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Suzette van Haaren, "The Digital Medieval Manuscript: Material Approaches to Digital Codicology" (Brill, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Welcome to the Library Science Channel of New Books Network. My name is Jen Hoyer, and today I'm speaking with Suzette Von Haren, author of the Digital Medieval Manuscript Material Approaches to Digital codicology, published in September 2025 by Brill. We increasingly encounter medieval books as digital facsimiles, zooming in on high resolution images, clicking through virtual pages, or engaging with interactive displays. But what actually happens when a parchment manuscript is translated into a digital object? How does this change affect our understanding of cultural heritage? Suzette Van Harden explores these and other questions in the Digital Medieval manuscript. And I am so delighted to be speaking with Suzette today so we can talk more about this book together. Suzette, welcome to New Books Network.
- [02:26]
D
Thanks so much and thank you for the beautiful introduction.
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E
Absolutely. Well, and before we really jump into talking about the book, one of the things that you noted in the preface of the book is how interdisciplinary it is. And I guess I'm making some assumptions from this, but I guessed that your background is equally interdisciplinary and So I would love if you could introduce yourself and chat a little bit for listeners about all the experience that you brought to doing this research and writing the book. Maybe you can share a bit about your background and the education that you've had that has brought you to this work.
- [03:09]
D
Yeah, of course. Yeah. So in the preface, I call myself the anti digital humanist, which sounds very negative. I am not against digital humanities, but it kind of means something else because I spoke to a colleague of mine here at Ruhr University, and he suddenly made it click for me where I fall in the discipline, because I've also. I've always kind of felt this kind of in betweenness when it comes to, like, positioning myself in certain disciplines. And he said that what we' doing here at the university in my current project, but also definitely what I did for this book was look at digital humanities, or digital technologies used within the humanities. Not from a DH perspective, but actually taking traditional humanities questions and asking what does it actually mean that we're digitizing, that these digital humanities are so prevalent right now, which is kind of doing or putting the digital humanities questions on their head, because it's a kind of a traditional view of very new and very new discipline. And actually, am I interdisciplinary? I'm. Yes and no. I. I guess I actually have quite a traditional education. I did an art history bachelor in Utrecht and also a Master of Medieval Studies in Utrecht and art history bachelor. Back then, at least at the moment, they are very focused on digital humanities. But when I was studying quite a traditional approach, I had to learn a lot of images and then kind of memorize the artist and style and name, which made for a very good background kind of ground to build up from. And my master's medieval studies I did with a focus on codicology, also quite traditional codicology, actually. I did a lot of looking at manuscripts. And in Utrecht and in the Netherlands in general, I guess we're very lucky to have quite a lot of manuscripts. And I was allowed to touch them and feel them, which is, for traditional codicology is quite an important, or at least for me, an important thing that shaped the way I looked at these objects. And then from there, I started being much more interested in contemporary society. I already was interested in it, but kind of incorporated in my research. And then modern Theory and digital culture. And the book that I wrote actually combines these things, because I explicitly do not want to position digitization as something totally new and totally like, kind of apart from everything else that happened before, but place it within a longer tradition. Of studying and working with and reproducing, preserving medieval manuscripts. So actually taking these kind of questions that we've had a long time that we ask of medieval manuscript, but then ask them of digital objects. Absolutely.
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E
And so I guess leading on from that, this work really falls into the realm of digital codicology. So for listeners who are not familiar with that field, can you explain how it lines up with, and as you've said, kind of continues on in this longer history of manuscript study and maybe give some examples of how it builds on that tradition?
