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Speculative Codicology

In March 2025, I presented a talk for the “Medievalia at the Lilly Library” annual event called “VCEditor as a Tool for Speculative Codicology.” I started the talk with a description of the VisColl Project, which is concerned with the practice and theory of modeling and visualizing the physical construction (aka collation) of codex manuscripts. Next, I talked about VCEditor, which is the current version of the software we use to build and visualize models (using the VisColl Data Model). 

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Addendum: Full citations for Specific Knowledge post

This post serves as an addendum to Specific Knowledge: Cassandra Daucus on Manuscripts, published by From Beyond Press.

If you’re here because you read the Specific Knowledge post and you’d like to know more about the manuscripts in the figures, welcome! Below you’ll find full citations, links to the catalog records and digital facsimiles, and videos where they exist.

All the books featured in the post are from the collections of the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries.

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Collection Sharing as a form of Digital Collections Security

This blog post was originally conceived as a contribution to Now You See It Now You Don’t: Sustainable Access in a Digital Age, an event organized by the Bodleian Library and held on Zoom on February 7, 2024. Although my name appears in the list of contributors, I caught the flu that week and wasn’t able to attend. But I was prepared, and even though I’ve no doubt other people there said similar things, I wanted to post this for FOMO if for no other reason. This post consists of screenshots of my slides, and accompanying notes that explain my points further.

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Modelling the Historical Manuscript: Theory and Practice 

Presented in the session Materiality of Manuscripts III: The Codex at the International Medieval Congress, Leeds, UK July 5, 2022 

Good morning, good afternoon. Thank you to Katarzyna and Kıvılcım for organizing these sessions on Materiality of Manuscripts for IMC 2022. I’m Dot Porter and I’m going to talk about modeling the historical manuscript theory and practice.

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(More) Books of Hours as Transformative Works

Originally presented as the keynote lecture for Bindings Across Physical Formats and Digital Spaces, organized by the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture, University of Wisconsin Madison, Madison, WI, June 2021. This is an expansion of the work described in my blog post Books of Hours as Transformative Works posted in November 2019.

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