Thursday Lecture: Professor Kathryn Rudy

Dirty Books 2.0: Quantifying Patterns of Use in Digitized Medieval Manuscripts Using a Pixel Meter

Professor Kathryn Rudy (University of St Andrews)

Books of Hours contain any number of devotional texts and images. When readers dipped into them, they left fingerprints in the margins, which became darker with increased use. These darkened areas, visible with the naked eye, are also captured in digital reproductions.  By measuring the darkness of these fingerprinted areas, we can detect which sections of the manuscript were most read and handled, and which were relatively ignored. Whereas an earlier study used a densitometer to measure the darkness of the fingerprints, the current proof-of-concept utilizes the Mac’s built-in a digital color meter to take measurements on fully digitized manuscripts.