I became involved in the study of the Royer Didier 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, Dr. Blanton and I had proposed a trip to Los Angeles to search for possible exemplars for the manuscript in the Getty archives. However, due to the COVID-19 lockdown in Summer 2020, this was 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 modern science. For me, it was extremely rewarding to learn what role I can play in taking my discipline forward.
Over the course of the academic year, I developed a digital humanities workflow 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 by manually transcribing it from the source manuscript.
Once this was done, I began to preprocess the text. This means I pruned my transcription into plain .txt files, delineated according to sections of the manuscript. This allowed me to analyze each section as a distinct dataset 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 uploaded my .txt files into Voyant Tools and ran them through its environment.
The results were fascinating and useful to our article. For instance, quantitative analysis revealed that “Didier” was not the most frequently occurring term in the text—“Dieu” (“God”) was. This shifted my interpretation: instead of reading it as a story about Saint Didier, I began reading it as a story about God with Didier as a supporting character. Another finding was that “Didier” often collocated with “nom” (“name”), pointing to how frequently the text emphasizes Didier’s name itself—“Didier,” derived from Latin “Desiderius,” translates roughly to “desired.” These insights reshaped our understanding of this manuscript.
These findings are detailed in our forthcoming article in Different Visions. In this article, Dr. Blanton and I employ digital humanities techniques alongside source studies, visual and rhetorical analysis, and critical theory methodologies for a comprehensive reading of Royer Didier.
The Royer Didier can be viewed by anyone at Spencer Research Library at Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. Schedule an appointment to see this beautiful piece of book art for yourself!