'What goes on?' Researching early medieval glossed corpora using a combined Digital Humanities and Celtic Studies approach

The 90-minute thematic session aims to investigate the intersections between early medieval vernacular Celtic and Latin glossing traditions. Our methodology integrates philological and (historical) linguistic approaches with those of the digital humanities, enabling us to conduct research on language contact and knowledge transfer during the early medieval period.

Our thematic session will be structured as follows:

1. Transcriptions utilising handwritten text recognition (eScriptorium)

2. Digital editions applying the standards of the TEI-consortium

3. Case studies of glosses in parallel transmission

In the first part, we will explore the potentialities (and challenges) associated with applying automatic segmentation and handwritten text recognition on early medieval manuscripts through first-hand examples from our ongoing research on creating a substantial corpus of glossed manuscripts. The second part of the session will concentrate on digitally editing these manuscripts based on the established transcriptions and will present our XML/TEI-data model. In the final part, we will discuss examples of glosses in parallel transmission from our corpus of early medieval glossed manuscripts on Priscian’s grammatical opus magnum Ars grammatica and the Venerable Bede’s computistical works De Natura Rerum, De Temporibus and De Temporum Ratione.