The Great Parchment Book
This blog records the project to conserve,
digitally reconstruct, transcribe and publish the manuscript known as the Great
Parchment Book. Led by London Metropolitan Archives, the project includes
contributions from Derry City Councils Heritage and Museum Service, University
College London (UCL EngD VEIV Centre in collaboration with UCLDH) and the
Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London.
The Project
The Great Parchment Book consists of 165 separate parchment pages,
all of which suffered damage in the fire in 1786. Due to its fragile state, it
has not been accessible to readers since this date. The uneven shrinkage and
distortion caused by fire has rendered much of the text illegible. The
surviving 165 folios (including fragments and unidentified folios) are stored
in 19 boxes, loosely tied into bundles drawing together as far as possible the
passages dealing with the particular lands of different livery companies and of
the Society. Much of the text is still visible (if distorted) and requires
flattening and digital imaging to improve legibility and to enable digital
access to the volume.
In the course of surveying the Irish Society’s collection with a
view to contributing loans to Derry’s upcoming exhibition to mark the 400th
anniversary of the building of the City walls in 2013, it was decided to
investigate the possibility of conserving the Great Parchment Book. It soon
became apparent that traditional conservation alone would not produce
sufficient results to make the manuscript accessible or suitable for
exhibition.
However, the importance of the item led us to explore other ways of
opening up access to the text. A partnership with the Department of Computer
Science and the Centre for Digital Humanities at University College London
(UCL) established a four year EngD in the Virtual Environments, Imaging and
Visualisation programme in September 2010 (funded by the Engineering and
Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and LMA) with the intention of
developing software that will enable the manipulation of digital images of the
book rather than the object itself. The aim is to make the distorted text
legible, and ideally to reconstitute the manuscript digitally. If successful,
such a methodology clearly has much wider potential application.
To make the digitisation process as successful as possible,
preliminary limited but crucial conservation treatments will be carried
out. Obscured areas of parchment, where the camera cannot reach the
text, will be opened out as far as possible. Also, as part of the
conservation project, the format and condition of the book will be investigated
and thoroughly documented. Advice has been given by Collections Care staff at
The National Archives and the British Library, and LMA is a member of the
Improved Damage Assessment of Parchment network (IDAP). LMA is grateful to the
National Manuscripts Conservation Trust for providing funding for the
conservation work.
The overall scheme is a large collaborative undertaking in which the
practical conservation of the Great Parchment Book is the essential first step.
Once the book has been treated, then the UCL research project can produce high
quality 3-D digital images from which a transcription and glossary can be
drawn. The project is being supported by Derry City Council, as well as
the Irish Society itself, and it is hoped that the book will play a significant
role in the 2013 events marking the 400th Anniversary in Derry. The digital
image and transcription will provide a lasting resource for historians researching
the Plantation of Ulster in local, national and international contexts. The
scheme thus represents a major partnership of international significance
between a number of institutions.
(Text available from the blog)