“A leaf of paper (in OE. called bóc, BOOK); a legal document or ‘deed’ written (usually) upon a single sheet of paper, parchment, or other material, by which grants, cessions, contracts, and other transactions are confirmed and ratified.â€? (From the OED.n1)

Starter Links: [under construction]

“3. A sheet of paper printed on one side only, forming one large page.â€? (From the OED.n.)

Starter Links:[under construction]

An illuminated manuscript used primarily from the 13th through 16th centuries; a personal prayer book for the laity to abide by the Christian church’s daily protocol of devotional prayer.

Starter Links:[under construction]

“A book containing a set or collection of antiphons.â€? (From the OED.n.)

Starter Links: [under construction]

Summary:
electronic book review (ebr) is “an online scholarly journal promoting print/screen translations and new modes of critical writing on the Internet.” Edited by Joseph Tabbi and published by Mark Amerika, the site operates through a sophisticated design, by Anne Burdick, that implements and enacts the theme of weaving “thREADs.” The journal can been accessed at www.electronicbookreview.com. (more…)

Online resource and course related to paleography.

“The English Handwriting 1500-1700 course has been designed for flexibility in an attempt to serve the needs of beginners and more experienced researchers alike. There are a number of ways in which you might approach the materials presented here, depending on whether you require information from the ground up or merely a convenient reference/practice resource.

The ‘historical introduction’ with Billingsley’s Pens Excellencie are resources that might be consulted at any time, but will, in different ways, provide an introductory overview to the subject of early modern English handwriting.” (From the web site.)

Starter Links: English Handwriting Site | Humbul Humanities Hub

Online educational tool to help teach Latin paleography.

“Ductus, from the Latin ducere (to lead), is a digital program designed for the teaching of Latin paleography either locally or via the internet. The program is based on 60 extremely high resolution facsimiles of manuscripts from the period 150-1500 A.D. It includes videos depicting a (modern) scribe at work, a 14-session course, and extensive glossaries and support documentation. It is already used byteachers and independent scholars around the world. In 2000 it received The Australian Award for Excellence in Tertiary Educational Multimedia. Ductus is available either for use by individuals or by institutions with a site licensing arrangement.

Ductus features:

Ductus includes an introduction to the history of western European handwriting and detailed interactive analyses of 60 sample scripts chosen from manuscripts in European, North American and Australian collections.” (From the web site.)

Starter Links: Ductus |
Detailed information about the CD-ROM

Online learning tool for the study of palaeography.

“In its origin, the ‘tutorial’ was conceived for seminars in the Centre for English Local History on medieval and early-modern palaeography, each comprising ten hours of contact time. To a large extent, the structure has been determined by that original objective. We have, however, tried subsequently to expand the material and the structure to make it more relevant for other users. It is intended as an introduction to practical palaeography – how to read hands. Although there is a smattering of formal palaeography, diplomatics and codicology, that material is included only in so far as it assists in practical reading.” (From the web site.)

Starter Links: Palaeography Home Page| Paleography Links for Teachers | Websites For Medievalists |

Summary:
The FogScreen is an innovative display technology that allows for projections on a thin layer of dry fog. Imagine the traditional pull down screen that is found in many classrooms today. Instead of a screen being pulled down from the ceiling, fog is pushed down and held in place by several small fans, allowing for a consistent surface for display. A user may simply stand back and view the material but can also reach or walk through the fog. A user may also interact with objects displayed in the fog with the use of an input device like a data glove, a tracked wand, or simply using hands (see Technical Analysis). Currently, there are only nine FogScreens available in the world. Most of the FogScreens are used as a novel display technology for businesses looking to attract visitors at conventions, or by artists / musicians as part of their entertainment shows. However, research is being conducted in attempts to find ways that the FogScreen can be used as an educational tool. In this report, we describe the FogScreen experience itself and the findings made when deploying LEMMA (Learning Environment with Multi-Media Augmentations) on the FogScreen. Due to extreme financial and spatial efforts of the device, it is unlikely that the average citizens will be able to interact with such a technology, but there are hopes of creating smaller, less expensive FogScreens, or similar devices, in the near future. (more…)

