What's a Digital Medievalist?

Since 1992 my personal business card has described me as a Digital Medievalist.

It's the best way I know to describe my training, my occupation, and my interests.

I am trained as a medievalist. I started studying medieval English literature as an undergraduate, and continued to emphasize things medieval and philological during graduate school. My doctoral dissertation concerns medieval English and Celtic literatures (it's about medieval fairies as Other, really).

My life as a digital medievalist began in 1989, when I was hired to turn a scholarly reference book, Richard Lanham's Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, into a digital book. People are sometimes puzzled by the idea of a medievalist working so very closely with digital technology, but the combination of digital technology and medieval studies isn't as unusual as you might think. We medievalists are surprisingly technologically savvy; there's a lot you can do with a scanner, some manuscripts and a computer. Look at the amazing work started by the CURIA project and continued by CELT at the University of Cork. They are digitizing and electronically distributing texts in Irish, English and Old Norse, including the medieval Irish texts digitized and parsed by CURIA. Or the more recent Irish Scripts on Screen (ISOS) project, where you can see high quality digital images of the major Irish manuscripts. Don't miss the Labyrinth project, a good starting place for anyone interested in things medieval.

There are enough medievalists with an interest in things digital, scholarly and medieval, that several got together to create The Digital Medievalist Project. The Digital Medievalist Project "is an international web-based Community of Practice for medievalists working with digital media. It was established in 2003 to help scholars meet the increasingly sophisticated demands faced by designers of contemporary digital projects." You can find their Web site here, and their online scholarly journal here.

Though my academic training predisposes me to work in the realm of codices and manuscripts, my professional life has largely been in the silicon realm. I've earned most of my living as a multimedia producer and digital technology consultant in the humanities. I have worked on CD-ROMs and Expanded Books™ from the Voyager Company and Calliope Media, and advised on a number of scholarly multimedia and hypertext projects. I worked with faculty and graduate students in UCLA's Humanities division to promote teaching with technology, and attended to the care and feeding of over six hundred class web sites a quarter, and incorporated digital technology and multimedia into online and off-line pedagogy. If instructional technology interests you, you might want to check out my instructional technology blog. I have also consulted for firms instituting technology use policies, researched intellectual property rights, and worked on various aspects of Internet use and policy implementation. I'm the technical editor of several consumer books about AppleScript, iLife, and Macintosh technology in general. Currently I'm the production manager for a company that creates therapeutic cognitive software for people in the early stages of Alzheimer's.

In my free time, I frequent Absolute Write Water Cooler, a forum for writers of all sorts. I'm the Sys Admin for a new reader's discussion forum here. I'm also the Web master for The Greenman Review. This page of links will give you some ideas about my favorite ways to avoid work.