Add to Date: 26 January 2009, 15:00-16:00
Venue: Royal Irish Academy, Dublin
Presenter: Ms Dot Porter, Metadata Manager (DHO)
In recent years there has been a growth amongst humanities scholars in the interest in the materiality of objects including manuscripts, printed books, and inscribed stones, as they relate to the text bore upon them and contained within them. This interest has shown itself in the digital humanities as well, as scholars explore how computers might be made to express the physical in the digital.
This may take many forms, including 2D images, 3D images or scans, or textual descriptions of objects. This presentation will explore how digital elements describing, expressing, or representing different aspects of a single physical object might be used to study the creation of that object. The focus will be on a manuscript commonly known as the Old English Illustrated Hexateuch (BL Cotton Claudius B.iv.), an Old English translation of the first six books of the Old Testament that includes over 400 color illustrations. In his recent book The Illustrated Old English Hexateuch, Cotton Claudius B.iv: The Frontier of Seeing and Reading in Anglo-Saxon England (British Library Press, 2007), Benjamin Withers describes a theory for how the relationship between the images and text prescribed both the layout of the content and the physical construction of the entire manuscript. How might Withers' theory be expressed, visualized, or tested in a digital environment? This presentation is intended to be the start of a conversation, rather than the answer to a very complex and wide-ranging question.
This lecture has been organized as part of the Culture and Technology European Seminar Series sponsored by the Humanities Advanced Technology And Information Institute (HATII) at the University of
Glasgow and will be simultaneously webcast.
To view the webcast you will need to download the Marratech software (http://www.marratech.com/download/). Once installed, open Marratech; it looks similar to a web browser with a panel running down the right-hand side. In the main window, go to http://dvc.unideb.hu:8000.
For "username", use 'Glasgow' or 'London' (without single quotes). Password for either username is 'Seminar2008'. Once logged in, click on "Culture and Technology". To view the presentation, click on the button in the far left bottom corner (the whiteboard). Please *do not* try to navigate through the Powerpoint.