Summary:
Jeffrey Shaw’s “Legible City” is an interactive art installation that requires active, physical participation of its viewers. To make the installation function, a “rider” sits on a stationery bicycle, pedals, and navigates through simulated city streets and architectural structures made of letters, words, and sentences that are projected on a large screen. In this manner, the viewer both rides and reads as she navigates through this text-based virtual space. Requiring as it does the active, embodied participation of the reader/rider, Shaw’s “Legible City” provides a very interesting, very visible expression and enactment of reading as a fully embodied and physical activity in which the human body is well integrated into its surrounding environment. (more…)

Summary:
As documents of any kind increasingly come in digital form, our reading habits change. Printing out documents on paper is still a common practice at the moment, but will cease to be so as better and more convenient devices for reading digital data come into existence. Reasons for this change include less effort for transport and printing, as well the trend towards overcoming text-only modalities. When ebook readers first appeared in 2000, they were unsuccessful, mainly because they were inconvenient. The iPod, originally marketed as an mp3 player, has the capability to display digital documents and combines this potential with various other features like audio, video and hypertext, which makes it a convenient and flexible accessory that may meet plenty of our reading needs. (more…)

[Course site]

In both film and literary studies, there is a strong tendency to study media history and media culture so that it delivers discrete “objects”, “texts”, and “visual and sound artifacts,” for close interpretation and study. One can find this procedure among scholars who favor “great” or “popular” media texts. While the history and discursive procedures of film and literary studies makes this bias quite understandable, this course attempts to take a different path. We want to pay attention to some of the most striking features of modern media forms, practices, and technologies: they facilitate mobility, transfers, adaptation, deformation, reformation, networking, mutations within the media infrastructure, and many species of communication (one to one; one to many; broadband, narrowband, etc.). All these transformations in the form of media are implicated in new spatial configurations and new (often accelerated) media temporalities. If there is a general logic to these morphologies of media, we hope our course will begin to explore them. (more…)

Online tool that provides its users with a broad overview of types, styles, and information on the culture of medieval writing from 400-1500 A.D.

“Medieval Writing” showcases images from many types of documents including manuscripts, legal, administrative and papal documents; the website provides an in-depth analysis of each type of document and its uses during the medieval period. Secondly, “Medieval Writing” offers paleography lessons so its users can become proficient in the various book hands and document hands used from the 6th to the 16th Centuries. (From Alison Walker’s research report.)

Starter Links: Medieval Writing Website

Transliteracies Research Report By Alison Walker

Summary:
The website “Medieval Writing: History Heritage and Data Source” provides its users with a broad overview of types, styles, and information on the culture of medieval writing from 400-1500 A.D. “Medieval Writing” showcases images from many types of documents, including manuscripts, legal, administrative and papal documents; the website provides an in-depth analysis of each type of document and its uses during the medieval period. Secondly, “Medieval Writing” offers paleography lessons so its users can become proficient in the various book hands and document hands used from the 6th to the 16th Centuries. (more…)

Online book-tracking service that allows people to enter a “collective library” on the Internet.

“Bibliophil allows its users to keep track of their books in a customized library with public/private library security available. Users can create Buddies with trust relationships, recommend books to buddies, and keep track of recommendations. Query their library and sort by title, author, rating, date read, etc. filter by author, unrated books, unread, reviewed on loan, wish lists, and for sale. Users can also export available via Excel (CSV) and have PDA and Mobile access to their libraries.” (From Bibliophil.org.)

Starter Links: Bibliophil.org | Answers.com take on bibliophil.org as a social library

Image “Screen Shots” from William B. Warner’s Flash Project.

(more…)

Searchable multimedia version of Beowulf.

”’The Electronic Beowulf Project’ is an image-based CD-ROM edition of Beowulf, the great Old English poem, which survives in only one manuscript: British Library Cotton Vitellius A. xv. The CD is a full-color digital facsimile of Beowulf, its associated texts, and glossaries. Future editions will include illuminations from contemporary manuscripts and external links to medieval and Anglo-Saxon resource sites.” (From Donna Beth Ellard’s Research Report.)

Starter Links: The Electronic Beowulf Project

Transliteracies Research Report By Donna Beth Ellard

Searchable, digital facsimile of the Exeter Book.

