MorrealeSberg13Transcript


Transcript: 
Laura K. Morreale 

Distant Gatherings: A Text-Case for Digital Manuscript Collaborations 
Delivered for the 13th Annual (Virtual) Schoenberg Symposium on  

Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age 
Manuscript Studies in the Digital Covid-19 Age 

November 18-20, 2020 
 
 

All right so so thank you very much and 
a special thanks to Lynn Ransom and 
everyone at the Schoenberg institute 
for all the hard work that's gone into 
organizing this conference. 
I’m going to start my talk, Distant 
Gatherings: a text case for digital 
manuscript collaborations” with a 
slightly personal statement 
that I know will resonate among many of 
you all. 
Very simply, I’ve missed seeing you all. 
for reasons we all understand 
our 2020 plans for projects for meetups 
and face-to-face exchanges 
have been eclipsed by this covid19 
moment and have kept us from seeing each 
other in the ways that we all rely upon 
in the ways that nourish our scholarship 
and our intellectual lives. 
And yet as we've all discovered life 
goes on and we have all 
learned how to cope and maybe even to 
flourish 
within this unexpected moment. 
what I’d like to suggest today is that 
due to this very dramatic change in how 
we're living our lives 
and the expectation, expectations we 
continue to bring to our scholarly work 
we've begun to see this world 
differently, to imagine ways of using our 
skills as medievalists 
that benefit from the digital tools we 
have our display at our disposal 
and our newfound proficiencies with them. 
i came to this conclusion after making 
two observations 
first that the zoom only conferences 



which have become our default 
simply replicate older forms of 
in-person interaction 
without allowing us to profit from the 
real benefits that face-to-face meetings 
allow 
this is why despite all the hard work 
and effort that go into organizing these 
events 
there remains there remains this sense 
of dissatisfaction when we all 
individually turn away from our screens 
at the end of a presentation 
and go back to our lockdown lives we all 
know that zoom fatigue 
is real and yet secondly 
it's not the medium that is the problem 
only the way we've chosen to use it 
we only need to recognize that people 
still even in lockdown 
willingly spend a lot of time 
communicating online on twitter and 
other social media platforms for example 
to understand that there's some value to 
be had in digital engagement 
so how do we harness the power of 
digital interactions 
for scholarly work without sacrificing 
the important exchange 
that occurs in more traditional formats 
the challenge in my mind is less to 
build 
new tools or structures to support the 
distant gatherings we now attend 
then to reconfigure what we currently 
have 
to capitalize on the unique 
characteristics of the digital medium 
and what are these characteristics 
computer-enabled work relies upon its 
own strengths 
including the ability to disseminate 
information efficiently 
to collate and visualize data too great 
for humans to manage on their own 
to virtually bring together items that 
are physically separate 
and to manipulate and modify sources 



without causing harm to the originals 
distanced scholarship that relies upon 
the online world 
capitalizes on the very qualities we 
have come to expect in our everyday 
communicative practice. 
It's dynamic, user driven, interconnected, 
and responsive to visitors, all 
characteristics 
we should first identify and then use to 
our advantage 
when we undertake digital scholarship. 
Now I have found that time-bound digital 
events 
that rely heavily on the dynamic quality 
of virtual exchange, 
that promote transparent and 
public-facing communities, 
and that circle around a circumscribed 
set of questions or problems-- 
much like a facebook post that poses a 
thorny question 
and then elicits a lengthy response-- 
these have been very successful ways to 
bring people together 
to engage in online scholarship. 
Now what does that mean in real life, how 
does that work out? 
Today I’ll be profiling three different 
manuscript-based projects 
that have capitalized on the qualities 
of online communication I’ve just 
outlined 
these include the defeat of translation 
project the las fera and image du mon 
transcription challenges 
and the pelerinage de damoiselle sapience 
transcription event 
which Amy just mentioned, which is taking 
place right now as we speak. 
All three of these projects rely upon 
the same basic workflow 
but they unfold over different time 
spans. 
The pelerinage event, as we know, was 
engineered as a three-day sprint 
the transcription challenges are styled 
as two-week efforts 



