Medieval Manuscripts
Overview
In September 2012, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded Yale University a $650,000 grant to support scholarship with medieval manuscripts by using new digital tools to facilitate access and to use new approaches to pursue answers to long-standing questions in the field. The rapidly evolving fields of digital technology can assist scholars of the Middle Ages in a variety of new ways–ways that can add a quantifiable and replicable dimension to the research, and ways that can advance and disseminate a scholar’s research that were not before possible. Digitally Enabled Scholarship with Medieval Manuscripts at Yale University is a 27-month project to introduce innovative tools for digital cultural heritage studies.
Methods & Tools
Yale faculty projects will utilize the Canvas Viewer/Mirador for image comparison and lightweight annotation. This tool, developed by Stanford University as part of a companion grant for Digital Manuscript Interoperability funded by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation, is an image viewer designed for the study of manuscripts. Researchers can select and view multiple pages from one or more manuscripts and study high-resolution images side-by-side using zooming and panning tools. Researchers can also display and compare various images of the same page, such as multispectral bands. The tool also supports the ability to view images with annotations, including transcriptions.
The Image Study Service was developed by YDC2 with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation. The Image Study Service is accessed via a web interface and represents the back-end support for serving and storing access controlled annotations via an application programming interface (API). Note that access to the Image Study Service and project annotations is currently restricted to named project participants. All other users have open access to the manuscript images here.
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