This article was first published on the Oxford Medieval Studies blog under the title Reaching out with Manuscripts
What do you get when you put together an excited group of medieval manuscript specialists and ask them to discuss blogging and teaching with digitized manuscripts? The answer: trumpets, drapes, marginal animal appearances, fake back-drops, cries of agony, laughter and lots of good advice.
A worldwide audience (from California to New Zealand!) gathered in three online sessions that were organized as additional evening events for the International Medieval Congress (IMC) at Leeds, 6–9 July 2020. The organisers were very pleased to see that each session had well over 100 participants. Our speakers shared their experiences on using digitized medieval manuscripts for teaching, and for reaching out to various audiences via social media, mainly through blogging and tweeting.
Blogging manuscripts with #PolonskyGerman
Tuija Ainonen, Andrew Dunning and Henrike Lähnemann (all of University of Oxford) opened the sessions by discussing their experiences on blogging for this project, Manuscripts from German-Speaking Lands - A Polonsky Foundation Digitization Project. We are midway through our three-year collaboration to open up the medieval German manuscript collections of two world-class libraries for research and reuse. The two libraries will digitize c. 600 medieval manuscripts of Germanic origin between 2019 and 2021. To date, we have also published 21 project blogs.
Watch the first session to hear some thoughts on writing project based blogs on a variety of topics:
In the first session each presenter highlighted a blog post they had written. By opening up their writing processes they provided some useful tips for what to do, and what they would do differently. Even with specialized projects the aim is to write to non-specialists, so using approachable language and sentence structures is essential. As illustrative images are taken from digitized copies, it is crucial to provide readers with the manuscript shelfmark, folio reference and a link to the digital copy. It is important to follow the libraries’ attribution and guidance for terms of use that are provided in the meta-data of the images. However, the best place of the shelfmark is perhaps not on the title of the blog post.
Teaching the digital codex
In the second session Mary Boyle (University of Oxford), Julia Walworth (Merton College, Oxford) and Leonor Zozoya-Montes (University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria) continued the theme of manuscript outreach. Discussions considered teachable features and pedagogical approaches to teaching with digital codices. Teaching the Codex was launched at Merton College, Oxford with a colloquium in February 2016, and it has since published formidable blogs on teachable features and links to paleographical and codicological training resources.
Watch the second session for great insights into how to approach teaching the digital codex:
Their individual and collective insights provided the listeners with lots of new ideas and thoughts. Perhaps the not-so-pretty manuscripts also deserve more time in the limelight provided by blogs. Various teachable features and manuscripts that cover multiple texts provide fertile ground for highlighting medieval manuscripts from various different viewpoints.
Blogging manuscripts for the general public
In our final session Alison Hudson (University of Central Florida) and Alison Ray (Canterbury Cathedral Archives) took us through a whirlwind of images and advice on good social media practices as they showed us examples of their twitter and blog behaviour.
Watch the third session for an excellent brief introduction to successful tweeting and blogging practices with medieval manuscripts:
With a handy and useful group of guidelines for continuing our journey on blogging and tweeting with medieval manuscripts, one particular thought is worth repeating here. We as manuscript researchers and readers are in the best position to showcase and promote the work we do. Blogs provide us a handy way of showing ways in which medieval books are still relevant today, and how the old authors, compilers, scribes and readers of old continue to speak to current audiences.
Blog writing challenge
In the weeks after the Fringe session at Leeds IMC 2020, the project ran a popular blog writing challenge. The blogging competition came to fruition at the Dark Archives Conference 10 September 2020. The Polonsky German Project awarded two main prizes, one selected by the conference participants and the other by a Project panel.
- Blogging Challenge Winner Award: Luise Morawetz: What’s for dinner: giraffe or lynx?
- Popular Choice Award: Natascha Domeisen: The importance of being (im)perfect
These and the other blogging challenge entries will be published in the coming months, so keep your eye on us!
Manuscripts from German-Speaking Lands - A Polonsky Foundation Digitization Project continues to accept proposals showcasing to a general readership manuscripts digitized within the project. From 292 manuscripts (and counting!) to choose from, which one do you highlight? Proposals for blogs of 500-750 words should be sent in the first instance to Andrew Dunning or Matthew Holford. The proposals should be sent by the end of 2020.
The Blogging with Manuscripts sessions were organised in collaboration with Manuscripts from German-Speaking Lands – A Polonsky Foundation Digitization Project, Oxford Medieval Studies, Teaching the Codex, and Dark Archives.
For more medieval matters from Oxford, have a look at the website of the Oxford Medieval Studies TORCH Programme and the OMS blog.
Follow us on Twitter: #PolonskyGerman #BloggingMSS
Tuija Ainonen is the Bodleian’s Manuscripts Digitization Project Cataloguer for Manuscripts from German-Speaking Lands