Please forward to any interested parties:

Ph.D. STUDENTSHIP AVAILABLE

TOPIC: Medieval Manuscripts and the Grid: datasets, data mining and 
solutions for online delivery.

A funded Ph.D. studentship is available in this project based at the 
Department of French at the University of Sheffield. The project will be 
co-supervised by Prof. Peter Ainsworth of Sheffield University and Dr. 
Daniel Kudenko of the computer science department at the University of 
York.

The position is restricted to applicants from EU countries. Knowledge of 
French will be a plus, as will be computer science background. For more 
information, please contact Prof. Peter Ainsworth 
(p.f.ainsworth@sheffield.ac.uk) or Dr. Daniel Kudenko 
(kudenko@cs.york.ac.uk).

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

The cross-disciplinary project will focus on the research potential of 
digital images captured from extremely valuable but fragile medieval 
manuscript books held, in controlled conditions, in a handful of 
research libraries. It proposes to view them from the complementary 
perspectives of the medievalist (and his/her international research 
collaborators), the library curator and conservator, and the designer of 
grid technology interfaces, searchable datasets and online viewing 
solutions. Competence in French would be desirable but not essential.

The core dataset is a select group of complete, late medieval French 
illuminated manuscripts on vellum held at libraries in the UK, Europe 
and the US. They were copied and illuminated in Paris circa 1410-1414 by 
two alternating teams of scribes and artists, whose labours appear to 
have been coordinated by a stationer recently identified as Pierre de 
Liffol.

Stored on the WRC Grid server as 144MB .TIF files, the images were 
captured between 2002 and 2004 in partnership with the relevant 
curators. For conservation reasons the manuscripts themselves are 
normally visible to no more than a handful of scholars in any given 
year, and a major thrust of the programme is to identify fresh modes 
whereby they could be made available to researchers and as an enriching 
and stimulating experience for the wider public.

The project will explore ways of mining this data via the grid, in 
collaboration with computing and art history colleagues belonging both 
to WRC and WUN (Urbana-Champaign, in partnership with curators at the 
Getty Institute, Los Angeles, and UCSD). The project also has links with 
JISC- and AHRC-funded initiatives at Liverpool, with the Programme 
Director's Leverhulme Trust programme (manuscripts as digital exhibition 
objects), and with the EPSRC White Rose research network of excellence 
in Affective Communication (exhibition and product design). The 
technical expertise of Sheffield's Humanities Research Institute will be 
available, whilst Sheffield's Concordat with the British Library will 
facilitate access to their manuscript collections.

White Rose Consortium / WUN Network Reading the Medieval Book

This network studies the medieval book in its various guises and from a 
variety of critical, theoretical and technological perspectives. 
Sheffield has expertise in Old and Middle French manuscript studies, 
palaeography, codicology, electronic approaches to manuscript study, 
Early English and Anglo-Latin; also in Medieval History and Computing 
for the Humanities. Leeds has expertise in Early English and Middle 
French and hosts the International Medieval Congress and International 
Medieval Bibliography. York boasts its distinguished Centre for Medieval 
Studies at the King's Manor, and has expertise in Artificial 
Intelligence, Grid Networks and Architectures.



-- 
Dr. Daniel Kudenko                    Office: CS202B
Department of Computer Science        Email: kudenko@cs.york.ac.uk
University of York                    http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/~kudenko
Heslington, York YO10 5DD             Tel: +44-1904-434776
United Kingdom                        Fax: +44-1904-432767