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…

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More from @lisafdavis

Dec 27
One of the astonishing parts about this update is that Rossi admits to "colourising" b/w photos! Plaigerism aside, & whether the "colourising" really happened in this case or not, the idea of taking a b/w photo and quietly colorizing it is incredibly misleading! ImageImage
Tacitly editing images of fragments seems to be her MO: adding borders where there are none, cropping for consistency of size, inserting a mis=matched binding, adding fake flyleaves, colorizing b/w images. How can readers trust such a deceptive author?
I've never encountered anything quite like it in the digital realm. It is analogous to the tacit "restoration" work 19th-century forgers practised on illuminated mss, like the one I describe here (a forgery Peter identified!): manuscriptroadtrip.wordpress.com/2019/08/28/man…
Read 5 tweets
Dec 25
Look, people, it's not that hard. The rules of #Fragmentology are simple and finite. 1) If you are going to piece a dismembered manuscript back together online, do it with intellectual honesty.
2) If there's are missing leaves, show us where it is by indicating lacunae, as in this screenshot of my own work on the Beauvais Missal:
3) If there's no binding, don't photoshop the reconstruction into one. Digital reconstructions aren't about "fixing" physical imperfections by adding elements to make it look pretty.
Read 5 tweets
Aug 18
Spending the afternoon @BeineckeLibrary photographing Wilfrid #Voynich 's scrapbook of press clippings heralding the "news" of the manuscript's decoding and attribution to Roger Bacon, and found this marvelous bit of editorial snark from the Providence Tribune, April 22, 1921:
Am now looking for an excuse to use the expression "I don't give two whoops in a rain barrel!"
Here's another good one, from the New York Evening Post, May 3, 1921. Apparently it is bad form to snort with laughter in the Beinecke Library reading room.
Read 6 tweets
Aug 9
OK, people, you worked hard to get me to 10K followers, so here is your reward! An epic 62-Tweet thread about the #Voynich manuscript coming your way, starting NOW!
1. First things first. The #Voynich manuscript (VMS from now on) is a real object. Please always keep that in mind! It is a medieval manuscript (more on that in a minute) that belongs to the @BeineckeLibrary at Yale University, where it has been MS 408 since it was given in 1969.
2. I have seen it on multiple occasions and can confirm this. It is not imaginary. It is not fake. It is not a gift from aliens. But what IS it?
Read 67 tweets
Jul 28
Remember a few weeks ago when I gave a lecture @imc_leeds about my reconstruction of the Beauvais Missal & announced that leaf no. 113 had landed in my inbox the day before? Now that I’m caught up on other things, I can work on placing it in the reconstruction. Here’s how…
Step 1: identify recto & verso. Generally a straightforward task…look for the binding holes (i.e. the gutter), which, in a manuscript that reads left -> right will be on the left of the recto side. In this case, the leaf is heavily trimmed on all sides, so no binding holes!
No binding holes, no problem. Just look at the text, and figure out which side continues the text from the other. In this case, though, the leaf is framed and only one side is visible! How to tell recto from verso, then? Is it impossible? Certainly not!
Read 13 tweets
Jun 10
Ever heard of Cistercian numerals? I hadn’t either until yesterday, and after hours of diving down lots of rabbit holes, I’m here to tell you all about this fascinating chapter in the story of medieval numeration!
We all know about the two dominant numeral systems in the European Middle Ages: Roman numerals and Arabic numerals. Roman numerals are good for labeling and expressing a single number like a date, but Arabic numerals won the fight for numerical supremacy...
...because of their superior functionality for arithmetic (try doing a complex calculation using Roman numerals) and inclusion of the all-important 0.
Read 16 tweets

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