Catalog of Digital Manuscripts

The Chronicle reported Tuesday about the Catalog of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts. This is a simple, lovely new resource developed by a UCLA professor of English, Matthew Fisher, to identify and index the digital manuscripts that are currently scattered across the web and difficult to find.

It’s a very simple idea, and not one designed for its commercial appeal but surely one that could usefully be applied to,  say, North American buildings built before 1800, referencing HABS, statewide surveys, etc., and including fields for name, location (ideally in lat-long format), date, and a link to the resource. It would be simple but labor-intensive to build, and a major boon to scholars and students of early American architecture.

There’s so much material available, I guess we’re back to needing Yahoo!, at least for scholars.

Teraflops for the Rest of Us

I missed this announcement while I was on the road but back in April, the Chronicle of Higher Ed reported that the NEH Office of Digital Humanities is sponsoring a grant program that will offer 100,000-hour bits of supercomputing time at the Lawrence Berkeley National laboratory. The plan is to get humanities researchers joining chemists, physicists and mathematicians developing research projects that require high-performance computing.

My first reaction to this was “whoa, cool.” My second was, “we’re so not there yet.” At least if the “we” is scholars of the material world. Unlike text-driven scholars, our stuff simply isn’t digitized in large quanitities yet. On the other hand, some of the relevant documentary materials ARE digital, like historic census and probate records, city directories, etc.

Brett Robley, director of the ODH, points out that scientists, too, had to learn about supercomputers before devising projects that could take advantage of them. The official announcement is here.

The mind reels.