A pioneering effort to digitize versions
of one of the most popular romances
of the Middle Ages, and to share
digitized copies with students and scholars
around the world, has won a $717,000 grant
from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to
enhance and expand the project.
Begun in 1998 as a close collaboration
between the Sheridan Libraries' Digital
Knowledge Center and the Krieger School's
Department of Romance Languages and
Literatures, the Roman de la Rose project
enables new approaches to medieval studies
through the creation of digital surrogates,
transcriptions, and text and image searching.
Rather than travel thousands of miles
to make comparisons of these texts, scholars
can easily compare and study them online.
The Mellon Foundation funding will help
create a board of advisers, underwrite a technical
conference and support digitization of
more versions of Roman de la Rose, a story of
a dreamer pursuing love while encountering
obstacles, adventures and life lessons along
the way.
To date, Rose manuscripts from the Walters
Art Museum in Baltimore, Pierpont
Morgan Library in New York, J. Paul Getty
Museum in Los Angeles and Bodleian
Library at Oxford University have been
digitized, providing scholars an online environment
for comparative analysis of works
produced centuries apart, ranging in quality
from commonplace to sumptuous presentation
manuscripts.
"We have contributed directly to the
transformation of scholarly research and
practices in the initial phase of the Rose
project,” Winston Tabb, dean of university
libraries, said. "One of the most exciting
aspects of this award is that it will enable us
to develop an integrated approach to preservation
and access issues through the design
of a repository, which will house the digital
content and support its easy integration into
learning environments.”
"The Rose project has already become a
teaching tool on a worldwide scale,” said
Stephen G. Nichols, the James M. Beall
Professor of French and Humanities and coprincipal
investigator on the project. "We
are delighted to have the opportunity to
continue our collaborations with researchers,
librarians, technology specialists and
museum professionals as we expand the
riches of this global resource for the scholarly
community.”
Creating a joint board of scholars and
technical experts will help the project further
design a means for ongoing collaborative
contribution to the site by qualified
scholars and students from around
the world; migrate the content to a better,
repository-based system; connect the repository
to learning systems; and add virtual
manuscripts from different countries and
chronological periods to enhance comparative
analysis.
"The Roman de la Rose Web site has already
proved extremely useful in both teaching
and research,” said Sylvia Huot, reader in
medieval French literature at Cambridge
University in England. "It allows students to
compare the way that different manuscripts
translate the text into visual imagery, to
assess the impact of illustrations on a reader
and to compare variant versions of the text.
The new phase will make the site richer and
much easier to use.”
Grants from the Samuel H. Kress and
Gladys Krieble Delmas foundations and the
Getty Trust funded the earlier phase of Project
Rose development. To visit the Rose site,
go to rose.mse.jhu.edu.
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