From Manuscripts to Networks

In recent years, digitized manuscripts have become increasingly available online, through the concerted effort of institutions, funding bodies, and scholars worldwide. This transformative change has greatly facilitated both traditional projects, like critical editions, as well as newer approaches, like large-scale Optical Character Recognition (OCR), that strive to unlock the wealth of material that currently lies inaccessible in manuscripts. But once we have gathered this data, what can we do with it? Apart from collating variant readings, what kinds of scholarly opportunities does this data open up — across texts, across languages, or focusing on paratexts or materiality? 

Charles Li is part of the Tamilex project at the Universität Hamburg, where he is the resident computational philologist. He was previously a research fellow at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and then at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, France, where he worked on the Texts Surrounding Texts project in partnership with the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF).

 

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Text Surrounding Texts Project