Dot Porter

@leoba

Medievalist, digital humanist, and wannabe booklicker. I'm here to post memes and yell about manuscripts. See also @sims-mss.bsky.social I speak for myself and not for my employer

2106 Siguiendo4511 Seguidores851 Publicaciones

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¿Es tu perfil?Reclámalo y leoba.dirty.social es tuyo.Reclamar perfil

Dot Porter@leoba· 16d

What's your sign?

Photo of a fish and Chips shop sign with a standee of Queen Elizabeth II behind it, and tee shirts displayed behind them. The shirt next to the Queen's head says "I don't want to brag but I just put a puzzle together in 1 day and the box said 2-4 years"

Dot Porter@leoba· Jul 7

Of course I was wearing my shirt!

Dot Porter@leoba· Jul 7

Attended a workshop at @imc-leeds.bsky.social , made a fun thing! (inspired by the woad guy in UPenn LJS 419 and an historiated initial in Ms. Codex 724) #imc2026

Dot Porter@leoba· Jul 6

How about these two? On f. 184v in UPenn Ms. Codex 724, a 13th c. Bible from France. 🔗: openn.library.upenn.edu/Data/0002/ht...

An eel and a fish kiss in the bottom margin of a Bible manuscript

Dot Porter@leoba· Jul 6

It is always a treat to see the manuscripts from one's institution featured in the opening keynote for @imc-leeds.bsky.social 😋 (h/t to Matthew Champion, University of Melbourne, and his lecture "Sounding Time: Senses, Spaces, Silences") 🔗: find.library.upenn.edu/catalog/9924...

Dot Porter@leoba· Jun 27

As opposed to women who lost weight the old fashioned way? This is such dumb framing. It's not glp-1s, it's attitudes towards fat people and it's always been this way

A depressing new study found women had an easier time getting hired after losing weight on GLP-1s

19 hours ago — Harvard economist Rebecca Diamond found weight loss on GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic improved women's prospects of getting hired or meeting a...

Dot Porter@leoba· Jun 20

From a gradual at the University of Rochester

Very large red and blue initial R surrounded by neumes and writing in black. There is a bird in the decoration around the initial, and maybe a snake too.

Dot Porter@leoba· Jun 4

DID YOU KNOW that I am teaching a one-day course on "Manuscript Materiality in a Digital World" on Friday, July 10, in Leeds (UK)? It's true! It's part of the Digital Medievalist Studies Institute, and happens the day after the International Medieval Congress ends.

Manuscript Materiality in a Digital World
Dot Porter (Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, University of Pennsylvania Libraries)

This workshop considers the challenges and opportunities of working with manuscript materiality in a digital world. Participants will examine selected manuscripts from the Cultural Collections of Leeds University Libraries and discuss the technical and philosophical issues that arise when engaging with both physical objects and their digital counterparts. They will then work hands-on with digital images, video, and the VCEditor (https://viscoll.org), a collation-modelling tool, to explore how manuscript structures can be represented and analysed in virtual environments.

Dot Porter@leoba· May 29

Jason! I took this into VCEditor and discovered that the formula you came up with isn't as clear as I thought. I came up with two possible ways to interpret it - whether the three quires are inside the first quire, or if the first and last quires are actually the enclosing quire together.

Dot Porter@leoba· May 12

Photo of a white and orange cat, her claw is caught on a pillow and she is just chilling. There is a speech bubble at the bottom of the photo, which points to the quoted skeet.

Dot Porter@leoba· Mar 23

Part 2 of the Frankenbook-of-hours project will be codex-as-roll

Dot Porter@leoba· Mar 7

FOR EXAMPLE. This doesn't make it better or worse. It's just all shit.

Screenshot: d
for advanced tools in manuscript studies and builds upon the success of VCEditor 1.0, which is actively used by manuscript
scholars, book historians, conservators, curators, catalogers, and students. VCEditor 2.0 aims to benefit users by expanding the
description and visualization potential of the existing software.
The VCEditor 2.0 Project does not directly
relate to DEI as it focuses on expanding tools
for manuscript studies without explicit
mention of inclusivity or diversity.
No. The VCEditor 2.0 Project does not directly
relate to DEI as it focuses on expanding tools
for manuscript studies without explicit
mention of inclusivity or diversity.

Dot Porter@leoba· Feb 28

Post a pic you took, no context, to bring some zen to the feed.

Dot Porter@leoba· Feb 19

it's so cool, and she's so generous to make it available

Photo of the partial front of a manuscript roll, cut out and taped together. It covers two tables and isn't even halfway done. it will be very long when it's finished.

Photo of a printout of a manuscript roll over several printed pages - front of the roll on the left, back of the roll on the right.

Dot Porter@leoba· Feb 14

Spotted by a friend at the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum in Williamsburg, VA

Photo of a pot with a blue beet-like object painted on it

Dot Porter@leoba· Jan 20

Help transcribing some 18th century English? It's a recipe for Gingerbread (YUM) but the last few lines are inscrutable to me. My attempt at transcription is in the alt text, please let me know if you can help me with the end! I want to make some 18th century gingerbread!

