The Digital Middle Ages: An Introduction


The Digital Middle Ages: An Introduction

By David J. Birnbaum, Sheila Bonde, and Mike Kestemont
Our aims in this supplement of Speculum are frankly immodest. In organizing a
series of sessions devoted to the digital for the Medieval Academy annual meeting
in 2016, we hoped, by bringing together a diversity of projects, to showcase for
the Academy membership the wide range of exciting possibilities afforded by dig-
ital humanities (DH). The papers gathered here are drawn largely from those ses-
sions, with several additions. We want to acknowledge the contributions of Sarah
Spence and William Stoneman, coorganizers of the sessions, for their inspiration
and help. This supplement is the first issue of Speculum devoted to digital medieval
projects, and it is offered in an online, open-access format that reinforces the open-
ness to which the digital aspires and which it encourages.
Busa

The advent of digital medieval studies is often attributed to the work of Roberto
Busa (1913–2011). The Italian Jesuit priest was a philosopher and theologian who
specialized in the lexical analysis of the works of Thomas Aquinas.1 Because of the
massive size of Aquinas’s oeuvre, Busa quickly found himself in need of an index-
ing method to search the corpus, one that could surpass the labor-intensive system
of handwritten fiche cards with which he began his work. Busa was quick to recog-
nize the possibilities of the early computing systems that were developed in his life-
time, and in or around 1949 he reached out to Thomas J. Watson Sr., the founder of
IBM. Watson and his staff at IBM were impressed with the aspirations of the Italian
Jesuit (they called him “more American than the Americans”), but IBM was per-
suaded to participate in a joint research initiative only after the priest pointed out
a flyer in the New York office of IBM that said, “The difficult we do right away,
the impossible takes a little longer.”2

Over the next thirty years, IBM and Busa created the Index Thomisticus project,
the world’s first sizable machine-readable corpus, containing, among an array of
other related texts, an index verborum of all 118 works of Aquinas, totaling ap-
proximately 11 million words.3 The project required an administrative and orga-
nizational staff that was unprecedented for a humanities research initiative at that
time, as Aquinas’s entire oeuvre had to be digitized onto punch cards (and later
1 For an excellent in memoriam on the occasion of the centenary of his birth see Marco Passarotti,
“One Hundred Years Ago: In Memory of Father Roberto Busa SJ,” Proceedings of the Third Work-
shop on Annotation of Corpora for Research in the Humanities (ACRH-3), ed. Francesco Mambrini,
Marco Passarotti, and Caroline Sporleder (Sofia, 2013), 15–24.

2 Passarotti, “One Hundred Years Ago,” 17.
3 The corpus can now be consulted online, http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/it/.

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S2 The Digital Middle Ages
magnetic tapes), which were the primary data carriers in use in the middle of the
twentieth century. Over the years, Busa would hire large numbers of young, local,
female typists for this specialized task (see cover of this issue).

Once, I was told by father Busa that he was used to choosing young women for punching
cards on purpose, because they were more careful than men. Further, he chose women who
did not know Latin, because the quality of their work was higher than that of those who
knew it (the latter felt more secure while typing the texts of Thomas Aquinas and, so, less
careful). These women were working on the Index Thomisticus, punching the texts on
cards provided by IBM. Busa had created a kind of “school for punching cards” in Gal-
larate. That work experience gave these women a professionally transferable and docu-
mented skill attested to by Father Busa himself.4

In recent years, these aspects of the Index Thomisticus project have become the
subject of research projects in the fields of oral history and gender studies, and the
index helps us to realize that women played a foundational role in the early days of
computer science and digital medieval studies.5

The open-minded priest never saw a conflict between the aims of his work and
his religious calling, seeing the computer “as the son of man, and therefore grand-
son of God.”6 Busa praised both the speed and the enhanced accuracy of computer
analyses. Today, one of the most esteemed awards in the field of digital humanities
is named after the Italian Jesuit: the triennial Roberto Busa Prize issued by the Al-
liance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO). Busa himself was the first
recipient of the award in 1998 and he remained an active contributor in the com-
munity until his death.
Digital Humanities and Medievalists

In the decades following the onset of the Index Thomisticus project, medievalists
were often early adopters of the digital, and continue to play an important role in the
development of a broader field, which came to be called digital humanities.7 This
field took other forms and names during its emergence and subsequent develop-
ment: humanities computing, humanist informatics, literary and linguistic comput-
ing, digital resources in the humanities, eHumanities, and others. These compet-
ing alternatives, among which “humanities computing” had long been dominant,
have only recently made place for the newly canonical term “digital humanities,”
which today is rarely contested.8 “Digital humanities” is generally meant to refer
4 Quoted in Melissa Terras’s “For Ada Lovelace Day—Father Busa’s Female Punch Card Opera-
tives” (blog), 15 October 2013, http://melissaterras.blogspot.be/2013/10/for-ada-lovelace-day-father
-busas.html.

5 See, for example, Julianne Nyhan and Andrew Flynn, Computation and the Humanities: Towards
an Oral History of Digital Humanities, Springer Series on Cultural Computing (Cham, 2016), https://
link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-20170-2.

6 Passarotti, “One Hundred Years Ago,” 20.
7 John Unsworth, “Medievalists as Early Adopters of Information Technology,” Digital Medievalist

7 (2011), https://journal.digitalmedievalist.org/articles/10.16995/dm.34/.
8 According to Kirschenbaum, the rise of the term “digital humanities” can be traced to “a set of

surprisingly specific circumstances”: (1) the publication of the 2006 Blackwell Companion to Digital
Humanities, (2) the inauguration of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), (3) the

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http://melissaterras.blogspot.be/2013/10/for-ada-lovelace-day-father-busas.html
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-20170-2
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-20170-2
https://journal.digitalmedievalist.org/articles/10.16995/dm.34/
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The Digital Middle Ages S3
to a broader field than “humanities computing.” Whereas the latter is restricted to the
application of computers in humanities scholarship and had narrower technical
goals, the former also incorporates a “humanities of the digital,” including the study
(potentially via traditional means) of digitally created sources, such as art and litera-
ture.9 DH is therefore profoundly multidisciplinary and attracts contributions from
scholars and scientists both within and outside the humanities and the humanistic so-
cial sciences.10

Digital humanists have taken care to define themselves in an inclusive rather
than exclusive manner. As a result, the term “digital humanities” connotes a greater
sense of integration than the diversity of approaches that are sheltered within the
“big tent” of DH and that are also reflected in the contents of this supplement.11

Thus, while the definition of DH has been the subject of dedicated anthologies,12

countless panel discussions, and even entire websites (http://whatisdigitalhumanities
.com), a better question may be whether there still exist nondigital humanists today,
sincemostscholarsatleasttosomeextentrelyoncomputationalaids,howeverbasic,
such as online search engines or word processors. Even the “original” objects of our
research are most often mediated by the printed or online text or the slide or digital
image.13 The difference between the digital humanities and their less digital counter-
part has become more a matter of degree than of kind.

It is clear that the digital humanities (and within it, digital medieval studies) are a
practice-oriented community. It may be that it is a pragmatic methodological aware-
ness that ties this community together, although theoretical self-reflection and meta-
analysis have nonetheless become more prominent recently.14 A number of theo-
rists, including Willard McCarthy, recipient of the 2013 Busa award, and John
Unsworth, have pointed to the necessary disjunction between the “object studied
9 Alan Liu, “The Meaning of Digital Humanities,” PMLA 128 (2013): 409–23.
10 This multidisciplinary nature is treated as central in most general-purpose introductions to digital

humanities, including A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and
John Unsworth (Oxford, 2004); and Digital_Humanities, ed. Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter
Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp (Cambridge, MA, 2012).

11 On the “big tent” discussion, see Matthew Jockers and Glen Worthey, “Introduction: Welcome
to the Big Tent,” in Digital Humanities 2011, ed. Alliance of Digitial Humanities Organizations (Stan-
ford, 2011), vi–vii. Geoffrey Rockwell humorously noted, “Having wandered in the wilderness that
was humanities computing since the late 1980s I find it ironic to be part of something that is suddenly
‘popular’ or perceived to be exclusive when for so many years we shared a rhetoric of exclusion.” See
the anthologized reprint, Geoffrey Rockwell, “Inclusion in the Digital Humanities,” in Terras, Nyhan,
and Vanhoutte, Defining Digital Humanities, 247–53, at 248.

12 Consult Terras, Nyhan, and Vanhoutte, Defining Digital Humanities.
13 See, for example, Matthew Battles and Michael Maizels, “Collections and/of Art and the Art Mu-

seum in the DH Mode,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, ed. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren
F. Klein (Minneapolis, 2016), 325–44.

14 The issue of “theory” in DH has been the subject of the first volume of the “Conversations” sec-
tion in the online Journal of Digital Humanities in winter 2011 (http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org
/1-1), in which a series of more spontaneous writings (e.g., from the blogosphere) about the topic have
been collected.

inauguration of the NEH’s Digital Humanities program. See Matthew Kirschenbaum, “What is Digital
Humanites and What’s It Doing in English Departments?,” in Defining Digital Humanities: A Reader, ed.
Melissa Terras, Julianne Nyhan, and Edward Vanhoutte (Farnham, 2013), 247–53, at 197–98 in particu-
lar.

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S4 The Digital Middle Ages
and the representation of that object in digital analysis.”15 McCarthy has argued
that the concept of “modeling” is a central characteristic of the digital humanities.16

By a model, he means “a representation of something for purposes of study, or a de-
sign for realizing something new.” Following Clifford Geertz, he distinguishes be-
tween models of things (for example, a grammar; a geographical map) and models
for things (for example, an architectural plan). Depending on disciplinary traditions,
scientific models are known under various names (representation, diagram, map,
simulation, and so on). What such models typically have in common is that they offer
a condensed, often simplified representation of things. Therefore, models are more
easily manipulated than the things they represent, which allows for experimentation.

In McCarthy’s view, “modeling,” the heuristic process in which models are con-
structed and manipulated, is central to the digital humanities. Of course, models
and modeling practices have long existed in humanities scholarship: the critical ap-
paratus in printed editions of medieval works is but one classic example of a well-
known edition model, which attempts to represent in condensed fashion the com-
plex phenomenon of a medieval text tradition. What sets the digital humanities
apart is an increased awareness of, and explicit interest in, modeling strategies,
as a consequence of the field’s intense interaction with computers. But computers
can process only fully explicit and consistent models, which means that if com-
puters are to analyze humanities data, our assumptions must be fully explicit and
consistent. The need for explicitness and consistency can be alienating for scholars
in humanities fields where the exceptional is often embraced. Scholars from post-
structuralist paradigms might also mistake the need for explicitness for scientific
positivism.
Digital Medieval Studies

Models and modeling provide a framework for presenting ongoing work in the
field of medieval studies and for explaining the ways in which much of this work
might deviate from what went before. First, much new groundwork is being done
in digital medieval studies. High-resolution electronic manuscript facsimiles are
produced in large quantities by heritage institutions in the GLAM (galleries, librar-
ies, archives, and museums) sector around the globe. The British Library Digitised
Manuscripts link and the Cathedral Library of Cologne (the Codices Electronici Ec-
clesiae Coloniensis) are two good examples.17 In the future, initiatives like the IIIF
(International Image Interoperability Framework) can be expected to enhance our
capacity to inspect and compare primary sources on a scale—and with an immedi-
acy—that would have been unimaginable for earlier generations of scholars. (We
should remember that some libraries do not even allow visitors to inspect multiple
physical items at the same time!) Institutions such as the Schoenberg Institute for
Manuscript Studies lead the way in this respect, with its visionary director Will Noel
15 See Julia Flanders and Fotis Jannidis, “Data Modelling,” in Schreibman, Siemens, and Unsworth,
Companion to Digital Humanities, 229–37.