and the Deiphira stretches over a 
longer period of time but still requires 
a relatively minimal weekly time 
commitment from project participants 
in all of these projects we began with a 
manuscript 
or a set of manuscripts that had been 
digitized 
so that the images are freely accessible 
to anyone 
once we located the desired manuscripts 
for each of these projects 
we loaded images into a transcription 
platform called from the page 
so that everyone involved in the project 
could access the manuscript and type up 
a transcription 
of the work directly in the 
transcription pane 
now in transcribing or in the case of 
images describing what we see in the 
digitized copy 
we scrutinize the copy of the medieval 
work we create our own 21st century 
version of that text 
and we record our observations of the 
manuscript or the text along the way 
once the transcription is complete we're 
then able to export it 
export it in a text file and create any 
kind of final product that we would like 
the tech part here is so easy as to be 
almost a non-issue which I think is an 
important part of what has made these 
projects effective 
these then are the mechanics of these 
online projects 
digitize manuscript to transcription 
platform to exported text to final 
product. 
But of course the machines and digitized 
images are not doing 
the scholarly work that needs to get 
done it's people who do that 
we must also recruit and organize 
participants in the project 
then provide the framework for how the 
work will proceed. 



Naturally the framework for how the work 
work gets done 
varies according to the project 
parameters 
so I’m going to start then to talk a 
little bit about the Deiphira 
translation project 
centered around the typ 422 manuscript 
housed at harvard's houghton library 
the different is a minor literary work 
by the well-known humanist 
author leon batisti alberti and it's 
been identified as the first 
dialogue on love in italian vernacular 
literature so 
um a work of of some consequence 
the dialogue is about a woman named Deiphira and 
the conversation takes place between 
palimacro 
the man who loves her and filarco his 
interlocutor, 
who claims to be wise in the ways of 
love and especially of women but we're 
all sort of doubtful 
of that at this point. If you look 
closely at the image on the frontice 
piece of the houghton typ-422 manuscript 
which I have reproduced here for you you 
can see those three figures, 
presumably the characters we meet in the 
dialogue, um this is the 
the Deiphira is the only text in the 36 
folio manuscript 
and it's written in a nice clear 
humanist script. 
So starting in April of this year a 
group of nine scholars who I like to 
call the Deiphira 9 
began a collaborative project to 
transcribe and translate the digitized 
version of the manuscript. 
The impetus for the project was largely 
Selfish- 
as the grip of lockdown tightened many 
of us were feeling isolated 
and we were looking for ways to connect 
with other scholars to continue to 
research and to share our expertise 



so the Deiphira 9 decided to meet up using 
the tools that the digital world now 
offers us 
zoom meetings and shared google docs a 
wordpress website to collect our 
materials 
and you can see the address at the top 
of the slide if you want to check it out. 
and then the digitized-manuscript -to- 
keyboard-text workflow that I just 
outlined for you. As we have transcribed 
and translated this work into English 
we have come to enjoy and to really 
capitalize on the digital environment 
as we build our working community of 
friends centered around this text. 
We meet twice a week on zoom for an hour 
each time first to do a very close 
analysis of the manuscript 
and the version of the text found in it 
and then to produce an English language 
translation and I’m pretty strict about 
keeping it at just one hour 
so people know what they're in for and 
that the project is not burdensome. 
During these meetings we've already 
completed a full transcription of the 
manuscript 
and just this past week we completed the 
first run through our English 
translation our next steps will be to to 
do another read through 
and to normalize our translation but 
these things will all be done 
collaboratively which means we benefit 
from everybody's expertise and 
perspective. 
In terms of the research products that 
have come out of our efforts so far 
we've put together a collation diagram 
using Viscollm so thank you =Dot and 
uh Alberto, we've isolated various hands 
within the manuscript and the 
corrections made to it 
we've discovered that the typ422 is 
actually extracted from a much larger 
manuscript 
and we've posted some of these findings 



in a preliminary project at digital 
mappa 
that brings together the manuscript 
images our transcription our translation 
and the collation diagrams. 
We hope then together all of these 
materials into a digital site housed at 
Georgetown university 
and add a collation of our edition to 
the standard print edition from the 
1970s. 
Our Georgetown hosted edition will also 
include annotations 
a manuscript recension and 
supplementary essays on the text in our 
methodology 
and we hope to have this done in the 
next six months or so. 
Now the second project or rather group 
of projects I’ll talk about is a series 
of two-week manuscript transcription 
challenges 
that Stanford rare books curator 
Benjamin Albritton and I organized 
and staged over this past summer and 
fall. 
To date there have been three of these 
transcription challenges the first 
featuring 
multiple manuscript of excuse me 
manuscripts of Goro Dati's 
15th century geographic tree uh text 
called la sfera 
and the most recent which just finished 
up on in October 
treating the first half of the first 
recession of Goussoin de Metz’ 
mid 13th century scientific treatise the 
Image du Monde 
all of that information there for you 
Now the inspiration for the first 
Challenge, a competition to transcribe 
versions of Dati’s work was the result 
quite honestly of just just too much 
time on twitter. 
In the earlier days of lockdown in the 
US Ben and I were lamenting our mutual 
feelings once again of isolation 



