Memory institutions have built up expertise and taken the lead in all aspects of digital humanities, especially the development and implementation of digital methods for the capture, analysis and dissemination of archives and special collections, including manuscripts. In recent years, these initiatives have become embedded into Digital Humanities Initiatives, Centres and Programmes within research libraries, adding value to the existing relationships between libraries and scholarly iniatiatives. These activities have fostered the development of new projects that bring into collaboration the skills and expertise of academics, librarians, and digital humanists, making the Library increasingly a “digital research infrastructure”. This presentation will discuss these developments based on the experience of the Research Programme in Digital Collections at the National Library of Wales, specifically discussing some recent experimentation with new methods for manuscript digitization and dissemination, including hyperspectral digitization of the Library’s Chaucer manuscripts. The presentation will also discuss the wider embedding of this work within the European Digital Humanities Context, through collaborations with the ESF Research Network Programe NeDiMAH (Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities).

1. The Library as a Digital Research
infrastructure: Digital Initiatives and Digital
Manuscripts at the National Library of Wales
Lorna Hughes
University of Wales Chair in Digital Collections,
National Library of Wales
Möglichkeiten der automatischen
Manuskriptanalyse: Trier, 24-02-2014
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2. Digital Collections and the National Library of Wales
• Digitisation supports:
• Access to Welsh and Celtic
materials by global audience
• Preservation
• Collections enhancement and
reunification
• Transformation of scholarship
• Community engagement
• A cohesive, national collection
• Underlying principle: free
access to digital content
• www.llgc.org.uk
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3. NLW Research Programme in Digital Collections
• A collaborative research programme
• Researching the impact and use of existing and emerging digital
collections
• Engagement with the communities of practice in digital humanities
around digital content
• A focus for digital humanities, combining digital
collections, tools, methods
• Building sustainable digital resources that have a impact on scholarship
• Develop strategic digitization initiatives for specific research needs
• Foster interoperability and re-use of collections
• Increase the embedding of digital content into scholarship
• Activities
• Research on digital collections development, use and discovery
• Project development
• Collaborations with partners in Wales and beyond
• Outreach, dissemination and publications
• Four Digital Humanities PhD students in collaboration with Universities in
Wales
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4. Welsh outlook, Vol. 7, No. 1 Jan. 1920
[advert]
4
Negative photostat print of NLW Peniarth 610 MS 191
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5. The Hengwrt Chaucer (Peniarth MS 392)
Imaging, 1926
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6. Imaging: 1926
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7. Imaging: 1931
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8. Imaging: 1939
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9. National Library of Wales journal
, Vol 1, no. 2, 1939
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10. The Manuscript ‘Laboratory’?!
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11. ‘The Merthyr Fragment’, NLW MS 21972D, 1936
authentication
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12. ‘The Merthyr Fragment’, Western Mail, 1936
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13. De Consolatione Philosophiae: Peniarth MS 393
Correspondence, 1879
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14. Discoveries through imaging…1930
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15. ‘The Cave’ at NLW, in 1939 and 2012
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17. The Cult of Saints in Wales: Medieval Welshlanguage sources and their transmission
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Online editions of digitised medieval
Welsh Saints lives from the NLW
collections will be developed by
researchers from the University of Wales
King’s College, London Department of
Digital Humanities will develop KILN XML
platform for digital scholarly edition of
digital manuscripts
NLW will host, implement and sustain the
edition
Output: a transferrable tool for creating
online editions of NLW manuscripts as
part of NLW Digital Library
Supporting
annotation, searching, comparing
manuscripts
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/ddh/
research/projects/current/welsh.aspx
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18. Photospectral imaging of the Hengwrt Chaucer at NLW by
team from Yale Computer Science Department
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21. Digitally enabled scholarship of medieval manuscripts: Using
Photospectral images in the “Canvas Viewer”
http://manifests.ydc2.yale.edu/viewer.html
http://ydc2.yale.edu/research-support/digitallyenabled-scholarship-medieval-manuscripts
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24. Modern digital capture with UV lighting on damaged mss
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25. Imaging manuscript under UV light at NLW
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27. NeDiMAH: Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and
Humanities
Chairs
Lorna Hughes, UK (Chair)
Fotis Jannidis, Germany,
Susan Schreibman, Ireland
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Researching the practice of advanced
digital methods in the arts and
humanities
Their classification and expression via 3
outputs:
– Map of digital humanities in Europe
– A collaborative forum of
communities of practice
– An ontology of digital methods in the
humanities
Support from 16 Member Organizations:
1. Bulgarian Academy of Science
2. The National Foundation of Science, Higher Education
and Technological Development of the Republic of
Croatia (NZZ)
3. The Danish Council for Independent Research –
Humanities (FKK),
4. The Academy of Finland – Research Council for Culture
and Society
5. TGE ADONIS – National Centre for Scientific Research
(CNRS)
6. Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)
7. Hungarian Academy of Sciences, (MTA)
8. Irish Research Council for the Humanities (IRCHSS),
9. Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR)
10. Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research
(NOW)
11. Research Council of Norway (NCR)
12. Portugal Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT)
13. Romanian National Research Council (CNCS)
14. Swedish Research Council (VR)
15. Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF)
16. UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
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28. NeDiMAH Working Groups
Methodological Working Groups
1. Spatial and Temporal Modelling
2. Information Visualization
3. Linked Data
4. Corpora: Building and developing
5. Using Corpora: Information retrieval and modelling
6. Scholarly editions
7. Scholarly publishing
8. ICT Methods Taxonomy
NeDiMAH support for digital methods in manuscript analysis
– Bursaries for the DiXT training workshop at Cambridge, 2014: Medieval and
Modern Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age
– Developing an interdisciplinary workshop and publication on digital methods
for manuscript analysis
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