16 These views have been summarized in Willard McCarthy, “Modeling: A Study in Words and
Meaning,” in Schreibman, Siemens, and Unsworth, Companion to Digital Humanities, 254–70.

17 http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/ and http://www.ceec.uni-koeln.de/.

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The Digital Middle Ages S5
being honored as a White House Champion of Change in 2013 for his commitment
to open science.18

Excellent examples of enriched digital libraries include the Online Froissart
(where high-resolution facsimiles often are accompanied by transcriptions and his-
torical information)19 or Monasterium.net, a virtual archive that offers centralized
access to over five hundred thousand primary diplomatic sources, such as charters,
from more than one hundred European archives.20 Equally representative is the da-
tabase and interface supporting the DigiPal project, which won the Medieval Acad-
emy’s first Digital Humanities Prize in the spring of 2017 (see the contribution to
this supplement about this platform for the paleographic study of English manu-
scripts by the project’s principal investigator, Peter A. Stokes).

Modeling choices present themselves at even the most basic research steps. With
basic facsimile creation, for example, critical modeling choices must take into con-
sideration bandwidth and memory limitations, which impose practical limits about
the resolution at which manuscripts can be photographed, stored, and distributed.
Starting from what resolution does a photograph offer a reliable representation of
the immediate source? Can we reasonably expect that some users will ever need re-
productions at 3,000 DPI or more? Johanna Drucker has therefore correctly stressed
that what we might regard as raw data (“given”) in the humanities are already the
product of some form of modeling, however modest;21 and she proposes that we use
the term capta (“taken”) to reflect the constructed nature of such data. Metadata
yield similar concerns, since many collections are currently digitized at a more rapid
pace than the GLAM institutions can manually annotate with metadata. Again, dif-
ficult choices have to be made: how can we responsibly (re)publish digital files for
which no, incomplete, or only outdated metadata is available? Should we allow
users from across the globe to crowdsource annotations for these newly digitized ob-
jects, or should this remain the domain of trained experts? Authority is a complex
issue in this respect and presently under intense renegotiation. Much effort goes into
federating access to heterogeneous data streams through the creation of informa-
tion repositories that collect linked information. Descriptive metadata standards,
such as Dublin Core or the Getty vocabularies, play an important role in this.22 The
contribution by Toby Burrows in this supplement sheds new light on how struc-
tured metadata can be leveraged in the field of manuscript studies.

Digital scholarly editing is one of the major stakeholders in the digital humanities
community, and much of the activity in this area revolves around the Text Encoding
Initiative (TEI, http://www.tei.org).23 The TEI defines an influential set of guidelines
for enriching texts with both interpretative and descriptive annotations using a
18 http://dla.library.upenn.edu/dla/schoenberg/index.html.
19 Peter Ainsworth and Godfried Croenen, ed., The Online Froissart, Version 1.5 (Sheffield, 2013),

http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/onlinefroissart.
20 http://monasterium.net/mom/home.
21 Johanna Drucker, “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 5

(2011), http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/1/000091/000091.html.
22 Seth Van Hooland and Ruben Verborgh, Linked Data for Libraries, Archives and Museums: How

to Clean, Link, and Publish your Metadata (London, 2014).
23 Elena Pierazzo, Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories, Models and Methods (Farnham, 2015).

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https://doi.org/10.1086/693968
https://doi.org/10.1086/693438
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http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/onlinefroissart
http://monasterium.net/mom/home
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S6 The Digital Middle Ages
markup language called XML. The contribution by Franz Fischer offers a broad
survey of the sort of digital editions and archives that currently live on the web.24

Optical character recognition (OCR) has allowed us to turn (scans of) existing edi-
tions into machine-readable and searchable texts, which often then serve as the basis
for new digital editions. The Electronic Beowulf project (http://ebeowulf.uky.edu) is
an early seminal project that allowed greater access to an important medieval text.
Beowulf is preserved in a single eleventh-century manuscript, which was damaged
by fire in 1731. Transcriptions made in the late eighteenth century show that many
letters then visible along the charred edges were subsequently lost. In 1845, each leaf
was mounted into a paper frame. Scholarly discussion of the date, provenance, and
creation of the poem continue around the world, and researchers regularly require
access to the manuscript. Digitization of the entire manuscript provides a solution
to problems of access and conservation. Immense corpora are today available to
medieval linguists; well-known examples from the Anglo-Saxon world include the
Linguistic Atlas of Early Medieval English (c. 650,000 words) or York-Toronto-
Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (c. 1.4 million words), and resources
on this scale have allowed scholars to verify long-standing questions in medieval
studies using quantitative means.25 The contributions by Maxim Romanov, Jeroen
De Gussem, and David JosephWrisley in this supplement illustrate the sort of macro-
analyses that large corpora enable.

Although much progress has been made on the level of OCR, the computational
study and semiautomated transcription of handwritten materials remains a much
more elusive application. Mike Kestemont, Vincent Christlein, and Dominique Stutz-
mann contribute an article to this supplement where the reader is introduced to the
field of computer vision and its considerable potential for the study of medieval
script. Many other interesting applications of digital script analysis have appeared
in recent years, such as automatic writer identification for medieval documents.26

Surely, we can expect much more progress in field of visual analyses for DH in
the coming years.

In her history of humanities computing, Susan Hockey notes that the earliest
work in the field of DH was strongly biased towards text.27 For medievalists this is
especially limiting, given the importance of manuscripts—including their illumina-
tions or initials—in medieval culture. When compared to, for example, image or au-
dio files, it is clear that plain text files come with much more relaxed computational
demands in terms of storage, user interfaces, and processing power. This helps ex-
24 Also see Greta Franzini, Melissa Terras, and Simon Mahony, “A Catalogue of Digital Editions,”
in Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories and Practices, ed. Elena Pierazzo and Matthew James Driscoll
(Cambridge, UK, 2016).

25 A relevant example is Jacob Thaisen, “Initial Position in the Middle English Verse Line,” English
Studies 95 (2014): 500–13. In this paper, Thaisen uses statistical language modeling to show that the
beginning (and, to a lesser extent, the ending) of Middle English verse lines are relatively more stable in
the transmission of texts.

26 For example, for Chaucer manuscripts, Marius Bulacu and Lambert Schomaker, “Automatic
Handwriting Identification on Medieval Documents,” in Proceedings of the 14th International Confer-
ence on Image Analysis and Processing (Modena, 2007), 279–84.

27 Susan Hockey, “A History of Humanities Computing,” in Schreibman, Siemens, and Unsworth,
Companion to Digital Humanities, 3–19.

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The Digital Middle Ages S7
plain why much of the early work has, for example, been lexicographic in nature.
Word-level analyses, such as the Index Thomisticus, lent themselves well to computer-
based indexing and quantification. Hockey gives special mention to medievalists like
Roy Wisbey, who produced an index to Early Middle High German literature as
early as the 1960s. But Hockey also emphasizes the serious limitations of both hard-
ware and software (in regard to memory) with which early adopters struggled. (It
is easy to forget that modern smartphones come with larger amounts of computer
memory than the onboard computer of the Apollo 11 mission in 1969.) Even what
are now regarded as relatively trivial issues, such as displaying basic medieval glyphs
on a computer screen for the common Germanic characters thorn (þ) and eth (ð),
remained a challenge until deep into the twentieth century. Today the Unicode Stan-
dard (http://unicode.org) seeks to provide support in operating systems and applica-
tions for all human writing systems, including those of the Middle Ages, and the Me-
dieval Unicode Font Initiative (MUFI, http://folk.uib.no/hnooh/mufi/) promotes a
microstandardization of the Unicode Private Use Area (PUA) specifically for West-
ern medieval writing.

Stemmatology is another typically medievalist domain in which we find early
adopters of computational methods. Collation software was able to align variant
manuscript readings, which could serve as the input to the machine-assisted identi-
fication of a stemma codicum. Peter Robinson’s Collate software was used to man-
age the variants in the Canterbury Tales Project and elsewhere and has now been
succeeded by the open-source CollateX (http://collatex.net) for textual collation.
An especially sophisticated exploration of machine-assisted stemmatology was Car-
oline Macé’s Tree of Texts project at KU Leuven (Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven),
which was the starting point for Tara Andrews’s StemmaWeb Project: Tools and
Techniques for Empirical Stemmatology (https://stemmaweb.net/).28

Within the domain of text analysis, computational stylistics (or “stylometry”)
also played an early role in the development of digital humanities, and the article
by Jeroen De Gussem in this supplement describes an application of this technol-
ogy to twelfth-century Latin literature. Stylistic phenomena belong to the realm of
tangible poetics and have the advantage of being more amenable to quantification
than hermeneutical features, that is, those relating to interpretation. This has led to
advances in authorship attribution of medieval texts, such as the many medieval ro-
mances that (allegedly) resulted from collaborative forms of authorship. Results in-
clude the early study by John R. Allen on the authenticity of the Baligant episode in
the Chanson de Roland29 and the more recent investigation of the Middle Dutch
Walewein by Karina van Dalen-Oskam and Joris van Zundert, which sheds new
light on the complex interferences between authorial and scribal aspects of medieval
texts.30 Likewise, the well-known dual authorship of the Roman de la Rose is now
28 Tara L. Andrews and Caroline Macé, “Beyond the Tree of Texts: Building an Empirical Model of
Scribal Variation through Graph Analysis of Texts and Stemmata,” Digital Scholarship in the Human-
ities 28 (2013): 504–21.

29 John R. Allen, “On the Authenticity of the Baligant Episode in the Chanson de Roland,” in Com-
puters in the Humanities, ed. John L. Mitchell (Edinburgh, 1974): 65–72.

30 Karina van Dalen-Oskam and Joris van Zundert, “Delta for Middle Dutch: Author and Copyist
Distinction in Walewein,” Literary and Linguistic Computing 22 (2007): 345–62.

