Digital Scholarship in the Field of Church History

Digital Scholarship in the Field of Church History Laura Morreale, Jennifer Paxton, Jonathan K. Henry, Michael Meeuwis, and Jennifer Paxton This second installment in our series of reviews of digital projects demonstrates once again how computer-based methods expand the ways in which historians of the Church pose questions, find answers, and disseminate their findings. Digital approaches to scholarship have swiftly become widespread in church history. They offer the possibility to investigate new questions and provide new insights into old questions that cannot be achieved through traditional scholarly methods alone. Digital projects accomplish a number of key goals. They make texts available and present an analytical framework for those same materials that can be used by both the creators of the project and other scholars to make historical claims. They document and thereby preserve the raw materials of humanistic inquiry, but also contextualize that data. Finally, they gather and arrange well-known materials to facilitate student inquiry and encourage students to create their own particular narratives or interpretations. Each of the three projects under review expands the accessibility of scholarship and provides the scope for further exploration by both students and experienced scholars. The projects illustrate the range of goals and methodologies available in this growing field. One of the most important types of digital project consists of sites that provide access to texts that can be searched and subjected to various kinds of analysis. The first site under review, Chrysostomus Latinus in Iohannem Online (CLIO), which provides access to the extensive corpus by John Chrysostom on the Gospel of John, is an excellent example of a project that makes key texts available and provides the means for other scholars to ask their own questions. The site is doubly valuable, because the analytical tool developed for this site by Joel Kalvesmaki, the Text Alignment Network (TAN), could now be used by scholars seeking to make other corpora of texts available to scholars. One of the most important advantages of digital projects is the fact that they can be improved based on feedback from reviewers. The reviewer of CLIO, Jonathan K. Henry, praises the considerable strengths of the site and also makes some constructive suggestions End Page 369 for improving its accessibility. Another example of such a textual repository is Missionary Linguistics in Colonial Africa / Corpus de Travaux Linguistiques des Missionnaires: Contextualizing French missionary analyses of African languages, c. 1850–1920, which gathers the text of twenty-four books written to aid the efforts of French missionaries in Africa who worked in a wide variety of indigenous languages. The reviewer, Michael Meeuwis, praises the creators of the site for paying attention to the context for the creation of these books and again offers suggestions for building out the site further. Finally, digital projects offer an enormous pedagogical opportunity both in making material more easily available to students in a variety of formats, but also in pointing the way toward projects that students can undertake on their own. The final site under review, The Pilgrim's Guide, allows students to explore the major pilgrimage routes of medieval Europe in a clear, engaging, and historically accurate fashion. It will undoubtedly make its way onto many syllabi, and we hope it will inspire many imitators! ________ Chris Nighman, Joel Kalvesmaki, et al. Chrysostomus Latinus in Iohannem Online (CLIO). Wilfrid Laurier University, 2016. https: //clioproject. net. For historians, new digital humanities initiatives that produce original document scans and digitized editions of texts will always be welcome news. The CLIO Project (Chrysostomus Latinus in Iohannem Online) provides open access scans of John Chrysostom's eighty-eight homilies on the Gospel of John (CPG 4425) in all four known Latin translations. But CLIO goes beyond merely hosting scans by contributing a born-digital publication of manuscript-historical discoveries and an open access software tool for comparing texts. CLIO is the first and only place to access Burgundio of Pisa's Explanatio in sanctum Iohannem (1173), which is itself the earliest known Latin translation of Chrysostom's homilies on John. The text is native to the website. Dr. Chris L. Nighman, the general editor and director of the CLIO Project, identified Burgundio's unpublished translation while working on. . .