Reproducing Medieval Manuscripts to Interrogate Descriptive Metadata in Our Digital Age

This presentation discusses a series of activities within a 200-level course, the Digital Humanities Project Lab, that leverage a detailed engagement with the materiality of the past to help students better understand the benefits and limitations of metadata and of how to most usefully study digital manuscript surrogates within their own research. Students begin their Digital Humanities by completing a reproduction of a folio from a manuscript using the technology available to scribes in the medieval past. Students then use this experience to inform their exploration of the work of the Peripheral Manuscript Project and the difficulties of describing a complex object like a medieval manuscript through a regularized descriptive taxonomy.