Manuscripts Hackathon 2020

Stacey Kaliabakos ‘23, Ryan Wynn ‘23. (Faculty advisor: Neel Smith)

What is a “manuscript hackathon”?

The MID Hackathon is a now annual day-long event where several high schools and middle school send groups of students and teachers to the College to learn how to transcript Latin manuscripts and create digital editions. The first Hackathon took place in 2018 and was organized by Hannah Nguyen ‘19, with the support of the J.D. Power Center. This year’s Hackathon was organized by Thomas Posillico ‘20. In 2019 and 2020, several alumni returned to help mentor the teams of school students. This is a unique opportunity for us to bring HCMID alumni and current students together.

In 2019 and again in 2020, we worked on a Bern Burgerbiliothek 88, a manuscript of Germanicus’ Aratea. The Aratea is a translation of the Phaenomena by the Greek poet Aratus describing the constellations. The Bern manuscript contains illustrations of the constellations as well.

Structure and organization of the hackathon

Students are split up into different teams (by school) and are each assigned a section of the manuscript. Two HCMID Holy Cross students or alumni are matched with each team to assist with any challenges or issues the high schoolers and their teachers may face. It is mostly the work of the younger students to work on the manuscript; however, the supervisors are there and willing to guide them through the language of the manuscript and to help download all the necessary software for the process.

Process of Hackathon

MID’s faculty advisor, Professor Neel Smith, gave a brief introduction to students explaining how to read the manuscript and to record its contents, including markup identifying names of people, corrections, abbreviations, etc. HCMID students and alumni helped everyone install the software we use (Atom for editing, a bash shell, and Docker for running customized validation software)

The first step in editing process is to index passages of texts to images. This requires understanding how to cite both the text and part of an image using canonical citation with URN notation, and compiling the results in a table.

Students were then guided in reading and transcribing the manuscript using XML following the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative. Students took turns working in the editor to gain familiarity with the terminal along with the language and style of the manuscript.

After indexing and editing a passage of text, teams then learned how to run an automated validation test that ensure the consistency of our references. The same test creates visualizations we use to compare the edited text with the corresponding section of the image. We refer to this computer-assisted evaluation as verification.

We collected the work of each team at the end of the day, and added it the git repository where we had previously committed work from the 2019 hackathon.

Struggles and problem solving

Some groups ran into issues, including getting used to the author’s hand in such a short amount of time, familiarizing themselves with the software, and learning the exceptions and rare phenomena in terms of terminology. For example, in many Latin manuscripts, authors tend to abbreviate the diphthong “ae” by writing a small hooked ligature under the “e” in order to minimize the amount of space used on each line.

For example, on folio 1 verso, the word quae appears like this:

quae

Students who were not familiar with reading Latin manuscripts could not have possibly been aware of this; therefore, it was the responsibility of the HCMID students and alumni to inform them of this abbreviation so that they could be aware of it in the future.

We faced an unexpected obstacle when the WiFi cut out and forced the HCMID supervising students to take out their own laptops to try to solve the problem. We learned how to adapt our initial plan to accommodate this problem, allowing the visiting students to use computers with software already downloaded until the WiFi was fixed. Despite this setback, we were ultimately successful in spite of it, transcribing a significant portion of the manuscript while also having fun.

Feeling Accomplished

Hackathon is a unique experience. It is rare for such young students to have the opportunity to read and understand an authentic ancient manuscript– an opportunity most students will not get until coming to college. Additionally, they were able to utilize the same skills that professionals use consistently in their own fields. The students left feeling accomplished in their work and their progress, excited to have worked on this project and to eventually see their work published.