- [07:20]
D
So codicology, I guess I'll just say for any listeners who may have never heard the word codicology, although we just talked about that, you interview more people with the kind of similar background, but just in case is the study of the codex. So it kind of usually refers to the study of handwritten books and then in general, I guess, medieval manuscripts. Right. And then digital codicology kind of again positions this very new term, I guess, digital and then codicology, very traditional old school science. So it is quite a confusing term and people use it in different ways. Of course, there's the one way of using digital codicology is referring to digital methods and techniques to study medieval manuscripts. A lot of people do this, for example, using high end imaging techniques or using OCR to recognize certain aspects or read manuscripts in terms of interpreting paleography or even using deep machine learning. So that's kind of one aspect of digital codicology. And then my digital corticology offers a meta analytic view in which I explore how the digital manuscript is a distinct material object. And then from there I look at how it was made and why it was made, how it functions and how it relates to its parchment counterpart. And so Bridget Worthy, who is an important inspiration and brilliant scholar, says that digital codecology is a rigorous analysis of the digital book as unique object. And this is kind of where I'm also working from because it's important to see digital manuscripts as an object that is central to how we deal with manuscripts today. Because if we look at a manuscript or if we study a manuscript nowadays, we see it more often in its digital form than in its physical form. So manuscript studies is a discipline that focuses on the material of the book. So in the material we can kind of read what it says about history, about the use of the book, for example, about the medieval society or not medieval society. Right. Manuscripts were used after medieval society too, after the Middle ages. And then we can actually do similar things with digital objects. So digital call ecology in that sense takes the digital objects seriously. So really, the central argument of my book is the digital manuscript is also an object. It's really there. We're really dealing with it. It's really material. It's real. And then I just wanted to say this is obviously not something that I made up myself. There are a huge amount of people, or maybe not a huge amount. Sorry. But there are some people who also deal with this, who also speak about this. Right. Bridget Worthy, I already said people like Bill Porter, Bill Anderson, Alain Treharne, Michelle Warren, Astrid Smith, obviously the people who are digitizing librarians. Those people are thinking about these things all the time and may not give it the same name, but are still considering the same aspects.
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E
So then your book asks some important questions about how manuscripts are transformed when they enter the digital realm. But you also emphasize that it's critical to recognize the materiality itself of digital objects. What are some of the reasons that it's so important for us to see the digital as material?
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D
This is a great question. Because this has changed so radically in the last few years, I would say the materiality of the digital is kind of more and more recognized. Right. And when I started this research, this is. I don't know if we acknowledge this, this book that came out of my PhD thesis. So I did my. I started my PhD in 2017, and I kind of started with the hypothesis, what does it mean when you digitize something and make something not material? And then I suddenly realized, hey, are we really sure that the digital is not material? Right. That's kind of. This was a big idea back then. Not obviously not followed by everyone, but kind of the general. In culture, in general society, people would say, digital is not really real. It's kind of ephemeral. You can't really touch it. Right. It's not really there. But just a little example, this morning I opened my news app and there was news that there were new calculations, there was new research done about energy consumed by data centers in the Netherlands. And these types of things are coming out more and more. Right. It's kind of very physical, the way that these, The. The way that the digital is showing its materiality. And it's. This was obviously also the case in 2017. We had data centers back then, but most people didn't really know about it, and they. They weren't really concerned with it. Whereas now it's getting more and more important. Right. All of our digital data, queries, searches, the zoom call that we're doing right now is inscribed somewhere on a Disk on a server. And this has very material and very real results. I guess the most common example, if we're thinking about manuscript studies, but not only manuscript studies, but just showing the importance of digital a materiality in libraries and scholarship, is the cyber attack on the British Library that is still seeing its effect right now. Right. The manuscripts are still not online, definitely not all of them. So this is obviously very, very dramatic way of describing materiality. It doesn't need to be dramatic. I guess digital objects, people often maybe didn't used to see it as material because it doesn't really feel like a material book when you're dealing with it. Right. Just because you're not really feeling the same thing, the same parchments or smelling the smell. People love to describe the smell of medieval manuscripts, especially when they are talking about describing it against what a digital object feels like. Just because you're not having that, it doesn't mean that you don't have an experience or you're not touching anything, right? You're still touching something, there's still materiality there. It's just a different experience. It also obviously has to do with the different context of use. You're not in a reading room, you're not being watched by librarians and other people. Like you're at home, maybe on your sofa or in your office. And it just completely different experience. And when something becomes an everyday experience, it suddenly becomes kind of feels less materially important. So in my book, I put a focus on the digital medieval manuscripts materialities and then the stuff it is made out of and how this relates to different environments and different interfaces. And that way I try to place it in the world, if that makes sense.
