IMC 2022: Sessions

While carrying out a large-scale digital project in medieval manuscript studies, scholars must cope with multiple acute problems laying beyond purely scientific defining its purposes and goals. Often, following the constantly renewed vision of the studied material, the very scope of the project tends to evolve blurring the initially intended limits of the work. What steps should be taken in order to secure the reusability of the data accumulated from the very beginning of the project?

The perpetualisation of the collected data together as well as the sustainability of the created infrastructure and the data models in use constitute another non-negligible problem which is intimately connected with the problem of interoperability of the data. The latter, apart from theoretical challenges to develop good data models, also implies many legal aspects, above all in the situations when the use of commercial datasets (e. g. copyrighted editions or proprietary databases and/or corpora) is inevitable. How can a mutually beneficial cooperation be achieved? What should be done to create a network of enterprises and to ensure the sustainability and interoperability of different kinds of data gathered independently within numerous and diverse projects, both public and private?

Finally, every single project is carried out within given institutional and financial circumstances. What strategies may be applied to secure the 'afterlife' of the project, its enriching, and maintenance after the end of funding? The session is intended to summarize and share experience of the research teams which have been working on long-lasting digital projects within the field of Medieval manuscript studies.

Paper -c is co-authored by Arianna Ciula (King's Digital Lab, King's College London), Paul Caton (King's Digital Lab, King's College London), and Geoffroy Noel (King's Digital Lab, King's College London).