and we came up with this idea to connect 
with other scholars 
who might enjoy gathering around and 
engaging with the text 
through the act of transcribing it 
collaboratively. 
we identified La Sfera as a good 
candidate since we could easily locate 
locate digitized versions of the text at 
Yale, the Arsenal inPparis 
and the Vatican library. We loaded the 
images of each of these versions into 
Stanford libraries’ instantiation of FromThePage 
and then we created a quick wordpress 
website where we collected all the 
materials 
that we would need for the challenge and 
then set out the terms of the 
competition. 
We created team pages with links to the 
transcription platform, a project log 
and a link to the rules and guidelines 
so everyone sort of knew 
knew what they were up to. Through our 
personal networks and the magic 
of twitter we were able to build three 
teams of 10 scholars each 
Team USA, Equipe France, and Squadra Italia. 
The rosters were filled and a group of 
team captains put in place about a week 
before the competition began 
at which time each team would have two 
weeks to complete their transcriptions 
and submit them to the panel of three 
judges they assessed each submission 
according to speed 
accuracy and collaborative participation. 
And once this first competition began 
officially 
the work was really fast and furious. 
Within about 24 hours of the start time 
roughly half of the transcription work 
had already been done and teams were 
moving on to the review stage. 
Ben and I along with many other 
competitors we're constantly tweeting 
updates 
to track our progress or to highlight 



what was discovered in our manuscripts 
whether it was a strange writing style 
or an unusual map 
or even a party of dragons who were 
hanging out 
in a misidentified tower of babel. During 
this first day of competition 
that first 24 hours or so our tweets 
attracted a lot of attention from art 
historians 
from librarians who had a copy of las 
vera in their own repositories 
to fellow medievalists who were just 
interested in what were going on and 
what was going on 
and dh scholars who were really 
intrigued by the competition 
competition’s framework. After the first 
flush of excitement the teams began to 
buckle down and engage in the 
nitty-gritty of producing a clean 
transcription 
to submit to the judges. 
Now to do this teams use several forms 
of digital communication 
including slack to really for inter- 
team communication, twitter to really 
speak more publicly, and then the 
challenge team pages where members would 
post observations some research and some 
substantive 
substantive findings 
uh the first success The first event was 
so successful and the demand for 
a second phase was so strong that we 
brought in five more copies of La Sfera 
and ran a second transcription challenge 
in late July meaning that at the end of 
the second two week challenge 
we had eight full transcriptions of this 
text from eight different manuscripts. 
Along the way our transcription work 
inspired a deep engagement with the text 
itself 
on the part of our transcribers who 
produced some amazing scholarship 
like this blog post authored by team 
captain Carrie Benes 



comparing the different scripts across 
the 8 manuscripts 
and you can still read Carrie's small 
essay on the team Vatican page of the 
La Sfera website. 
We've also cataloged and made public all 
the data all the transcriptions created 
during these events 
so that other scholars can learn about 
the challenges and use our 
transcriptions in their own work. 
Now one of the greatest points of pride 
for me at least over the course of these 
challenges 
is that all told somewhere between 75 
and 100 medievalists 
have participated, each bringing his her 
or their own expertise and enthusiasm to 
the effort in their own ways 
and I know a lot of transcribers are out 
in the audience right now listening 
and um it's been really gratifying to 
see our community come together 
through these projects and I hope that 
other scholars will come forth who want 
to adopt this model and propose 
their own texts. 
And speaking of other texts I’ll just 
take my last few minutes to talk about 
the Pelerinage de Damoiselle Sapience 
transcription event that's going on 
as a part of the Schoenberg conference. 
The task for the 30 event participants 
just as we have mapped it out on the 
event website is to transcribe the ten 
folios of the Pelerinage de Damoiselle Sapience  
a previously unedited work from UPenn’s 
ms 660, then to prepare a set of rules for 
the transcription we make-- 
that's today's task --and then to create a 
narrative section to introduce our 
methodology and the work itself. 
Our goal is to prepare all of these 
scholarly products bring them together 
into one document and then submit 
our work to the Digital Medievalist for 
possible publication in the journal 
as one of their methods articles. 



