Digital Proceedings of the Lawrence J. Schoenberg Symposium on Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age

The Lawrence J. Schoenberg Symposium on Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age is organized by the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image (SCETI) in partnership with the Free Library of Philadelphia. It brings together scholars from around the world and across disciplines to present research related to the study of manuscript books and documents produced before the age of printing and to discuss the role of digital technologies in advancing manuscript research. Whether relying on traditional methods of scholarship or exploring the potential of new technologies, the research presented in these proceedings highlights the value of the manuscript book or document in understanding our intellectual heritage.

For more information on the symposium, go to http://www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/lectures/ljs_symposium.html.

The symposium is made possible thanks to the generous support of Library overseers Lawrence J. Schoenberg and Barbara Brizdle. For more information on Schoenberg Collection and the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts, go to http://www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/lectures/ljs_symposium.html and http://dla.library.upenn.edu/dla/schoenberg/index.html.

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 14
  • Publication
    Panel Report: Scientific Manuscripts in the Digital Age
    (2009-09-02) Brey, Gerhard
    The 1st Annual Lawrence J. Schoenberg Symposium on Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age was concluded by a panel discussion under the title "Scientific Manuscripts in the Digital Age". The members of the panel comprised both digital humanities specialists and scholars working in the history of science. This report summarizes the discussion.
  • Publication
    Manuscripts of Latin Translations of Scientific Texts from Arabic
    (2009-09-02) Burnett, Charles
    Manuscripts of translations give one the opportunity not only to compare texts in two different languages but also to compare the formats of those texts and to consider whether any features of the source manuscript have passed over into the target manuscript. Though it is very rare to find the very manuscript that a translator used when making his translation, there are translations in which, in one way or another, the Arabic Vorlage has influenced the way the translator has set out his material. By examining the manuscript evidence from scientific texts, this paper explores various ways in which translators dealt with certain formal challenges posed by the translation from Arabic into Latin.
  • Publication
    Manuscripts in the Hampton L. Carson Collection in the Free Library of Philadelphia
    (2010-04-09) Kennedy, Kathleen E.
    The Hampton L. Carson Collection of Anglo-American Common Law comprises one of the largest collections of English common law manuscripts in North America. The statute collections in the Carson Collection provide samples illustrating a range of topics of central importance to the study of English legal history, bibliography, and medieval English culture. LC 14 20.5 and LC 14.21 date to around 1300, and are among the earliest statute collections, copied as the nature of statutes as law was still developing. LC 14 09. 5 dates to the later fifteenth century, as legal manuscripts were beginning to compete with print. MS 14 09 5's illuminations have been used to identify a group of manuscript artists who seem to have specialized in legal manuscripts. In "Manuscripts in the Hampton L. Carson Collection" I will introduce these manuscripts and others as I assess the usefulness of the collection for scholarly research.
  • Publication
    Henry Charles Lea: Jurisprudence and Civilization
    (2010-04-09) Peters, Edward
    During the same nineteenth century when the modern study of legal history got underway in Europe, from Savigny to the Codex Iuris Canonici of 1917, Henry Charles Lea (1825-1909), an ocean away and without a serious library in sight, undertook the study of several aspects of ecclesiastical and legal history that brought him into contact with canon law at virtually every turn. This talk will deal with Lea's encounter with canon law - in and out of historical study proper - in the young and library-thin America of the 1850s and 60s. That is, I will focus on Lea's early work - Superstition and Force (1866), An Historical Sketch of Sacerdotal Celibacy (1867), Studies in Church History (1869), and the beginning of his work on the various inquisitions. In the preface to the second edition of Superstition and Force (1870) Lea remarked that "The history of jurisprudence is the history of civilization." For Lea, that jurisprudence included canon law.
  • Publication
    Readers in the Margins: Pictorializing the Study of Roman Law
    (2010-04-09) L'Engle, Susan
    The shortened version of the paper presented here will address the various types of marks--graphic and pictorial--made by readers in the margins of twelfth- and early thirteenth-century manuscripts of Roman law. The graffiti and their multiple functions will be discussed in the context of the early teaching and study of law, particularly in Bologna. A scholarly version of this paper will appear in the Festschrift for Richard and Mary Rouse, edited by Christopher Baswell, Sandra Hindman, and Consuelo Dutschke, published by Brepols, and slated to come out in 2010.
  • Publication
    Early Islamic Legal Manuscripts: What we know; what we may yet discover
    (2010-04-09) Brockopp, Jonathon
    Forty years ago, Fuat Sezgin completed what is still our only survey of early Islamic legal manuscripts (in the first volume of his Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums). Since that time, Joseph Schacht drew the attention of the scholarly community to important collections of manuscripts in Fez, Kairouan, and Tunis, and Miklos Muranyi has published a series of articles and books probing the riches of these collections. But much more work remains to be done. The Kairouan collection is of particular importance. Virtually uncatalogued, this collection contains some of the oldest legal manuscripts in Arabic, including fragments datable to the early ninth century CE. In this paper, I will review the accomplishments of scholars thus far and suggest some of the ways that further study of these manuscripts can increase our understanding of the development, practice, and study of early Islamic law.
  • Publication
    Digitized Manuscripts and Open Licensing
    (2010-04-09) Cayless, Hugh
    This report examines the issue of copyright law in digitizing manuscripts and making images available online. Specifically, it looks at the possible solutions provided by Creative Commons.
  • Publication
    Archimedes in Bits: The Digital Presentation of a Write-Off
    (2009-09-02) Noel, William
    The Archimedes Palimpsest is considered by many to be the most important scientific manuscript ever sold at auction. It was purchased at a Christie’s sale on October 1998, by an anonymous collector for $2,000,000. The collector deposited the Palimpsest at the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, for exhibition, conservation, imaging and scholarly study in 1999. Work has been ongoing ever since. The Archimedes Palimpsest contains seven of the Greek mathematician’s treatises. The manuscript was written in Constantinople (present day Istanbul) in the 10th century. In the 13th century, the manuscript was taken apart, and the Archimedes text was scraped off. The parchment was reused by a monk who created a prayer book. The Archimedes manuscript then effectively disappeared. Since 1999, intense efforts have been made to retrieve the Archimedes text. Many techniques have been employed, including multispectral imaging, x-ray flourescence imaging and synchrotron x-ray scanning at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California. The imaging efforts have led to a re-evaluation of the work of Archimedes, and to the retrieval of entirely new texts from the ancient world.
  • Publication
    Charters Encoding Initiative Overview
    (2010-04-09) Vogeler, Georg
    The Charters Encoding Initiative considers the possibilities of a standard to encode medieval and early modern charters with XML. It represents a working group to notify our intention to work continuously together, to spread our proposals in the scientific community and to integrate them into existing standards especially the guidelines of the TEI. See also http://www.cei.lmu.de/.
  • Publication
    Spoken Text and Written Symbol: The Use of Layout and Notation in Sanskrit Scientific Manuscripts
    (2009-09-02) Plofker, Kim
    Because of the traditional reverence for oral composition and recitation in Sanskrit literature, most Classical Sanskrit treatises, including scientific ones, were composed in verse and intended (at least in theory) for memorization. Written versions of Sanskrit texts are often presented in imitation of their ideal oral form, as an almost continuous and unformatted stream of syllables. Manuscripts of technical works on subjects such as mathematics and astronomy, however, had to combine this “one-dimensional” text stream with graphical and notational features generally requiring two-dimensional layout, such as tables, diagrams, and equations. This paper looks at how the ways in which this synthesis could be achieved posed several significant challenges for Sanskrit scribes.