It’s been, as usual, a busy few weeks here in Exeter, as things start to settle down in PGR-land. I’m writing this just after my third supervisor’s meeting, which went rather well: having produced a 3,000-word ‘way in’ to my thesis, my focus is now on entering the longer ‘background-reading-and-ruminating’ stage. Of course, I’ll still be writing during this time – mostly little ‘reactions’ to some of the primary source material I’ll read on medieval educational practices – but I’m not expecting to produce another 3,000 words before the middle of November. Since arriving in Exeter, chapter outlines have changed, new secondary material has come into focus, and targets have mutated, but perhaps the biggest shift has been that I’ve begun looking at my work through a whole host of different lenses.
Within the broader world of ‘Anglo-Norman studies’, one of the areas that has made a particular impression in the past few weeks is the subject of ‘Digital Humanities’. For the uninitiated, the discipline centres around the application of digital technologies to the humanities, done in such a way as to open up possibilities for research that would be been impractical were it not for the enormous savings in time and effort that computing brings. To give a very simple example, the main character in Chrétien de Troyes’ Arthurian romance Le Chevalier de la charrette, ‘The Knight of the Cart’, goes by two different names during the narrative: his name, Lancelot, is only revealed halfway through the narrative, before which he is simply ‘the knight’ (le chevalier). Tracking the many occasions on which the knight is named (at least 172, all coming in the second half of the 6000-line text) would have taken days beforehand; nowadays, it can be done with some online text and the control-F key (try it here!).
This is, of course, a very simple example, and modern-day Digital Humanities is about a lot more than simply making tasks easier. Instead, it’s moved on to undertaking tasks that would have been downright impossible before the advent of the technology we have today. Take, for instance, the Medieval Francophone Literary Cultures Outside France project, which I had the good fortune to be involved in a few years ago. Abbreviated to the much catchier ‘MFLCOF’ (‘muffle-cough’), the rigorous (and, dare I say it, ‘traditional’) research conducted by scholars mapping the textual traditions of literary works has been rendered far more accessible through visualisations that bring the spread of these texts to life. Similarly, Exeter’s very own Virtual Magic Bowls Archive allows for side-by-side comparison of extremely fragile objects that would not have been able to be brought together in real life. I’ve recently had the opportunity to get involved in some more Digital Humanities work myself, as part of the wonderful Values of French team – but more on that in a later post …
Why am I mentioning this? Well, of all of the myriad workshops and training events that I’ve attended since arriving at Exeter, one of the most resonant for me has been the workshop on digital textuality that was held a couple of weeks ago. Exeter is currently putting a lot of money into the subject area, and the event was organised partly to raise awareness of the new Digital Humanities Lab, currently under construction about 200 metres away from where I’m typing this post. The 30 or so of us who had made it to Lecture Theatre 6.2 were treated to a range of presentations that showcased some of the projects currently being undertaken at the University, ranging from innovative uses of the Text Encoding Initiative in the digital editing of Thomas Hardy’s correspondence to the creation of a visitor exhibition at Powderham Castle based around the Courtenay cartulary.
Of particular interest for me, though, was the presentation by Dino Felluga, Professor in English at Purdue University (USA). The crux of his talk was the assertion that while traditional academic presses have certain advantages over more transitory web resources, this situation need not last forever. He addressed one particular criticism of Digital Humanities – that their focus on technical knowledge devalues critical expertise – and made a compelling argument in favour of bridging the gap between traditional and digital humanities scholarship. Even for someone like me, whose experience in the area is rather limited, and who works primarily in a completely different time period from Felluga, the talk, and the discussion that followed, left me inspired to look further into how digital tools can help advance – and certainly not replace! – the work that I’m doing.
So, just a brief update this time: I’m still here, and Anglo-Normantics certainly isn’t going anywhere any time soon. Next week, I’ll be bringing you an update that’s slightly more ‘day-to-day’ in nature, as I take you inside the mysterious world of the Queen’s Building PGR offices …
Edward Mills 
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