Using Data to find Interesting Manuscripts in the Bodleian’s Medieval Catalogue
On Friday 25th July 2025, the Bodleian Coffee Morning presentation was given by Matthew Holford and Sebastian Dows-Miller, who are working on a project on the Bodleian’s western medieval manuscript catalogue data.
The purpose of the project, funded by Digital Scholarship @ Oxford, is to open up the library’s TEI catalogues for use by students and non-digital scholars by extracting the data into spreadsheets, which allow cross-comparison of over 11,000 medieval manuscripts held in Oxford’s collections.
Being able to compare manuscripts by details like their size and layout means that we can identify particularly interesting outlier manuscripts, and that was the topic of this presentation. Those present were treated to an introduction to:
- MS. Lat. th. b. 4: the manuscript with the most lines per page (105+).
- MS. Canon. Liturg. 28: the manuscript with the thinnest binding (9mm).
- MS. Rawl. G. 26: one of just 4 manuscripts in the catalogue recorded as having 5 columns per page.
- MS. Auct. F. 2. 6: the narrowest manuscript in the catalogue (that is, the one with the lowest ratio of leaf width to leaf height).
- Canon Class. Lat. 84: one of the manuscripts in the catalogue with the biggest margins (that is, the lowest ratio of text to blank page).
- MS. Bodl. 787 (endleaves): the manuscript unit with the greatest average height between lines.
If you’re interested, you can download the raw data by clicking here.
Watch the full recording of the talk below! The slides shown are included beneath the video.
View the Slides below:
