2024/25 Taught Postgraduate Module Catalogue

MEDV5100M Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age

30 creditsClass Size: 20

Module manager: N. Kivilcim Yavuz
Email: n.k.yavuz@leeds.ac.uk

Taught: Semester 2 (Jan to Jun) View Timetable

Year running 2024/25

This module is not approved as an Elective

Module summary

This module provides a holistic understanding of the medieval manuscript book in its material, cultural and historical contexts, as well as situating the study of medieval manuscripts in the digital age. Each manuscript is important not only for understanding the processes of production, dissemination and reception of a given text but also for uncovering the cultural and historical circumstances in which it was copied, put together or manipulated.

Objectives

The objective of the module is to provide you with an understanding of medieval bookmaking practices and book history and to enable students to gain hands-on experience. Working with medieval manuscripts in the digital context brings about many possibilites as well as challenges, which the module will address. You will gain experience in working with medieval manuscripts both by using the manuscript resources housed at the Special Collections of the University of Leeds Libraries and by engaging with digital repositories and platforms.

Learning outcomes
On successful completion of the module students will have demonstrated the following learning outcomes relevant to the subject:
1. Develop a familiarity with key terms and concepts in medieval manuscript studies;
2. Evaluate medieval manuscripts as cultural and historical artefacts;
3. Cultivate an applied understanding of digital applications to manuscript studies.

Skills Learning Outcomes

On successful completion of the module students will have demonstrated the following skills learning outcomes:
4. Deliver effective and engaging oral and visual presentations to a variety of audiences;
5. Explore different ways of learning in digital spaces and with digital media;
6. Examine and describe cultural heritage objects according to current standards and practices, including creating TEI-conformant XML files.

Syllabus

The module will have at its centre the manuscript book in Latin scripts in the West, but there will be opportunities to engage with manuscript cultures of non-Western societies and non-Latin scripts, offering a comparative overview. Indicative topics may include: material philology; codicology; fragmentology; format, design and function of medieval manuscripts; bookbinding structures; provenance research; manuscript description and cataloguing; descriptive bibliography; digital manuscript repositories; authority files and linked data; text encoding; Text Encoding Initiative; manuscript digitisation; multispectral imaging; reflectance transformation imaging; digital scholarly editing.

Teaching methods

Delivery type	Number	Length hours	Student hours
Fieldwork	1	4.00	4.00
Practical	4	2.00	8.00
Seminar	6	2.00	12.00
Independent online learning hours			30.00
Private study hours			246.00
Total Contact hours			24.00
Total hours (100hr per 10 credits)			300.00

Opportunities for Formative Feedback

Students receive feedback via seminar discussions, questions in class following presentations, 1-2-1 feedback on a series of assignments, and office hour advice.

Students will submit a 1000-word encyclopaedic entry for a manuscript feature as a formative assignment in advance of choosing their case study and submitting their first summative assignment. They will receive peer-feedback as well as written feedback from the module leader for this formative assignment. Each student will choose a different feature to write on, allowing them to do in-dept research into concepts related to medieval manuscripts. They will then be providing feedback for their peers, which will further enable them to expand their learning by close reading of their peers’ writings.

Students will be actively learning how to examine a variety of manuscripts, how to conduct research on manuscripts and how to describe them in addition to using a variety of digital tools and platforms through a variety of applied tasks throughout the module. The seminars and practicals themselves will provide opportunities to provide formative feedback as the students develop their skills.

Students will receive both written and verbal feedback on their presentation, which they will use as a starting point for their descriptive catalogue record. Students will consolidate the feedback they received on their presentation and their work in seminars into the descriptive catalogue record at the end of the module. Therefore, feedback (written and oral) on summative work also has a key formative function.

Methods of assessment

Coursework

Assessment type	Notes	% of formal assessment
Oral Presentation	15-minute verbal presentation with slides	40.00
Practical	A detailed descriptive catalogue record of a manuscript, encoded according to the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines	60.00
Total percentage (Assessment Coursework)		100.00

In consultation with the module leader, the students will choose a case study (a medieval manuscript) that they will be working on throughout the module. Both assignments will be on the same manuscript unless agreed in advance with the module leader. The presentation may be recorded, depending on the size of the group. For the catalogue record, students will learn Extensible Markup Language (XML) and will need to master the Manuscript Description module of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange (https://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/MS.html).

Reading list

The reading list is available from the Library website

Last updated: 29/04/2024 16:15:06

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