Manuscripts Online: Some Views of the Book
I have been updating the list of digital resources for manuscript and book studies that I normally use in my teaching and thought that it might be useful to make it available more generally. This is a loosely classified list which is by no means complete and which in some areas is somewhat outdated, but it is designed to give some brief indication of the range of what is available. In particular, I find it a useful exercise to ask how each of these resources implicitly answers the question 'what is a book?'. The approaches to that question can be dramatically different from one resource to the next, including 'a sequence of images', 'images linked to text', 'an object with binding [but not pages]', 'a container for handwriting', and many other things as well. None of these is right or wrong, of course: as Willard McCarty has argued in his contribution to the Companion to Digital Literary Studies (and elsewhere), no model can or should ever be complete. This is not a problem, as he demonstrates: on the contrary it is a virtue and is 'dangerous to us only if we miss the lesson of modeling and mistake the artificial for the real'.
Some Larger-Scale Digitisation Projects
- eCodices: Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland. <http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch>
- British Library Digitised Manuscripts. <http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/>
- Gallica: Bibliothèque nationale de France. <http://gallica.bnf.fr>
- Luna: The Bodleian Library. <http://bodley30.bodley.ox.ac.uk:8180/luna/servlet/ODLodl~1~1>
- Early Manuscripts at Oxford University. <http://image.ox.ac.uk>
- Digital Scriptorium. <http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/digitalscriptorium/> Particularly useful for images of provenance information.
- Parker on the Web [Requires subscription, but 'basic' services free.] <http://parkerweb.stanford.edu/>
- Wellcome Arabic Manuscripts Cataloguing Project. <http://wamcp.bibalex.org/>
Some aggregation sites and lists of lists of digitised projects include:
- The Medieval Electronic Scholarly Alliance (MESA) <http://www.mesa-medieval.org>
- Manuscripts Online: Written Culture 1000 to 1500 <http://www.manuscriptsonline.org>
- The UCLA Catalogue of Digitised Manuscritps <http://manuscripts.cmrs.ucla.edu/>
- Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts Online <http://www.digipal.eu/blog/tag/mss-online/>
Palaeographical and Typographical Projects
- DigiPal: The Digital Database and Resource for Palaeography, Manuscripts and Diplomatic. <http://www.digipal.eu/>
- Late Medieval English Scribes. <http://www.medievalscribes.com>
- Album interactif de paléographie médiévale <http://ciham.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/paleographie/>
- Cuneiform Digital Palaeography Project. <http://www.cdp.bham.ac.uk>
- What the Font (font recognition software) <http://new.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/>
- Type Navigator <http://typenav.fontshop.com/>
- IdentiFont – Fonts by Appearance <http://www.identifont.com/identify.html>
Linking Image and Text
- De Casu Ciʒaris Dutis Regis Iabin: An episode from John Lydgate's Fall of Princes. <http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/lydgate/>
- Jane Austen Fiction MSS. <http://www.janeausten.ac.uk/> (Try Watsons (2), p. b7-7)
- Van Gough Letters. <http://www.vangoghletters.org/>
- The Archimedes Palimpsest Project. <http://archimedespalimpsest.net/>
- The Roman de la Rose Project. <http://romandelarose.org/>
- Chopin's First Editions Online. <http://www.cfeo.org.uk/>
- Book of Margery Kempe. <http://english.selu.edu/humanitiesonline/kempe/>
- Shelley-Godwin Archive. <http://shelleygodwinarchive.org>
- Beckett Archive demo. <http://www.beckettarchive.org/demo/>
- Proust Prototype. <http://research.cch.kcl.ac.uk/proust_prototype/>
Comparing Pages and Texts
- On the Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favoured Traces <http://benfry.com/traces/>
- Jesse Hurlbut, 'The Manuscript Average' Parts 1 and 2 <http://jessehurlbut.net/wp/mssart/?page_id=2097> and <http://jessehurlbut.net/wp/mssart/?page_id=2887>
- The Shakespeare Quartos Archive <http://www.quartos.org/>
Maps
- Linguistic Geographies: The Gough Map of Great Britain. <http://www.goughmap.org/>
- Mapping Medieval Chester. <http://www.medievalchester.ac.uk/>
- Museum of Writing. <http://blog.museumofwriting.org/>
The Book as Object (or not)
- Bill Endres, The St Chad Gospels: Potentials for 3D in the Study of Manuscripts (YouTube Video published by the University of Kentucky). <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MILnCIZCuGw>
- Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) Viewer, including its example files for ancient and medieval manuscripts, available at <http://culturalheritageimaging.org/Technologies/RTI/index.html>
- 3DBook Flash Page Flip Platform. <http://www.3d-book.com>
- SfarData <http://sfardata.nli.org.il/sfardatanew/home.aspx>
- The SIMS Manuscript Collation Project <http://dorpdev.library.upenn.edu/collation/>
- Compare also more 'naive' views of the book, such as those above and also:
- Google Books Book Viewer, e.g. <http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=SKRJAAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false>
- Internet Archive Book Viewer, e.g. <https://archive.org/stream/dasleidenunsersh00bras#page/n1/mode/2up>
- Early English Books Online (EEBO),e.g. <http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:image:8881> (requires subscription)
Paper
- The Memory of Paper <http://www.memoryofpaper.eu:8080/BernsteinPortal/appl_start.disp>
Decoration
- British Library Digital Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts <http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/welcome.htm>
- British Library Images Online <http://www.imagesonline.bl.uk/>
- Roman de la Rose Project. <http://romandelarose.org/>
- Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Codices Iconographici <http://mdzx.bib-bvb.de/codicon/start.html>
- See also IconClass: <http://www.iconclass.nl/>
'Virtual Restoration'
- Archimedes Palimpsest <http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/>
- Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music <http://www.diamm.ac.uk/>
- Rinascimento Virtuale <http://www.rinascimentovirtuale.eu/>
Bindings
- Bindings of the 15th and 16th Centuries (Berlin Staatsbibliothek) <http://www.hist-einband.de/> [German only]
- British Bookbindings 16th–19th centuries <http://special.lib.gla.ac.uk/exhibns/bindings/index.html>
- British Library Catalogue of Bookbindings <http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/bookbindings/>
- Scottish Decorative Bookbindings (National Library of Scotland) <http://digital.nls.uk/bookbinding/index.html>
- Bookbindings in the Dutch National Library <http://www.kb.nl/en/special-collections/bookbindings-and-paper-history/bookbindings/>
- Hand Bookbindings: Plain and Simple to Grand and Glorious <http://libweb5.princeton.edu/visual_materials/hb/index.html>
Libraries
- St Gall Monastery Plan <http://www.stgallplan.org/en/>
Collections and Provenance
- The British Book Trade Index <http://www.bbti.bham.ac.uk/>
- The Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts <http://dla.library.upenn.edu/dla/schoenberg/>
- Provenance: Marks in Manuscripts <http://homepage.ntlworld.com/peter.kidd20/provenance/>
- Royal Identification Marks (Royal Library of Copenhagen) <http://www2.kb.dk/kb/missingbooks/marks/>
- Identifying Sloane's Books (The British Library) <http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/sloane/Identifiers.aspx>
- Sotheby's, Western and Renaissance Manuscripts <http://www.sothebys.com/en/departments/western-medieval-manuscripts.html>
- Christie's Books and Manuscripts <http://www.christies.com/departments/books-and-manuscripts-10-1.aspx>
- eBay Books – Antiquarian and Collectible <http://www.ebay.com/sch/Antiquarian-Collectible-/29223/i.html> then search for 'Manuscript'
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