Redefining the MOOC

#DDMss, 'Digging Deeper 1: Making Manuscripts', recently ended its six-week run with a very good level of success, according to Stanford Online's administrators.* We had a completion rate of 25% from around 4500 registered students--a high percentage for online learning. Of those who filled in our survey, we obtained a satisfaction rate of 98% ('Somewhat Satisfied, 15%; Very Satisfied, 47%; Extremely Satisfied 36%'). I'd be happy with those percentages in a campus course of, say, 12, 24, 45, or 68 students; but here, there were 830 respondents, so those figures suggest we've offered something that's been regarded as worthwhile.

Student Evaluations from 'Digging Deeper 1'

Now, Manuscript Studies is quite a specialised area of study and research, so we were never expecting 40,000 students to register, as sometimes happens in a 'Massive Online Open Course' (MOOC) like 'Computer Programming' or 'Become an Entrepreneur'. As we were preparing 'Digging Deeper' in the two years before it launched, I hoped we get 2,000 participants in the course's first iteration to help justify the time, effort, and money that went into making the films, the surrounding resources, and the platform's design. To get more than double that number is pleasing, and of these, while a surprising proportion was curators, graduate students, and academics, many more were complete novices, or had engaged in very little formal palaeographical or codicological training. 'Digging Deeper' had to try and meet the needs of this diverse community, which necessitated some rapid responses in weeks 1 and 2, as it became clear we'd taken some things too much for granted. These diverse communities resulted in different uses for the course and dramatically variable learning environments. I know of two institutions that used the course alongside an on-campus seminar, to augment what students were learning in class. I know of many other participants who worked on their own in remote locations, accessing our material through dodgy wi-fi connections, but pleased to be part of a broader community that extended across the world, from Aberystwyth (hello, Mum!) to Austin, Lima to Lisbon, St Petersburg to Sydney.

Imago mundi, c. 1190
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 66

There has been a tremendous amount of critical and apocalyptic commentary about MOOCs and their potential effect on Higher Education (outlined here https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/05/14/faculty-group-continues-anti-mooc-offensive and here http://news.dice.com/2013/12/18/moocs-fail/, for example. Here's where online learning might be heading: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/upshot/true-reform-in-higher-education-when-online-degrees-are-seen-as-official.html?_r=0&abt=0002&abg=0), but I believe such modes of learning have genuine pedagogic and academic value.

While 'Digging Deeper 1' can hardly claim the 'Massive' status of a MOOC, we put it together to provide something that's not offered on every university campus; to show any interested participants some of the basics about medieval book history, using the resources of Cambridge University Library and Stanford Green Library's Special Collections. We wanted to offer an introduction to the richness and beauty of medieval books and documents, so many of which can now be seen in Open Access repositories. It has been my strong belief for the last decade or so that all of us who look at this material digitally can usefully benefit from a degree of training in what it is that we're seeing and how we might interpret the images we view. Online learning is one way to make Manuscript Studies more widely available, accompanying the increasing numbers of excellent resources to be accessed through the internet. It's also why there is a 'Digging Deeper 2: The Form and Function of Manuscripts' in April 2015, where we'll feature the work of conservators, digital specialists, and non-Western-manuscript scholars (http://online.stanford.edu/). We hope you can join us!

[*The 'Digging Deeper' team is Dr Benjamin Albritton, Dr Orietta Da Rold, Dr Suzanne Paul, and Professor Elaine Treharne with Dr Kenneth Ligda, John Mustain, Jonathan Quick, Andy Saltarelli, Colin Reeves-Fortney, Adam Storek and the EdX Platform team at Stanford.]

The Broken Book I: Getty Exhibition 'Canterbury and St. Albans: Treasures from Church and Cloister'

At the exhibition of the St Albans Psalter and Canterbury stained glass, hosted by the Getty Museum from September 20, 2013 to February 2, 2014 (http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/canterbury/), the curators claim that ‘By uniting the intimate art of book illumination with monumental glass painting, this exhibition explores how specific texts, prayers and environments shaped the medieval viewer’s understanding of these pictures during the period of artistic renewal following the Norman Conquest of England’ (blurb on board at entrance wall). Pace the facts that 'prayers' are 'texts', that it was more than England that the Normans conquered, and there was never a diminution of English artistic achievement such that ‘renewal’ was required, the focus on ‘these pictures’ should have been a warning of what was coming as I turned the end of the wall to face the first room. First, though, I had to pass another board that mistakenly claimed: ‘[In 1066] Latin replaced English as the written language used in government and religious life’. First, Latin had always been used in government and religious life; secondly, it did not replace English, especially in ‘religious life’; thirdly, why do the curators feel it necessary to ameliorate their exhibit by diminishing social and cultural accuracy? Why not reflect a more nuanced historical reality?  

Front Steps of The Getty

What is really missing at the exhibition, though, is that which claims to be present: the St Albans Psalter itself (or, indeed, complete stained glass). In a provocative display, the curators choose to maximize the literal spread of the codex by utilizing its current disbound state to disperse bifolia through the four large, high-ceiled rooms, dimly lit and ideologically impelled. Most curious is the decision to show bifolia in separate wooden frames, categorized in sections by various labels like ‘Text Page’ (containing the Alexis Quire, as if only those folios have ‘text’). These exhibited bifolia are obviously conjugate pairs of leaves, but since many are outer bifolia, this means that only very rarely does one observe what would be an actual opening in the properly assembled and bound book. Successive folios representing what a medieval viewer might have seen are infrequent and the book is thus turned into a dismembered spectacle, displayed in component parts (like the Calendar, which is shown out of monthly order). The book is made extensive, but its functional extensity is utterly elided. 