- [15:46]
E
And I don't know, I'm like laughing to myself because definitely last week, part of my day job involves making sure the books for our library are cataloged. And the other part of my day job is making sure the online databases work. And last week we got a new art book for the library collection and it was beautiful. And I took it out of the box and I definitely opened it and smelled it because it had such nice paper and ink. And I've never. I've never organized access to a new database. And you don't smell it, but there's still materiality there. And I don't know, it's an interesting through line to figure out. Anyway, so to talk more about materiality, the first of three case studies in your book really dives deeper into all of this. And so your first example is the very Bible. So could you explain for listeners what we should scrutinize about how, and I'm quoting you here, how the manuscript is structured and controlled through institutions, environments, technology, software and interface. And maybe give some examples of what this type of scrutiny of what asking these questions allows us to understand.
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D
And an important thing to remember about digital manuscripts, and it's the same obviously, for the manuscript itself, is that it is created for a specific purpose by a specific institution, often by people and within the context of available technologies. And when I talk to people nowadays, most importantly, often within specific financial context. It's funny if you imagine how much of what we see online is constrained by financial difficulties, or sometimes maybe not difficulties, right. Some digitization projects have amazing finances, and you can immediately see it. Right? So this idea obviously stands within the history of medieval manuscripts and purposefully also in my book at least, I purposely put it there because within specific cultural or institutional context and physical environments, if these environments change, it also change interpretation. Right. Understanding and use. And I use the Bury Bible as a case study in my book. This is a manuscript that is kept at the Parker Library at the Corpus Christi College in Cambridge. And this was digitized for the Parkour on the Web project. I guess probably lots of people know about this project, a relatively early digitization project. And it started, at least the digitization started in 2004. And the Parker on the Web project was launched in 2009. And has undergone a few iterations by then since then. And this project also involved quite a lot of experimentation and new discoveries because it was very early and it had to also deal with a lot of environmental issues. And I've had the opportunity in my research to speak to some of the personnel who were there for the digitization process. So I've heard some wonderful stories about what it was like to photograph massive manuscript because the burial Bible is gigantic. It's a 12th century giant Bible. So if you can imagine, it's as big as a manuscript can physically get. Basically funny. I don't know if it was. It's funny now, but good stories about, like how the Parker Library floors would vibrate so that. And because the pictures were such high quality and it took such a long time to take one photograph. And if someone would walk by like a student, the whole photo would have to be taken. Again, honestly, there's super interesting stories to be told by the digitizers there. So understanding this environment and how this manuscript was put online. And I'm talking about this one manuscript, but this could, of course, be done where I could Write about any other manuscript that's in the Parker Library. This can be understood by studying the project and the history of the project. And luckily right now there's quite a lot known about Parker on the web project. But this is not always the case. Like most digitization projects don't do a lot of documentation or at least not a lot of public documentation, which is difficult for someone like me who wants to know. But also we can look at the manuscript itself, right? The digital manuscript itself. If you look at the images, for example, there's like little things that show me that it's quite an old photograph or old. I'm putting that between the scarecrows. It's not that old relatively, but it's. You can see for example, the bone weights. There's like little tiny triangular gray weights. Those are bone. They keep the page flat. And right now there's like different ways of doing this. Photographers use cradles that use suction or different. There's other techniques as well. So you don't have. So you don't have that kind of interference. But this kind of shows me that it's photograph that was taken in 2004 or 5. So it's important to think about the choices that were made within a project and the people who made them. For example, you can think about. And this is a big part of my. This chapter I talk about how light and reflection of color and gold works within a digital photograph. And those are choices made by the photographer. So this is the way you see this. Manuscripts online is determined by someone. It's not copied by photocopier. Kind of choices were made. Someone is shaping how this image is looking. Not just one person, but also the Parker Library who is determining we want this online and we want that. And this is the equipment we can afford. This is the experiments we can try. And this really affects how manuscripts online are presented.
