The second Christmas of the project is now upon us and the team have gone their separate ways to spend the festive period with their loved ones. This seems a good opportunity to take stock of how the project is going, as we are now at the halfway point of the four years of the project. Time flies!
The manuscripts E1 and E2 are now fully transcribed and tagged and are being checked and sent off to the collation tool. We are using these manuscripts as base texts for the other manuscripts we have, and Q, T and Ss are now well underway. We are reaching the stage where we have some of the same textual divisions from more than one manuscript transcribed and tagged, meaning we can test the shiny new collation tool in the new year. This will be exciting (believe me).
We have held two colloquiua during 2014 – one in the previous academic year and one this academic year. Both were well-attended and were opportunities for the scientific council to meet and discuss the project, as well as for those involved in the wider team and those interested in all things Alfonsine, transcribing, crowdsourcing and medieval to share research. There were also some nice dinners involved! What’s a conference without a conference dinner?
Research affiliated to the project is coming along nicely in the form of three doctoral theses, not all by the same person, and lots of ideas float around the office from time to time about future research topics for papers and chapters when we are further along in the project. We have also started to look to the future of the project, once the original four years are up, and to ways that we could increase our research during the current time-period of the project. Watch this space.
Since last Christmas we have been joined by two new permanent team-members, Christian and Enrique. We were also joined for three months by friend of the project (i.e. ‘wannabe’), Alicia. In their own ways, each has all helped contribute to making Estoria Towers a fun and intellectually (and often not so intellectually) stimulating place to work and bring interesting insights into project matters. They also help us keep the ‘naughty drawer’ well stocked, which is where we keep the biscuits and cakes, although Enrique does have a worrying tendency to bring in fruit. Note to Enrique for 2015: fruit is not naughty enough for the naughty drawer and should not be allowed anywhere near the biscuits in case of contamination of the naughty food by ‘good’ germs.
The year has seen members of the team continuing globe-trotting, sharing the Estoria love at conferences, colloquia and symposia in many places. The closest was just downstairs from our office, but we should also include trips to London, Oxford, Liverpool, Galway, Toulouse, Groningen, Madrid, and there are bound to be places I have forgotten. Next year we have project representatives going on a trip to the big medieval bash in Kalamazoo.
2014 has been a big year for crowdsourcing, which we launched in April and which has steadily been gaining momentum, particularly this academic year. This has been helped by the online course we were involved in creating and rolling out, and we are pleased to say we now have quite a merry band of transcribers working behind the scenes. Their input is so helpful because not only does it allow us to make progress with our transcriptions, but their questions force into the light issues which sometimes require fresh eyes to spot and ask about, meaning our transcription norms are made sharper.
2015 is set to be another bumper year for the project. We hope to complete transcriptions of T, Ss and Q, to have a good grasp of the collation tool, to know pretty much how the final edition will look, and to continue attending conferences to share our research and learn from others. The first team trip will be down to Queen Mary in the Big Smoke in January, and our 2015 colloquium is hopefully going to take place in Seville in the autumn.
Before we all sign off for the year, can I take the opportunity on behalf of the whole EDIT team to thank our crowdsourcers, social media likers, those who read our blogs on purpose and those who simply stumble across the page by accident but stay long enough to be reading this now, and to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.