BREACHING THE STRONGROOM - A Pervasive Informatics Approach to Working with Medieval Manuscripts

Peter Ainsworth, Mike Meredith

2011

Abstract

This paper outlines a pervasive approach to informatics-enhanced humanities research on medieval manuscripts. Digital surrogates (created for conservational as much as for research purposes) provide a first step towards ‘breaching the strongroom’. Yet even when libraries can offer scholars digital copies of manuscripts, the holdings available rarely match up as a corpus to those sought by a particular scholar. Progress towards overcoming the mismatch has begun to be made via large-scale online digitisation initiatives such as the Roman de la Rose, e-Codices and Europeana Regia projects, collating thousands of items from research libraries on different continents. Focusing on the Online Froissart project, the paper looks first at some new tools for making online manuscript collections more genuinely pervasive, insofar as they allow users to move seamlessly through, across and within them. The second topic addressed is the additional informatic uses to which the project’s electronic images are being put (using as a springboard the analysis of their semantic content) in the wider context of e-Research conducted by an international consortium working out of the Universities of Sheffield, Urbana-Champaign, Michigan State and South Carolina and using the same Cloud-based technologies to investigate distinct but ultimately comparable image corpora.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Ainsworth P. and Meredith M. (2011). BREACHING THE STRONGROOM - A Pervasive Informatics Approach to Working with Medieval Manuscripts . In Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing - Volume 1: KMIS, (IC3K 2011) ISBN 978-989-8425-81-2, pages 264-271. DOI: 10.5220/0003718702640271

in Bibtex Style

@conference{kmis11,
author={Peter Ainsworth and Mike Meredith},
title={BREACHING THE STRONGROOM - A Pervasive Informatics Approach to Working with Medieval Manuscripts},
booktitle={Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing - Volume 1: KMIS, (IC3K 2011)},
year={2011},
pages={264-271},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0003718702640271},
isbn={978-989-8425-81-2},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing - Volume 1: KMIS, (IC3K 2011)
TI - BREACHING THE STRONGROOM - A Pervasive Informatics Approach to Working with Medieval Manuscripts
SN - 978-989-8425-81-2
AU - Ainsworth P.
AU - Meredith M.
PY - 2011
SP - 264
EP - 271
DO - 10.5220/0003718702640271