Creating and questioning research-oriented digital outputs to manuscript metadata. A case-based methodological investigation.

The transition of traditional manuscript studies into the digital framework impacts the methodological premises upon which manuscript descriptions are modeled, created, and questioned for the purpose of research. This paper intends to explore the issue, by presenting a case-based methodological investigation into how digital outputs to manuscript metadata respond to the scholarly expectations of research, and the other way round, how the requirements of research questions feed back into the creation and enrichment of metadata in an iterative loop. The case-study metadata corpus is kindly provided by the Polonsky Foundation Greek Manuscripts Project from the Universities of Cambridge and Heidelberg.