Milestones in manuscript scholarship

On July 11, FLIP (Florentine Library Intermapping Project) signed an agreement with the Biblioteca Riccardiana to cooperate on digitizing manuscripts through a groundbreaking pilot project. FLIP is the “brainchild” of manuscript scholars Claudia Rammelt and Justine Walden (Yale University), who in June 2010 attended the first edition of ISI’s Translating the Past workshop coordinated by Prof. Stefano U. Baldassarri (Academic Director, ISI Florence). Today the project is staffed by Yale graduate and postdoctoral students and professors who maintain close links with ISI. The FLIP-Riccardiana partnership will see the digitization of several important manuscripts that will in turn form the nucleus of a new online database. Building on the tools for digital manuscript analysis, developed collaboratively at Yale and Stanford, the FLIP website will offer a host of features that assist users in better understanding manuscript production, consumption, and distribution, drawing on manuscripts from repositories located miles apart. FLIP has also launched WaRP (Watermark Recognition Project), an initiative to date and contextualize manuscripts via automated watermark identification in order to better assist researchers and students.