Digital

Digital Critical Edition

The Making and Knowing Project’s digital critical edition of Ms. Fr. 640 is openly accessible at https://edition640.makingandknowing.org.

The digital critical edition comprises an open access, electronically searchable, and intuitive user-directed online format of the four versions of the manuscript:

1. high-definition facsimile images
2. diplomatic French transcription
3. normalized French transcription
4. English translation

The critical apparatus includes multimedia annotations, essay-length analyses of techniques and materials, a glossary of technical terms, and a list of resources for further exploration, such as researcher field notes, paleography tools, the Research and Teaching Companion, and the principles guiding the Project’s translation and reconstruction decisions.

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Mock-up wireframe of the annotation listing in the upcoming Digital Critical Edition.

Mock-up thumbnails display of the annotation listing organized by theme in the upcoming Digital Critical Edition.

Mock-up wireframe of the annotation listing organized by theme in the upcoming Digital Critical Edition.

Mock-up wireframe of the manuscript entries listing in the upcoming Digital Critical Edition.

Completed Annotations

University of Amsterdam Completed Annotations

Prototypes

Explore the Project’s prototypes of the digital critical edition:

• Minimal Edition of the Transcriptions and Translations of Ms. Fr. 640 (Last released July 2018)
• Prototype Reading Display
• Prototype Manuscript (produced by xpMethod)
• Prototype Annotation: One-Sided Hollow Cast Medals

Sandbox

The Secrets of Craft and Nature Sandbox presents experimental, provisional, and in-progress work that expands upon the engagement and analyses with the data, topics, and content of Secrets of Craft and Nature and with the manuscript, BnF Ms. Fr. 640.

Sustainability and Open Access

Columbia University Libraries has committed to hosting and sustaining the digital critical edition and the Project’s data. This required that the critical edition was built on a limited technology stack using the most durable formats that allow migration and conversion of all digital assets in response to changing technologies. The Project’s data is open access, thus available to be reconfigured and repurposed for new and experimental applications beyond the scope of the Project itself, including advanced data visualization, textual analysis, and further historical, technical, and material research.

Digital Humanities and Pedagogy

The Making and Knowing Project has offered three courses in the digital humanities.

GR8975: What is a Book in the 21st Century?

In Spring 2017, the Making and Knowing Project offered a new graduate-level digital humanities seminar through the Department of History, “HIST GR8975: What is a Book in the 21st Century?” Using the English translation of Ms. Fr. 640 as the basic data set, students collaboratively created a minimal (i.e., limited, basic feature) digital edition by the end of the semester, effectively prototyping a design for the Project’s final digital critical edition. Additionally, the course introduced students both theoretically and practically to the concepts and tools relevant to the creation of a digital edition, such as image and text capture; metadata, tracking, and data management; data curation; transformations to, representations of, and interfaces of digital resources; and archiving, licensing, persistence, and re-usability. The seminar thus equipped participating students with identifiable, measurable, and repurposable digital skills while furthering the Project goals.

Explore our minimal edition:

• Minimal digital edition of the working English translation of BnF Ms. Fr. 640

Read the Spring 2017 “What is a Book in the 21st Century?” syllabus

W4172: 3D User Interfaces and Augmented Reality

In Spring 2018 and 2019, Professor Steven Feiner taught a reorientation of this computer science course for advanced undergraduate students. Throughout the semester, students learned methods for designing and developing effective 3D user interfaces, from desktop to immersive, including augmented reality, mixed reality, and virtual reality. In lieu of a final exam, students worked in groups to create a mobile augmented reality (AR) application. In 2018, all projects focused on aspects of the Making and Knowing Project. In 2019, students were given the option, but not required to use Making and Knowing data. Student groups were given full access to Making and Knowing Project data and were assisted by members of the Project staff, who also attended the final presentations. Select applications were selected for further development.

Read the Spring 2019 “User Interfaces and Augmented Reality” syllabus

GU4031: Transforming Texts: Textual Analysis, Literary Modeling, and Visualization

Designed for graduate and advanced undergraduate students in the social sciences, humanities, and computer science, this Spring 2019 hybrid course was situated at the crossroads of historical exploration and computer sciences. Students were exposed to digital literacy tools and computational skills through the lens of the Making and Knowing Project. This course built off the encoded English translation of the manuscript, prepared by the Spring 2017 course “What is a Book in the 21st Century?” The skills students learned over the course of the semester were widely applicable to other types of Digital Humanities projects, and indeed, in many fields outside of traditional academic study. For the final project, students collaborated to investigate linguistic features of Ms. Fr. 640 using natural language processing and text mining techniques. These projects shed light on topics of interest within the manuscript and uncover connections within the textual data. By working alongside computer science students, the groups learned to adapt and recode data sets, and to view them into a variety of visualizations.

Read the Spring 2019 “Transforming Texts” syllabus

Ms. Fr. 640 in Virtual and Augmented Reality

The Columbia University Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Lab (CGUI), led by Professor Steven Feiner, has developed an augmented reality (AR) toolset to complement the digital critical edition. These interactive tools help communicate the practice-based experiential knowledge generated in the Making and Knowing lab, allowing readers to experience the process of historical techniques through cutting-edge visualization technologies, including Microsoft HoloLens and Google Tango devices.

CGUI Research Assistant Samantha Siu developed a mobile app that allows users to add impromptu notes, take video, and capture photos while viewing items or undertaking an experiment in the Project laboratory. For their final project in GU4031: Transforming Texts, a student group collaborated with Samantha to test her application and develop a test database in which the entire process of following a recipe and the corresponding user’s annotation at each step is readily available.

Explore the AR tools as they develop:

• Hovering swatches
• Contents in drawers
• Prototyping Spatiotemporal Documentation for Digital History