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S8 The Digital Middle Ages
often used as a generic test case in the development of text analysis software.31 In
more focused contributions, the results of stylistic analyses have been linked to is-
sues involving gender criticism.32 Metrical analyses, such as the work by Friedrich
Dimpel on Middle High German, are another domain where computational meth-
ods can be expected to break ground.33
Visualizations, Sound, and 3D Modeling

Although historically the digital humanities have been dominated by text-oriented
paradigms, the community is increasingly engaging with multimodal research ob-
jects and methods.34
The Visual Turn

DH has adopted visualizations in many areas of research. Graphs, charts, dia-
grams, and other visual interpretations were common in pre-DH scholarship, but
with DH has come the interest and ability to engage with large data sets and to rep-
resent them visually—see, for example, the varied visualizations in Maxim
Romanov’s contribution to this supplement.35 Network visualizations are also fre-
quently used, not only for textual exploration (De Gussem’s paper), but also for geo-
graphic analyses, for instance in the papers by Romanov and Toby Burrows.36 An-
other recent article points to the potential for visual analysis to produce results in the
arena of image-feature analysis, taxonomy building, and clustering methods for me-
dieval manuscripts;37 see also Kestemont, Christlein, and Stuzmann’s article on com-
putational approaches to identifying scripts in this supplement. A number of recent
projects have invested effort in virtual recreations of medieval libraries at Chartres,
Lorsch, and elsewhere.38 Manuscriptlink, a new digital humanities initiative, aims to
reconstruct “virtual” medieval libraries by collaborating with collections around the
31 Maciej Eder, Jan Rybicki, and Mike Kestemont, “Stylometry with R: A Package for Computa-
tional Text Analysis,” R Journal 8 (2016): 107–21.

32 Examples include Jan Ziolkowski, “Lost and Not Yet Found: Heloise, Abelard and the Epistolae
duorum amantium,” Journal of Medieval Latin 14 (2004): 171–202; Mike Kestemont, Sara Moens,
and Jeroen Deploige, “Collaborative Authorship in the Twelfth Century: A Stylometric Study of Hil-
degard of Bingen and Guibert of Gembloux,” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 30 (2015): 199–
224.

33 Friedrich M. Dimpel, Computergestützte textstatistische Untersuchungen an mittelhochdeutschen
Texten (Tübingen, 2004).

34 Susan Hockey, “History of Humanities Computing.”
35 S. Jänicke, G. Franzini, C. Faisal, and G. Scheuermann, “Visual Text Analysis in Digital Human-

ities,” Computer Graphics Forum 35 (2016), doi:10.1111/cgf.12873.
36 David Hadbawnick, “The Framing Narrative and the Host: Two Kinds of Anxiety in the Canter-

bury Tales,” in Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales, http://www.opencanterburytales
.com/open-review-home/the-framing-narrative-and-the-host/.

37 DominiqueStutzmann,“ClusteringofMedievalScriptsthroughComputerImageAnalysis:Towards
an Evaluation Protocol,” Digital Medievalist 10 (2015), https://journal.digitalmedievalist.org/articles/10
.16995/dm.61/.

38 For Chartres, http://www.biblissima-condorcet.fr/fr/a-new-life-medieval-libraries-chartres; for Lorsch,
https://www.uni-heidelberg.de/presse/news2012/pm20120323_lorsch_en.html.

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https://doi.org/10.1086/693970
https://doi.org/10.1086/693970
https://doi.org/10.1086/694112
http://www.opencanterburytales.com/open-review-home/the-framing-narrative-and-the-host/
http://www.opencanterburytales.com/open-review-home/the-framing-narrative-and-the-host/
https://journal.digitalmedievalist.org/articles/10.16995/dm.61/
https://journal.digitalmedievalist.org/articles/10.16995/dm.61/
http://www.biblissima-condorcet.fr/fr/a-new-life-medieval-libraries-chartres
https://www.uni-heidelberg.de/presse/news2012/pm20120323_lorsch_en.html
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showLinks?doi=10.1086%2F694236&crossref=10.1484%2FJ.JML.2.304220&citationId=p_n_39
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showLinks?doi=10.1086%2F694236&crossref=10.1093%2Fllc%2Ffqt063&citationId=p_n_40


The Digital Middle Ages S9
world to reaggregate previously lost medieval volumes.39 Burrows’s contribution to
the present supplement tackles related issues.
The Spatial Turn

The strategic use of digital mapping is an offshoot of visualization, one that is of-
ten directed toward graphic analysis of location, ownership, and distribution within
geographic boundaries. Data sets providing greater access to larger spatial data sets
have enhanced research in this area. For example, Harvard’s Digital Atlas of Ro-
man and Medieval Civilizations (DARMC) app provides GIS maps and geodata-
bases that are openly available and searchable online.40 The Digitized Medieval
Manuscripts app (DMMapp) provides original map resources online,41 while the Dig-
ital Mappaemundi allows for searching between medieval maps and textual sources.42

Geographic Information System (GIS) technologies provide ways to map and
compare spatial data.43 For example, GIS has been used to investigate the history of
medieval rural and urban landscapes. City Witness (http://www.medievalswansea
.ac.uk/), a multidisciplinary research project, has created an online interactive map
of Swansea, c. 1300, showing its principal topographical and landscape features,
alongside an electronic edition of fourteenth-century texts. Together the map and
texts provide multiple vantage points on the town and the significations attached
to locations within the town by various social and ethnic groups (including Anglo-
Norman and Welsh, lay and religious, male and female). The focus of the Mapping
Medieval Chester project (http://www.medievalchester.ac.uk/index.html) is the iden-
tities that Chester’s inhabitants formed between c. 1200 and 1500. Like City Wit-
ness, the project integrates geographical and literary mappings of the medieval city
using cartographic and textual sources in order to understand how urban landscapes
were interpreted and navigated by local inhabitants.

GIS has also been used to “map” individual objects like the manuscript page.
Mapping texts through GIS is at the heart of David Wrisley’s contribution to the
supplement; and the Lancelot-Graal project (http://www.lancelot-project.pitt.edu
/lancelot-project.html), featured in the article by Alison Stones in this supplement,
is one of the leaders in this adaptation of GIS. In the Gough map project (http://
www.goughmap.org/), GIS was used to analyze the relational representation of
space in medieval and contemporary maps, allowing us to understand that the
fourteenth-century map was designed to be functional and demonstrated a high de-
gree of spatial accuracy.44 Mapping of places within charters or even hagiographic
39 A description of the Manuscriptlink project is available on Vimeo (http://vimeo.com/98052555)
and YouTube (http://youtu.be/B9r7F0PAeYQ).

40 http://darmc.harvard.edu/.
41 http://digitizedmedievalmanuscripts.org/.
42 https://ihr.asu.edu/research/seed/digital-mappaemundi-resource-study-medieval-maps-and-geographic

-texts.
43 Ian Gregory, Christopher Donaldson, Patricia Murrieta-Flores, and Paul Rayson, “Geoparsing,

GIS, and Textual Analysis: Current Developments in Spatial Humanities Research,” International Jour-
nal of Humanities and Arts Computing 9 (2015): 1–14.

44 Christopher D. Lloyd and Keith Lilley, “Cartographic Veracity in Medieval Mapping: Analyzing
Geographical Variation in the Gough Map of Great Britain,” Annals of the Association of American
Geographers 99 (2009): 27–48.

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http://www.medievalswansea.ac.uk/
http://www.medievalswansea.ac.uk/
http://www.medievalchester.ac.uk/index.html
https://doi.org/10.1086/694300
http://www.lancelot-project.pitt.edu/lancelot-project.html
http://www.lancelot-project.pitt.edu/lancelot-project.html
https://doi.org/10.1086/693969
http://www.goughmap.org/
http://www.goughmap.org/
http://vimeo.com/98052555
http://youtu.be/B9r7F0PAeYQ
http://darmc.harvard.edu/
http://digitizedmedievalmanuscripts.org/
https://ihr.asu.edu/research/seed/digital-mappaemundi-resource-study-medieval-maps-and-geographic-texts
https://ihr.asu.edu/research/seed/digital-mappaemundi-resource-study-medieval-maps-and-geographic-texts
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showLinks?doi=10.1086%2F694236&crossref=10.3366%2Fijhac.2015.0135&citationId=p_n_50
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showLinks?doi=10.1086%2F694236&crossref=10.3366%2Fijhac.2015.0135&citationId=p_n_50
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showLinks?doi=10.1086%2F694236&crossref=10.1080%2F00045600802224638&citationId=p_n_51
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showLinks?doi=10.1086%2F694236&crossref=10.1080%2F00045600802224638&citationId=p_n_51


S10 The Digital Middle Ages
texts can allow for a deeper understanding of the construction of a sociopolitical
landscape. The mapping of the locations and types of miracles within the Life of
Sainte Foy of Conques provides evidence for the spatial extent of the monastery’s
influence and for differences within it.45
Three-Dimensional Reconstructions

Seminal three-dimensional reconstructions of past buildings and spaces have in-
cluded the reconstructions of the church at Cluny by the laboratory at Darmstadt
University;46 the Amiens Cathedral website directed by Stephen Murray at Colum-
bia University;47 and the MonArch website, with its three-dimensional reconstruc-
tions, time slider, and linked textual sources for Saint-Jean-des-Vignes, Soissons,
produced by Sheila Bonde and Clark Maines.48 See also the contribution by Sheila
Bonde, AlexisCoir, and ClarkMaines on the abbey of Ourscamp in the current sup-
plement. An ambitious recent project harnesses the results of archaeological survey
and historical sources to create a complete three-dimensional reconstruction of the
architecture of the entire medieval town of Montieri, Italy. This 3D reconstruction
has aided researchers in their analysis of the architecture and layout of the town
and will also make contributions to heritage and tourism.49
The Sonic Turn

Digital advances that allow us to recreate medieval manuscripts or to see three-
dimensional recreations of medieval structures have made important contributions
to the understanding of the medieval past. Having a full understanding of how
people experienced these objects and buildings carries this understanding still fur-
ther.

Sound studies have been strongly linked to heritage and conservation, often fo-
cusing on the capture of songs, music, and sounds of our cultural environment.50

For medievalists, the recreation of past music and soundscapes links these efforts
to the three-dimensional architectural reconstructions. One digital resource is pro-
vided by DIAMM (the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music) at Oxford Uni-
versity, which presents information on thousands of manuscripts, as well as nearly
fifteen thousand images and associated metadata. The online forum Sounding Out!
45 Faye Taylor, “Mapping Miracles: Early Medieval Hagiography and the Potential of GIS,” in His-
tory and GIS: Epistemologies, Considerations and Reflections, ed. Alexander von Lünen and Charles
Travis (Heidelberg, 2012), 111–25.

46 Manfred Koon and Horst Cramer, Cluny: Architektur als Vision (Heidelberg, 1993).
47 http://www.learn.columbia.edu/Mcahweb/Amiens.html.
48 http://monarch.brown.edu/monarch/index.html.
49 Daniele Ferdani and Giovanna Bianchi, “3D Reconstruction in Archaeological Analysis of Medi-

eval Settlements,” in Archaeology in the Digital Era, vol. 2, e-Papers from the 40th Annual Conference
of Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA), Southampton, UK, 26–29
March, 2012, ed. Philip Verhagen (Amsterdam, 2013), 156–64.

