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1 About
Peter of Poitiers, a renowned scholar in Paris, originally designed the Compendium historiae as a tool to help his students learn the complexities of biblical history. He innovated a linear synopsis to visualise time, a graph designed so that synchronous and diachronic relationships of people and events can be read simultaneously. The sequence of generations from Adam to Christ forms a central axis, correlated with the lines of biblical families and other diagrams representing biblical events. The Compendium historiae clarifies the scientific and theological underpinnings of history, while providing a mnemonic tool to facilitate learning. Peter of Poitiers’ synopsis quickly spread throughout the Latin West. Over three hundred manuscript witnesses survive from the late twelfth to the early sixteenth centuries. Despite its prevalence, the Compendium historiae has neither been edited nor studied with regard to its graphics — a “metastructure” for the order of history.
The aims are
- a comprehensive overview of the tradition of the Compendium historiae,
- an analysis of the graphic metastructure as well as the texts, diagrams and images embedded in it (recording variants),
- a critical scholarly edition,
- an investigation of socio-cultural context.
The project will result in
- a codicological database,
- a navigable visualisation of the graphic metastructure,
- a critical edition of the text,
- publications and lectures regarding individual case studies of manuscript witnesses, socio-cultural context, and other aspects of the tradition.
Digital and freely accessible, the digital edition breaks new methodological ground with graphic and textual elements displayed in a navigable graph. In making accessible one of the most visually innovative and influential works of the Middle Ages, the project sheds new light on the history of the visualisation of knowledge.
- data creation
- presentation (which manuscripts to show)
There's a debate going on concerning the way we want to present our NavGraph. Possibilities are: 1) having the NavGraph simulating a roll, which is scrollbar and starts from the top; 2) showing the NavGraph as a whole, with the option of zooming in to see the details of the different nodes/diagrams/texts. This choice is connected with a more general reflection on the affordances and potentials of the digital medium: if we are to remedialise our sources, what are the most effective solutions we can opt for?