Invited Speaker: Toby Burrows (Oxford) Mapping Manuscript Migrations: Tracking the Travels of 220,000 Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts

Day	Wednesday, March 10
Time	3:00 PM to 4:00 PM
Where	Zoom meeting ID is 970 8903 8153

Toby Burrows, senior research fellow at the Oxford e-Research Centre, University of Oxford, and the School of Humanities, University of Western Australia, will speak on "Mapping Manuscript Migrations: Tracking the Travels of 220,000 Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts."

This talk is in cooperation with the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CEMERS) at Binghamton University.

Zoom meeting ID is 970 8903 8153

Hundreds of thousands of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts still survive today, and detailed information about their history and provenance is scattered across a large number of databases and Web sites. Combining this kind of data was the focus of the Mapping Manuscript Migrations (MMM) project, which was funded by the Digging into Data program of the Trans-Atlantic Partnership between 2017 and 2020, and brought together manuscript researchers, curators, librarians, and computing specialists from institutions in Oxford, Philadelphia, Paris, and Helsinki. The project combined three large collections of data relating to the history and provenance of more than 220,000 medieval and Renaissance manuscripts.

This talk will discuss the work done by the MMM project, especially its deployment of Semantic Web and Linked Open Data technologies in order to transform, aggregate, and harmonize such a large body of data. It will also examine the various ways in which the data have been published: through a public Web portal, as a searchable Linked Open Data store, and as a downloadable dataset. It will demonstrate some of the ways in which the data can be used to answer research questions, including creating visualizations through the Web portal, and running SPARQL queries against the data store. We will also look at the way in which the project was organized, and how the contributions of specialists from such diverse fields were brought together. We will finish with some thoughts about how the lessons learned from the MMM project can be applied and developed in the future.