50 See Tanya Clement, “When Texts of Study Are Audio Files: Digital Tools for Sound Studies in
Digital Humanities,” in Schreibman, Siemens, and Unsworth, Companion to Digital Humanities, 348–
57.

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https://doi.org/10.1086/694169
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The Digital Middle Ages S11
provides space for publication, posts, discussion, and recordings.51 The Stanford
Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) is a multidisci-
plinary facility where digital technology is used as an artistic medium and research
tool.52 One recent recreation of the medieval soundscape for the cathedral of Santi-
ago da Compostela, led by Rafael Suárez from the Universidad de Sevilla, found
that the acoustic conditions for pilgrims in the nave were compromised, while the
acoustic conditions in the choir were ideal for both plainchant and polyphony.53

See also the contribution to this supplement by Bissera Pentcheva and Jonathan
Abel, which explores the acoustics of Hagia Sophia; and the article by Spyridon
Antonopoulos, Sharon Gerstel, Chris Kyriakakis, Konstantinos T. Raptis, and James
Donahue describing the acoustic aspects of Byzantine churches in Thessaloniki.
Immersive Environments and Heritage

The ability to make a virtual visit to medieval sites is one offshoot of digital work
with a heritage application, and Google and UNESCO have collaborated to offer
virtual visits to several important locations.54 IIVE (Interactive Immersive Virtual
Environments) provide an interactive engagement for the “viewer” as part of a mu-
seum or heritage display. Second Life and its open-access counterpart, OpenSim-
ulator; Myo; GoogleGlass; and Oculus VP are all potential applications. These vir-
tual worlds, where users are represented by avatars, allow interaction between users
and the environment and are thus appropriate for simulating (past) environments
in real time. They may (though they do not always) include senses beyond the visual,
especially harnessing sound. One such site, focused on the cathedral of Saint Andrews
in Scotland, combines three-dimensional reconstruction of the cathedral buildings,
the movement of processions, music, and other sounds, experienced through an av-
atar.55 While brick and mortar museums are costly to build and maintain, and travel
to an archaeological site may not be practicable (especially after an excavation has
ceased), a simulated experience of a site visit can be created through digital technol-
ogy. Two archaeological projects from the Roman world, the Rome Reborn and
Portus projects, have provided these technologies for virtual visitors.56 One recent
medieval application has been realized for a tenth- to twelfth-century Muslim suburb
51 https://soundstudiesblog.com/2016/04/04/17060/.
52 https://ccrma.stanford.edu/about.
53 Rafael Suárez, Alicia Alonso, and Juan J. Sendra, “Intangible Cultural Heritage: The Sound of the

Romanesque Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela,” Journal of Cultural Heritage 16 (2014): 239–43,
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1296207414000788.

54 http://whc.unesco.org/en/news/570/.
55 S. Kennedy et al., “Exploring Canons and Cathedrals with Open Virtual Worlds: The Recreation of

St Andrews Cathedral, Saint Andrews Day, 1318,” Digital Heritage (2013), https://risweb.st-andrews
.ac.uk/portal/files/75971074/digitalheritage2013_submission_536.pdf.

56 Kimberly Dylla et al., “Rome Reborn 2.0: A Case Study of Virtual City Reconstruction Using Pro-
cedural Modeling Techniques,” in CAA 2009: Making History Interactive; 37th Proceedings of the
CAA Conference March 22–26, 2009, Williamsburg, Virginia (Oxford, 2010), 62–66; S. Keay et al.,
“The Role of Integrated Geophysical Survey Methods in the Assessment of Archaeological Landscapes:
The Case of Portus,” Archaeological Prospection 16 (2009): 154–66. On the use of Second Life in ar-
chaeology, see Luis Miguel Siquiera and Leonel Morgado, “Virtual Archaeology in Second Life and
Open Simulator,” Journal of Virtual Worlds Research 6 (2013): 1–16.

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https://doi.org/10.1086/693439
https://doi.org/10.1086/693378
https://doi.org/10.1086/693378
https://doi.org/10.1086/693378
https://soundstudiesblog.com/2016/04/04/17060/
https://ccrma.stanford.edu/about
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1296207414000788
http://whc.unesco.org/en/news/570/
https://risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk/portal/files/75971074/digitalheritage2013_submission_536.pdf
https://risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk/portal/files/75971074/digitalheritage2013_submission_536.pdf


S12 The Digital Middle Ages
of Sinhaya, outside Zaragoza. The visualization of Sinhaya was based on the archae-
ological evidence of excavations as well as archival material. Photorealistic lighting
algorithms were developed by Grupo de Informática Gráfica Avanzada (GIGA), and
the virtual animation can be viewed in a low-cost CAVE-like system.57
Open Medieval Studies

In the digital humanities, traditional print publication forms have not ceased to
exist, but they are often complemented and supported by electronic formats. Many
digital humanists are attracted by the low threshold and immediacy of electronic
communication platforms, so that scholarly communications increasingly happen
in less formal blog posts, comments sections, and online or micromessaging plat-
forms, such as Twitter. Many digital humanists are inspired by the open-science
movement, which advocates the widest possible electronic distribution via open-
access repositories and journals, not only of research results, but also of primary re-
search data (for example, editions) and any home-brewed software that enabled the
research. Some scholars even wonder whether it would not be desirable to open up
the entire research cycle to the wider public—which is still often the primary source
of humanistic scholarship—from funding proposal, to software development, to
peer review.

Such ambitious proposals are sometimes contrasted to more conventional schol-
arship in the humanities, where scholars are imagined as sitting alone and brooding
over their work for a prolonged period, until the research is finally perfected and
released in a format that will, they hope, last for ages. Such conventional longer-
term projects—typically undertaken by individuals instead of teams—are today
under pressure from digital humanists, who argue that more traditional forms of
scholarship and the associated publication culture lead to less sustainable research,
although the reverse is also true from some perspectives.

Creating and publishing a traditional print edition of medieval documents does
not easily allow future generations to refine this work and add layers of annotation
and analysis, especially if the original source data is not released with the print vol-
umes. With electronic publication, supplying the primary data also means that fu-
ture scholars will not need to go through a cumbersome and error-prone digitization
process. The use of version-management platforms, such as GitHub (http://github
.com), are helpful in this respect, because they allow scholars—and their peers—
to keep track of, comment on, and distinguish among versions of the work in real
time. Thus prepublication feedback can be taken into account by scholars, and mi-
nor postpublication corrections need not wait until the next print edition to be inte-
grated.

The ease with which digital scholarly work in medieval studies can be modified
over time makes it more fluid than print formats. Umberto Eco was but one among
many contemporary thinkers to link the instability of modern electronic resources
to the medieval transmission culture of texts. The internet is a young and still-fragile
57 Diego Gutierez et al., “Archaeological and Cultural Heritage: Bringing Life to an Unearthed Mus-
lim Suburb in an Immersive Environment,” Journal of Cultural Heritage 5 (2004): 63–74.

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The Digital Middle Ages S13
medium that struggles with the well-known phenomenon of “dead links” that nat-
urally compromises the citability of sources. The citability of both scholarship and
data sources is an obvious “teething issue” of DH and therefore an important con-
cern in many projects.58 And so is the durability: books are not copied and distrib-
uted as easily as digital files, but we have books that are still usable after centuries,
while computer files can become unreadable in a decade as operating systems, stor-
age formats, encodings, and application software go out of fashion. In many cases,
the fragility of a digital edition lies not only in the data, but also in the application
we use to interact with the data. For example, a digital concordance may have prac-
tical advantages over a paper one, but only as long as it is not locked into a hard-
ware or software environment that has gone out of fashion.

Intellectual property rights, economic costs, and privacy issues also stand in the
way of the naïve realization of the ambitious goal of a completely open medieval
studies.59 The entire Patrologia Latina, for instance, can today be found in digitized
versions online. While the quality of such freely available texts is generally lower—
they abound in OCR errors—than what can be found in established subscription
databases such as Brepols’s Library of Latin Texts (http://www.brepolis.net/), it is
an interesting, but also worrying, development that the mere “availability” of a par-
ticular text version is rapidly becoming a selection criterion that rivals the age-old
importance attached to the criterion of quality.60 Many digital humanities venues al-
ready require scholars to submit their source data together with their papers, which
is impossible in the case of copyrighted editions. Whereas for many applications in
data mining, the minute differences among editions of the same text will not matter
very much, it is frustrating that the high-quality materials produced by previous gen-
erations of scholars are sometimes severely underused in DH because of accessibil-
ity and “shareability” issues.

When it comes to the economic side, open-access journals, such as the Digital Me-
dievalist Journal (https://journal.digitalmedievalist.org/), are courageous initiatives
because they cannot count on a steady income flow in the form of subscription fees
to guarantee their future sustainability. Many open-access journals will in fact charge
the author a substantial “article processing charge” (APC), which raises concerns
about the financial independence of scholars without institutional backup, especially
retired scholars or those in alternative academic careers (#alt-ac). One major advan-
tage of traditional print journals is therefore that they are largely free of charge to
authors. The open-access community is currently working to overcome this chal-
lenge: national academies will probably take up new responsibilities, and initiatives
such as the Open Library of Humanities (https://www.openlibhums.org/)—which
aims to cover fully the APCs for the journals in their collections—can be expected
to play a more prominent role in the near future.
58 Jonathan Blaney and Judith Siefring, “A Culture of Non-citation: Assessing the Digital Impact of
British History Online and the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership,” Digital Hu-
manities Quarterly 11 (2017), http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/11/1/000282/000282.html.

59 Such issues lie at the heart of the current work by Walter Scholger, University of Graz.
60 This issue is, for instance, raised in David Bamman and David Smith, “Extracting Two Thousand

Years of Latin from a Million Book Library,” Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage 5 (2012):
2–13.

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S14 The Digital Middle Ages
All in all, copyright remains a largely unsettled matter in the humanities today
and, arguably, too few medievalists, digital and nondigital alike, are properly in-
formed about the various licensing possibilities. Open-access licenses, such as the
Creative Commons (CC), allow authors to enforce an attribution to the original cre-
ator of a work (e.g., CC-BY) or add restrictions with respect to the commercial us-
age of their work (e.g., CC-NC) or subsequent reuse (CC-SA, CC-ND). The fact that
this digital supplement to Speculum is published in open access, under a liberal li-
cense that encourages wide dissemination, reflects these concerns in the DH com-
munity. We are thankful to the University of Chicago Press and to the Medieval
Academy of America for their openness to this project as well as for their support.
A Panoramic Reading of SPECULUM

From a methodological perspective, it is vital that new approaches to medieval
culture not lose touch with traditional and more conventional scholarly methods.
Nevertheless, thought-provoking tensions have emerged between the digital and tra-
ditional humanities. In 2010, for example, Google collaborated with a large number
of scientists to publish an influential Science paper on the well-known Google Books
project.61 In this project, the California technology giant claims to have digitized
roughly 4 percent of all books ever printed—and the expansion of the data set is
still ongoing. Because this data set is easily searchable online,62 it offers a convenient
resource, which today is probably queried by scholars more often than they care to
admit. In this paper, Jean-Baptiste Michel et al. discuss an emerging research field
called “culturomics,” the study of high-throughput cultural data through lexical
analysis, and they focus on the diachronic analysis of word frequencies in English
books (1800–2000). Although their word-counting strategy was simple, their re-
search demonstrated that word usage in large corpora correlates with cultural devel-
opments. The relative frequency of the word “slavery,” for instance, peaked in their
data during the U.S. Civil War and later during the civil rights movement. In addition
to a large array of linguistic analyses, their word counts even demonstrated the active
censorship of Jewish artists, such as Marc Chagall, in Nazi Germany.

