The “Sandbox” space makes available a number of resources that utilize and explore the data underlying "Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France. A Digital Critical Edition and English Translation of BnF Ms. Fr. 640" created by the Making and Knowing Project at Columbia University.
Columbia University, History Department, graduate-level “Lab Seminar”
This Lab Seminar course studies the materials, techniques, settings, and meanings of skilled craft and artistic practices in the early modern period (1350-1750), in order to reflect upon a series of issues, including craft knowledge and artisanal epistemology; the intersections between craft and science; and questions of historical methodology and evidence in the reconstruction of historical experience. The course was run as a “Laboratory Seminar,” with discussions of primary and secondary materials, as well as text- and object-based research and hands-on work in a laboratory. This course contributed to the collective production of the digital critical edition of a late sixteenth-century manuscript, BnF Ms. Fr. 640. Final essays in this course were workshopped and readied for publication as the Research Essays of Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France.
The course was offered from 2014-18, guided by a different theme each year to help focus research on related techniques described in the manuscript:
Columbia University, History Department, advanced undergraduate- / intro graduate-level “Lab Seminar”
This Laboratory Seminar is a re-working of the graduate-level GR8906: Craft and Science, tailored to advanced undergradute and graduate students. This course introduces students to the materials, techniques, contexts, and meanings of skilled craft and artistic practices in early modern Europe (1350-1750). The course will be run as a “Laboratory Seminar,” with discussions of primary and secondary materials, as well as hands-on work in the M&K laboratory. This course tests the use of Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France. A Digital Critical Edition and English Translation of BnF Ms. Fr. 640 in a higher education classroom to inform the development of the Making and Knowing Project’s Research and Teaching Companion. Students’ final projects (exploratory and experimental work in the form of digital/textual analysis of Ms. Fr. 640, reconstruction insight reports, videos for the Companion, or a combination) will be published as part of the Companion or the Sandbox.
Columbia University, History Department, graduate-level “Digital Seminar”
Using the English translation of Ms. Fr. 640 as the basic data set, students collaboratively created a minimal (i.e., limited, basic feature) digital edition by the end of the semester, effectively prototyping a design for the Project’s final digital critical edition. Additionally, the course introduced students both theoretically and practically to the concepts and tools relevant to the creation of a digital edition, such as image and text capture; metadata, tracking, and data management; data curation; transformations to, representations of, and interfaces of digital resources; and archiving, licensing, persistence, and re-usability. The seminar thus equipped participating students with identifiable, measurable, and repurposable digital skills while furthering the Project goals.
Columbia University, cross-listed in the Departments of English, History, and Computer Science, advanced undergraduate- / intro graduate-level “Digital Seminar”
Designed for graduate and advanced undergraduate students in the social sciences, humanities, and computer science, this Spring 2019 hybrid course was situated at the crossroads of historical exploration and computer sciences. Students were exposed to digital literacy tools and computational skills through the lens of the Making and Knowing Project. This course built off the Spring 2017: What is a Book? course described above. For the final project, students collaborated to investigate linguistic features of Ms. Fr. 640 using natural language processing and text mining techniques. These projects shed light on topics of interest within the manuscript and uncover connections within the textual data.