This is the Laboratory, in which you can find Tools to help you analyze manuscripts and share your findings.
The Digital Beehive is a web interface that serves as both a digital representation and host of digital tools for researching and working with Pastorius’s manuscript and its system of cross-referencing.The Digital Beehive lies at the nexus of manuscript studies and digital humanities. Not quite an aggregated database nor a digital edition, this project pushes our understanding of the digital humanities in new directions, as our datasets ultimately serve to replicate, reveal, and share a hyperlinked data system developed by a single author in the Early Modern period in manuscript form.
Digital Mappa (DM) is an open-source DH platform for open-access workspaces, projects, collaborations, and scholarly publications. “The premise of DM is simple: if you have a collection of digital images and texts, then you should be able to develop a project where you can identify specific moments on these images and texts, annotate them as much as you want, link them together, generate searchable content, collaborate with your friends, and publish your work online for others to see and share.” SIMS hosts an instance of DM with completed projects for you to view. If you need help understanding how to use DM, the UW-Madison DM site has a Creator Guide for those getting started with a project. An introductory video tutorial on how to use DM is also available. To request to begin a project on the SIMS DM instance, go to the SIMS instance and Register at the top right of the page.
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 Database of Manuscripts, the Bodleian Libraries, and the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes. The data have been combined using a set of shared ontologies and a novel unified Data Model that extends the CIDOC-CRM and FRBRoo ontologies. A diagram of the Data Model can be seen here. The original data have not been corrected or amended in any way, only aggregated from the legacy databases and transformed and linked into a global knowledge graph hosted in a linked open data service. The semantic portal MMM was created on top of the data service using its SPARQL API. If you would like to learn how to conduct SPARQL queries with this dataset, please see the SPARQL header in the Classroom.
A calculator for diagnosing the category and format of 15th century paper.
The SDBM aggregates observations of pre-modern manuscripts from historical and contemporary sources that document the sales and locations of these books from around the world. SDBM user accounts are free and open to all, and give users the opportunity to contribute and edit data, bookmark and download records, and collaborate with other users via our Forum and User Groups. This introductory webinar provides a basic introduction to the database. It includes an explanation of the SDBM’s development history and data model, followed by demonstrations of the user interface and search strategies. Viewers will also learn how to contribute their own knowledge to the database in the form of Personal Observations. This webinar was recorded on May 19, 2020 with a live audience and includes their questions at the end.
VisColl (Collation Visualization) is a system for modeling and visualizing the physical collation of medieval manuscript codices. For an example of how the modeler looks in context, see Lewis E 89 a Book of Hours from the Free Library of Philadelphia. Click on the icon that looks like a stack of quires in the upper left (next to the gear icon) and the collation visualization will appear across the top of the screen. For more information see the VisColl project website or the tutorial.