Abreast of the Times

The stereotype of an (Early Modern) historian at work is someone spending day after day in the silence of a library, surrounded by ancient, dusty manuscripts—and perhaps this is true in most cases, except for the dust. However, while ancient manuscripts are still the main source for generating new knowledge, the way historians approach them has changed enormously thanks to evolving technology.

Powerful tools are revolutionizing the discipline and ushering the era of digital humanities. A main consequence is the easiness with which we can now access the textual corpora: digital archives like RUTTER’s “A Sea of Books” allow us to reach with a click manuscripts preserved thousands of miles away, and devices like the ScanTents available at the BnF turn the long waits and excessive prices required by libraries scanning services obsolete and unnecessary. But the groundbreaking achievements were made in the way of collecting and elaborating data, such as the possibility to automate demanding processes like manuscript transcriptions. We can thus thank the Transkribus team if, for example, in June 2023 the first Portuguese model for automatic transcription of manuscripts will be presented.

Unfortunately, for a long time the supervision required by digital work was not available to students willing to walk this path, and still today some institutions are not well equipped in this sense. This gap has been partially filled by alternative training opportunities like workshops, where students and researchers can acquire new skills.

The first workshops on computational skills applied to history seem to date to the period 1974-1982 at the Newberry Library in Chicago, as reported by Adam Crymble in his book Technology and the historian: transformations in the digital age. Since then, the initiatives have multiplied, nationally and internationally, including courses and summer schools, discussion groups and, currently, a large variety of online resources.

Inspired by the desire to learn and share this new knowledge, the RUTTER training school “The Long Life of Manuscripts: From Material to Immaterial Texts” has been planned to take place in Lisbon in September 2023. This course will provide a thorough overview of multidisciplinary approaches to early modern scientific writing practices, and registrations are open. Going over crucial moments of historical research, the participants will gain familiarity with a great variety of written texts, sources and case studies, as well as general competencies of the digital tools applied to historical research. All these core skills will help researchers to use historical knowledge to demystify simplistic ideas and interpret scientific phenomena in a new way. If you are interested, do let us know! Registrations are now open here. [Silvana Munzi]