To Strive, To Seek, To Find

First Page of Beowulf

Often in literature courses, professors are trying to do the impossible: they’re teaching  literary analysis, specialized terminology, mechanics of formal structures, significant authors and works, a sense of genre, the evolving histories of those genres, academic writing conventions, and many other goals.

So it’s not surprising that the more technical side of the production and consumption of books as physical objects is sometimes overlooked. These factors are especially important when the book in question has qualities which are not easily reproduced in print. Think of a hand-produced medieval manuscript, for instance, lavishly illuminated and written on vellum. For scholars studying these incredible works of art, nothing can substitute for an in-person examination of the artifact.

Recent improvements to computer imaging and memory have, happily,  made fascimiles of these works available as never before.

As Professor Kevin Kiernan’s work with the Beowulf manuscript demonstrates, sometimes the data from a computer image can be manipulated and optimized to provide information about a text previously invisible to the naked eye. (See The Electronic Beowulf for more information.)

The technical examination of books is a fascinating subject. Greg Gephart, one of our own English Majors, once had the opportunity to work with fragments of a Shakespeare manuscript. He reports on his experience:

 My descriptions are deliberately vague because of non-disclosure agreements that must be honored.The Electronic Beowulf Project at the University of Kentucky is a great illustration of how modern technology can be used to analyze old manuscripts.  Dr. Kiernan’s work was able to salvage a lot of material thought to be lost.  

There is a lot of work being done to authenticate works of art and verify the age of old manuscripts.  Dr. Kiernan’s work reminded me of a job I worked on about a year ago.  

In my previous life I was a staff scientist in an analytical lab. A Shakespeare library wanted us to verify some work done previously that purported to establish the age of a Shakespeare document using a technique called Auger Electron Spectroscopy or AES. The claim was that using this technique to measure the width of specific ink lines on the paper could be used to determine the age of the document.  The hypothesis was, with age the ink will tend to spread out.  

Well, it doesn’t take much imagination to think up many different scenarios which can affect how much the ink may wick out on the paper.  We tried very hard to duplicate the earlier AES results but couldn’t.  But it was still a very interesting project.

 

Yes, he has magic bard dust on his fingers now….

Colorado Pete with a knitting machine, at the Woodmen Sanatorium near Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1923.

Professor Lawrence Moe has published a book making available for the first time the life and work of a virtually unknown figure from Midwestern literary history. “Colorado Pete” is the pen name of a Minnesotan named Arthur Owen Peterson (1896-1932). He was raised in Bagley and attended Carleton College before joining the US Army to serve in France during World War I. And for that he paid a price, as Dr. Moe has written:

“He wasn’t wounded by enemy fire, but he was wounded. Amoebic dysentery was the most clear and immediate problem, but there was something else, perhaps in his present and certainly in his future. From this time forward Arthur’s life would be characterized by a cycle, a grim and terrible cycle: a period of health and energy, followed by a very different period of sickness and suffering. And that second period gradually took over.” read more »