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A decade of the Digisig Project: finding a (new) place for seals in the digital landscape
Friday, December 6 , 11:00 am – 12:00 pm CST
The DIGISIG project, begun in 2013, initially aimed to address a long-standing challenge for sigillographers. Hundreds of repositories in England hold medieval seals, but in 2013 there was no single resource that could tell a researcher where any particular seal was located. The first version of DIGISIG addressed this problem. But once the prototype system was in place, it proved to have further unanticipated capacities. DIGISIG enabled researchers not only to discover seals, but to analyze, compare, and combine information from multiple reference works. These capacities may transform sigillography by enabling scholars to consider long-standing problems in the history of sealing practices, based on a fuller understanding of the evidence. The development of systems such as DIGISIG underlines the complex interactions between search and discovery systems and the scope of historical knowledge. The emergence of better search systems tantalizes scholars with the prospect of better search results, but it can also give them new approaches to established research questions, which creates challenges for the designers of search systems. Should Digisig become a place where people go to search for particular seals and for answers to more complex research questions? The purpose of this talk is to introduce and evaluate the current state of the Digisig project and to reflect on the future of digital sigillography.
John McEwan is an assistant librarian in the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Kansas. He was previously assistant professor of digital humanities and director of the Walter J. Ong. S.J. Center for Digital Humanities at Saint Louis University. From 2009 to 2014, he was a researcher in the Department of History and Welsh History at the University of Aberystwyth (Wales, UK), where he worked on the Seals in Medieval Wales project.
Part of the Milner Library Digital Scholarship Speaker Series.
This event is sponsored by the Harold K. Sage Foundation, the Illinois State University Foundation Fund, and Research and Sponsored Programs.
