Presentation - The National Archives

Tiziana Mancinelli

BIFLOW - Toscana bilingue

My experience in Data driven INNOVATION and Cultural Heritage

PhD at University of Reading and King's College on Digital Humanities

CCeH - Cologne Centre for eHumanities

ERC project - University of Venice

VeDPH - Venice Centre for Digital and Public Humanities

Interdisciplinary and intersectionality

A continuing digital project building on five years of intensive research by medieval scholars

What? A variety of literary documents that circulated simultaneously in more than one language (Latin and vernacular) in Tuscany, Italy

When? Mid-13th century - beginning of the 15th century

Link: https://tmancinelli.github.io/biflow_website/

WHAT IS THE BIFLOW CATALOGUE?

Provide an advanced tool for scholars and students of medieval culture and translation studies

Develop our understanding of the social and cultural history of medieval Europe, particularly related to textual and manuscript production

Use digital tools to shed new light on medieval cultural production

FUTURE AIMS: building an extended network with archives worldwide; reaching new audiences, expanding accessibility

AIMS AND GOALS

Manuscript 1

Manuscript 2

Manuscript 3

derived from

What we learned

What? Locating the texts (primary source and translated versions); mapping relationships between the texts (the graph of versions).

Text

The Régime du corps, a medical text originally written in French, is instanced in 13 distinct versions in a range of languages: Catalan, Flemish, French, Italian, and two Latin versions.

Author

Copyist

Translator

Who? different actors involved in the production of knowledge in the Middle Ages:

What we learned

Identified producers include: 134 authors; 38 copyists; and 6 known translators (many more remain so far unidentified).

Our most prolific copyist, with 7 manuscripts, is Johannes Burcardi (c.1450-1506), an Alsatian born priest who served at the courts of several popes. He is best remembered for his own Liber Notorum recording details of papal ceremonies.

We identified key actors in one of Europe's most fertile zones of cultural productivity in the Middle Ages.

So far the catalogue studies over 700 manuscripts (and growing).

studying the development and distribution of text production across languages and locations.

What we learned

It is harder to trace the geographical spread of textual production. We generally know where manuscripts have been preserved (in libraries and archives across Europe), but not where they were originally composed. However, ongoing research by paleographers and codicologists on the material aspects of manuscripts (from layout and script to inks and parchments) is expanding our knowledge.

The Liber of Saint Angela da Foligno, a wealthy widow from Umbria (central Italy) who became a Franciscan nun, is preserved in Latin and Florentine Italian witnesses. Only the Florentine Italian translations have remained preserved in Tuscany to the present day, while the Latin versions are found in collections around the world from Oxford to Chicago.

We traced texts and manuscripts across over ten languages: Latin; French and Langue d'oil; Catalan and Flemish; plus several Italian vernaculars.

how we did it: methodologies

Metadata represent the inherent characteristics of a catalogue -- well-defined metadata are the key to unlock resources
Semantic Web technologies and Linked Open Data allow us to fully map out entities and their relationships using principles of abstraction in order to represent multilingualism and translation in the Middle Age