"Getting Medieval in Real Time"

Literature Compass, 2012

In this article, the author looks back at over 30 years of experience with ''Digital Humanities'' and argues that while our media for research, delivery, have changed, our methodologies have not. That fact poses a significant challenge for Digital Medievalists because the author believes and advocates for a significant change not just in our delivery systems, but that the digital tools we now have should be changing the way we think and do research, teach, and advertise Medieval Studies as a whole. At once a personal story of experience in the field and an analysis of current practices, this article critiques practices frequently touted as innovative and the wave of the future as nothing more than the same old packages using a new delivery system that may or may not be as effective as the previous delivery system. This critique in the author's view applies to our teaching as well as to our research. Finally, the author offers some suggestions for both research and teaching that attempt to break out of the old molds and methods and use the digital tools we have in innovative ways that do change the way medievalists research and teach and take fuller advantage of what working digitally offers the field.

Cover Art: British Library Lansdowne 451, f. 127 Marginal image of a leper with sores on his face, and missing a hand and foot, holding a bell, with a scroll above which reads, in English: 'sum good my gentyll mayster for god sake'.

Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Reforme, 2018

This essay offers an insight into the way digital editions of medieval texts can be employed to replicate the medieval reading experience. Awareness of the characteristic features of medieval textuality, exemplified through select late medieval texts, can help in developing increasingly flexible editorial models, which are more consistent with medieval reading practices than current editions. Editions, transformed from single textual occurrences into fluid, communal, and unfolding processes, can uncover a complex notion of medieval hypertextuality by linking texts, images, and tunes. They can then even trace the reception of a given text. As readers are empowered to “zoom” in and out specific textual components, of manuscript witnesses, of families and printed editions, digital editions can present individual witnesses alongside editorial apparatuses and thus bridge the gap between the Old and the New Philology.

There is a pervasive sense of incessant acceleration in the academic world. This book puts the temporal ordering of academic life under the microscope, and showcases the means of yielding a better understanding of how time and temporality act both as instruments of power and vulnerability within the academic space.

T his essay ofers a framework for thinking about the active mutability of form in an early modern context. My purpose is to illuminate a potential point of intervention in emerging relationships between the digital humanities and historical scholarship. As Henry Turner has recently pointed out, many of our current understandings about the materiality of form are drawn from contemporary assumptions about the limits of disciplinary practice. Turner identiies rich inluences from both contemporary historians of science and early modern poetics that work to inlect a "notion of form [that] is not a static architecture or an immanent, closed idea," but which lourishes as a "renewing, relational network" (5). I am particularly interested in following this idea as a way back into our prevailing sense of what historical work can ofer to the "digital turn" (including the new institutional hegemony of the digital humanities) and, conversely, what the digital turn can ofer to historical work. My principal contention is that we are yet to see a thoroughgoing consideration of the deeper impacts of historical methodologies on digital practices and theories. I close with a brief demonstration of how attention to "renewing, relational" networks of form, using the works of Margaret Cavendish as an example, have the potential to transform our investigations into the practical and theoretical implications of the digital.

The Ballad of the Lone Medievalist, edited by Kisha G. Tracy and John P. Sexton, Punctum Books, 2018, pp. 355-360., 2018

