Thread by @lisafdavis

I know we're all obsessed with the stream of discoveries about #receptiogate, the revolving-door website updates, & Rossi's doubling-down claims of innocence that are easily disproven, but I also want to talk about her #fragmentoogy work, which is troubling in several respects...

As many of you know, I have been working closely with @FragmentariumMS and many other scholars for decades to develop best-practices for cataloguing, data-modeling, and digital reconstructions of dismembered manuscripts, i.e. #fragmentology

To her credit, Rossi is doing that too, working to recontruct recently-dismembered Books of Hours, transcribing them to allow for deep analysis of the recovered liturgy. This is a very worthy goal, & the transcriptions, while not always correct, are useful. So that’s great! But…

Two of the touchstones of best-practices for digital fragmentology is transparency and intellectual honesty. We (fragmentologists, that is) don’t digitally repair fragments by colorizing, cropping, or layering, or photoshopping fake bindings and flyleaves.

Rossi does all of those things, without telling her readers that that’s what going on. The reconstructions are very pretty, but they are not honest. Readers are shown completeness where none exists.

By contrast, I would point you to this valuable @digitalmedieval case study by @ISASaxonists, in which she experiments with digital repairs to the Exeter Book. The honest and transparent way to do such manips is to show exactly where the manipulations are: journal.digitalmedievalist.org/article/id/700…

In addition, in order to give readers the full picture of the impact of biblioclasm, it is extremely important to provide leaf-level metadata for each fragment, such as dimensions, incipit/explicit, liturgical content, and, most importantly, its location.

None of this information can be found in Rossi’s reconstructions, so it is not possible to cite individual leaves, even though each leaf is in fact a separate entity.

By photoshopping the leaves into an unrelated binding and not indicating lacunae between extant leaves, Rossi gives the appearance of completeness where none exists.

Here, for example, are two facing pages (87v and 91r) that are not in fact consecutive, and you can see the unrelated binding peeking out from the edges.

btw, I got that image from @mssprovenance OG post, which, it turns out, is citable!

Kidd, Peter. "Nobody Cares about Your Blog!", Medieval Manuscripts Provenance, 25 December 2022,mssprovenance.blogspot.com/2022/12/nobody…

By contrast, I offer this screenshot of my own work on the Beauvais Missal, which includes leaf-level metadata and lacunae and the unretouched fragments in all their messy, difficult, inconsistent, wonderful glory. fragmentarium.ms/overview/F-4ihz

These little survivors have stories to tell, and we shouldn't erase those stories through photoshop and intellectual dishonesty.

#Fragmentology best-practices have been developed by fragmentologists over the course of decades of meetings, symposia, publications, and collaboration. These standards have been developed with care are in keeping with modern librarianship and data modeling.

By ignoring the work done by the rest of us, Rossi has created misleading and dishonest reconstructions. Plagierism, stock photos, & website chaos aside, the lack of adherence to standards is really unfortunate, because the reparative work is so important and could be so useful.

I don’t know where this story will end, but I hope at the very least it has made clear that standards exist for a reason, and ignoring them can only lead to problems down the road.

For a brief survey of the history of #fragmentology, see my recent #OA piece in Florilegium: utpjournals.press/doi/full/10.31…

p.s. if you want to learn more, I’m teaching #fragmentology @rarebookschool online next fall and will be incorporating this episode into my syllabus! rarebookschool.org/courses/manusc…