I’d
like to offer some reflections on the experience of developing a massive open
online course on medieval manuscripts. From 2014-2015, I got the opportunity to
collaborate on the Digging Deeper
sequence of online courses, initiated by Professor Elaine Treharne, with a
crack team from Stanford University (which funded the courses, and hosts the material) and
Cambridge: Drs. Benjamin Albritton, Suzanne Paul, Orietta Da Rold,
and Jonathan Quick.
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| Ben Albritton gets miked up by Colin Reeves-Fortney as the team looks on |
We launched Digging Deeper: Making Manuscripts in Winter 2015, and the second course, Digging Deeper: The Form and Function of Medieval Manuscripts, in Spring. I was
the English Department Academic Technology Specialist at the time, and my role
was essentially project management. This is a privileged position for this sort
of project, because I got to work at the jointure between extremely disparate
groups—academics, platform engineers, videographers—as they figured out how to
collaborate in the service of a new kind of cohesive learning experience.
Digging
Deeper is about how
manuscripts were created, the steps in their development, their conservation;
the longer I worked on it, the more I came to see MOOC production itself as a sort
of echo, or descendent, of manuscript production. So, in giving an overview of
this experience, I’ve tried the experiment of using the unit names of the Digging Deeper sequence, reappropriated
here for their relevance to online courses.
A
MOOC, like a manuscript, is produced with great toil and striving. With great
expense, and effort. As a work of
devotion. I find it hard to believe that MOOCs can be produced without people
like the Digging Deeper course team,
who have the passion and profuse intellectual energy to power through the work—to
carry the inspiration for it intact through the welter of the actual process. In
many cases, and certainly in ours, MOOC instructors get no extra pay, and no
allotted time, to create the project. They have
to do it out of love.
And the production is, as with a de luxe manuscript, corporate: lots of
people, lots of groups; work goes on at lots of different buildings. Just for
fun, a list of units involved: Cambridge University Library, Stanford English
Department, Stanford Digital Library Systems and Services, and Stanford Special
Collections, St John’s College Cambridge, the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning,
the Academic Technology Specialist Program, video production, graphics post-production,
the OpenEdX platform team at Stanford, the EdX platform team at Harvard/MIT.
It’s complicated. But it all has to come out simple and unified.
That’s
easy: Palo Alto and Cambridge. In a week dedicated to filming, we worked in
Cambridge in 2014, which was the bulk of the footage; but we also shot a good
deal at Stanford in libraries and studios.
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| Setting up at Stanford's Green Library Special Collections |
I
was frankly appalled the first time it was borne in upon me what was required
to put a penmark upon a parchment leaf. The only similar revelation has been
learning what real video requires. It
has no more resemblance to shooting video of my kids on my phone than a Post-it
note has to the Book of Kells. Aside from manuscript production itself, I know
of no other type of media creation that requires so much—so much expertise, so much money, so much planning, so much
work after you think the main work is
finished; such insane attention to detail—I know of no other medium, save
parchment and I guess stone, that is so unforgiving of error.
Also under “Manuscript materials” we
could talk about the platform—but let’s class that under…
A
major component of Digging Deeper is
learning and practicing transcription. And let me tell you: learning and
practicing transcription of medieval manuscripts is not something that was envisioned as a primary use-case by MOOC
platform designers. Indeed, the whole MOOC world has its genealogy in STEM, and
we’re still very much in the process of adapting STEM tools to humanities ends.
When we first launched Digging Deeper,
we had a simple textbox for transcription; no underlining, no special
characters (except math characters—thank you), to do transcription. It wasn’t
good enough, but we made do. But the platform team at Stanford, working with
the one at MIT/Harvard, were interested in what we needed here, and custom
designed a
new transcription tool that includes all the medieval characters that are required,
plus underlining and other special features. So, a little bit at a time, and
with serious help from CS-land, the humanities MOOC is getting there.
As
with medieval books, information indexing and retrieval is a major challenge. In Digging Deeper, the team shows medieval techniques of information
sorting, and also takes us into the daunting world of current library cataloging.
Behind the scenes, it transpired that one can recognize serious video
production teams by the way they organize their files. And what has been
interesting, and challenging, above all is the negotiation of cataloging
systems between disparate worlds, and finding a larger system that accommodates
them all. I could go on. But let me just say: do not organize a medieval
manuscript project along a similar-sounding schema to that of the library that
you are working at. I never again want to hear an exchange like: “Did we just
film segment 2.1.5 onIi.2.11?” “No, I think this was 2.2.11 on Ii.1.5.”