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Absolutely, yeah. So many personal choices and personal knowledge and expertise that goes into all of those. Those things.
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E
And so then the second case study you focus on, it looks at the manuscript Der Natura Bluma, which is a manuscript whose digital facsimile gives us really great examples of fragmentation in digital space. So what are some of the things this manuscript teaches us about the longer traditions of fragmentation across both the physical and digital realms? And could you maybe share some examples of how fragmentation allows digital manuscripts to play a role in larger cultural narratives?
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D
So DOD Porter describes the act of digitization as kind of fundamentally fragmenting a medieval book. Just the simple act of photographing it and putting that online, taking a picture of each leaf and then putting it in a long list in an interface that does not really show the wholeness of a manuscript, but separate elements. So it's kind of. This bookness is kind of fundamentally already fragmented. Then again, medieval manuscripts are hardly ever still as they were when they were first created. I think it happens much more often if we look at a medieval manuscript that it has been changed, altered, things were added, things were taken out. And there's of course, the tradition of cutting up manuscripts, which happened throughout history and still kind of relatively common. This also happened in Der. In the Thurblooma. At least one of the. At least one of the miniatures is. Is cut out and a few of the leaves. And this is not uncommon, obviously in manuscripts at all, especially not in beautiful manuscripts like this one. And I just want to say that I'm talking about Dernatuure Blumen manuscript in the National Library of the Netherlands, that's in the Hague. But they actually own two, which is really cool. Cool not only because they own two Dernatuho Blumer manuscripts, but they are also. The one is a direct copy of the other one. So it also kind of makes me think about like medieval manuscripts are reproductions in general. Like manuscript is reproduction and then we have a direct copy, and then that is also then copied in multiple ways. And one of those ways is in. As a digital object that doesn't really have anything to do with fragmentation. But I just think it's really cool, actually, the manuscript that is. I'll just say the shelf numbers. The manuscript that I look at in my book is KA16. And the other manuscripts, the shelf number. So the other Dernatur manuscripts in The Hague is 76E4, if I am correct. But I'm doing this by heart, so I may be wrong. So digitization kind of fragments, right? As Dot Porter explains. But it also, when you put something online, you kind of open it up. Then the digitization kind of opens up the manuscript for fragmentation and dissemination as well in its open accessibility. In more or lesser degree, when you put something online, it can be shared relatively easily. It can be taken apart and shared relatively easily. And Dernatur Blumen is a really good example of this because first of all, it's a manuscript that contains a lot of miniatures of the natural world. And the miniatures are great, right? They speak to the imagination. They're very sweet and funny and beautiful looking. And in Its digitization, the National Library of the Netherlands also put all of those images separately, so already cut out on Wikimedia Commons. So there's one long list of these images which kind of already creates a prefabricated fragmentation, right? You can just go on Wikipedia comments. It's also commons, right? It's openly usable. And these miniatures especially are often used in memes. And a great example of this one that was relatively popular was the Angry Oyster image. I hope some people who are listening recognize it if I say it like this. And if not, Google angry medieval oyster. You will see it's great. And of course, memes are funny and strange and we all love them, right? We all love to share them, but they are often not taken particularly seriously because of this, right? It's kind of something you do because it's funny and then you don't think about it anymore. But they are actually, I think, important cultural objects. And they're also, especially when they include cultural heritage objects like this medieval miniature, they're an important kind of continuation of how we think about medieval manuscripts, especially when they have lots of images in them. When you think about that, people wanted to cut out these miniatures. If you take a photograph of a manuscript, you love to. You love to. Or if you are in a museum even, we just put open the pages that have the nice images in them. So memes are, in a way a continuation of them. And then also they add kind of multiple layers of interpretation, and they say something about how we think about medieval objects, even if we only think, hey, this looks old, so it must be medieval. It says something, right? About what we know and about what we think is interesting about them, what we think is funny right now. Because usually the jokes are kind of pointed towards modern associations. And then now, perhaps nowadays, as in this was written a few years ago, I'm wondering how kind of culturally significant memes are right now, But I'm thinking more about how these images are shared on Instagram or on TikTok. On TikTok. There's also often this medieval music also again, between square coats. It's interesting to think how these fragments, fragments of manuscripts live on in different ways online.
