New MSc in Digital Scholarship

This year, Oxford offered a brand new degree, and I had the joy of directing it. Twelve students from 12 different academic disciplines, from Medieval Studies and Musicology to History and Linguistics, enrolled in the new MSc in Digital Scholarship, a programme designed to train Humanities students in how to apply digital tools and methods to their research.  
 
The programme is a collaboration between the Bodleian Libraries and Oxford’s Humanities Division, and draws on the library’s world-leading staff and resources. The philosophy is that each student will keep a foot in their traditional discipline (many will go on to doctoral studies in their respective fields), so in Hilary term they take a special subject Paper from their own specialist discipline. Practical application of digital skills is central to the degree and in Trinity term each student is hosted by one of over 60 of Oxford’s leading digital projects, joining an active team of researchers.

Whatever your research question, it seems that digital tools and methods can often help create new knowledge and answer questions which a single scholar could not achieve manually. All students on the degree are offered hands-on tech training and coding in programming languages Python and R. Some students want to learn how to digitize museum objects and use photogrammetry to create images with visual detail beyond what the human eye alone could see. The work of Campion’s own Carmen Denia, on Father D’Arcy’s vestment collection, is a wonderful example of this.

Other students are digitizing medieval manuscripts from the Bodleian so that scholars in other parts of the world could not only see them but also annotate them, and link and compare them with other collections. Others are exploring the new language of young people on social media and the building of large corpora (collections of text) of millions of words which could reveal patterns in attitudes and mindsets across time. Some students are using AI and machine learning to interrogate the intellectual influence of scientists on philosophers; others are using network analysis and graph theory to highlight connectors and hubs within historical groups of people; others are using GIS to map people and places across time.
 
It has been a delight to see students who had no tech knowledge whatsoever before arriving at Oxford gradually gain skills and confidence in trusting their imagination and creativity in their research. They now realise that no research question is beyond limits. Wherever our curiosity and imagination leads us, if we have the skills, we can follow.

This term, I have been looking through archives related to the Campion Hall vestment collection. One item that appears in almost every catalogue or list since the 1930s is the precious Basset vestment, which Master Martin D’Arcy picked up in a shop on Bond Street in London. In a delightful piece of prose, he noted that an expert antique dealer visiting the Hall had praised him for the purchase, but the fathers were unsure about the identity of the embroidered figures until “a Miss Buckler told us that they were obvious to anyone who knew the legend of St. John the Evangelist clothed as a pilgrim giving St. Edward the Confessor a ring” (Cat. D).

Catalogues A to E, which were most likely written by masters or members of the Hall from the 1930s to the 1960s, provided short variations on the theme: “14th C. purple one side, & 15th C. other side – chasuble.” (Cat. A) Notably, a couple of catalogues foregrounded the narrative, e.g., Catalogues E and G included the same excerpt about the encounter between St. John and St. Edward from Saints and their Symbols (E. A. Greene, 1881).

More recent listings have taken a technical turn. Professional assessments in 1986 and 2009 highlighted the potential value of several vestments, including this chasuble, if insured or sold. A catalogue by Mr. Frank Rhodes in 2015 offered a whole paragraph on the materials and iconography of the Basset vestment then concluded that its orphreys date to the late 15th century while the velvet combined two pieces from the 15th and 18th century.

My personal favourite of the catalogue entries, though, is from Cat. F (c. 1983), which found the Basset vestment to be “quite all right, but it is not much of a vestment” and recommended that “[p]arts of it should be shown in small frames”, possibly insinuating that the chasuble could be cut up and its best sections displayed. Although I am glad that the vestment remains with us intact, it is very interesting to consider such a different approach to collection management from only a few decades ago!

In the weeks ahead, I shall continue annotating our archive handlist and cataloguing the vestments themselves. I am incredibly grateful for the gracious supervision of Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson, archival guidance from Alice Millea and Diarmaid MacCulloch, logistical help from Trudi and Karolina, and the countless moments that I have received such good research advice from Hall members. Together with 3D models of selected vestments — which we made with the help of friends from the Oxford Internet Institute and the Bodleian — all the gathered information will hopefully make it easier to discover, study, and enjoy the Hall’s remarkable vestment collection.