#digitization project

[surlycakes]

Dear Grandma Rose

More than two decades after Grandma Rose’s passing, I’ve been digitizing her writing and correspondence. I knew she wrote, but I didn’t realize until I started this project that she was a preservationist who saved everything. Among her things, I found stacks of letters and cards her grandchildren had sent to her. Our childhood scrawls were filed right alongside decades of correspondence,…

Dear Grandma Rose

[engl333blog]

using my last digitization project slot to be horrendous. but i called up like 3 medical texts on the last day so who’s surprised?

i heard about anthropomorphic biocodicology in a podcast episode and when i saw the medical heritage library on archive.org i knew i had to find it. this is the highwayman by james allen, and it is apparently bound in human skin! (yes, it’s james allen’s skin, and he wanted it to be like that. one copy would go to his physician and the other to a guy he failed to rob. make of that what you will.) 

the actual skin cover from the atlas obscura: i mean they clearly were sort of worried that the human (!!!!!!!!!) skin would come off so no one can go see it anymore :( although i don’t think my mom would be down to head out to boston for that anyway so it’s good that someone popped in on the internet. 

but i’m like... why? a quick wikipedia search about human skin bindings will say that everyone who did it apparently were really committed to the bit, and bound stuff like holbein’s The Dance with Death and medical textbooks. but then i remember that they used the skin of criminals and dead patients and well. we talked about canon-making and the control of printing--and i think this is an interesting take on the idea of materiality as a form of exerting control. a gruesome take for sure, but interesting.

[engl333blog]

digitization 2 is the link to the anne de bretagne (i do read the comments! sometimes) and right off the bat: holy moly. the flowers and the lock (?? the thing that prevents the pages from getting puffy) already have me so charmed

oh these illustrations are gorgeous. i mean It Is Known that the illustrations would be beautiful--i wasn’t expecting this level of vividness and detail. nothing but awe wrt the digitization process, and the colour preservation. i’m assuming the people working are going to be doing duties that are associated with that time of day? 

but what really catches my attention is that first colour page where the pieta is directly across from anne (???) herself. and we walk right on back to projections of authenticity in this stuff. authenticity isn’t the word i should be using but i’m blanking--it’s not about accuracy so much as it is power? authority? i saw this same thing in one of the other books of hours in RBSC, where the person who commissioned the illustration made it in next to the saints.  of course anne de bretagne wasn’t alive to see jesus rise from the tomb--but the fact that she could get herself drawn as if she was says something on its own, and that’s fascinating. 

broad and potentially incorrect generalization here too but i kind of want to dig up more examples of this in medieval art? it feels like it says something about cultural priorities and how media culture affects ideas of truth, but i don’t know where that essay would go. we just deal with it differently now, i guess? it’s not so much about the vibes anymore, because that would just be straight-up lying now. handy tie-in to the actual practice of digitization/access in general: i wonder if portraits and other things along this vein fell by the wayside a little when information and texts were able to be democratized in a way. information and resources were less connected to power and more to... objective things--not that objectivity is ever Really a thing when a medium is being consumed etc. etc 

it’s just interesting to chew on, for the same reasons i was so fond of the “here be monsters” stuff and the way we choose to fill--or not fill--gaps in knowledge. 

[engl333blog]

digitization project piece 1 is from gallica: i’m looking at the chretien de troyes manuscript for  Le Chevalier au lion, Le Chevalier de la charrette, Cligès. (that link should work--the fact that everything is french now makes it somehow harder to navigate, although i’ll be nice to myself and say that the website design is not my favourite.) 

i took a french arthuriana class w prof. moran last year and we were on zoom for a good early chunk. so i have very vivid memories of being read pieces of the knight of the cart in the original french while someone was doing construction work on somewhere in his general vicinity. he left us a bunch of online resources but after watching the bibliotheque nationale website buffer for ten minutes, i wasn’t inclined to try it out myself--until now! 

notably that class was in english, and our translation of everything was in prose--so before opening this manuscript, i completely forgot that these were poems to begin with. would be a fascinating job for the translator. i don’t know if it would be fair to parallel moving from song to prose with the somewhat prose-y/diaristic style of like... pop music? (spitballing. i actually have no clue) 

i’m assuming that the little letters? numbers? are line numbers, but given the extent to which the website will let me zoom i have no idea. i’ll go ahead and forgive myself for not getting the words, but the handwriting makes it so that i can’t even figure out that many letters. (i have the sneaking suspicion that we were getting easy samples in class.)  

[nollywoodmagazine]

‘EFCC ’ll continue with NBC probe despite DSO launch’

‘EFCC ’ll continue with NBC probe despite DSO launch’

By Emmanuel Elebeke

THE Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, has said that the ongoing probe of the alleged digitization scandal by the Economic and Financial Crime Commission, EFCC will go on despite the successful launch of the pilot scheme of the project.

The Minister explained that the essence of the probe is to uncover the exact amount realized from the sale of the…

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