“Digital images of the Exeter Book were produced in 1996, and from these images, a “virtual manuscript” has been produced. “The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry” is edited and compiled by Bernard J. Muir and Nick Kennedy. This program is a CD set that is scheduled for production in March 2006. The CD will contain interactive facsimiles, a page viewer, codicological report, historical and cultural materials, and audio readings of the poems. (From Donna Beth Ellard’s Research Report.)

Starter Links: EVellum’s description of the project

Transliteracies Research Report By Donna Beth Ellard

Considers the implications of Marey’s graphic method as a part of the greater discourse of signification and writing systems.

“The discourse of graph may be considered to be a micro-discourse, a series of signifying practices that loosely–perhaps even unconsciously–organizes meaning not from the standpoint of a unifying discourse such as science or theology that organizes knowledge from the outside in but rather signifies a particular episteme from the inside out. The word and suffix graph appears in the names of many new technologies in the middle and late nineteenth century: photography, cinematography, cardiography, phonautograph, graphophone, heliography, telegraphy, ideograph, phonograph, seismograph, myography, etc. ...Marey’s graphic method modernized the study of physiology by helping to displace quasi-mystical theories of vitalism with a positivistic understanding of the human body. As writing, the indexical traces produced by means of the graphic method evidence a radical cultural transformation of the status of writing from transcendent signifying practice to the machinic writing of life based not upon a higher power but rather the movements of the body as machine. The graphic method takes part in a larger cultural and epistemic project of the scientific secularization of writing and inscription.” (From James J. Hodge’s Research Report.)

Starter Links and References:
Marta Braun’s. Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) | François Dagognet’s Etienne-Jules Marey: A Passion for the Trace (1987), trans. Robert Galeta with Jeanine Herman (New York: Zone Books, 1992).

Transliteracies Research Report By James J. Hodge

Graduate Student, English Department, UC Santa Barbara (more…)

Summary:
The aim of this entry is twofold: to describe a field of discourse that located around the protean status of the word and suffix graph in latter half of the nineteenth century, and to instantiate that discourse through a consideration of Etienne-Jules Marey’s méthode graphique [graphic method]. The discourse of graph may be considered to be a micro-discourse, a series of signifying practices that loosely–perhaps even unconsciously–organizes meaning not from the standpoint of a unifying discourse such as science or theology that organizes knowledge from the outside in but rather signifies a particular episteme from the inside out. The word and suffix graph appears in the names of many new technologies in the middle and late nineteenth century: photography, cinematography, cardiography, phonautograph, graphophone, heliography, telegraphy, ideograph, phonograph, seismograph, myography, etc. Beyond recognizing graph as a facile gesture of nomenclature, this entry argues that its prevalence signifies a culturally and historically specific micro-discourse with deep implications for the study of writing as such in the broader media ecology of the late nineteenth century. Marey’s graphic method represents a meta-example of this micro-discourse. Marey’s graphic method modernized the study of physiology by helping to displace quasi-mystical theories of vitalism with a positivistic understanding of the human body. As writing, the indexical traces produced by means of the graphic method evidence a radical cultural transformation of the status of writing from transcendent signifying practice to the machinic writing of life based not upon a higher power but rather the movements of the body as machine. The graphic method takes part in a larger cultural and epistemic project of the scientific secularization of writing and inscription. (more…)

Summary:
The Exeter Dean and Chapter MS 3501, or “The Exeter Book,” is the oldest of four collections of Anglo-Saxon poetry. It is believed to have been produced in southwest England, probably between 965 and 975 (Muir 1).

Digital images of the Exeter Book were produced in 1996, and from these images, a “virtual manuscript” has been produced. “The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry” is edited and compiled by Bernard J. Muir and Nick Kennedy and produced in July 2006. It contains interactive facsimiles, a page viewer, codicological report, historical and cultural materials, and short audio readings of selected poems. (more…)

Summary: “Electronic Beowulf Project” is an image-based CD-ROM edition of Beowulf, the great Old English poem, which survives in only one manuscript: British Library Cotton Vitellius A. xv. The CD is a full-color digital facsimile of Beowulf, its associated texts, and glossaries. Future editions will include illuminations from contemporary manuscripts and external links to medieval and Anglo-Saxon resource sites. (more…)

Here we will be describing the innovations in interface design and reading practices during the Renaissance.