Resources: Tools

  • Canvas

    Canvas is the primary learning management system for the University of Pennsylvania. Instructors can use Canvas in conjunction with other digital tools as an interface for integrating special collections into their teaching.

  • Digital Beehive Project

    The Digital Beehive Project provides a digital tool for navigating Francis Daniel Pastorius’s “Bee-Hive” manuscript, UPenn MS Codex 726. The project currently provides a complete page-by-page representation of the manuscript as well as a partial hyperlinked interface for navigating sections of the manuscript.

  • Finding Aids

    The finding aids provide a thorough account of manuscript collections and archival materials available at the University of Pennsylvania. Finding aids include an inventory of the collection as well as relevant background information.

  • Mapping Manuscript Migrations

    Mapping Manuscript Migrations (MMM) is a semantic portal for finding and studying pre-modern manuscripts and their movements, based on linked collections of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, the Bodleian Libraries, and the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes. Researchers are able to analyse and visualize the aggregated data at scales ranging from individual manuscripts to thousands of manuscripts.

  • Needham Calculator 1.0

    The Needham Calculator is a tool created at the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies for manuscript scholars, art historians, incunabulists, and all those interested in the categories and formats of fifteenth century paper, and the impact they had on the sizes of books and works of art. The Needham Calculator derives its name from scholar Paul Needham because it is dependent upon his classification of categories of fifteenth-century paper.

  • VisColl

    VisColl is a system for generating visualizations of a physical manuscript’s collation. It consists of a data model for modeling of a manuscript (based on quires, leaves in quires, and typology for the leaves (original, missing, added, replaced)), software for building models in a tabular format (published online and expressed in a custom XML schema), and software for generating visualizations from that model, via another online form. VisColl is free and available for anyone to use.