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E
I mean, now that I think about it, even last night I was like sharing a meme that I saw online that was like, if an office party was a medieval manuscript and it took illustrations from medieval manuscripts of the different kind of stereotypes of people we see at our office parties. And, yeah, they're still circulating and finding new meaning very different from the original meanings, right?
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D
And the only thing really that matters in a joke like that is that the fact that it is from a medieval manuscript, but otherwise the whole medieval context is lost. The context now added is modern context. And I think that's honestly a really interesting kind of cultural amalgamation of kind of ideas of what history is.
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E
And so then moving along to the third case study in your book, you look at the Prayer Book of Mary Gelders and you raise questions about preservation and the interplay of sustainability issues between physical and digital versions of the manuscript. So can you explain how the digital facsimile of this prayer book supports physical conservation of the manuscript? And then conversely, how it reminds us that we also need to pay attention to the fragility of digital things?
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D
So this thinking about sustainability is actually the theme that kind of started my interest in digitization. When I was doing my master's, as I explained, quite traditional kind of codicological training. I was asked to speak at a conference and I thought it would be fun to talk about digitization. I don't remember why. Well, I now know why it's fun, but I don't remember why I chose that subject. But I wanted to talk about long term data preservation and medieval manuscripts. So that's kind of what kind of launched this whole interest of mine. And the Prayer Book of Mary of Gelders is also special to me because I also did a different research project into this. I was actually part for a little while of the big research project at the Radboud University and the conservation project that was kind of linked to that in Berlin. So the digitization was also part of this project. So they initiated this digitization. And this can be found, if I'm correct, and it's still the case on the Radbard University Special Collections, which is strange because the manuscript itself is not kept there. But this is because the project initiated this. The digitization itself was made in Berlin. So digitization is often seen as a step in conservation and preservation processes of books. First of all, because the digital is or was often seen as something that is everlasting, which is, as I will talk about, it's not. And then secondly, because the digital object means could mean that the parchment book does not really need to be used anymore, because people can say, if you want to see the book, you can go online. And for a lot of reasons for seeing the book, the online version is pretty good. So the fragile manuscript and the Prayer Book of Mary of Gelders is particularly fragile. It's no longer bound. So it's basically a stack of Quires and loose leaves. The fragile manuscript can be kept in the safe, basically in the archive, and be kept there for as long as possible with as little handling as possible. And the idea that the digitization kind of helps this process is that people can still see the book, but it's online. I've also heard people argue the opposite. That is to say that because something is digitized, it increases in fame and does handling because people want to see it more. I am not entirely sure whether that argument holds true. I think there's no research being done on that, so I can't say anything about it. But there's certainly something there in terms of like promoting and making openly accessible online. Also make sure that more people know about a book. Right. So I'm. But I'm just not entirely sure if that's. If actually more people are asking to see it. What's definitely true is that hands are dangerous to manuscripts, especially to the Prayer Book of Mary of Gelders. This is pretty much at least some of the pages are very, very fragile. And they are not dangerous to digital objects. Like hands are not dangerous to digital objects. They are actually helpful. It's kind of the opposite. The digital objects actually need to. To be used to stay accessible. Not kind of physically, but if they don't get used. And they are often not updated or degrade quicker, as in they are taken offline because they're not used. On the other hand. So medieval manuscripts can survive for hundreds of years. Right. The Prayer Book of Mare Gelders celebrated its. And I have to say that correctly now, 600th