Digital Medieval Studies: Practice and Preservation ed. by Laura K. Morreale and Sean Gilsdorf

Abstract

Reviewed by: Digital Medieval Studies: Practice and Preservation ed. by Laura K. Morreale and Sean Gilsdorf Paul Evans Digital Medieval Studies: Practice and Preservation. By Laura K. Morreale and Sean Gilsdorf, eds. Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2022. Digital Medieval Studies is a short, 121-page, edited collection that makes an argument for using a specific methodology, known as the digital documentation process (DDP), to document digital scholarly projects in medieval studies. Although it is now common for medievalists to preserve public GitHub repositories associated with their digital projects, DDP is a more structured approach aimed at documenting projects narratively in a form accessible to scholars who are not versed in digital methodologies, including those who are involved in hiring and tenure decisions. Medievalists who have done at least some digital work are the book's intended audience, and its primary agenda is to encourage them to preserve their projects in what, the contributors hope, will become a comprehensive, persistent, corpus of digital medieval scholarship. Except for an introduction by editors Laura K. Morreale and Sean Gilsdorf and a concluding retrospective by Lisa Fagin Davis, the contributed chapters focus on projects that have been archived according to DDP. Although the chapter authors do not go out of their way to foreground the process, their individual articles form an expanded commentary on each project's archiving dossier narrative (ADN), the historical component of DDP. Readers interested in archiving their own projects according to DDP will benefit from consulting the project information in the appendix to connect the content of the essays with the corresponding digital artifacts. In the book's five contributed chapters, the editors offer a commendable range of perspectives, spanning public humanities, research, teaching, and technical approaches. In chapter 1, Deborah Everhart and Martin Irvine narrate the history of the Labyrinth, a 1990s-era portal that collected and presented a curated set of links to resources for medieval studies. The authors take justifiable pride in this early project, which established medieval studies as a first mover in using the web as a vehicle for scholarly communication and for what today is called public humanities. They note, however, that the demise of the Labyrinth project offers a cautionary lesson on the vulnerability of still-valuable [End Page 147] project information to the vagaries of platform evolution. Today there are only two existing archives of the Labyrinth contents: the original hand-edited HTML from 2007 and an Adobe ColdFusion format from 2014. ColdFusion was a web platform that enjoyed some vogue among university IT departments until about 2010 but is rarely used now. This means that the 2014 archive is effectively unrecoverable for most users. In chapter 2, John McEwan describes the digital sigillography project (DIGISIG), which makes the standard print references, upon which the subdiscipline of sigillography has long depended, available in an online form. In doing so, DIGISIG shows these references to be more than the sum of their parts because it invites both extensive cross-referencing and sophisticated hierarchical classification schemes. McEwan also indirectly highlights a more general problem: that of recording, organizing, and searching for information not easily represented in standard character formats such as Unicode text. In this respect sigillography has much in common with the only partially solved problem of digital paleography. In chapter 3, Rowan Doran presents a clear narrative of the life-cycle of the Corpus Synodalium project and highlights the importance of a good set of explicit fundamental decisions in guiding digital humanities projects—noting, in this case, that the project should be "designed for permanence" and "driven by research questions'' (55) and should not "replicate the existing unevenness in availability of sources" (56). In the case of the Corpus Synodalium project, design for permanence entailed a clear separation between format and platform commitments: plain-text data and comma-separated metadata, on the one hand; the ARTFL Project's PhilLogic4 on the other. (Doran's contention that capturing information in the simplest formats possible, such as .txt and .csv, is a key to long-term project data survivability is also a theme of Davis's closing chapter.) Doran is forthright in acknowledging that his project enjoyed an unusual level of institutional support, so...