CMEMS Workshop: Quinn Dombrowski (Stanford)

The Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies will continue the Wednesday lunch-talks series via Zoom. We will continue to meet at 12:00 noon (Pacific Standard Time). The link to each Zoom meeting will be shared soon.

"The Novgorod Birchbark Letters and the Power of the Ordinary"

This talk will introduce the Birchbark Letters, a unique set of texts written by “ordinary people” in northeast Russia starting in the 11th century. These documents have led to new insights on matters ranging from education, to the role of women, to same-sex relationships, to language and cultural contact. The Birchbark Letters are recognized as a resource worthy of care, attention, and curation, and thousands of scholar-hours have been dedicated to sketching and transcribing them over the last 50 years. Recent technical developments in the automatic digitization of manuscripts is making it possible for individual scholars and universities to create a much greater level of access to documents that have been deemed “ordinary”, and not worth the investment to create an edition or even rich metadata. As we contemplate a future where so much remains uncertain — from how we meet and teach, to what materials we can access, to the way universities prioritize the humanities — what might we gain by reconsidering the “ordinary”?

Quinn Dombrowski is the Academic Technology Specialist in the DLCL and the Library. She worked on the Birchbark Letters at the University of Chicago, where she received a BA/MA in 2006. She then worked in central IT at the University of Chicago and UC Berkeley for a decade, picking up an MLIS from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign on the way. Quinn has enjoyed getting back to her medieval roots from time to time since coming to Stanford in late 2018.