I became involved in the study of the Royer Dider in the Spring of 2020, when Professor Blanton suggested it as an undergraduate research project. The Royer Didier is a French illuminated manuscript produced in 1904. Although it is a modern book, it is very much a product of the Medieval Revivalist movement of the 19th century—a faithful homage to the devotional texts of the Middle Ages. It is a Life of Saint Didier of Langres, the patron saint of the town in which the book was made. This text was recently purchased and gifted to the Spencer Art Research Library at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City.
Originally, Doctor Blanton and I had proposed a jaunt to Los Angeles to search for possible exemplars for the manuscript in the Getty archives. However, the Summer of 2020 COVID lockdown meant this was clearly no longer possible. Not content to let the pandemic slow down our research, we retooled our project as an archival Digital Humanities study. The best part of doing this kind of digital humanities archival project was learning ways in which pure, humanistic literary studies can be brought into the twenty-first century. The study of language and literature can be just as analytical and sophisticated as any of the modern sciences. And for my part, it was extremely rewarding to learn what role I can play in taking my discipline forward.
Over the course of the academic plague year, I developed a digital humanities workflow, which I adapted from techniques developed at Arizona State University’s Laubichler Lab for performing computational analysis on digital texts. My first step was to digitize the text. This was done manually, by simply transcribing the text of the source manuscript.
Once this was done, I began to preprocess the text. This means that I pruned the beautiful transcription that I had made into rather drab .txt files, delineated according to the sections of the manuscript. This would allow me to analyze each section as a distinct data set, compared to the manuscript corpus as a whole.
Although a proper Digital Humanist would script their own algorithms, I used Voyant Tools to analyze the Royer Didier. Voyant Tools describes itself as “a web-based reading and analysis environment for digital texts.” It can be found at https://voyant-tools.org/. I simply uploaded the .txt files that I had prepared from my transcription and ran them through this environment.
The results were fascinating and useful to the article that Professor Blanton and I had been working on. For instance, the quantitative analysis of the Royer Didier revealed that “Didier” was not the most frequently occurring distinctive term in the text. Rather “Dieu” (“God”) is. This changed my reading of the manuscript. Originally, I had been reading it as being a story about Saint Didier. However, this analysis forced me to read the text as being a story about God, with Didier being a supporting character. Another interesting result from the analysis was that “Didier” was a collocate of (meaning, likely to occur with) the word “nom” (“name”). This reveals a tendency for the text to point to the name “Didier” as an object. The text repeatedly invites us not only to think about Didier, but also the name Didier, which roughly translates to “desired.” Didier is also known by the Latin name Desiderius and the French name Dizier, which makes the connection to the word “desire” more clear.
These and many other findings can be read in our article, forthcoming in the online journal Different Visions. In that article, Dr. Blanton and I employ not only these digital humanities techniques, but also source study, visual and rhetorical analysis, and critical theory methodologies to outline a comprehensive reading of the Royer Didier.
But don’t take our word for it! The Royer Didier can be viewed by anyone at the Spencer Research Library at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, now once again open to the public. Schedule an appointment and take a look at this beautiful piece of book art for yourself.