birthday, birthday in square codes a few years ago, kind of surrounding this project, the research project. But we don't actually know how long Digital objects last. 20 years, I guess, would be quite a long time. Like if you're thinking about Parker on the web, this has been updated quite a lot. Right. But the images are still the same. Then also you get a kind of ship of theseus, this situation there, when is it still the same object? So digital sustainability is a real problem, kind of both materially but also culturally. Digital objects are not really valued in the way that physical heritage objects are. They're often seen as troublesome to keep up. It's a lot of work. And then on the other hand, there's also kind of this throwaway attitude. It's kind of a daily object that we just use. And when we don't use it anymore, why don't we just get a new one? I know a lot of digitization people will stand up in their chairs right now and shout, no. It's obviously a lot of work to make a digitization, but I think in kind of general attitude toward digitization, this is maybe not recognized, but it's kind of changing right now. Also with these ideas about materiality and with also the energy consumption, we're kind of being more conscientious in digitizing. Another kind of thing that comes with this is that, for example, while I was writing my book, this started in 2017. A lot of my case studies have changed, changed in location, interfaces, metadata has changed, which actually makes practicing the discipline of digital codicology particularly difficult because I can't actually go back and look at the same digital manuscripts that I looked at in 2017. There needs, in that sense, a lot of documentation is needed, and the Internet Archive is a huge savior and needs to be protected. So part of taking the digital manuscript seriously as an object and to understand how it moves and functions in the world, it's also, it really needs taking into consideration that they are fragile objects. And we need to think about preservation, not only about the medieval manuscript itself, the parchment book, but also the digital medieval manuscript. Absolutely.
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E
And so then all of the issues that you're examining in your book provide really clear reminders that digitization isn't just the next stage in a linear life cycle for manuscripts, but is part of this bigger ecosystem that manuscripts exist in. And you've asked some really important questions about this. But I'm curious what other ways you'd like to see this area of study continue to develop, and what other questions about the creation and care of digital manuscripts need more explanation or exploration? I guess this is also a chance for you to think you've done a lot of work on this, but what work do you hope other people will also take on? None of us are doing this alone.
- [43:00]
D
Right. I do hope a lot of other people are taking this on, because, to be honest, I think it's really interesting and relevant to think about the way historical material doesn't need to be medieval manuscript, just heritage objects and the way history survives. And think about how a contemporary society deals with these, with these objects, but also with the questions that come along with them. Right. They are not just a window into the past, but they are also a window into what we're doing right now and pretty much every time in between. Right. I would say a medieval manuscript could say so much about the 19th century. I would say that's like a real interest of mine is how this relates to histories of keeping and collecting and reproducing and histories of technology. Right. But then, okay, so just to answer your question, I see my book really as a first tiny little step, a kind of an exploration of what it means to digitize manuscripts, digitized objects like medieval manuscripts, and kind of what it means to translate one material object into a completely different material object. But that also kind of means that there's a very open field lying in front of us. And this could go in many different ways, not only for theorizing, but I also think about interesting different ways of representing manuscripts in digital contexts. I'm thinking, for example, of fiscal. This is developed by Dot Porta and Alberto Campagnolo, and it's a tool in which manuscript collation can be visualized in interactive diagrams. And it's very useful for manuscript research. Like a lot of manuscript researchers and conservators are using it. And it's also part of my current research project. This, I think, is really interesting. So different ways of representing this material online. And then, of course, there's also new technologies. Think, for example, virtual reality, to bring manuscripts in totally different contexts. Again, I'm