(Reblogging from Mapping Books)
“Today I’m teaching a workshop on using “screen scraping” in the digital humanities. No workshop is really useful without practical examples so last week I decided to try out my screen scraping chops on an exciting new database of book history data. The Kislak Center at Penn (where I’m Scholar in Residence) is quickly becoming one of the most important sites for book and manuscript provenance research and I wanted to see what I could do to highlight the potential for making extant provenance data more useful through new visualizations.
Several years ago, a few of the scholars behind the monumental Corpus of British medieval library catalogues project (now at fifteen volumes) led by Richard Sharpe began working on an online database to update and provide access to the wealth of information on medieval manuscripts contained in Neil Ker’s Medieval Libraries of Great Britain (1941, 1964, and 1987). These volumes include accounts of books and manuscripts known to survive today which once were owned within Great Britain before the mid-16th century. Recently, through grants from the Mellon foundation and others, the team has taken much of this information and made it available online in the MLGB3 searchable database. The site appears to be in beta mode at the moment and intermittently accessible but when it launches fully it will be an amazing resource and the culmination of a good deal of work by Sharpe and others. Looking through the database I was especially intrigued by the wealth of data on the current location of many of these medieval books and manuscripts. Given how comprehensive and detailed the project data is, even at this stage, I wanted to get a sense of what kind of picture would develop if we looked at the points of origin and current location of all these manuscripts in aggregate.”
For the full post visit http://mappingbooks.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-dispersal-of-medieval-libraries-of.html.
The Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies 