Mapping Manuscript Migrations: Digging Into Data For The History And Provenance Of Pre-Modern European Manuscripts

Hundreds of thousands of pre-modern European manuscripts have survived until the present day. As the result of changes in their ownership over the centuries, they are now spread all over the world. Collectively they constitute a great cultural and scholarly treasure. There are many sources of data relating to them, and new sources continue to proliferate in the digital environment. This project will link disparate datasets from Europe and North America to provide an international view of the history and provenance of these manuscripts. The aggregated data will enable researchers to analyse and visualize these topics at scales ranging from individual manuscripts to thousands of manuscripts. Our research will address their origins and movements, and the collectors and owners involved in their history. We will be able to show how these manuscripts have traveled across time and space to their current locations, where they continue to find new audiences.

The project will run from 2017 to 2019, as part of the Digging into Data Challenge, which is funded by 16 funding bodies in 11 countries through the Trans-Atlantic Platform.

The Principal Investigators are: Toby Burrows, University of Oxford, United Kingdom, AHRC/ESRC Eero Hyvönen, Aalto University, Finland, AKA Lynn Ransom, University of Pennsylvania, United States, IMLS Hanno Wijsman, Institut de recherche et d'histoire des textes, France, ANR

https://diggingintodata.org/awards/2016/project/mapping-manuscript-migration...