also thinking about Bill Anderson's work. He experiments a lot with different ways of representing manuscripts kind of visually, including VR. And I'm also keeping a close eye on developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence. So how does AI interpret a mass of manuscripts that is digitized? I know Hannah Busch in Cologne is doing a really interesting work on this, but you can also imagine, for example, how does a. An AI, A generator generates. How does it interpret? If you say, like, hey, generate a medieval manuscript. For me, it often looks really horrible. Like how. Like, why. Why does it, like, it has this huge mass of digitized manuscripts. How does it, like, imagine a manuscript? Yeah. So machine learning, there's really interesting work being done there as well. There's also. Sorry, I'm just. This is a super interesting project. And I just. I don't remember this person's name, but there's a composer, not a musicologist, but a composer, who actually fed medieval music manuscripts into machine learning. And there he. And then that. The kind of. And this is, I think, even pre. LLM. But this tool then developed. And he then kind of composed a new piece of music based on this one Man Shift. It's really beautiful and very haunting and weird, obviously, because it's a computer that's interpreting this manuscript, but kind of creatively, really interesting project. And I'm so sorry that I forgot his name.
- [47:39]
E
That's okay.
- [47:41]
D
So I'm reading and thinking a lot about Digitization and digital projects that deal with medieval material. And kind of the one thing that I'm hoping, like a lot of the things that I'm reading is just description of how people use digital methods and digital projects. But I'm hoping to see more of kind of this kind of reflective and nuanced quality in the research. So not only how do we digitize and how are we using these digital methods, but also why and what does it actually mean? Like, what do these changes in methods and techniques in research mean for understanding medieval material and for understanding the Middle Ages in general?
- [48:20]
E
Definitely.
- [48:22]
D
Yeah.
- [48:22]
E
Well, so then I guess to wrap up, I'd love to give you space to share about any projects that you specifically are working on. No pressure. You just got a book out. So, like, you know, I hope you get to take a break, but I'd love to hear if there's any research projects, creative projects that you're focusing on right now.
- [48:43]
D
Snow breaks for me. I'm working. I'm working on a project right now, actually. And here in at University Bochum, I'm part of a research research institute that is called Virtuale Lebenswalden, which means virtual worlds. And it's a big research center with all different projects that go many different ways. I work with sociologists and I work with people who are in robotics and art historians and people in media studies. It's really interesting to work with people who are not necessarily from the same disciplinary backgrounds. My project is called Virtuales Mitteralter or Virtual Middle Ages. And confusingly, it is less about VR than you may think. Actually, I have written a little bit about VR manuscripts in VR, but that's more of a kind of passion project of mine. And this is also where the fiscal research comes in. I'm actually researching how medievalists, medieval historians use digital methods and digital tools, digital objects, and how that then affects not only them and their research, but also the way that they think about the Middle Ages. And the kind of grand question, which I'm not going to answer, but it's a nice background question to have, is how do the Middle Ages change because of digitization and kind of the rise in digital technologies? So that's what I'm working on right now, and this is unfortunately finishing in July 2026. So I am looking for a new opportunity. I don't have anything lined up right now, but I'm looking to expand my knowledge kind of more into collection management and libraries, maybe university libraries, and then specifically into kind of digital technologies and innovation. I'm interested, really interested in digitization in general. Just digital changes in society. Digital information management doesn't have to even be about medieval manuscripts. In fact, I love being a medievalist, but maybe I love being a digital media scholar more.
- [51:22]
E
Who knows? I guess you'll find out.
- [51:24]
D
Yeah.
- [51:25]
E
What's next? Lots of cool things. Working on. Well, thank you so much. And once again today I've been speaking with Suzette vanhaeren, author of the Digital Medieval Manuscript Material Approaches to Digital Coda College, published in September 2025 by Brill. My name is Jen Hoyer.
- [51:57]
C
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