Why Do We Need to Digitize the Materiality of Pre-Modern Books?

Understanding the material aspects of historical books is crucial. Unlike modern books, copies from the same print run of historical books, especially from the hand-press period, are unique due to the hand-press printing techniques used. Hence, a shift towards digitizing the material aspects of these books is necessary and already underway in some quarters. In today’s post, I will introduce you to the content taught in our new free self-learning video class and why it’s important. Also, check out the first blog post What do we mean by ‘materiality’ in the context of rare book digitization? The YouTube playlist “Digitizing the Materiality of the Premodern Book” is complemented by a repository of slides.

Historical books are not like modern books in that we expect that a copy from one print run is the same as any other. In fact, because of the hand-press printing at the time, books from the hand-press period are not at all the same. Each book is a unique copy. In the last post, I already told you all about that.

The Course Digitizing the Materiality of Pre-Modern Books: Bridging the Gap

Our course wants to bridge the gap between traditional humanities scholars and digital humanists by offering an introduction to book history, librarianship, bibliographical description, and digital editing. The course covers a brief introduction to book history, followed by a look at digitization techniques in libraries (the famous “Graz book table”!), including multi-spectral imaging for revealing hidden text elements like palimpsests. If you want to know what a palimpsest is, you can watch the video on the introduction to book history in the course materials 😉

Book history matters for the DH!

So, long story short: the materiality of texts is important. And you can do research about that. That’s called book history or descriptive bibliography. It’s essentially cataloging things in enough detail that you’ll be able to tell differences in different copies and investigate material aspects. And that’s where we’re at digitizing the materiality of the pre-modern book.

However, to do that effectively lots of skills are involved and many people may not have access to relevant instruction. A typical humanities user doesn’t have all the skills required. And it is a pretty specialized set of skills. Also, especially if you want to go into digital editions as well. It’s an area where both the humanities people who know about rare books, and the digital humanities people who know about digital editing, but not necessarily about rare books, can learn something. This is why we designed this course at the intersection of book history, librarianship, bibliographical description, digital humanities, and digital editing.

So the class starts with a brief introduction to book history. Because I felt like, you know, as a digital humanities person, I never had a formal introduction to these things. And I would have loved to have had that because I always felt like I lacked that skill. But I didn’t know how I could work on it really, because it seemed to be locked away in the libraries, somehow beyond my reach. And I feel like if your master’s program doesn’t automatically include this, then how do you get that info?

That’s the reason why I was so adamant about developing this class that I always would have wanted to attend myself.

Freeing rare book and digitization knowledge from expensive barriers and gatekeeping

I did have the (extreme) privilege once to attend a Rare Book School class but they are so inaccessible: It’s hard to even get a place in the school, the application process is complicated and, if you’ve gotten past all those hurdles, then there’s the exorbitant price. I guess maybe it seems normal to people in the US where you’re expected to go into debt to get an education. But 1000$ for just an online class? It’s really quite gatekeepy. And I didn’t even get into the class that I actually wanted to take. Not very accessible.

That’s what made me think: Let’s just get funding to create the class I would have wanted to attend so everybody can have it for free. Is it as detailed as the many specialized rare book school classes? No, probably not. Actually, definitely not. It’s just the length of one winter school, it can’t cover as much detail. But I tried to team up with experts that I trust to do a great job communicating the basics so that after completing the class, you’re hopefully ready to progress on your own.

The class also serves as a gentle primer fo the Beyond TEI class

We’ll also look at the basics of digital editions. I think that I made some good videos of my basic content (intro to XML/TEI and digital scholarly editing) in this new course. This provides a solid base before you get into the Beyond TEI class level. There is some overlap and the Beyond TEI class was designed in a way so that you theoretically could take it without previous knowledge but then it’s a very steep learning curve. Just learning XPath and XSLT on their own is hard enough. If you’ve never even heard of XML before, it’s a challenge. The new class Digitizing the Materiality of the Pre-Modern Book feels like a bit of a softer, fluffier entry point into the topic which you can consume without twisting your mind too hard. You can hang out on the couch and learn the basics. Then you get to your desk to continue with XSLT 😉

The new class is a solid starting point with its very gentle, slow introduction into XML, what is digital scholarly editing, what is modeling in the context of historical books, and so on. So I think if you’re looking for a primer, this is it. We’re also looking at how Transkribus works but just very briefly, because they have such good tutorials on their own stuff that you really don’t need me much at all. And then we will also learn how to use the msDescription module in the TEI to specifically describe manuscripts. We will look at digital editing elements in the TEI that you should know about if you want to do digital editions. We also do a practical hands-on on how you do bibliographical description, which is a very specialized skill. Obviously, we can also only give a very brief intro, but that was also something I would have always loved to have gotten when I was new to the topic. And we have some great footage of really cool old books, so I think it’s worth checking out just for that.

Learning Outcomes in a Nutshell

You will get hands-on experience with bibliographical description—a specialized skill that is often locked away in library science curriculums. The course content has been partly adapted from the Harvard Beyond TEI class and serves as an excellent (if I may say so 😉 ) starting point for anyone interested in digital scholarly editing. The Harvard Beyond TEI class provides more advanced training in digital editing, including XML and XSLT (see First ever LaTeX Ninja workshop at Harvard: “Beyond TEI: Digital Editions with XPath and XSLT for the Web and in LaTeX”).

Conclusion

Digitizing the material aspects of historical books is an area that can benefit from the combined expertise of traditional humanities and digital humanities scholars. Our class is a way you can now easily and accessibly acquire this knowledge. I’m looking forward to hearing your feedback! I will also keep creating YouTube shorts from some of the videos to keep the algorithm appeased, so maybe check that out, too, if you think you would enjoy short-form content on the DH!

So long and thanks for all the fish.