MAA News – The Digital Middle Ages

In their introduction to the The Digital Middle Ages (Speculum 92S1), issue editors David J. Birnbaum, Sheila Bonde, and Mike Kestemont wrote: “Our aims in this supplement of Speculum are frankly immodest….[W]e hope, by bringing together a diversity of projects, to showcase for the Academy membership the wide range of exciting possibilities afforded by digital humanities….This supplement is the first issue of Speculum devoted to digital medieval projects, and it is offered in an online, open-access format that reinforces the openness to which the digital aspires and which it encourages.” The supplement–different, of course, from the electronic version of the October issue–is a stand-alone issue available to all but only in digital format, since it demonstrates, through resources available online, the wealth of methodologies increasingly available to medievalists. We hope you have had a chance to delve into it, and we offer a few images from its pages as inducements:

Stones: British Library, MS Add. 10294, fol. 44. Miniature (© British Library Board; GIS © Alison Stones).

McGillivray and Duffy: Detail of MS Cotton Nero A.x. fol. 90/94r (with and without infrared).

Wrisley: A heat map of place names found in Joinville’s Vie de saint Louis, created using the Geographic Information System software ArcGIS.

Bonde, Coir, and Maines: Notre-Dame d’Ourscamp, 3D reconstruction of stage 44 showing the beginning of roofing of the Gothic chevet (Bonde, Coir, and Maines).

Pentcheva and Abel: Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, balloon-pop response (above) and associated spectrogram (below), December 2010 (diagram by Jonathan S. Abel)

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