Brut to the Future!

Author: Neil Weijer

Hi everyone! I’m very pleased to be a new addition to the Remix team. Before beginning my current role as a CLIR postdoctoral fellow, my PhD research was on the re-shaping and re-interpretation of history in England, more specifically on the ways in which the legendary origins imagined by medieval chroniclers were disputed, accepted, and otherwise encountered by late medieval and early modern readers. Few histories in England pose these questions better than the Brut. I thought it was ironic that historians had to twist themselves in knots to explain why this chronicle was the most common place that people learned history, on the one hand, and why these “stories” had little to do with proper historical work, on the other.  Put simply, I wanted to know what “history” would look like to someone who grew up reading, seeing, and generally hearing about these figures as part of their curriculum, and where that knowledge might take them.

One of the key scenes from Britain’s prehistory: a band of exiled Trojans led by Brutus rid the island of its prior (gigantic) inhabitants, illustrated in Oxford. Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc 733

Now, as someone who works on scholarly digital projects from a library standpoint, I’m thrilled that the opportunity has come up to combine these two efforts, and that the Remix team has come up with a much more elegant solution to keeping the Imagining History database running than the one that I arrived at as a graduate student – emailing the project contacts at Queens University Belfast when I went to use it and found that the site was no longer available. Scraping, archiving, and re-arranging the project data was a necessary part of this work, but now the larger question becomes: what do we do with it? How do we arrange it (curate it?), and preserve it in a way that is internally consistent and useful to a range of people? Who might those people be?

In thinking about these questions, I realized that I’d already done something like a user test of the database in my research, so let me jump into my own version of the Wayback Machine and head for 2013, when I wanted to use the data on the Imagining History project to plan my own research.

As I mentioned, I wanted to use the Brut chronicle as a test case for how “history” was read in the fifteenth century. For me, that meant identifying groups of manuscripts that contained substantial additions by users, either in the form of marginal annotations or, what I really wanted to see, other genres of texts that weren’t properly considered “historical.” I was just about as close to an ideal user of the database as possible, but to use it the way I wanted to, I was faced with two big challenges. The first was that I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for (limiting the usefulness of the website’s search functions) and that I needed to manipulate the data as I went. The project website had no way to look at groups of manuscript descriptions, short of pulling them up in tabs. The second challenge was that I wasn’t as interested in the Brut as I was in everything else that was around it in the manuscript codex.

So, to get the data to do what I wanted it to, I needed to manually “scrape” the relevant information into a format where I could manipulate it. Since my web knowledge was functionally zero, my method of doing this was–over a period of a few days–clicking on all of the links on the site and copying the relevant information into an Excel spreadsheet. They really do give graduate students all the time in the world.

And another 110 rows just like these

As a result of my particular needs, I was primed to interpret and prioritize certain types of information preserved by the Imagining History project and ignore other types. The only way I could think to limit the amount of grunt work I was doing was to run simple searches for the textual versions of the chronicle that I knew had to have been written in the fifteenth century or later. Because of the combination of approximate and exact dates in the sheet there would have been no way to do this quickly. The only small shortcut I was able to create was because I came to the site with knowledge of what made it tick. I had been using the census of Brut manuscripts painstakingly put together by Lister Matheson, which served as the organizing principle for the project, so I could search for two exact dates: “1419” and ‘1461” the dates of the two main textual versions written in the mid and late fifteenth century. I still had to go back and look for all the “Peculiar Versions” – the manuscripts that didn’t fit well into Matheson’s categories.

pre-Imagining History? Lister Matheson’s Prose Brut, the typed “addition” of a manuscript discovered after the book went to press was handed out by the author at the first Dartmouth conference

Even so, I ended up ignoring, or being unable to use, a great deal of the categories that were present in the site. The linguistic features of the Brut manuscripts that were important to Matheson were of no use to me, as were the scribal characteristics of each manuscript that were interesting to the Imagining History researchers. Even really granular information that might be useful – the folio numbers of annotations—wasn’t particularly helpful without the book in hand, as I didn’t know how that information related to the text, or whether it was an owner’s name written hundreds of times. I ended up reverting to a “None/Some/Lots” distinction, just to make it apparent to me why I should consider looking at a book up close, but which wasn’t really useful to anyone but me.

Needless to say, my reliance upon the database and the searches I ran in it left some holes in my own methodologies – for one thing, I was limited to the subset of books described in the project or those that I’d already seen. And, as research often does, my own premises needed to adjust when I didn’t find exactly (or even mostly) what I’d thought or hoped. I started using the spreadsheet to fill in some of these holes, when I realized that there were a number of other “miscellaneous” manuscripts, or ones written in different languages, that actually overlapped quite readily with some of the more interesting copies I’d seen. The experiment did give me a chance, without ever setting foot in a library, to see more of what was available, and I hope that the newly-amended version that we’ll put out here will do the same for someone else – not least because it now accounts for all the digitized copies that have come online since the project began, only some of which were there when I first scoured its contents nearly five years ago.

In the projects that I’ve been working on at Johns Hopkins, most notably the Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe, these questions have come up in abundance. How do you get someone who doesn’t know what they’re looking for to find what we have, and what happens when (as it certainly will) someone wants to use the resource for a purpose other than the narrow one that it was designed for? We’ve needed to adapt AOR to encompass new books and updates to its viewer, soon to be in beta.  But we’ve also needed to think about how the project has changed over the four years it’s been underway and transitions to “finished” product – the state that I found Imagining History in when I was introduced to it.

One thing has become abundantly clear – thinking broadly about these questions at the start of any project, and asking them of projects past, is the best opportunity we have of building things that people will come to, stumble upon, and, most importantly, use for their own purposes.

 

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