In December 2010, the paper’s two lead authors presented their thought-
provoking work at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. The
association’s President, Anthony Grafton, would later offer a fascinating account of
this event: “For all their panache—and all the fun their tool permits—Lieberman-
Aiden and Michel also inspired a little worry, as well as some hard thinking about
the status of our discipline.”63 Grafton regretted that the paper’s list of authors,
though sizable, did not include a single historian, and that this lack of historical ex-
pertise occasionally showed in their presentation. He stated, in disappointment,
“[A]pparently, historians have not established, in the eyes of many of their col-
leagues in the natural sciences, that they possess expert knowledge that might be valu-
61 Jean-Baptiste Michel et al., “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books,”
Science 331 (2011): 176–82.

62 https://books.google.com/ and https://books.google.com/ngrams.
63 https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/march-2011

/loneliness-and-freedom.

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The Digital Middle Ages S15
able, or even crucial.” Lieberman-Aiden and Michel would later counter this view,
stressing that they did receive input from academic historians, although their names
were not included in the final author list.64 They stated that, “while ‘expert knowl-
edge’ is important, shared paradigms, a shared language, and common intellectual
values are a big part of what makes a successful team come together. This suggests
that history departments have to grapple with several emerging responsibilities: to
encourage familiarity with quantitative methods, with computational techniques,
and—as you so eloquently wrote—with large-scale collaboration.”65

The research initiative behind the culturomics paper is a typical instantiation of
what is today commonly called “distant reading” in the digital humanities, a loosely
defined notion seminally introduced by Franco Moretti in a momentous series of es-
says.66 At present, distant reading (sometimes also known as macroanalysis, algo-
rithmic criticism, panoramic reading, and other terms) plays a role in a variety of
approaches to text analysis in the humanities where large bodies of texts are queried
and analyzed using a combination of techniques from language technology, infor-
mation retrieval, and data science.67 Common to all these approaches is the strategy
that an important part of the conventional reading process is in fact deliberately
outsourced to a machine; human intervention is largely postponed to the interpreta-
tion of the simplified model that the algorithms yield. As Moretti noted, the reader’s
distance from the original text as such becomes a function of the increased scope of
the reading effort.

Grafton’s mixture of fascination and worry is probably representative of the at-
titude that many scholars today entertain towards such forms of distant reading.
The fact that a crucial part of the reading process is outsourced to a machine calls
into question the quality of the textual model that state-of-the-art computational
methods can deliver. As a way of interrogating these issues, it will be illustrative to
discuss a small, yet representative and critical, distant-reading exercise.68 For this,
the University of Chicago Press granted us access to a digital version of the Speculum
archive covering the entire seventy-year period between the journal’s inaugural issue
in 1926 and December 2016. As in any sizable corpus nowadays, the quality of the
digital text varies enormously: for the part up to volume 84, we have to work from the
uncorrected output of optical character recognition, whereas we can work with
clean, born-digital data from volume 85 onwards.

As can be gleaned from the bar plot on Fig. 1, where the token counts have been
aggregated on a yearly basis, the full data set amounts to over 65 million tokens
64 http://www.culturomics.org/Resources/faq/thoughts-clarifications-on-grafton-s-loneliness-and
-freedom.

65 Ibid.
66 For example, Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (2000): 54–

68. These essays were later brought together and commented on in Franco Moretti, Distant Reading
(London, 2013).

67 Relevant references for these terms include Matthew Jockers, Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and
Literary History (Lincoln, 2013); Stephen Ramsay, Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Crit-
icism (Lincoln, 2011); Thomas Crombez, “Het onbehagen in de digitale cultuur: De opkomst van Dig-
ital Humanities,” Meta: Het Vlaamse tijdschrift voor bibliotheek en archief 4 (2013): 8–13.

68 All software used for this exercise is made available on https://github.com/mikekestemont
/panorama.

Speculum 92/S1 (October 2017)

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http://www.culturomics.org/Resources/faq/thoughts-clarifications-on-grafton-s-loneliness-and-freedom
http://www.culturomics.org/Resources/faq/thoughts-clarifications-on-grafton-s-loneliness-and-freedom
https://github.com/mikekestemont/panorama
https://github.com/mikekestemont/panorama


S16 The Digital Middle Ages
(that is, words, but also punctuation marks and other symbols), although the num-
bers show severe fluctuations over the individual years. Nevertheless, the impres-
sive size of the archive raises the intriguing question whether valuable patterns could
be extracted from this data, which might yield a “panoramic view” of the jour-
nal’s contents and thematic biases as well as its development throughout the years.
Which medieval authors and texts rank highest, for instance, in Speculum’s popu-
larity hit list; and which scholarly approaches have grown into or out of fashion
over the years? For this effort, we made use of a range of computational techniques,
which are representative of the state of the art in textual modeling strategies in the
digital humanities nowadays. Hopefully, this array of methods will allow us to
showcase, in a nontechnical language, the opportunities and, perhaps more impor-
tantly, the challenges that arise from such a “vanilla” application of distant reading.

One common preprocessing step in textual analysis is to apply a so-called tagger
to the material, an established procedure in natural language processing. In this
exercise, we segmented the original raw stream of characters in a Speculum article
intomeaningfultokenunits—forexample,clitic“don’t”willberestoredto“do”and
“n’t”.69 We applied the Stanford CoreNLP software suite to the archive, which of-
fers a host of basic procedures and which is maintained by one of the leading re-
Fig. 1. Word counts for the data in the Speculum archive, aggregated at the year level
(1926–2016).
69 For an introduction to basic methods in NLP, consult, for instance, Dan Jurafsky and James Mar-
tin, Speech and Language Processing, 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, 2009).

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The Digital Middle Ages S17
search groups in the field of language technology.70 Above, we show an example in
Table 1 for the suite’s output for a randomly selected sentence from a 1955 Specu-
lum contribution. As can be seen in this example, the software will attempt to deter-
mine for each token its lemma (or uninflected dictionary headword; that is, past
took becomes take), its part of speech (title, as it is used in this example, is an NN,
or singular noun) and an indication of whether the token is a named entity (1066 is
a date, but Raimond is categorized as a person). The software makes these decisions
on the basis of a statistical assessment of a token’s appearance (for example, is the
token capitalized?) and the lexical context in which it appears (for example, is the
token preceded by an adjective?).

Because of the ambiguous nature of human language, such an automatic enrich-
ment of the material will naturally yield many errors, especially in the case of the
OCR-entered data with its unstable spellings, but it nevertheless already offers many
possibilities for creatively querying the corpus. One interesting question might be
which medieval dates have been most frequently mentioned in Speculum over the
years. For this, we traced the cumulative frequency of all numbers in the data set that
had been marked as a date in the named entity column and that fell in the “medieval”
range of 500–1500. In the scatter plot in Fig. 2, we plot the twenty-five dates with the
highest cumulative frequency in the corpus as a function of their coefficient of var-
iation over the documents in the corpus, to keep track of their dispersion over the
material.

The higher up in the plot a date can be found, the more frequent the date is; the
more leftwards it is positioned (and the larger its font size), the better is it distributed
over the individual documents in the corpus. The top of the list is clearly dominated
70 Chr
Proceed
Demons

All us
Table 1
An Example of a Sentence (Randomly Drawn from a 1955 Speculum Issue)

as Tagged by the Stanford CoreNLP suite

Index Token Lemma Part of speech Named entity

1 This this DT O
2 Raimond raimond NN PERSON
3 took take VBD O
4 the the DT O
5 title title NN O
6 of of IN O
7 Baron Baron NNP PERSON
8 de de IN PERSON
9 Saint-Gilles Saint-Gilles NNP PERSON
10 in in IN O
11 1066 1066 CD DATE
12 . . . O
istopher Ma
ings of the 5
trations (Ba

Thi
e subject to U
nning et al., “The
2nd Annual Meet
ltimore, 2014), 55–

s content downloade
niversity of Chicag
Stanford CoreNLP
ing of the Associat
60.

d from 146.175.012.
o Press Terms and C
Natural Language
ion for Computatio

Speculum 92

154 on October 17, 20
onditions (http://www
Processing Toolkit,” in
nal Linguistics: System

/S1 (October 2017)

17 02:47:26 AM
.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).



F

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.
ig. 2. Scatter plot showing the most commonly mentioned years (500–1500) in Speculum
u/t-and-c).



The Digital Middle Ages S19
by round dates (1300, 1200, 1000). This reflects the fact that medievalists have gen-
erally preferred to think along conventional decennial, centennial, and millennial
boundaries. Nevertheless, it is tempting to link a number of dates higher up in this
hit list to well-known events in the medieval period, including 1066 (the Battle of
Hastings) or 1204 (the sacking of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade). For an
iconic date such as 1430, it is interesting that one might be tempted to link it to sev-
eral events, which helps explain its prominence: one can think of the siege of Com-
piègne and Joan of Arc’s capture, but also Philip the Good’s marriage and the in-
stallment of the Order of the Golden Fleece. Interestingly, the years 1000 and 1348
(outbreak of the Black Plague) have a lower dispersion than their elevated frequency
might make us suspect.

Such corpus-level aggregations of frequencies are an interesting toy to help us
characterize medieval studies from a panoramic viewpoint, but the tagging of our
material also allows us to query Speculum in a more specific fashion. For the line
charts in Figs. 3a–b, for instance, we have calculated the relative frequency of all
nouns (whether plural or singular) in the material throughout the period 1926–
2016. Using a common statistical test (Kendall’s tau) we have queried the results
for the five nouns that have shown the steadiest decrease (a) or increase (b) in us-
age throughout Speculum’s history. The results in Fig. 3a are not particularly excit-
ing, and show merely that traditional (Latinate) citation styles (op. cit., ff., loc.) are
growing out of fashion among Speculum authors. Fig. 3b, on the other hand, sug-
gests a clean and surprisingly linear frequency increase of the words “role” and
“context”: this phenomenon strongly suggests that medieval studies, as represented
by Speculum articles, have been marked in the twentieth century by a transition to-
wards a more functionalist and contextualized approach to the Middle Ages, some-
thing that has already been often observed in literary studies. The shift in the use of
the words “overview,” “focus,” and “potential” seems on the other hand to be of a
metascholarly nature and might signal a trend towards greater scholarly profession-
alization and specialization in the broader field of medieval studies.

