Breakfast Lecture

Digital humanities tools are often niche, project-specific, hard to use, and burdened with a steep learning curve. In this talk I present two tools that try to change this while adhering to common standards.
The first is MANU (manu.is), a collaborative annotation platform combining IIIF images with thematic annotation layers and optional AI-assisted transcription. It offers real-time collaboration, granular access control, and export as W3C Web Annotation JSON, so users are never locked into its environment.
The second is Vocabula.lat, a federated Latin lexicon querying Whitaker's Words, Cappelli Online, and the Czech Dictionary of Medieval Latin from a single search box, with lemmatisation and morphological analysis presented in a form any user can read.
Demonstrated together, the two sketch a continuous workflow from digitised page to annotated, lexically resolved text. The talk closes with reflections on open standards, data portability, and the long-term sustainability of small scholarly software.

Martin is a medieval philologist by training and a digital humanist by practice. He holds a PhD in Medieval and Neo-Latin Studies from Charles University in Prague, where his dissertation traced the contaminated textual tradition of medieval dreambooks in Bohemian manuscripts. His research splits between traditional philology and digital methods: he remains interested in oneiromancy and textual transmission, but also in the tools scholars use to study them and in user experience and design more broadly. He teaches UX and Digital Humanities in Prague and is a collaborator of the Digital Lab at the Institute for Medieval Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
 

The literary canon is more than a set of texts: it is a national literary tradition, a condensation of established literary historical narratives, a model for what valuable literature looks like. Because it is such an integral part of how we relate literary history, the canon—and its counterpart, the “Great Unread”—was central to computational literary studies (CLS), a field that, from the start, wanted to tell that history more completely.
This talk will give an overview of recent developments in the interaction between canon studies and CLS and show how similarities between texts can be modelled so that their cultural centrality—their canonicity—can be compared to their structural centrality. Using network models as the analytical framework makes this comparison possible across languages and opens up avenues for temporal analyses that give us more insight into how both the canon and the “Great Unread” are inscribed into literary history. In doing so, it asks what we really mean when we call a text canonical, and whether canonicity, influence, and cultural significance leave recognizable patterns in the text.

Judith Brottrager is a postdoctoral researcher at the Technical University of Darmstadt, working at the intersection of computational humanities and literary studies. Her research focuses on canonisation processes, quantitative cultural history, and comparative computational approaches to literature, with work spanning the formation of national canons, cultural memory, multilingual literary networks, and literary histories.

Historical texts often survive in multiple manuscript and printed witnesses, each preserving evidence of historical, linguistic, philological, and material variation introduced through transmission across time and space. Yet this variation remains difficult to study systematically because annotations are typically produced within discipline-specific environments using incompatible data models. In April 2026, the Research Foundation–Flanders (FWO) awarded funding for the development of M-PATCH, a modular and reusable research infrastructure designed to support the multidisciplinary study of historical texts across their material transmission. Currently under development, M-PATCH is designed to combine IIIF manifests, semi-automatic transcriptions, and richly interlinked annotations into a Linked Data environment. This lecture presents the conceptual foundations of the project, discusses the epistemological and practical challenges involved in designing a reusable multidisciplinary infrastructure for fluid historical texts, and outlines the initial steps in its development.

Steven Vanderputten (https://research.flw.ugent.be/nl/steven.vanderputten) is senior full professor of medieval history at Ghent University and PI of the M-PATCH project.
Anne Breitbarth (https://research.flw.ugent.be/en/anne.breitbarth) is associate professor of historical linguistics at Ghent University and co-promotor of the M-PATCH project.