Mastodawn

Carin Ruff Nov 18, 2022

Time for a belated introduction!

I'm a medievalist, teaching graduate Medieval Latin courses in the DC area and paleography virtually and IRL (e.g. for HMML and in workshops).

I'm currently working on an open-access Latin paleography textbook and also writing a novel about nuns and archaeologists. I have high hopes that procrastinating on one of those projects will result in finishing the other, or vice-versa.

Since 2010, most of my work in DC has been in historic preservation, with a focus on the architecture and development of DC's neighborhoods. A lot of my energy over in the other place was devoted to local DC matters—yelling about statehood, yelling at District agencies, following weather and traffic, etc. I expect I will remain there for those purposes as long as those functions continue.

#paleography #medievaldons #medieval #manuscripts #nuns #womenreligious #benedictines #archaeology #dchistory #dcstatehood #historicpreservation #preservation

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Marjorie Harrington Nov 18, 2022

@carinr tell me more about this OA paleography textbook? Very exciting!

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Carin Ruff Nov 18, 2022

@mlkharrington So, a decade ago I wrote the online Latin paleography curriculum for https://hmmlschool.org/ , pulling together what I thought were the best approaches (pedagogically) of all the paleographers I'd studied with but reshaping the content to make it largely accessible to interested users with no Latin, rather than just medieval studies grad students.

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Carin Ruff Nov 18, 2022

@mlkharrington We made great use of digitized MS images from HMML's collections and other collections, with permission, but we were pretty constrained in the end in terms of what the original vision for that curriculum had been.

With the enormous advances in what's been digitized and made available either public domain or with very liberal #creativecommons licensing, it's become possible to illustrate a lot of what I wanted to do then more richly, especially for the earlier periods.

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Carin Ruff Nov 18, 2022

@mlkharrington I realized I really wanted to have more control over the display of information than I would have in a website or app, and I wanted something that could be used in the modular way I originally envisioned, in a super-accessible and freely-reproduceable format—just PDFs, +/- epubs.

Still working on the logistics, but basically it'll be similar to the HMML course, but illustrated with a whole lot more freely shareable images.

Plus in the intervening decade I've rethought a lot of the orthodoxies I was taught by the late-20th-c. greats I studied with.

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Heide Estes