Scéla

Celtic Studies Resources from a Digital Medievalist

Welcome To Scéla

Digital Medievalist: Scéla consists of "Opinionated musing on things digital and medieval, particularly those that are Celtic, involve digital manuscripts, digital text, or otherwise strike my fancy." I'm especially interested applying digital technology and humanities computing to medieval scholarship; hence the "Digital Medievalist" domain and title. Scéla is the plural of Old Irish scél, or "tale," usually translated as "news, tidings." It's not uncommon for a character in Irish medieval texts to ask another for "Scéla." That's what this blog is for, tidings.

The Panjab Digital Library

Posted By Lisa Spangenberg on May 4, 2010

Via Peter Scott’s Library Blog, I learned about the Panjab Digital Library, an open, free, public digitization project. You can see an online exhibit of some of their very high quality manuscript digitization. The PDL digitizes books and photographs as well as manuscripts, but you can see the manuscripts that are currently available here.The Panjab Digital Library’s mission’s statement is:

to locate, digitize, preserve, collect and make accessible the accumulated wisdom of the Panjab region, without distinction as to script, language, religion, nationality, or other physical condition.

Category: Art, Digital Scholarship, Manuscripts | No Comments »
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Smart Essay about Tolkien’s Monster and the Critics

Posted By Lisa Spangenberg on May 2, 2010

Michael Drout, he of the almost completed second edition of Beowulf and the Critics, has a short piece on a LOTR forum on “”Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”: The Brilliant Essay that Broke Beowulf Studies.” The essay is, not surprisingly, smart, and well-worth reading. It’s a good background and intro to Tolkien’s essay, and I suspect those who haven’t read Tolkien’s essay, will read it. I like very much that Drout nods at some more recent Beowulf scholarship in providing a better context for the reactions and reception of Tolkien’s essay. The comments, here are worth reading as well, as Drout notes.

It makes me very happy to see this sort of outreach and deliberate cross-pollination; we need more.

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Some Wisdom about Writing from Lynn Hunt

Posted By Lisa Spangenberg on March 28, 2010

You cannot accumulate pages if you constantly second guess yourself. You have to second guess yourself just enough to make constant revision productive and not debilitating. You have to believe that clarity is going to come, not all at once, and certainly not before you write, but eventually, if you work at it hard enough, it will come. Thought does emerge from writing. Something ineffable happens when you write down a thought. You think something you did not know you could or would think and it leads you to another thought almost unbidden.

So says Professor Lynn of Hunt of UCLA’s History department. The entire article “How Writing Leads to Thinking (And not the other way around)” from the Art of History column in the February 2010 issue of Perspectives on History is available online here. Thanks to Jean Smith of the History Compass Exchanges blog for calling Hunt’s article to my attention.

The idea of writing as discovery is not new to composition teachers, or rhetoricians, but I do very much wish that more senior scholars would do as Professor Hunt has, and talk about their writing process. Pass the link on to others; it might be the very thing some graduate student needs.

Category: Outreach | No Comments »
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