Greetings, and welcome to the first blog entry for ‘Digitising the Bannatyne MS’.
This project is generously funded by the Leverhulme Trust and supported by the College of Arts and Science at the University of Saskatchewan. This project recognises that this institution is situated on Treaty 6 Territory and the homeland of the Métis. We pay our respect to the First Nations and Métis ancestors of this place and reaffirm our relationship with one another.
It is hoped that this blog will become a working record of progress on this project. As a first entry, I wished to outline the progress that has been made thus far, and offer an idea of what will come next. Please feel free to follow us on Twitter @BannatyneMS.
NB: The two-year funded Postdoctoral Fellowship will focus on the digitisation of the fourth section of the manuscript. It is hoped that future funding may allow for a digitisation of the manuscript as a whole.
Since arriving in Saskatoon in late January, much of my time has been spent familiarising myself with the field of Digital Humanities, as well as situating what work has been done on the Bannatyne MS thus far. I have attended a number of professional development opportunities, most notably the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at UVic, where I was fortunate enough to attend classes on ‘Conceptualising a Digital Edition’, and ‘TEI Fundamentals’. I have read widely on the current issues facing the field of Digital Humanities, and hope that this project can provide a thoughtful and informative incursion into the potential of a digital future for Older Scots studies.
This website represents an exciting new chapter in the project, as I move from the theoretical considerations to the practical steps in making this remarkable material available online. I would like to extend my thanks to the Programming Historian, whose tutorials have helped immeasurably in establishing this website.
Future blog entries will focus on short insights into the practical elements of the project, such as the utility of TEI, the use of IIIF images, the challenges of putting material online. Alongside this, I wish to reflect on the context of the manuscript itself: who was George Bannatyne, and why should we care? What does this manuscript offer us in terms of historical and literary insight? What parallels can be drawn between Bannatyne’s editorial process and that of a digital edition?
These are but some of the issues that I hope will come to light as this work progresses. Thank you for your interest in these early stages.
LH