In the early twentieth century, many scholars focused on the preparation of editions and translations of texts previously available only to the few specialists able to read archaic hands and privileged enough to travel to work in person with them in manuscript. Valuable scholarship in its own right, the preparation of these editions and translations for particular texts deemed important enough to justify the effort and time, laid the foundation for generations of scholarship in medieval studies. On the other hand, for many materials in historical archival collections, including already digitised collections, medievalists have only had the time to create partial transcriptions, if any at all. Access to textual material from the medieval period has increased greatly in recent years with digitisation, and we are able to imagine many new research projects in decades to come. What challenges do new frontiers of automation in the archives raise with respect to medieval studies and in particular to the ways we transcribe? In this article, we argue that if medievalists hope to pursue the kinds of analysis that goes on in advanced computational research, we will need new kinds of transcriptions, intentionally theorized not only for human reading, but also for machine processing. We already have mature methods for remediating generations of editions of medieval works such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR), but we can ask ourselves if these are the kinds of text we want to use for future computational analysis. We suggest instead that one way forward is by going back to the scriptorium.
翻译:20世纪初,许多学者侧重于编写版本和翻译过去只有少数能够阅读古老手的少数专家才能得到的文本,这些版本和翻译以前只有少数专家才能得到的文本,这些版本和翻译的文本本身就具有宝贵的奖学金,编写这些版本和翻译被认为足以证明这种努力和时间的重要的特定文本,为中世纪研究中的几代人奖学金奠定了基础。另一方面,对于历史档案收藏中的许多材料,包括已经数字化的收藏,中世纪主义者只有时间创造部分的翻版(如果有的话 ) 。 近年来,中世纪时期的文字材料的获取量大大增加,可以亲自与他们一起在手稿中工作。我们可以想象未来几十年的许多新的研究项目。 档案中的新的自动化领域在中世纪研究方面,特别是我们所研究的方式,特别是我们所研究的方式,如果中世纪主义者希望进行先进的计算研究,我们所需要的是前期的脚本,我们需要新型的翻版,而我们所有意的文字的翻版不仅用于人类阅读,而且还用于机器处理。