Receipt to make gingerbread

To one gallon of molases one quart of
beer one pound of butter 4 oz of ginger
see that the butter and ginger be well [??]
in the flour. Dissolve 2 oz of salt of tarter (ed: now baking powder)
or pearl ash well in the beer (?) through once
or pearl ash is said to be enough make dough
[???] than cake is made
[?] should be [?] immediately after
being [?]

Dot Porter@leoba· Jan 14

BookBeetle is in the house*!!! *Vitale II Lab for Book History and Digital Humanities

Photo of a small, tabletop printing press along with its accoutrements

Photo of a small, tabletop printing press

Dot Porter@leoba· Dec 28

post a perfect album from the 90s that isn't nirvana, pearl jam, soundgarden, or alice in chains

The cover of the neutral milk hotel album in the aeroplane over the sea (1998)

Dot Porter@leoba· Dec 16

What a difference two years makes! (For both of us)

A woman and a child sit together at a table.

A woman (smaller than in the first photo) and a young man sit together at a table.

Dot Porter@leoba· Oct 25

I'm happy with this score.

Dot Porter@leoba· Sep 24

Collation models I build using VCEditor, they're visual reconstructions of quire structure (showing the leaves and how they connect and are arranged), I map contents and diagrams/illustrations to leaves, and link digitized images to leaves, too. It's a compact, detailed view of of a book.

Screenshot of a quire from a book of hours in VCEditor

Dot Porter@leoba· Jun 13

If you see this share a skeleton.

Two mini skeletons sitting on a cardboard box. One sits on the other's lap and they appear to be flirting.

Dot Porter@leoba· Jun 10

Proof of perkiness!

Photo of an orange and white cat drinking from a large cup set in a bathtub (aka tub waters)

Dot Porter@leoba· Jun 8

Rosie update! Thanks for all your tips. I ended up taking her to the vet. She got a painkiller injection and subcutaneous fluids (which one of you also recommended ❤️). They seemed to do the trick - she was chugging the fountain last night 😍 Hopefully she's good to go 🤞

Photo of Rose (a white and orange cat) lounging in her bungalow

Dot Porter@leoba· Jun 7

Rosie got oral surgery earlier this week and now she has trouble drinking water. She wants it but it seems difficult for her to find a good angle, both cups and fountains. Could a guinea pig bottle work? Does anyone have experience and suggestions with something like this?

Photo of an orange and white cat sitting in a bathtub next to a cup full of water that she is unable to drink. She is very sad.

Dot Porter@leoba· Jun 5

Day 4 of Digital Codicology (Rare Book School L-160) we started with fragments (I boosted @lisafdavis.bsky.social's Digital Fragmentology course), moved on to video & 3D imaging, then data visualization & physicalization, and now we're team-building a quire! Only one more day to go 😭

Photo of the Beauvais Missal on Fragmentarium

Students deciding how to video & 3D model their books

Photo of a chart showing the comparative contents of several books of hours (the gold line down the center shows the location of the hours of the virgin)

Photo of a sheet of parchment with ruling lines drawn. We're ready to write!

Dot Porter@leoba· Jun 5

Days 2 & 3 of Digital Codicology (Rare Book School L-160)... more materiality (we bound our printed sheets and made illuminated initials!), talked about cataloging, IIIF, VisColl, DM, HTR, and we toured our digitization lab (SCETI) and took photos of our own. WHEW! Two more days to go!

Students in Digital Codicology class sitting around the table, making their illuminated initials.

Photo of a beautiful illuminated initial S (made by a student)

Photo of a bound version of the sheet we printed at Common Press on Monday

Photo made by a microscope camera, it's a close-up of a little face in a root in LJS 419, a 15th century Italian herbal. The little face looks very grumpy.

Dot Porter@leoba· Jun 2

First day of Digital Codicology (Rare Book School L-160)!! We looked at books and then took a step towards making one (at the Common Press). Tomorrow we'll talk about cataloging and make a quire 😍

People looking at manuscript with unrolled parchment roll in the foreground

Person laying type in an early printing press

Dot Porter@leoba· May 30

The first word of the poem in the only surviving medieval manuscript copy isn't MONSTRUM, it's NOSTRUM. Monstrum has been written in the margin by a later hand (the zine is tiny so I also took a photo of Bridget's slide so you can see it better)

Photo of a manuscript page printed into a little zine, about 2/3 down the page the poem starts, you can clearly see a capital N in red, the first letter of Nostrum; the note in the margin next to it is the word Monstrum written in a later hand in black ink

A photo of Bridget's slide showing a close-up of the manuscript, with NOSTRUM as the main text and Monstrum written in a later hand in the margin.

Dot Porter@leoba· May 30

several examples of translations, editions, and a translation of the poem "In puellam hermaphroditum," all of which have the first word of the poem as MONSTRUM (rendering the first two words, Monstrum feminei, to be something like "monstrous woman") The problem is that - also shown in the zine -