Old Light on New Media: Medieval Practices in the Digital Age

Abstract

Old Light on New Media Medieval Practices in the Digital Age 4 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.

Among Digitized Manuscripts. Philology, Codicology, Paleography in a Digital World

“…In the limited cases that digital documents are considered in their materiality, users pretend they are (like) print publications.31 A computer still provides, as it were, a transparent window onto the document. 32 McLuhan already wrote in the sixties that "the electric light escapes attention as a communication medium just because it has no 'content. '"33 This transparency is augmented by the shared control of writer and reader over the text's appearance (in fact, both think they have sole control, not considering the other).34 These are fundamental misunderstandings, though easy to make within the paradigm of the digital world.…”

“…This is a cost you incur that is hard to counteract. 32 Since the end-user is now completely at the mercy of the team, this problem is aggravated when the tool demands a user to upload his or her material to the team's server. The server might be terribly slow or sometimes go offline, and if next to the raw data also notes and analysis are saved on that server, the scholar is no longer in control of their own work.…”

Philology on the Move: Manuscript Studies at the Dawn of the 21st Century

“…The intensity of interdisciplinary scholarship in this field may be appreciated by examining recent contributions in journals such as Digital Medievalist, Digital Philology and Literary and Linguistic Computing, which report innovative research endeavours for example into editorial philology, handwriting analysis and the visual markup of manuscript texts (see e.g. Cloppet et al 2011;Andrews & Macé 2013;Kiss et al 2013). Recent years have also seen the publication of several highquality collections of articles addressing the interface between philology, manuscript studies and digital humanities (see e.g.…”