codicologie | Bibliothèques Humanistes

Date(s) : du 10 mai 2023 au 12 mai 2023

Lieu : CESR (Centre d’Etudes Supérieures de la Renaissance)

Despite the advancements in digitization, the study of books as objects, for the most part, still relies on autoptic investigations because traditional digitization transmediates only limited information regarding an object’s materiality. Autoptic observations are not always possible, and this has become even more evident and relevant with the pandemic crisis of Covid-19. While significant progress has been made in accessing written heritage through digitization efforts (IIIF, TEI), the digitization of the material features of books is still lagging and at the experimental phase. The availability of great numbers of textual data has permitted the development of distant reading techniques to discover patterns in texts and the utilization of artificial intelligence to read manuscripts (HTR) and printed books (OCR) en mass. The availability of digital data on the materiality of books would extend these practices to the book as an object. Recently, some projects have brought forward novel approaches to the digitization of material features of books but we lack a comprehensive methodology capable of bringing it together in a coherent research field: digital codicology. In the first two and a half days of the event, eminent scholars at the forefront of material digitization efforts will present their research. The last half-day will be dedicated to a round table and a working group to discuss and set the groundwork for a white paper on what digital codicology is and still needs to become the overarching field we foresee.

Rémi Jimenes (CESR-BVH) et Thierry Brouard (LIFAT) interviendront conjointement le jeudi 11 mai dans la Session 5 : Book Culture and Digital Paractices (II) pour présenter le lancement des travaux engagés dans le cadre de l’ANR TypoReF : TypoReF project : studying French Renaissance typography using digital images.

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RÉSUMÉ

The digitization of books is generally understood as the capture of the page contents through photography and imaging. Not all features of books can be digitally acquired in this manner — we will refer to these as untransferable characteristics — and models and descriptive metadata are necessary steps to computerize important information about the structure and materiality of books. Digitization, in fact, can do much more than reproducing books as texts to be read, and books are much more than flat sequences of pages. Among these elusive features we find the physical form of books (e.g., bindings, the form and materials of the pages, the gathering structure, and so on). While digitization tends to concentrate on the remediation of the content of books, we argue for an increased interest in the transmediation of the materiality of books. This digital representation and manipulation of an object’s materiality is achieved through a number of means, metadata designation being one of the most established processes to bring these untransferable features into the digital. Digital surrogates created in this manner have the potency to be more than mere replacements of the original objects. Instead, when the transformative nature of the digitization process is more fully harnessed, they can become digital cultural objects: digital objects that transcend the originals, work in synergy with them allowing them to be studied in a variety of different ways and make them something more.

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Bibliothèques Humanistes

Programme de recherche sur les textes numériques du Centre d'Etudes Supérieures de la Renaissance

Archives par mot-clé : codicologie

Colloque : Novel approaches to Digital Codicology | 10-12 mai 2023, CESR, Tours

Conférence | « The elusive book. Modelling and digitizing the materiality of books towards digital codicology and bibliography. », Alberto Campagnolo. Mercredi 30 juin 2021, Tours [Présentiel & en ligne]

RÉSUMÉ