Greetings, all,
I'm writing to report that my Simmons School of Library and Information Science students have just reconstructed part of Otto Ege's "Fifty Original Leaves" portfolio, leaf no. 30 by uploading, cataloguing, and sequencing 27 leaves from 27 collections in the Fragmentarium interface. Here's the direct link to the reconstruction: http://www.fragmentarium.unifr.ch/view/page/F-djs6
Fragmentarium is a new interface that allows for cataloguing of individual leaves (for example, http://www.fragmentarium.unifr.ch/overview/F-qux7) and creating an online reconstruction. In particular, it allows users to create flexible and editable IIIF-compliant reconstructions in a shared-canvas viewer. It is truly extraordinary, and the possibilities are endless. The data for each leaf and for the reconstructed object can (and will) be updated and refined at any time, and additional leaves can be easily added. The records for individual leaves, can be found by searching from the Fragmentarium homepage, http://www.fragmentarium.unifr.ch/ As their final assignment, I assigned each student one example of "Fifty Original Leaves" no. 30 (a lovely early fifteenth-century Book of Hours) to catalogue in Fragmentarium. In addition to identifying the text on each leaf, part of the cataloguing process includes creating a shared- canvas sequence in which the two images are presented in the correct order. Then we worked together to establish the original sequence of leaves, assembling the individual canvases in Fragmentarium to create the reconstruction, which has its own record. Once we had built the reconstruction, one group of students looked at the totality of the preserved liturgy to investigate Use (it's Paris). A different group of students scoured the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts and discovered that this manuscript was likely C. L. Ricketts, Census no. 116. That entry led us to two Quaritch catalogues (1905 and 1910), and the Conway/Davis Directory pointed us to a 1939 Parke-Bernet sale. Once we found the Quaritch and PB catalogues, the identification was confirmed. The Quaritch, Ricketts, and PB descriptions can be clearly identified with the reconstructed manuscript, not only by codicological features but by the contents, which include enough unusual features to make the identification certain. This identification would not be possible based on the data provided by a single leaf. Only by reassembling the extant leaves can we conduct research on the liturgy and provenance of the original codex. I'll be giving a paper on the project at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University next May. The whole process was a very effective pedagogical tool with real results, and I look forward to putting my class to work on a different reconstruction every year. I am so grateful to Fragmentarium directors William Duba and Christoph Flüeler for facilitating the project, and to the holding institutions for making their images available. - Lisa
-- Lisa Fagin Davis Executive Director Medieval Academy of America 17 Dunster St., Suite 202 Cambridge, Mass. 02138
Phone: 617 491-1622 Fax: 617 492-3303 Email: LFD@TheMedievalAcademy.org