Our analyses so far have been purely lexical or carried out at the level of indi-
vidual words. The problem with such a brute surface-counting approach is that it
conceals the actual context in which words are used. If a word has been frequently
used in Speculum, that would indeed seem to attest to the cultural salience of the
word in the world of medievalists, but this context-free approach cannot tell us
whether the term has primarily positive or negative connotations, nor does it in-
dicate the scholarly context in which it is typically used. To remedy this situation,
the digital humanities increasingly make use of methods borrowed from distribu-
tional semantics, an exciting research domain in natural language processing (or
computational linguistics). In this field of study, researchers build upon the general
idea that words derive meaning primarily from the lexical context in which they
appear.71 For example, in a sentence such as “I made the *blarf fetch the stick” or
71 A classic reference (among many others) is Zellig S. Harris, “Distributional structure,” Word 10
(1954): 146–62. An interesting recent opinion piece about distributional methods in language technol-
ogy is Chistopher D. Manning, “Computational Linguistics and Deep Learning,” Computational Lin-
guistics 41 (2015): 701–7.

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http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showLinks?doi=10.1086%2F694236&crossref=10.1080%2F00437956.1954.11659520&citationId=p_n_69
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showLinks?doi=10.1086%2F694236&crossref=10.1162%2FCOLI_a_00239&citationId=p_n_70
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showLinks?doi=10.1086%2F694236&crossref=10.1162%2FCOLI_a_00239&citationId=p_n_70


Fig. 3. (a) The relative frequency of nouns with the most linear drop in frequency. (b) The
relative frequency of nouns with the most linear increase in frequency.
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The Digital Middle Ages S21
“I took the *blarf for its evening walk,” the context in which the nonexistent term
*blarf appears strongly hints towards a domestic animal—perhaps a dog.

In distributional semantics, researchers attempt to model the distributional pat-
terns in word co-occurrences found in large corpora, such as the Speculum archive.
The underlying assumption is that the vocabulary can be modeled into a set of se-
mantic fields or topics; these topics consist of clusters of words that typically co-
occur in documents or paragraphs and that are therefore more likely to belong to
the same topic than words that never appear in the same context.72 Each of the top-
ics in such a “topic model” can be assumed to bear a certain weight, or topic score,
on each document in a corpus: a newspaper article about a famous soccer player’s
transfer to Real Madrid, for instance, might be characterized as being 92 percent
about “sports,” 6 percent about “finance,” and 2 percent about “Spanish lifestyle.”
We have subjected the Speculum archive to a topic-modeling exercise using the
well-known method NMF (non-negative matrix factorization). We have asked the
method to extract the 250 most salient topics from consecutive segments of 500 words,
which did not include any so-called stopwords (such as articles, punctuation marks,
or prepositions).

We have cherry-picked a representative selection of these topics and visualized
them as a series of word clouds in Fig. 4. This selection clearly demonstrates the
international and thematic variety of Speculum contributions over the history of
the journal. In these clouds, the font size of the individual words reflects their rela-
tive importance to the topic. Note that the topic model itself does not produce a neat
“label” for a topic, but its most significant words typically give a solid indication as
to the semantic scope of a particular theme. These topics form relatively neat word
clusters, even though this analysis does not depend on any external, handcrafted re-
sources such as dictionaries: the model derives its semantic knowledge in a com-
pletely data-driven fashion solely from word usage statistics in a large corpus.

This overview of topics does attest to the dominance of insular topics, including
those capturing the thematic fields surrounding the Canterbury Tales, Beowulf,
Monmouth’s Arthuriana, Piers Plowman and its alliterative colleagues, or the dom-
inance of Cluniac monasticism and cathedral architecture. Nevertheless, the topical
diversity is rich enough to include twelfth-century Latin literature from France, such
as the Cistercian cluster of literature around Bernard, and also the world of Scan-
dinavian sagas and of Dante’s Commedia. A number of topics also clearly reflect
higher-level thematic interests, such as courtly love, as well as themes within medi-
eval architecture, Islamic studies, and gender studies. Many topics also seem to pick
up on the major cultural clashes that characterized the medieval period, including
the confrontation of Christian with Arabic culture in medieval Spain or the tension
between Christianity and Judaism—note the presence of high-polarity terms such as
accusation, violence, and murder in the latter topic.

Interestingly, this topic model also enables us to study the Speculum archive in a
more diachronic fashion. If we were to calculate the average presence of a specific
topic in all the Speculum issues that were published in a given year, plotting these
scores on a timeline might provide insight into thematic evolution. In Figs. 5a–d,
72 On topic modeling, consult for instance David M. Blei, “Probabilistic Topic Models,” Communi-
cations of the ACM 55 (2012): 77–85.

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http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showLinks?doi=10.1086%2F694236&crossref=10.1145%2F2133806.2133826&citationId=p_n_72


Fig. 4. Word clouds representing a cherry-picked selection of topics from our thematic model
(250 topics in total). Only the most salient words are plotted for each topic; the font size of the
individual words gives an indication of their relative importance to the topic at hand.

S22 The Digital Middle Ages
we have plotted a number of trend lines for a selection of topics that seem to re-
veal interesting evolutionary patterns. The gender-related topic 156 (women, fe-
male, male), for instance, seems to have gained prominence only in the eighties, and
the same goes for the sociocultural, functionalist approach to literature (social, cul-
tural, culture), which seems to be captured in topic 231. One of the more obvious
“downward” trends is the declining use of Latin throughout the journal’s history
(topic 3)—our analyses also suggested similar trends for other languages, such as
French and German—suggesting that Speculum is becoming a more monolingual
journal. Other topics are characterized by more local peaks, such as topic 48, which
reflects a elevated number of citations in the field of medieval Aristotelianism (averrois,
aristotelem, commentariorum) in the period 1950–70.
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The Digital Middle Ages S23
While topic modeling thus offers insights not available from simpler word-count
approaches, it also raises new issues. Does the word Bernard, for instance, refer to
the medieval author Bernard of Clairvaux or the present-day scholar Bernard Mc-
Ginn (or both)? The problem that arises here is that even named entities can be am-
biguous, and to achieve a more holistic approach to autonomous machine reading,
such entities must be disambiguated. “Wikification” is a term that is used colloqui-
ally to denote the process of cross-document named-entity disambiguation in nat-
ural language processing.73 Many software tools, such as the Stanford CoreNLP
suite used above, are available today to tag automatically the named entities in free-
running text, such as the names of individuals or places. While this process of named-
entity recognition is already a crucial step towards knowledge extraction, the ambi-
guity of named entities presents a major obstacle on the road towards a machine’s
autonomous text understanding. In a sentence like “Clinton took the stage,” it is un-
clear whether the named entity refers to Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, or the epony-
mous funk musician, George Clinton.

In wikification studies, researchers attempt to extract clues from the semantic
context in which a named entity occurs to help disambiguate these mentions. If the
sentence reads “Secretary Clintontook thestage,”the apposition “Secretary” would
strongly suggest that the sentence refers to Hillary, since she is the only disambiguation
Fig. 4 (Continued)
73 Xiao Cheng and Dan Roth, “Relational Inference for Wikification,” in Proceedings of the 2013
Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Seattle, 2013): 1787–96.

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Fig. 5. Four plots showing the diachronic presence of selected topics in Speculum issues on
an annual basis.

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Fig. 5 (Continued)
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S26 The Digital Middle Ages
candidate to have held this specific office. Additionally, wikification systems can ex-
ploit the fact that the named entities that are mentioned in a text typically form a se-
mantically coherent set: in the sentence “Clinton tookthe stage withBob Marley,” the
relatively unambiguous identification of the musician Bob Marley would suggest that
the Clinton in this sentence is the artist George Clinton.

Scholars often turn to Wikipedia as a resource for mining fixed, unique identi-
fiers for named entities. Through linking the named entities to the single, relevant
entry for a named entity in the well-known encyclopedia, the algorithm effectively
performs cross-document named-entity resolution. Additionally, Wikipedia is built
on top of a rich ontological structure, so that various sorts of metadata can be har-
vested for each entity, in the form of descriptive labels indicating whether an indi-
vidual was, for example, a philosopher or a king. Wikipedia has an impressive scope,
but at the same time the use of a wikifier introduces strong biases. Uncommon
named entities that have not yet received an identifiable Wikipedia page will be ig-
nored by necessity. Likewise, the fact that we use a wikifier for the English language
might bias our analysis towards entities that are relatively more salient, culturally
speaking, in the Anglo-Saxon part of the world. When we apply the Illinois wiki-
fier74 to Speculum’s plain-text archive, a superficial reading of the wikifier’s output
anecdotally suggests that the wikifier struggles with the poor OCR quality of the
earliest volumes, but nevertheless is able to output interesting annotations:

Long ago <a class5''wiki'' href5''http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rhys'' cat5''per-
son knight academic writer celticists member principal''>Sir John Rhys</a> offered a so-
lar interpretation of <a class5''wiki'' href5''http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_of
_Britain'' cat5''legend''>Arthurian</a> lore , but , according to <a class5''wiki'' href
5''http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Sherman_Loomis'' cat5''academic person scholar
alumnus''>Loomis</a> , he did not work out the Celtic mythological system from
the evidence of the <a class5''wiki'' href5''http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_language''
cat5''language''>Irish</a> and <a class5''wiki'' href5''http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
/Welsh_language'' cat5''language''>Welsh</a> legends themselves.