For this event we've chosen the metaphor 
of the relay race and this is the spirit 
that has been brought to the work since 
yesterday morning. 
We have three teams working together 
passing the baton from one to the next. 
Team transcription began the event by 
transferring the text from the digital 
images of UPenn's ms660 
to the transcription pane and then 
passing the baton off to team revision, 
today's team who's now reviewing the 
version created 
by the first leg of the race and 
creating their transcription statement 
that sets out the rules. 
Tomorrow team submission will take us 
all the way to our finish line 
of a fully transcribed text with a 
transcription statement and a small 
narrative 
and how we got our work done. 
Now in a relay race you watch your 
teammates intently you support them and 
encourage them when you can and you 
build the strategy for your own 
participation 
based on what they accomplish so with 
this ethos in mind we've been watching 
intently what our teammates have been 
doing as they complete their leg of the 
race 
cheering them on through channels like 
twitter or facebook for example 
and strategizing for our chance to take 
the baton. 
This event then is a test case for a 
digital methodology 
that brings together transcribers from 
near and far as mapped on the Damoiselle Sapiance   
participant 
map and it's an experiment with 
different ways that our workflow 
might function on a very limited 
timeline. 
So to wrap up I think the elements that 
make these events work so well 
are the following there's really a 



well-defined time period that allows 
participants to know what they're 
in for the easy tech allows for a very 
low barrier 
barrier of entry and I think they both 
promote and rely upon 
communication and community these are 
all important aspects. 
So where do we go next? um These projects 
have tested the waters of our digital 
scholarly practice 
and they represent but one way to gather 
together around manuscripts 
while at a distance from the work and 
from each other. 
While virtual manuscript work will never 
replace interacting with the material 
objects that's for sure 
we can enjoy these distant gatherings 
for now 
knowing that we're engaging in real 
scholarly work even as we look to the 
day that we can finally map 
out new journeys to unite with these 
materials and with each other. 
Now I started with a personal statement 
and I will end with one as well. 
Like many medievalists who followed a 
non-traditional career path 
who could never displace themselves to 
spend extended periods of time in the 
archives 
or take up visiting teaching positions i 
found that the shift to online work 
was really a comfortable one for me. In 
fact I had already spent years learning how 
to work at a distance when our lockdown 
lives began. 
Certainly postcovid scholarship will 
look different than what has come before 
as medievalists recover from this moment 
and we are forced 
to recalibrate our scholarly methods as. 
I'm sure we will 
I encourage the community to look 
especially to those scholars 
with non-traditional backgrounds who may 
already have navigated 



some of the challenge that will face 
challenges that will face us 
as we move beyond this pandemic moment. 
And I’ll stop there and thank you very 
much for your attention. 
Thank you very much. It's um I feel as 
though we 
have talked a lot about how we can use 
digital methods to bring 
scattered manuscripts together but it's 
really heartening to hear about 
using the tools to bring scattered 
scholars 
together um so now we will 
take time for questions on this talk 
I yeah we already have one question for 
Laura 
um federico botana do you want to ask 
directly if you could uh turn your video 
on 
and I’ll let you take it away yes done 
thank you 
um I have worked on La Sfera and uh 
I had a lot of problems sort of working 
with the printed printed 
printed editions which I think is more 
or less the the 
early 1500s edition which was re-edited 
in the 19th century and there's so much 
difference in manuscripts it's still the 
same text we can see where the errors 
are and I think this 
big need for digital for a critical 
edition is 
that with what you've been producing is 
um 
is that a possibility I think would be 
much very helpful for everybody. 
Well you know at this point we're kind 
of taking the the approach that um 
each manuscript is is its own product 
and there's 
there's an amazing joy um I think that 
the participants felt in engaging so 
deeply 
with all these variations and then i 
mean it's really great to be able to see 
all eight of them up and see where 



things don't match up and 
um you know even the sort of adjustments 
that the scribes were making right as 
they were 
um working through these you know 
different variations and copying and so 
we're just I mean it's such a huge 
tradition 
i think there are over 150 um extant 
versions 
um so it would be an enormous amount of 
work if someone wanted to undertake it 
and you and I should talk 
um but um 
yeah but for the moment it's more um you 
know 
giving sort of honoring those those 
individual witnesses 
um so but we'll see where the project 
goes thanks yeah it would be great to 
see I’d love to see it because I must 
say I have to struggle a lot with some 
of 
sometimes it's a sound only that makes 
um 
things change but anyway I stopped there 
thank you very much for watching 
absolutely. uh 
All right I see catherine chandler has a 
question 
hi yes um I pers participated in the 
most recent 
transcription project which was very 
challenging and a lot of fun 
um and so I’m I’m not sure if it's 
important to have a critical 
edition come out of the project 
or what but um somebody who's more of a 
liturgist 
and somebody who works more with music 
manuscripts um 
is it possible that there might be a 
project involving 
liturgical texts or music texts 
ones that involve more latin latin west 
liturgical things um Thank you so much 
and thanks for your participation I will 
just tell you too 