The
most obvious association for mise-en-page
in a MOOC means riddling out how in the heck to configure these various
elements—video, readings, text, assessments, discussions—onto the screen. Just
like our medieval forebears (maybe because
of our medieval forebears) we’re still there wrestling with fitting rectangles
into rectangles.
But mise-en-page
has another, more special meaning to me in the MOOC context. We have a segment in which Dr Paul shows a lovely compendium volume, CUL Gg. 1. 1, and
observes the great virtues of a volume being carefully planned beforehand. We have another in which Dr Albritton shows musical notation, and in which the
layout at the bottom of a page has collapsed—it’s all crammed in, no staves,
just whatever works. Planning in advance. That turns out to be important in
manuscripts as in MOOCs.
Preparing
the folio: folding, pricking, ruling. A lot of effort went into creating a
straight, even, experience on a relatively flat page. The digital world
though—with some fancy exceptions—remains an entirely flat world, and this has
consequences. Showing folding: that’s tough. Getting a flat, even image of a
manuscript page: that’s tougher. The page is three dimensional, and it is
impossible to hide this in the precise pixel grid of the screen.
A special word on pricking and ruling,
especially drypoint ruling. With good macro photography you can get great
images of these, but it may take
about an hour per image. It is exacting.
“I’m NOT taking any more pictures of pricking!” as our photographer
said, still hangs in my mind as a key statement from the Cambridge trip.
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| Cambridge University Library, Ii.2.11, eleventh-century Old English Gospels with drypoint ruling (photo: Colin Reeves-Fortney) |
In
Digging Deeper, East means Arabic and
Chinese manuscript traditions. But to me, East means Sacramento. Cambridge is
definitely the Far East. Digging Deeper
was very much a worldwide effort. There
are amazing benefits to this. To name just one, our ability to respond to
questions in the online forums. As Dr. Paul observed: “It's all about timings - between us
we've pretty much got 24 hour coverage.”
But there are also cultural conflicts. And
I would just urge my fellow Americans to stick to your principles: there is no
“u” in color, nor is there an “s” in digitization.
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| Conserving Elaine (made-up for shooting) |
What
happens next? There has been such a rush on to produce MOOCs in the last few
years that it seems that no one has really thought through the eschatology of
the thing. What comes next? It would be appalling to just dispose of the
material once we’re through, or even just to push it into reruns. There are the
materials of course—the videos, the online learning resources, and whatnot—those
shouldn’t just be ditched. But far above that is the community—the community of
scholars, librarians, researchers, novices, and like-minded souls the world
over who have made these courses work. So, shifting into the next stage of the
project, that community is, I think, what we want to keep together and help to
grow.
The
last week of our second course it on digitization. In Digging Deeper, digitization means primarily rendering digital
photographs of manuscripts on the internet. But Digging Deeper is, of course, itself
digitization. So throughout the process we’ve had to think very carefully about
what this kind of digitization means,
how it works, what its aim is. I remember clearly, in a big room at Cambridge
stuffed with camera equipment and with us all swirling around, and in the
middle, holding the stage silently, a large manuscript—like in the Frost poem,
with the secret which sits in the middle, and knows. What is this all about? Making
slick video? Designing a fun interface?
I’ll close with the example of our
section on Practical Paleography—that is, the transcription component I
mentioned earlier. The exercise here is simply looking at a manuscript on the
screen, then transcribing it with a pencil, then typing it onto the screen to
check your transcription. I have to tell you that, not being a medievalist, I
had no idea why we were doing this. Twenty years ago, OK: you needed a way to
be able to draw and transfer information about the manuscript without taking
the manuscript itself. But now that we can mostly capture this stuff with smart
phones, and that more and more of it is online, what’s the point? I plucked up
the courage at one point to ask. And the answer was interesting. It was, in
essence, “If you don’t do this painstaking task, then you’ll never learn what
you’re actually looking at.”
The dystopia of digitization, I think, is
lots of images being created and passed around like Bitcoins, without anyone
ever really knowing what they’re worth or what they mean. The utopia, or simply
the way forward, is using digitization to focus attention better, more clearly,
and for more people, on that central experience: one person concentrating on
one page, and working to understand what it means.