2014

The essays, manifestos, rants, screeds, pleas, soliloquies, telegrams, broadsides, eulogies, songs, harangues, confessions, laments, and acts of poetic terrorism in these two volumes — which collectively form an academic “rave” — were culled, with some later additions, from roundtable sessions at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in 2012 and 2013, organized by postmedieval: a journal for medieval cultural studies and the BABEL Working Group (“Burn After Reading: Miniature Manifestos for a Post/medieval Studies,” “Fuck This: On Letting Go,” and “Fuck Me: On Never Letting Go”) and George Washington University’s Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute (“The Future We Want: A Collaboration”), respectively. Gathering together a rowdy multiplicity of voices from within medieval and early modern studies, these two volumes seek to extend and intensify a conversation about how to shape premodern studies, and also the humanities, in the years ahead. Authors in both volumes, in various ways, lay claim to the act(s) of manifesting, and also anti-manifesting, as a collective endeavor that works on behalf of the future without laying any belligerent claims upon it, where we might craft new spaces for the University-at-large, which is also a University that wanders, that is never just somewhere, dwelling in the partitive — of a particular place — but rather, seeks to be everywhere, always on the move, pandemic, uncontainable, and always to-come, while also being present/between us (manifest). This is not a book, but a blueprint. It is also an ephemeral gathering in the present tense. TABLE OF CONTENTS Vol. 1: Miniature Manifestos for a Post/medieval Studies, edited by Eileen A. Joy and Myra Seaman Heather Bamford: INTENTIONALLY GOOD, REALLY BAD — Frank Battaglia: SEEING A FOREST AS WELL AS TREES — Bettina Bildhauer: NET WORTH — Martha Easton + Maggie Williams: OUR FEMINISM, OUR ACTIVISM — Ruth Evans: BE CRITICAL! — Joshua R. Eyler: THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON MEDIEVAL STUDIES — Lara Farina: STICKING TOGETHER — Matthew Gabriele: WAGING GUERRILLA WARFARE AGAINST THE 19TH CENTURY — Gaelan Gilbert: MEDIEVAL STUDIES IN THE SUBJUNCTIVE MOOD — Noah D. Guynn: RADICAL RIDICULE — David Hadbawnik: BURNED BEFORE WRITING — Guy Halsall: HISTORY AND COMMITMENT — Cary Howie: ON NEVER LETTING GO — Shayne Aaron Legassie: THE GOTHIC FLY — Erin Maglaque: FUCK POSTCOLONIALISM — Material Collective: WE ARE THE MATERIAL COLLECTIVE — Thomas Mical: MEDIEVALISM/SURREALISM — Chris Piuma: DE CATERVIS CETERIS — Daniel C. Remein: 2ND PROGRAM OF THE ORNAMENTALISTS — Christopher Roman: A MEDIEVAL: MANIFESTO — Eva von Contzen: HOMO NARRANS — Erik Wade: HISTORICISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS — Lisa Weston: ‘TIS MAGICK, MAGICK THAT WILL HAVE RAVISHED ME *Miniature Manifestos for a Post/medieval Studies is a punctum book Vol. 2: The Future We Want: A Collaboration, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen Anne Harris + Karen Eileen Overbey: FIELD CHANGE/DISCIPLINE CHANGE — L.O. Aranye Fradenburg + Eileen A. Joy: PARADIGM CHANGE/INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE — J. Allan Mitchell + Will Stockton: TIME CHANGE/MODE CHANGE — Lowell Duckert + Steve Mentz: WORLD CHANGE/SEA CHANGE — Chris Piuma + Jonathan Hsy: SPECTRAL VOICE CHANGE/LANGUAGE CHANGE — Julie Orlemanski + Julian Yates: COLLECTIVE CHANGE/MOOD CHANGE *The Future We Want: A Collaboration is an Oliphaunt book"

Reti Medievali Rivista, 20/1, 2019

[En] The article highlights the relations between Italian medieval studies and digital humanities, starting from researches conducted on Vatican documents and other ecclesiastical sources since the 1980s; then it goes on to discuss some more recent projects, based on various types of sources. A multi-faceted debate emerges, in which the experiences of historians and editors of medieval sources are intertwined with those of archivists and librarians, to face the incessant transformation of Information Technology, from the first “Read-Only” Web to the Web 2.0, from the Semantic Web to the challenges posed to historians by research data and Linked Open Data technologies. [IT] L’articolo ricostruisce i rapporti degli studi medievistici italiani con le digital humanities, muovendo dalle ricerche condotte sulla documentazione vaticana e su altre fonti ecclesiastiche a partire dagli anni Ottanta del secolo scorso, per passare poi a discutere di alcuni progetti più recenti, basati su diverse tipologie di fonti. Emerge un dibattito a più voci, in cui le esperienze degli storici e degli editori di fonti medievali si intrecciano a quelle maturate nel mondo degli archivi e delle biblioteche, per affrontare le incessanti trasformazioni della Information Technology, dai primi siti in rete al Web 2.0, dal Web semantico alle recenti sfide lanciate agli storici dai dati della ricerca e dalle tecnologie dei Linked Open Data.