Please join us Tuesday, November 13th, in the seminar room at CESTA (Bldg. 160, Rm. 433A) from 1:00–2:00pm for the final lecture in our fall quarter CESTA Seminar Series.
Dr. Bridget Whearty will present:
From Scribes to ScanOps: 600 Years of Copying Hoccleve
Abstract:
Digitized medieval manuscripts are curiously depopulated things. Although large teams of workers create each one, evidence of those workers is generally erased from the final product. But this standard practice today goes against centuries of earlier bookmaking, which emphatically foregrounded the physical and mental labor of books’ intervening copyists. This talk traces the transmission of the works of Thomas Hoccleve, fifteenth-century poet and professional scribe—through fifteenth-century manuscripts to twenty-first century digitizations to show where and how scribal erasure became the norm today. Ultimately, I argue that recovering pre-twentieth-century bookmaking values can redress problematic labor practices today and help us achieve a more just digital future.
About the speaker:
Bridget Whearty is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Literature and the Medieval Studies Program at Binghamton University. Prior to this, she was a Council on Libraries and Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Medieval Studies at Stanford University where she worked in the Digital Library Systems and Services department of Stanford University Libraries (2013-2015). An alum of the “Diversifying Academia, Recruiting Excellence” Fellowship, her visit to Stanford is supported by the VPGE and the “DARE@10” conference and celebration.
visit cesta.stanford.edu/events for more information.