- With the rise in digital media, manuscript pages have become increasingly fetishised as reusable visual commodities – but what meaning can be found in their strangeness and their beauty? What happens when digital images circulate in isolation from their manuscript contexts? Through a series of conversations, multimedia interactions and collaborative crowdsourcing, this event will explore the use and consumption of medieval manuscripts today.
Julia Crick (Professor of Palaeography and Manuscript Studies at King’s College London), and Daniel Wakelin (Jeremy Griffiths Professor of Medieval English Palaeography at the University of Oxford) will curate conversations between academics and practitioners from different disciplines, asking them to respond to manuscript images in the light of their own research. We will turn to our audience as readers, and ask them to contribute their thoughts and observations on our collection of images.
Hartker's Antiphonary (late 10th): Gregory the Great dictating to a scribe writing on a wax tablet #SWStGall390 pic.twitter.com/nvW4XM6qGr
Follow live tweets from public discussion on the use and abuse of digital images of medieval books: #ManuscriptsNow.
Why digitise? Fame? To reach a wider audience. Items that would usually be restricted. #ManuscriptsNow
#ManuscriptsNow @SarahJBiggs prioritized MSS that are hardest for the public to get to see! Impact of issues like condition of MS & funding
Why have medieval images become so popular on social media? #ManuscriptsNow- Things to consider with digitisation: status, access, funding and condition #ManuscriptsNow
- #ManuscriptsNow @DanielWakelin1- does beauty impact decision? @SarahJBiggs - mix of demand & scholarly use; process as transparent as poss
- Value=Beauty? #ManuscriptsNow
- How can we judge what matters? Is it a beautiful manuscript? An interesting context? #ManuscriptsNow
Where does aesthetic attraction (beauty) fall in the Venn diagram of public interest v scholarly interest in MS images? #ManuscriptsNow- Venn diagram - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaVenn diagrams or set diagrams are diagrams that show all possible logical relations between a finite collection of sets (aggregation of...
- #ManuscriptsNow @orietta_darold & @DanielWakelin1 - How do we make paper exciting? Let's tweet funny watermarks! Spot the watermark!
- This freedom means that relevance is expanded. Public interaction #ManuscriptsNow
- .@SarahJBiggs making the good point that @BLMedieval is harnessing MS popularity / public interest (& I'd add, even comedy!) #ManuscriptsNow
- How can museums and libraries benefit from their digital collections economically under public domain licences? #ManuscriptsNow
- False advertising? The Middle Ages is considered a backwards place. #ManuscriptsNow
- On going problem/benefit of moderating, open use, editing and re-editing. #ManuscriptsNow
- Visual & Material Reproduction #ManuscriptsNow
- #ManuscriptsNow Panel 2: Visual & Material Reproduction with Julia Crick, Sophie Page, Sarah Salih and Ayla Lepine
- Do we look for the beautiful images to attract audience? #ManuscriptsNow
- #ManuscriptsNow Ayla drops the word #authentic on us like a bomb!
