Digital science in codicology and manuscripts

Suzette van Haaren was granted a stipendium in May, 2020. She is doing a co-tutelle with St Andrews and Groningen.
The title of her thesis is ‘The digital medieval manuscript: approaches to digital codicology’.

She describes her works as follows:

‘The overall aim of my PhD project is to explore how digitalisation affects the reproduction, representation and preservation of medieval manuscripts. The dissertation offers a reflection on the way medieval manuscripts function and move as cultural artefacts in an increasingly digital culture, and how this, in turn, is reflected in the objects themselves. New technologies, locations, interpretations and relationships form and reform the object, giving prominence to the dynamic nature of the manuscript’s materiality.

Digital reproduction is one of the most impactful events in a manuscript’s life, because it offers the codex completely new possibilities: think of the digital as a democratising platform, how networks form online, and how images are scattered over the Internet. To fully understand how we perceive the manuscript as modern cultural artefact we must look its whole life: how it has been handed down to us and how this affects its materiality, from the middle ages until now. I propose the following question: How does the dynamic material process of digitisation — the translation from book-object to digital object, and their interrelationship — affect the way we perceive, interpret, reproduce, preserve and use these manuscripts as cultural objects?’