Author Archives: Chase Hockema

Digital Medieval Studies

How DH Has Helped Me Make Sense of My Field

Early in my graduate studies, when I took the Digital Humanities Colloquium at Boston College, the professor had us read a series of definitions of “the Digital Humanities” to introduce us to the scope of the work we might be doing. Many of these definitions rightly focused on interdisciplinarity, computational analysis, multimedia pedagogy and scholarship, and the need for an umbrella term to encourage institutional support and funding. One definition, however, continues to resonate with me as it is particularly germane to my own field of medieval studies: “[u]ltimately, what sets DH apart from many other humanities fields is its methodological commitment to building things as a way of knowing.” This emphasis on DH as primarily a methodology of building things clarifies what I can do with DH. When conceptualizing a new DH project, I begin by asking myself, “what am I hoping to build to help me know something new about this topic?”

Often, the answer to that question has something to do with the materiality of the topic. As a translator in medieval studies, I have spent untold hours poring over manuscripts and textual editions, navigating the webs of cramped handwriting spilling across pages and the matrices of the apparatus criticus. Text encoding, the DH work I have done with such manuscripts, has given me a deeper insight into the physicality of the scribal tradition and allows me to represent the complexity of the folios. Because DH prioritizes the creation of new material, I get to know the material culture of my field more closely than I might have otherwise.

This digital methodology of “building” gives me a different way of knowing the content and the context of the material I study. Both formats, manuscript and XML file, have their affordances for marking intertextual material, line breaks, section headers, etc., and the painstaking encoding process creates an intimacy with the text which more traditional humanistic scholarship may not allow. In many ways, the detailed encoding (done in an XML file) feels like the practice of copying a manuscript, and the final result visually complements the original folio.

DH methodologies ask me to think about the medieval world in a new way, demanding that I consider how to transfer the technology of the manuscript into digital technology. As I build a digital manuscript of my own, I can almost see through the lens of the scribes themselves, how they constantly referred back to their source text to produce a faithful copy. Digital humanities offers a new entry point to the field and literally allows me to continue the tradition I study, and it doesn’t hurt that the end result is really cool, too!

Manuscript viewer built from the XML file above through Edition Visualization Technology v. 1.3. This work-in-progress provides multiple nodes of engagement with both the manuscript and the text itself.

Venetian Art and Architecture

Venetian Art and Architecture is an ongoing project by Professor Stephanie Leone and the students of ARTH3344, is a course resource featuring digital exhibits curated by students. The collections showcase the visual culture of Venice, utilizing exhibits that correspond with topics of study in the course, including architecture, sculpture, artists and visual themes that are prevalent in Venetian art history. The site serves as an accessible guide to course content and is an opportunity for students to collaborate on a shared intellectual project.

This project was built using Omeka, an open source platform that supports digital exhibits and curation. The site was originally developed in collaboration with members of the Digital Scholarship Group, Visual Resources Curator, and an undergraduate research assistant.

Keywords: Digital Exhibition, Images, Metadata, Teaching

Séamus Connolly Collection of Irish Music

Launched at the end of 2016, the Séamus Connolly Collection of Irish Music is a digital archive featuring traditional tunes and songs collected by master fiddle player Séamus Connolly, Sullivan Artist in Residence in Irish Music at Boston College (2004 to 2015) and National Heritage Fellow (2013). Freely available, the collection offers over 330 audio recordings featuring more than 130 musicians via SoundCloud, with accompanying stories, transcriptions, and introductory essays.

This project was created through a partnership between Séamus Connolly and the Boston College Libraries.

Keywords: Audio, Digital Exhibition, Metadata, Music Transcription

J. Donald Monan, S.J. (1924–2017)

The J. Donald Monan, S.J. exhibit was designed by the Digital Scholarship Group to celebrate and reflect on Fr. Monan’s immense contributions to Boston College and beyond. When Reverend J. Donald Monan, S.J., died on March 18, 2017, BC not only lost its 24th president, it lost its modern institutional architect. We at BC grieve his loss and do our best to carry his devotion to teaching, scholarship, and building communities into a new era.

Morales Mass Book

Morales Mass Book is an open-access companion site to the First Book of Masses by Cristóbal de Morales (ca. 1550-1553), a Spanish composer at the Papal chapel in Rome. The project explores the Missarum liber primus (Lyon: Moderne, 1546) focusing on the composer, the printer, and the processes that informed the composition of four of Morales’s polyphonic masses. In addition, video and audio recordings invite us into the world of Morales’s superb music. The physical 1546 edition of the Missarum liber primus was acquired by the John J. Burns Library in 2011.

This project is a collaboration between Boston College Libraries’ Digital Scholarship Group and the Music Department in the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences.

Keywords: Audio, Images, Video

Jesuit Online Bibliography

The Jesuit Online Bibliography is a re-envisioned, open access and fully searchable database of bibliographic records for scholarship in Jesuit Studies produced in the 21st century. This database contains more than 15,000 records of books, book chapters, journal articles, book reviews, dissertations, conference papers, and multimedia content, with the records also being accessible through The Portal to Jesuit Studies, an open access resource for Jesuit research and scholarship.

The Boston College Libraries project team developed this resource in collaboration with the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies (IAJS). Built using open source technology, the code used is available in the BC Libraries’ GitHub repository.

Keywords: Database, Metadata, Open Access