Note that the wikifier deals well in this example with abstracting over superfi-
cial synonyms: in texts that mention Bernard, Bernardine, or Bernard of Clairvaux,
the entities will be mapped to the same unique identifier as their Latin equivalents,
such as Bernardus Clarevallensis. Therefore, such a tool offers much more power-
ful search capabilities than raw text data. Nevertheless, the “disambiguations” are
certainly not flawless, and at times are tragically hilarious—all sorts of American
celebrities, including famous wrestlers and pop artists, would appear to have made
a much larger contribution to medieval scholarship than we might have anticipated.
Nevertheless, when aggregated at a higher level, the wikifier’s output is accurate
enough to draw up even more insightful hit lists than the ones we have shown so
far. In Fig. 6, we have exploited the metadata that the wikifier attaches to each entity
to draw up a list of the most salient—or, at least, most frequently mentioned—au-
thors (a), poems (b), and saints (c) in Speculum.
74 Lev Ratinov, Dan Roth, Doug Downey, and Mike Anderson, “Local and Global Algorithms for
Disambiguation to Wikipedia,” in Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for
Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, vol. 1 (Portland, 2011), 1375–84.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rhys
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_of_Britain
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_of_Britain
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Sherman_Loomis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_language


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S30 The Digital Middle Ages
While such hit lists are interesting in their own right, looking at mere frequency
does not reveal the complex relationships that might exist among them and with
other words with which these entities are typically associated. To study and visual-
ize these, we turn to one final technique, from the sphere of distributional embed-
dings: word embeddings. Just like topic modeling techniques, word embeddings
build upon the distributional hypothesis that words with a similar meaning will have
the tendency to appear in similar contexts. However, whereas topic modeling tech-
niques are geared to finding good representations for topics and documents, word
embedding can yield much more fine-grained representations for individual words.
Word embeddings will represent the items in a vocabulary using a numerical vector,
or a list of numbers that aim to characterize the word meaning. The advantage of
such a word-level model is that we can apply straightforward arithmetic to these vec-
tor representations and ask the model, for instance, to return the five words that it
deems most similar to a certain query term. If we apply a popular word-embeddings
model (word2vec) to our wikified corpus, we can inspect the immediate semantic
neighborhood of the following terms listed in Table 2.75 Using the vector represen-
tation that we can extract for our wikified authors, we can also use these embeddings
to visualize the relationships between our authors in a dendrogram, or tree diagram.
In Fig. 7, the wikified links take the form of leaves in a tree, which are eventually
joined into new nodes in a branch structure. The branches reflect the distances be-
tween the representations that we obtained for these authors. Note how the struc-
ture that arises from this tree makes sense (monarchs cluster with monarchs, philos-
ophers with philosophers, and so on) but also offers some surprising results: Ovid
and Virgil, for instance, cluster with Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Dante, instead of with
other authors from antiquity, such as Cicero or Plato. Note, also, how the tree re-
alizes at the top level what seems to be a fairly neat split between vernacular au-
thors and nonvernacular authorities.

Such word embeddings have attracted a good deal of attention recently, mostly
because it has been shown that these models are able to solve independently an in-
teresting form of analogical reasoning problem. For example, when asked which
word is to “woman” as “king” is to “man,” a model trained on English Wikipedia
text will output the word “queen.”76 The task is simply solved through the following
equation: king – man 1 woman. The idea is that the model takes its vector represen-
tation for the word king, “subtracts,” or removes, all abstract properties that it as-
sociates with the word man, and then adds all the properties that it associates with
the word woman. The model subsequently returns the word that is closest to the re-
sult of the operation. Other, culturally intriguing outputs of the original model
were: japan – sushi 1 new_york → pizza and belgium – brussels 1 france → paris.
As an interesting Spielerei, note that such a model is able to solve thought-provoking
questions such as “Who is the Chaucer of the French?” through simply modeling
it in the form of the equation Geoffrey_Chaucer – English_language 1 French
75 Tomas Mikolov, Wen-tau Yih, and Geoffrey Zweig, “Linguistic Regularities in Continuous Space
Word Representations,” in Proceedings of the 2013 Conference of the North American Chapter of the
Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (2013), 746–51.

76 Ibid.

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The Digital Middle Ages S31
_language. A number of actual results from drawing such a deliberately provocative
analogy from our Speculum model are given below:

Geoffrey_Chaucer – English_language 1 French_language → Jean_de_Meun

Geoffrey_Chaucer – English_language 1 Latin → Ovid

Geoffrey_Chaucer – English_language 1 Italy → Giovanni_Boccaccio

While the output from such a naïve model naturally should be taken with a grain of
salt,such exercises are neverthelessuseful becausethe models are built in a purely data-
driven way, and researchers have noted that these models generally tend to reproduce
the cultural biases that are present in the material on which they have been based.
Conclusion: The “Canon” of Medieval Studies

Proponents of distant reading have often praised the ability of computer tech-
niques to broaden our reading scope beyond the obligatory canon of Chaucers,
Dantes, and Chrétiens. Moretti, for instance, famously suggested that computer
techniques would finally allow us to tackle what Margaret Cohen has called the
“Great Unread,” the oubliëtte of historic literature.77 So far, however, the results
in this respect have been limited, and many digitization projects still center around
the comfortable and well-known pantheon of canonized authors—the dispropor-
tional attention for a figure like Chaucer in traditional medieval studies, for instance,
has been remarkably closely paralleled in the digital universe so far. This is but one
case where digital medieval studies can probably do a better job of living up to its
promise and lure our attention away from an already overexposed medieval canon
towards the lesser-known peripheries of medieval culture.

Nevertheless, it is troubling that much new digital medieval work responds more
closely to the questions and concerns of nineteenth-century medieval scholarship
than those of the twentieth or twenty-first centuries. In the field of text analysis, for
instance, practitioners have so far shown little interest in modern literary theory,
Table 2
The Nearest Neighbors for a Selection of Canonical Entities

Using a Word-Embeddings Model

KING_ARTHUR CHRÉTIEN_DE_TROYES GEOFFREY_CHAUCER CHARLEMAGNE
Matter_of_Britain Perceval,_the_Story_

of_the_Grail
The_Canterbury_Tales Louis_the_Pious

Round_Table Yvain,_the_Knight_
of_the_Lion

General_Prologue Pepin_the_Short

Gawain Cligès The_House_of_Fame Charles_the_Bald
Mordred Erec_and_Enide Troilus_and_Criseyde Clovis_I
Round_Table_

(Camelot)
Erec Troilus Carolingian_dynasty
77 Some of his semin

This co
All use subject to Uni
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ntent downloaded from 146
versity of Chicago Press Te
ve been reproduced in More

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.175.012.154 on October 17, 2
rms and Conditions (http://ww
tti, Distant Reading.

2/S1 (October 2017)

017 02:47:26 AM
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Fig. 7. A dendrogram representing the outcome of a cluster analysis, where the (dis)similar-
ities between writers are visualized as a tree structure. The dissimilarities here are based on
the embeddings we obtained for these writers and which capture the semantic context in
which these writers are typically mentioned in Speculum.
u/t-and-c).



The Digital Middle Ages S33
and especially poststructuralist approaches. The postmodern dismissal of—and lack
of interest in—the authorship of texts may also explain why digital scholars might
keep their distance from a field that does not value issues central to much of digital
medieval studies. Influential digital humanists, such as Geoffrey Rockwell or Stephen
Ramsay, might interpret this observation in the light of their—as they themselves
admit—rather polemic view of digital humanities as a community of “builders”: a
community that “does” instead of “talks,” one that “makes” instead of “writes”78—
and, we could add, perhaps also a community where scholarship is often so experi-
mental that it is more like “playing” than “working.”79

The Brothers Grimm rediscovered medieval literature in nineteenth-century Ger-
many and took pains to initiate the scholarly study of a strange cultural phenome-
non from a distant past, still fundamentally new to them at the time. They found
themselves confronted with the need to catalog, describe, and edit an unstructured
mass of new sources, and they struggled to apply the existing scholarly models that
they had inherited from their humanist predecessors. Because of the European di-
mensions of many medieval phenomena, they were also involved in constant nego-
tiations through their international scholarly correspondence, for example, about
the authenticity of particular text versions or the directions of cultural exchange in
medieval Europe. It would not be far-fetched to liken the condition of present-day
digital humanists to their nineteenth-century precursors. Modern digital humanists,
too, are confronted with the scholarly study of a medieval heritage that they often
have to digitize from scratch, even as they define a scholarly, digital practice without
a tradition of existing models that can be applied easily to the computational study
and dissemination of these artifacts and new insights about them. Working as a com-
munity, many digital humanists are currently reinventing important aspects of me-
dieval studies in that process, through fundamental discussions about the purpose
and meaning of the field.

This situation leads to a complex, opaque, and fascinating relationship between
digital medieval studies and their conventional counterpart. On an anecdotal level,
digital humanists are inspired by the relative freedom they enjoy in the experimen-
tal playground that is DH, where scholars can operate largely outside the gaze and
criticism of the conventional humanities. According to some, DH can be viewed as
a deliberately “undertheorized” field,80 where young scholars are not hampered by
the mechanisms of intimidation and exclusion that are often related to the concept
of “theory.”81 Others have claimed that DH is in fact much more theoretical than
the traditional humanities, because of the central place that is assigned to funda-
mental methodological debates about modeling in the humanities. In a famous blog
78 See, for example, their polemic pieces reprinted in Terras, Nyhan, and Vanhoutte, Defining Digital
Humanities: Stephen Ramsay, “On Building,” 243–45; and Geoffrey Rockwell, “Inclusion in the Dig-
ital Humanities,” 247–53.

79 On less targeted research methods facilitated by the digital, see Stephen Ramsay, “The Hermeneu-
tics of Screwing Around,” http://quod.lib.umich.edu/d/dh/12544152.0001.001/1:5/--pastplay-teaching
-and-learning-history-with-technology?gpdculture;rgnpdiv1;viewpfulltext;xcp1#5.1.

80 Rockwell, “Inclusion in the Digital Humanities.”
81 For “theory” as a source of intimidation, see Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short In-

troduction (Oxford, 1997), 15.

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S34 The Digital Middle Ages
post, “Who You Calling Untheoretical?,” Jean Bauer quoted Susan Smulyan, who
shouted on one occasion, “The database is the theory!”82

While the presence of higher-level theoretical and methodological debates is not
open to question, the relationship between traditional and nontraditional schools
in medieval studies merits a closer look here. Scholars in digital humanities typi-
cally justify their existence through an active affiliation with older humanities dis-
ciplines83—in fact, one could say that it is primarily this affiliation that separates
the digital humanities from computer science. In medieval studies, too, the link be-
tween traditional and digital practitioners is crucial if the medieval field is to ad-
vance as a whole. Importantly, this requires a mutual interest from both parties and
a fundamental willingness to learn from one another, while not neglecting the rich
tradition of medievalist scholarship.

While we expect digital medieval studies to become more mainstream in the fu-
ture, it will remain important to maintain dedicated outlets for digital medievalists
to reflect on the more technical aspects of their work. A number of more recently
inaugurated specialized journals, such as the Digital Medievalist Journal (https://
journal.digitalmedievalist.org/) and Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cul-
tures (Johns Hopkins University Press) merit watching, in addition to the more es-
tablished, multidisciplinary journals in DH, such as LLC: Digital Scholarship in
the Humanities (Oxford University Press; formerly known as Literary and Lin-
guistic Computing) and Digital Humanities Quarterly, both published on behalf
of ADHO. Likewise, the book of abstracts of the annual global conference in DH
organized by ADHO (http://adho.org/) helps keep track of current developments
in the field.

