To view the edition: https://cu-mkp.github.io/GR8975-edition/
The digital minimal edition is a course project of the graduate-level digital humanities seminar, “HIST GR8975: What is a Book in the 21st Century? Working With Historical Texts in a Digital Environment” offered by the Department of History at Columbia University as the 2017 History in Action Clinic Course. Students, instructors, TAs from History and Computer Science, and Project Assistants worked collaboratively and creatively to construct this edition, spending the first half of the semester learning the skills--both collaborative and technical--necessary to such a project, and the second half preparing the text by generating a marked up version for Ed, a Jekyll theme for minimal editions developed by Alex Gil and others.
The basic data set for the minimal edition is the working English translation of BnF Ms. Fr. 640, produced by participants in three successive Summer Text Workshops held by the Making and Knowing Project (2014-16), in which advanced students of French history, language, and art history learned middle French paleography, TEI encoding, and project management skills while generating the transcription and translation of the Fr. 640. While the collaboratively produced French transcription is now quite accurate (as of August 2016), the translation is still a work in progress, and serves as a testament to the difficulties of collective translation. Future Text Workshops will refine and complete the interim translation used in this minimal edition.
The project is thus an integral part of the Making and Knowing Project, and is closely connected to its other research and pedagogical components. The present minimal edition of Fr. 640 has a basic and limited feature set, yet serves as an important prototype for the design of the Project’s final digital critical edition (scheduled for publication in 2019). The organization of the content in this edition corresponds to that in Fr. 640, however, differs in a significant way from the manuscript itself. The manuscript is of course organized by its underlying structure of folded folio sheets of paper into a bound book, each bifolium containing multiple entries positioned under clearly marked titles or headings. The entries--or "recipes"--with their clearly marked titles (which do not, however, always relate precisely to the text that follows!) include diverse contents, including "recipes"--instructions for particular processes (often related to other entries throughout the manuscript); observations on making procedures and craft practitioners or, for example, the prices of various materials; advice about making and materials; and many other aspects of craft procedures, natural materials, and daily life.
Participants in the class decided to rethink the structure of manuscript for the digital age, taking as the basic unit of the manuscript not the folio, but the entry. They have thus divided the text into entries, marking up each entry's identifier, heading, main blocks of text, marginal additions, and illustrations. As they marked up the text, they converged on a consensus markup schema for the text that included specific elements in each entry, such as, purpose, activity, material, tool, name, profession, unit (of measure), plant, animal, currency, foreign language, material format, place, time, and color. The resulting list of entry titles gives a quickly-grasped snapshot of the manuscript that is responsive to the user's interests, is electronically searchable, and enables the underlying marked up data (available in the course's Github repository) to be subjected to interesting user-directed analysis. An offering of such analysis is provided by the "Lists" on the side menu of the edition. A particularly useful feature for the Making and Knowing Project of this prototyping in What is a Book in the 21st Century? has been the rethinking by a new set of individuals unfamiliar with the manuscript, and their sense that the text needed to be reorganized to make it more accessible to the user. The division of the text into entries and the markup elements of purpose and activity thus provide for the readers this immediate insight into the contents of the text.
This History course (HIST GR8975) introduced graduate students at Columbia University to techniques of working with texts in digital environments. The course was supported by the History in Action initiative of the History department, The Making and Knowing Project, the Provost's Hybrid Grant in collaboration with The Center for Teaching and Learning, and the Collaboratory Program. Through hands-on assignments (with plenty of assistance), students have learned a variety of skills that constitute literacy in digital humanities, and are now able to take their newfound digital literacy with them to pursue their own study, research, and future work.
Please see our course syllabus and course schedule which charts the gradual acquisition of digital competencies throughout the course.
Throughout the course, skills were built by implementing them to collectively create a minimal digital edition, which is the site you are now viewing. This digital edition draws on collaboration with, and research done by the Making and Knowing Project on an anonymous sixteenth-century French compilation of artistic and technical recipes (BnF Ms. Fr. 640). The Project’s existing English translation (still a work in progress) constitutes the “data” with which students worked to create this minimal digital edition. This rare French manuscript resulted from the compilation of craft knowledge over time, followed by its subsequent “disassembly” in a late sixteenth-century workshop by an author-compiler-practitioner who experimented on techniques contained in the manuscript’s entries. While the course focused on this intriguing manuscript and the research that has been carried out on it, the skills students learned over the course of the semester are widely applicable to other types of Digital Humanities projects, and, indeed, in many fields outside of traditional academic study.
The Making and Knowing Project has produced the transcription and English translation of this manuscript, “disassembling” Ms. Fr. 640 through research seminars and workshops, involving multidisciplinary teams of students and scholars. The Project is currently engaged in creating a complete critical digital edition for publication in 2019, which represents a reassembly of this manuscript in a 21st-century form. In this course, each student was an active participant in the Project’s exploration of the technologies that allow not just a reading of the text but an interaction with the content itself. This is in direct resonance with the ways that this sixteenth-century recipe collection can only be transformed from text to knowledge when the techniques contained within it are practiced, whether in the sixteenth century or in the Making and Knowing Laboratory reconstructions today. Through this exploration, the course fostered reflection on the constraints of the codex as a framework and vehicle for the production of knowledge, and a re-thinking of the technology of the book and what it means to read a text. To this end, the course also included collaboration with Professor Steven Feiner’s Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Lab.