            This is understandable in some respects, since spread-out like this, many folios are available for viewing by many viewers simultaneously. A touchscreen reproduction of one opening, which is itself encased adjacently, allows the reader to move around the virtual page with a cursor, with a neat function to allow simultaneous translation of the Latin. A facsimile of the St Albans Psalter sits on a lectern against a sidewall for the assiduous attendee, but there is otherwise little left of the bookness of the book. Moreover, unhelpful juxtapositions mislead or make convenient connections that cannot be chronologically, generically or thematically justified. Thus, for instance, for no apparent reason, two leaves of the Eadwine Psalter’s prefatory cycle (owned now by the Pierpont Morgan, though more properly belonging with the unmentioned Cambridge, Trinity College R. 17. 1) appear at the exhibit’s margins, marginalized, against separate walls with little connection made between these and St Albans’ deconstructed quires.

            The first three of the large rooms are deliberately made to emulate sacred space; the stained glass (with two black-and-white supply panels) overlooks the fragmented Psalter, but does not connect with it in any meaningful way. Situated in front of the glass are long benches, like church pews, and this ecclesiastical setting is continued in oversized pictures (a cloister photograph covers the end wall in the second room, for example; and Canterbury Cathedral’s East End sits to the right of the stained glass). 

Digital Image from http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/getty-voices-designing-canterbury-and-st-albans/

 

Why did this seem like a good idea? Why is this hyperreal immersion, this pretend churchi-ness, appropriate? The third room—loosely about saints and Thomas Becket—proffers more forced connections: manuscripts with tentative links to Becket or showing the same artist as one of those in the St Albans Psalter are juxtaposed with a pilgrim badge, a Limoges reliquary, another reliquary casket and a liturgical comb carved with Henry II and Becket. Perhaps I didn’t read carefully enough in this room, but the theme of saints’ cults is oddly attached to two sets of texts (the Psalter and the windows) that are concerned with saints in far more complex ways than are suggested here. A more obvious connection might have been salvation.

            The final room is explicatory and by far the clearest part of the exhibit. Cases demonstrate how medieval illumination was produced and how stained glass is made. It’s a good final reminder that in this exhibition we are dealing with real objects that have multiple functions. The Psalter and the stained glass are not just pictures. There is so little emphasis on word-text in the case of the Psalter that one would be forgiven for forgetting the Book of Psalms is all about the text (said, sung, read, memorized). The real object is displayed at The Getty, ironically, as if it were digital—chopped up into its consistent parts, browsable in no defined order. And while it is a wonderful opportunity to see up close the details of the manuscript’s folios, one wonders what impression modern viewers are left with of this rather lovely, but here entirely decontextualised, set of materials.

Swerving from the Straight and Narrow: Greenblatt's Fictional Medieval Period

Although Stephen Greenblatt published his blockbuster The Swerve in 2011, a recent book review in the Los Angeles Review of Books (http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type&id=1217&fulltext=1&media#article-text-cutpoint) has ignited great debate on the merits of the book. The Modern Language Association's myopic decision to validate the book by awarding it a prize has poured further fuel on that debate (see Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's Blog [http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2012/12/stephen-greenblatts-swerve-and-mlas.html] and the various Twitter exchanges cited). For me, the debate centres not on the book's focus on Poggio's discovery of Lucretius, nor on the many odd and misconceived statements sprinkled throughout, but on the grand narrative that emerges--a grand narrative that trumpets the Renaissance partly through its insistent derogation and misrepresentation of the Medieval.

Quite why scholars like Greenblatt feel the need to valorise their own literary and historical period of specialisation by dismissing earlier or later centuries or movements or demarcated temporal units (like 'Middle Ages' or 'Late Antiquity') is a mystery to me. It is entirely disrespectful to write off whole swathes of time, of cultural production, of literary composition, of personal volition, of daily living, as Greenblatt does. So, when Greenblatt claims that the Renaissance effectively threw off the 'constraints that centuries had constructed around curiosity, desire, individuality, sustained attention to the material world, the claims of the body...' (p. 9), he provides us with a sequence of superficial imaginings that might yet prove damaging to readers who, assured by the prize-winningness of this volume, assume they are being told something other than fiction.

From a text technological perspective, Greenblatt shows a total disregard for textual production, transmission and reception in the period between the Fall of Rome and the finding of classical nuggets in the monastic libraries of the late Medieval period. He forgets that the real Middle Ages provided the world with universities and the full flourishing of scholasticism; with the twelfth-century Renaissance, which like its later iteration, re-discovered classical texts protected by the cultural bastions of organised religion. He forgets that history is never the story of homogeneity, of stasis, of universal darkness. He forgets that Renaissance writers, like Southwell, Herbert, Donne and Sidney valued a world after this one. He forgets that testifying for the individual are the hundreds of lyrical voices calling from the thousands of Medieval books that survive, despite the best destructive efforts of later cultural vandals. Perhaps Greenblatt doesn't forget; perhaps he never knew.

But if he never knew, he should not deride the cultural landscape of a thousand years--a culture which is rich and deep and worth studying. And one would hope that scholars, of all people, would know better than to try and make their own speciality seem 'better' or more worthwhile simply by rubbishing others' areas of expertise.