that the judges for the Image du Monde got 
in touch with me last night and there is 
um there is a decision so that will come 
out very soon um 
but in terms of what comes out and what 
sort of challenges appear later 
um what I really hope and I know um Ben 
Albritton and I agree on this is that we 
hope that people will take the model 
and will run their own challenges 
because frankly 
it's a lot of fun but it's a lot of work 
right and so 
and you know to tell you the truth I’ve 
learned so much 
doing them about those particular texts 
and so I think it's a really great way 
both to 
advertise the text that you're 
interested in in the work that you've 
done on it right 
but also to you know bring that 
expertise it's it's 
I never could have imagined what people 
you know 
what they brought to the challenges it's 
it was so amazing 
um the work and the the genie, right that 
people brought 
so thanks it was great fun thank you so 
much for all the hard work you do 
it's a lot of fun 
thank you are there other questions from 
the audience if not 
i have one and so uh I’ll go ahead and 
ask it and if anyone has another 
question they can 
write it in um I just kind of following 
up on that 
um and also the lovely visual 
of the map with people all over the 
world participating 
um I wonder like how much you thought 
about like how this pro this kind of 
project might 
scale up I’m not sure it needs to scale 
up but 
you know how do you make it larger how 



do you make it how 
not you but how does one make it larger 
how does one make it more inclusive 
um and what what would be the challenges 
if there are any other than just the 
fact that it's a lot of work for one 
person to manage like are there 
ever platforms to put this out on or 
there probably are other platforms i 
mean you know part of the reasons that 
we use the tools that we did is because 
they're 
um almost universally accessible and you 
know 
people you know most everybody can get 
onto a google doc 
um so you know that we relied on on 
those tools in that way 
in terms of how might one might scale it 
up um certainly you could do 
more delegation um you know my role as 
um the coordinator of these events um 
particularly La Sfera and the Image du Monde 
was really just to absorb any problems 
that would come along and try to fix 
those things and so 
I’m sure if you were to have you know 
three people doing that job 
um that that could be done as well um 
i mean I haven't really thought making 
it bigger I you know I was I was 
overwhelmed that 
50 plus you know scholars were 
participating in each of these things 
it's 
um it was great so sorry Lynn no I mean 
i I mean I think it's fantastic I don't 
mean to suggest that it needs to get 
bigger or anything but it just seems 
like such 
it's such a good idea and you could 
really just 
get so much new data out there 
right anyway well congratulations it's 
it's been fun to watch 
um okay so one person has another 
question has come in 
uh Sarah Savant you want to 



sure I was actually asking sort of the 
opposite question to you I think or 
a slightly different question which is 
how did you get started in the first 
place and what is the 
i mean it's quite a lot to get 50 people 
i think and what is kind of the value 
that you think 
brought people to want to do this um you 
know it strikes me a little bit like 
hackathons 
but um that people do in computer 
science but what 
you know what what motivates everyone 
and people don't have time I mean 
you know even in lockdown there's a lot 
of people who are juggling 
more not less. I got to tell you Sarah i 
mean I i was 
amazed that people would do this but you 
know one of the things that I like to 
to build into any of these um events 
is a little bit of fear I mean I think 
the competition thing 
gets people going I mean we're all you 
know polite people 
but at the end of the day like we want 
to win right and so um I think there's 
that little bit that's that 
that's in there and that's you know I i 
built that into the 
Damoiselle Sapience thing too like we need 
to be done by Friday night 
right and the challenge is how can you 
know how can we do that so I think it's 
the combination of that 
little bit of sort of thrill fear um 
and then the limited time span when you 
say to somebody 
listen, for the challenges, I would say, 
listen if you're just doing 
transcription ,if you're not a team 
captain or anything like 
five to six hours ,tops um you get to 
interact with everybody you get to do 
something that you really enjoy doing 
and that maybe you know 
your ten-year-old doesn't care about 



who's sitting right 
um and so it's five to six hours tops um 
you get to be part of this team interact 
with people and then two weeks we're 
done like we're done 
right and so I think that allows people 
a little bit of joy in what they're 
doing. A really strict project 
timing like knowing and and being and 
being loyal to that 
okay and I love the competition idea 
we all do we all do, yeah I know exactly 
thank you