Hyperbook”. In Paul Delany and George P. Landow, eds., Hypermedia and Literary Studies. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.
Grotans 2006 Grotans, Anna A. Reading in Medieval St. Gall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Hansen 2004 Hansen, Mark B.N. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004.
Harley MS 3244 Warning: Biblio formatting not applied. Harley MS 3244 London, Manuscript, British Library, Harley MS 3244, folios 27v–28.
Harley MS 5237 Warning: Biblio formatting not applied. Harley MS 5237 London, Manuscript, British Library, Harley MS 5237, folio 35v.
Harley MS 5311 Warning: Biblio formatting not applied. Harley MS 5311 London, British Library, Harley MS 5311, folio F. ie 5.
Hayles 2000 Hayles, N. Katherine. “Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis”. Postmodern Culture 10: 2 (2000).
Hockey 2004 Hockey, Susan. “History of Humanities Computing”. In Susan Scheibman Ray Siemens and John Unsworth, eds., A Companion to Digital Humanities. New York: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. pp. 1-19.
Jackson 1995 Jackson, Shelley. Patchwork Girl; or, a Modern Monster. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1995.
Landow 2006 Landow, G.P. Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.
Manovich 2001 Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001.
McDonough 1967 McDonough, James T. “Computers and the Classics”. Computers and the Humanities 2: 1 (1967), pp. 37-40.
Page 2002 Page, Sophie. Astrology in Medieval Manuscripts. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002.
Shillingsburg 2006 Shillingsburg, Peter L. From Gutenberg to Google: Electronic Representations of Literary Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Strickland 2002a Strickland, Stephanie. V: WaveSon.nets/Losing L’una. New York: Penguin, 2002.
Strickland and Lawson 2003 Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries nd