Equally important for the further development of the field are platforms of a more
pedagogical nature, where practical tutorials are offered that can help novice prac-
titioners of the DH to acquire digital skills that may not yet be part of curricular
training programs in higher education. Websites such as the Programming Histo-
rian (http://programminghistorian.org), for example, offer a wide range of peer-
reviewed tutorials on technical skills. Other popular pedagogical resources for nov-
ice scholars are the many long-standing training events that are annually organized
in the DH community, such as the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the
University of Victoria, the European Summer University in Digital Humanities at
the University of Leipzig, and the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School
(DHOxSS) at the University of Oxford. The THATcamp (The Humanities and
Technology Camp) “un-conferences” held in various locations have also spread
the word about digital methods and approaches to a broad audience.84 Apart from
a longer exposure to digital humanities practices, such events have an important so-
cial dimension by allowing newcomers to build up a network in DH.
82 Jean Bauer, “Who You Calling Untheoretical?,” Journal of Digital Humanities 1/1 (2011), http://
journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-1/who-you-calling-untheoretical-by-jean-bauer/.

83 Cf. Liu, “The Meaning of Digital Humanities.”
84 http://thatcamp.org/.

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http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-1/who-you-calling-untheoretical-by-jean-bauer/
http://thatcamp.org/


The Digital Middle Ages S35
This Digital Supplement

This supplement is divided into four sections that aim to represent many of the
trends we have traced above. In the first section, “Manuscripts and Images,” four
papers engage with approaches to manuscript analysis. Toby Burrows introduces
a project that collates the manuscripts formerly in the collection of Sir Thomas
Phillipps and explores the challenges of analyzing large corpora. The enormous
manuscript collection assembled by Phillipps in the nineteenth century was subse-
quently dispersed to institutions and private collectors around the world. Because
the evidence relating to the provenance and history of these manuscripts is extensive
and varied, developing a coherent framework for analysis required implementing a
new data model for manuscript provenance. As well as examining the technical pro-
cesses involved in this work, Burrows presents the results of applying this approach
to two specific research questions: the histories of the group of manuscripts that
were owned by both Thomas Phillipps and Alfred Chester Beatty, and the combined
histories of the former Phillipps manuscripts that are now in institutional collections
in North America.

Although it is well known that many scribes had several scripts and even alpha-
bets available to them, there has been little discussion of the phenomenon from a
paleographical point of view, and even less of the methods to address it. In his con-
tribution about multigraphism in late Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, Peter A. Stokes
examines the work of two multigraphic scribes in detail, drawing on the DigiPal
framework and exploring the capabilities that it gives for communication and anal-
ysis of script and the insights it provides about late Anglo-Saxon scribal practice and
multigraphic script in general.

Mike Kestemont, Vincent Christlein, and Dominique Stutzmann propose what
they call “artificial paleography,” based on the adaptation of technology from the
field of computer vision and artificial intelligence to the paleographic study of me-
dieval manuscripts. Their paper focuses on the automatic identification of script
types in medieval manuscripts, which is an important step on the road to the fully
automated “machine reading” of these documents. The work is presented in the con-
text of a recently organized competition, or “shared task,” on this subject, which is
an increasingly common scientific format in the world of digital scholarship. In ad-
dition to a high-level introduction to the computer models they use, the paper fo-
cuses on the interpretation of these complex systems against the background of tra-
ditional paleography.

Murray McGillivray and Christina Duffy shine the new light of spectrometry to
see beneath the illuminations of the well-known Gawain manuscript. Their article
engages with the techniques of multispectral imaging to examine the illustrations
in London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.x., the unique manuscript of Sir Ga-
wain and the Green Knight and three other important Middle English poems. Imag-
ing reveals the ink drawings under the later paint and detects differences from the
illustrative goals, damaged and faded portions of images that were restored, and
the intentional deployment of chemically different pigments that have come to look
similar with the passing of time.
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https://doi.org/10.1086/693438
https://doi.org/10.1086/693968
https://doi.org/10.1086/694112
https://doi.org/10.1086/693361


S36 The Digital Middle Ages
The second section, on “Mapping,” includes two articles that illustrate the use
of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in medieval studies. David Joseph Wrisley
explores digital mapping for medieval studies at multiple scales for both close and
distant readings. His article distinguishes mapping geographical information from
historical GIS, and it presents several findings of the Visualizing Medieval Places
(VMP) project for the study of medieval French texts. Wrisley argues for the need
to expand the project into a research architecture that allows social cocreation of
data and explores the affordances of linked open data. M. Alison Stones describes
the evolution of the web-based Lancelot-Graal project, which adapts GIS to the geog-
raphy of the manuscript page, using it as part of a comparative examination of dif-
ferences in the choice, placement, and treatment of subjects in manuscript illustra-
tions.

The third section, “Texts and Editions,” brings together four articles. Jeroen De
Gussem traces the “secretarial trail” of Bernard of Clairvaux by using the techniques
of stylometry. The literary style of Bernard of Clairvaux (c. 1090–1153) was of such
grandeur that it was imitated by the greatest theologians of his time, providing an
“architecture” for a Cistercian way of writing. Bernard’s best imitators were, in
fact, found by his side, in the scriptorium of Clairvaux. These scribes were trained
to mimic their abbot’s preferred wording and his mastery of rhetorical twists, and
although Bernard made a habit of rereading, correcting, and repolishing his works,
it is often unclear how we should estimate his secretaries’ part in the ultimate con-
stitution of his oeuvre. The focal figure in Bernard’s scriptorium was Nicholas of
Montiéramey, who served the abbot from c. 1138–41 to c. 1151–52, and in this ar-
ticle, the dynamics of kinship between Bernard’s and Nicholas’s oeuvres are laid
bare through stylometric methods. The stylistic familiarity between their texts can
teach us more about the nature of collaboration in the scriptorium of Clairvaux as
well as allowing for a better close reading of Bernard’s more dubiously attributed
texts.

Maxim Romanov presents an algorithmic analysis of medieval Arabic biograph-
ical collections, a unique data collection whose sheer size has hindered a holistic
scholarly treatment so far. His paper illustrates the sort of macroanalyses that large
and understudied corpora enable, with an emphasis on the geographic and tempo-
ral distribution of the entities in his data. Romanov discusses the complexities of
tagging, structuring, and sustaining these data and offers valuable pointers to prac-
tical tools and realistic methodologies.

Mark Cruse performs a quantitative analysis of toponyms in a manuscript of
Marco Polo’s Devisement du monde (London, British Library, MS Royal 19 D 1).
Scholars have long noted that Marco Polo’s account presents many textual prob-
lems, and not only to modern scholars. The text’s toponyms also posed a particu-
larly great challenge to the scribes who copied the early manuscripts because so
many were unknown, and quantitative analysis of the toponyms in the oldest Old
French copy of the account (Royal 19 D 1) confirms the scribal uncertainty that at-
tended the copying of these words. By distinguishing between familiar and unfamil-
iar toponyms, by assigning the occurrences to specific scribes, and by quantifying
the number of variants and the degree of orthographic and phonetic variance for
each toponym, the article argues that we can identify the words and contexts that
proved difficult to scribes. Rather than regarding these variants as errors, Cruse ar-
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https://doi.org/10.1086/694300
https://doi.org/10.1086/693969
https://doi.org/10.1086/694188
https://doi.org/10.1086/694188
https://doi.org/10.1086/693970
https://doi.org/10.1086/694170


The Digital Middle Ages S37
gues, we should analyze them as forms of reader response. An analysis of these top-
onyms in their manuscript context as semantic markers devoid of modern annota-
tion enables us to encounter Polo’s text as its earliest readers did—as the description
of an as yet unknown world teeming with exotic places rich in significance. Ulti-
mately, the ways in which scribes responded to the toponyms in Polo’s account re-
flect not only scribal practice, but also the processes by which new geographical in-
formation was absorbed by medieval readers.

Franz Fischer’s article surveys a series of digital scholarly editions with a focus on
the options and requirements for developing digital textual corpora. On the one
hand, textual—or, rather, editorial—plurality seems to be one of the main charac-
teristics of digital editions; on the other, the usefulness of a corpus depends substan-
tially on the uniformity and representativeness of the texts that it includes. Based on
a clear yet flexible definition of digital critical editions, Fischer makes several pro-
posals to resolve the conflict between a variety of editorial approaches and a desir-
able homogeneity within a corpus. Through the inclusion of editions that are digital
in a wide sense and critical in a narrow sense, a focus on works rather than docu-
ments, and linkage to, or integration of, external resources, he argues that it is pos-
sible to create a valuable and truly digital corpus of critical editions. The usefulness
of its features and the technical framework of such a corpus would be based on an
elementary data model for metadata, text, annotation, and paratexts.

The fourth section, on “Multimediality: Space and Sound,” presents three ar-
ticles that explore reconstructions of medieval architectural space and of the
sounds within medieval buildings. Sheila Bonde, Alexis Coir, and Clark Maines
use computer-aided design (CAD) technology to reconstruct, represent, and study
architectural process at the Cistercian church at Notre-Dame d’Ourscamp, concen-
trating on the late thirteenth century, when workers dismantled the church’s Ro-
manesque east end and replaced it with a new Gothic choir. They argue that digi-
tal representation has the potential to encourage viewers to engage with the fuller
life cycle of a building, and that it encourages researchers to analyze the three-
dimensional application of their interpretations of building change. The goal of their
digital project has been to promote a fuller understanding of the process by which
medieval builders dismantled parts of earlier buildings to attach newer extensions.
The article and CAD project present an extended examination of the construction
sequence and engage with issues of uncertainty in virtual representation.

The remaining two articles in this section examine the sounds of Byzantium. The
international team of Spyridon Antonopoulos, Sharon Gerstel, Chris Kyriakakis,
Konstantinos T. Raptis, and James Donahue investigates the acoustic aspects of
Byzantine liturgical spaces in Thessaloniki’s churches. Their project unites scientific
analysis of acoustics with consideration of the architectural frame and imagery of
choral performance. Their project aims to identify and preserve the acoustic signa-
tures of the churches under study and to capture the multisensory experience of the
Byzantine worshipper.

Bissera Pentcheva and Jonathan Abel present the method and the results of the
Stanford University multidisciplinary Icons of Sound project. They argue that dig-
ital technology allows us to transcend a text-based encounter with Byzantine litur-
gical music and restores the performative aspects of the sung rite, and their focus is
on Hagia Sophia: its acoustics, aesthetics, and music. The article details the effects
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https://doi.org/10.1086/693823
https://doi.org/10.1086/694169
https://doi.org/10.1086/693378
https://doi.org/10.1086/693378
https://doi.org/10.1086/693439


S38 The Digital Middle Ages
of the domed structure on the experience of sung chant within it: the amplification
of sounds together with overlapping of notes and an “acoustic waterfall” produced
both an aural and an optical brightness. Using digital technology, Icons of Sound
has successfully imprinted the acoustic signature of the building on the live perfor-
mance of Byzantine cathedral chant.

The articles in this supplement thus combine to offer a window into the wealth of
approaches and experiences that medievalists have brought to the field of digital hu-
manities. It is hoped that this contribution to Speculum incites (even more) new in-
terest and fresh activity in this promising field.
David J. Birnbaum, University of Pittsburgh (djbpitt@pitt.edu)
Sheila Bonde, Brown University (sheila_bonde@brown.edu)
Mike Kestemont, University of Antwerp (mike.kestemont@uantwerp.be)
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