Image from LJS 449, which Kim Schwenk studied during her week at RBS.
Kim Schwenk participated in the Rare Book School course that Dot Porter and Will Noel taught this summer at Penn: “The Medieval Manuscript in the 21st Century.” This is a blog post about her final project. We’re glad she had such a great time!
“Of course, no one is suggesting that digital images of membrane pages should or can replace physical books as objects of study and teaching, and it must be noted that digitization projects, as they crack open manuscripts that may not have been examined carefully in many years, have led to immediate and significant discoveries on the ground. The point is that the digitization of the parchment inheritance yields (or at least has the potential to yield) a fundamentally different kind of information than that afforded by extended immersion in a much smaller number of manuscripts. This is one of the principles of digital humanities, of course: that the computerized transformation and geometric expansion of the world’s archives invites new sorts of questions tied intimately to the modes of preservation, enhancement, indexing, and so on that capture the objects of digitization. Given the speed with which so much information (textual, visual…
The Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies 