I am currently working on two digital humanities projects in the field of medieval studies in collaboration with Andrea R. Harbin, Ph.D. (State University of New York-Cortland):
- The Augmented Palimpsest Project is an ongoing digital humanities project that explores how the medium of augmented reality (AR) can be used in teaching medieval literature; and
- Gazemapping the Reading Experience of Medieval Manuscripts is a new digital humanities project that uses eye-tracking technology to examine the extent to which the physical design of a medieval manuscript page directs our reading and reception of the written and visual text.
The Augmented Palimpsest is a digital humanities tool that explores how the medium of Augmented Reality (AR) can be used in humanities pedagogy—specifically the teaching of medieval literature. The project is funded by a NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) Digital Humanities Startup Grant (2014-2016). Because the enhancements emerge from the printed page, the prototype maintains a pedagogical emphasis on close reading while encouraging students to develop their skills in textual analysis, critical thinking, interdisciplinary study, and new media literacy. This hybridization of the digital with the printed text also preserves the reader’s physical and kinesthetic connection to the literary work.
Fiducial markers (more complex and aesthetically pleasing than QR codes) are “hidden” in medieval manuscript border to trigger:
- Audio of passage in Middle English
- Link to digitized image of medieval manuscript page with opening of The Canterbury Tales
- Link to online Middle English glossary
- Link to online modern English translation
- 3D model of Canterbury Cathedral
Augmented reality artifacts can be tied to print pages through a “trigger” image—that is, an image sufficiently complex and densely pixelated to trigger the digital enhancement. One of the first challenges we faced was deciding what sort of images we would use to trigger our augmentations. In choosing medieval manuscripts, we had two things in mind: firstly, many medieval manuscript borders have the required density and color saturation for use in an AR text; secondly, and perhaps more importantly, using medieval manuscripts as a base for our AR edition would help students learn more about the medieval period in general and in medieval book history in particular.
The prototype of the digital humanities tool was built with the cross-platform game engine Unity Pro and its mobile app development tools. Triggering the digital enhancements on the printed page of our edition is easily accomplished by scanning the manuscript border with a smart device, such as a tablet or smart phone. However, for our more complex, interactive 3D digital models, we had to find a way to turn them “on” or “off” as needed. Rather than touching the screen of the smart device, the user touches a “virtual” button on the printed page.
For example, scanning the peacock with a smart device triggers the appearance of a 3D model of Canterbury Cathedral. Touch the peacock’s tail on the printed page so that you briefly cover it, and the roof comes off the Cathedral, allowing you to see inside; touch the peacock’s tail a second time, and the roof re-appears.
The Manuscripts:
So why are we not using images from one of the manuscripts of the poem? Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales survives in two complete manuscripts: the Hengwrt manuscript (Peniarth MS 329D) in the National Library of Wales and the Ellesmere manuscript in the Huntington Library. Unfortunately, the illuminations in the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts are not sufficiently complex or varied to support the AR technology at the time of developing the prototype.
Therefore, we are using images of manuscripts made available “copyright free” through the British Library. The process of selecting the manuscript pages presented its own set of problems. Because the edition is designed for high school or undergraduate students who have not had much exposure to medieval literature or culture, we decided to give each pilgrim in the General Prologue his or her own page so that we would have ample opportunity to explain what sort of person this pilgrim was and how they might have fit in medieval society. In an ideal world, we would find manuscript pages that reflected that pilgrim’s occupation in the illuminations, yet often images of those occupations were difficult to find within the publicly available manuscripts.
In our quest to find manuscript pages with borders that would support our augmentations, we found we were pulling from many different types of texts, from breviaries and psalters to bestiaries. In choosing to draw from these different types of manuscripts, we are aware that we are presenting Chaucer’s tale in an essentially inauthentic form. Our AR-enhanced edition is not what his work looked like in manuscript form. Furthermore, by presenting a secular literary work within the border of a religious work or other genre, we are appropriating illuminations that would have originally served another purpose. Since we do not have a technical remedy as we create the dh prototype, we have chosen to turn this “bug” into a feature. The use of these diverse manuscript images offers an opportunity to teach students about the richness of book culture. For each of the pages we have created, we will have a manuscript button, or trigger, which will take the reader to the original image of the manuscript and to a discussion of what that manuscript was, its origins, and its uses.
Sample Page: The Knight
BL MS Egerton 2019, f. 104
Gazemapping the Reading Experience of Medieval Manuscripts
This new digital humanities research project, which will be the first (to the best of my knowledge) to use eye-tracking technology to study the reading process with medieval manuscripts through gazemapping (data visualizations that can communicate important aspects of visual behavior), will explore to what extent the physical design of the manuscript page directs our reading and reception of the written text. The physical page—that is, the form by which the written text is conveyed—is not incidental to how a text is engaged with and understood. The application of eye-scanning technology and methodology to the reading practices in the Middle Ages forms the foundation of this planned research project.
Because digital reading platforms are so new, we are aware that they direct our reading, often in ways quite different from those of the more traditional print book. We are less aware of such direction with printed books because we have learned at an early age how to read them. And because medieval manuscripts appear similar in many ways to the printed book, our expectations for how to read a literary work in medieval manuscript form are much like those for the printed text. However, reading medieval manuscript pages with their visual design, decorations, and illuminations may, in fact, have more in common with reading a webpage than the printed page.
Consequently, Dr. Harbin and I plan to use eye-tracking technology to explore how readers view the medieval manuscript page, especially for texts that survive in multiple manuscripts with significantly different layouts. For this pilot study, we will use digitized manuscript facsimiles of medieval literature authored by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and their contemporaries that are available online.