III: Small: Medieval Unicorn: Toward Enhanced Understanding of Virtual Manuscripts on the Grid in the Twenty-First Century

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Computation has revolutionized the study of historic documents and is growing rapidly in terms of use and importance to interdisciplinary technology/domain groups and individual scholars and researchers. An interdiscipinary team at the University of Illinois proposes to research and develop cyber tools for exploratory visual studies and quantitative analyses of large volumes of midieval manuscipts. The project will focus on visual imagery embedded in thes manuscripts and where the analysis tools will require large amounts of computational resources and scalable algorithms. The test collection will be digitized copies of Froissart's Chronicles, a set of midieval manuscripts available for reserch and teaching over the Worldwide Universities Network grid and accessible through Virtual Vellum ( developed at the University of Sheffield, UK, and funded by the UKs Arts and Humanities and Engineering and Physical Sciences experimental e-Science program.) The broader scientific impacts resulting from the proposed activities are expected to be in new methodologies, scalable algorithms. The work will also provide new exploratory frameworks that will support questions related to studying broad, difficult and complex topics such as the composition and structure (codicology) of manuscripts as cultural artifacts of the book trade in later medieval Paris and identifying the characteristic styles and iconographic signatures of particular artists. The research will contribute to a body of recent scholarship that seek to define how books were made, how they circulated, and what their cultural value was in the late medieval period.