Medieval Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age (MMSDA) 23–27 April 2012

Please note that the course is now open to PhD students from any COST country (essentially Europe and Israel), and includes bursaries for travel and accommodation.

The Institute of English Studies (London) is pleased to announce the fourth year of 'Medieval Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age', an intensive course for PhD students jointly funded by COST and the AHRC, and run in collaboration with King's College London, the Warburg Institute, and the University of Cambridge.

The course is open to arts and humanities doctoral students registered at institutions in any of the thirty-six COST countries. It involves five days of intensive training on the analysis, description and editing of medieval manuscripts in the digital age to be held jointly in Cambridge and London. Participants will receive a solid theoretical foundation and hands-on experience in cataloguing and editing manuscripts for both print and digital formats.

The first half of the course involves morning classes and then visits to libraries in Cambridge and London in the afternoons. Participants will view original manuscripts and gain practical experience in applying the morning's themes to concrete examples. In the second half we will address the cataloguing and description of manuscripts in a digital format with particular emphasis on the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). These sessions will also combine theoretical principles and practical experience and include supervised work on computers.

The course is free of charge but is open only to doctoral students registered at institutions in COST countries. It is aimed at those writing dissertations which relate to medieval manuscripts, especially those on literature, art and history. Some bursaries will be available for travel and accommodation, courtesy of COST, to be assigned based on an even distribution of nationality and gender. Places on the course are limited to twenty. Applications close on 13 January 2012 but early registration is strongly recommended.

For further details see http://ies.sas.ac.uk/StudyAndResearchTraining/MMSDA/ or contact Dr Peter Stokes at mmsdasas.ac.uk.

Funding for this course is generously provided by the AHRC's Collaborative Training Scheme and by COST Action IS1005, 'Medieval Europe - Medieval Cultures and Technological Resources'.