I am an ARTS STUDENT. I should not have to draw tables.

[highlyeccentric]

So I set out to create a manuscript description, happy in the knowledge that no easy-to-use description of Cotton Nero A.i has already been made.
What I want in a MS description:
* items clearly laid out, with modern English descriptions where appropriate
* first lines of homilies in Old English
* texts identified by their common title as well as their MS title
* clear quire divisions within the list
* references to editions
* the ability to scan the description either quire-by-quire OR by content type

Which means a table. Vertical axis numbering items and listing foliation. Horizontal axis listing content type (Insitiutes, laws, homilies, other). So one can scan down the 'homily' column if one so desires, or one can isolate the fifth quire, or whatever. FABULOUS.

BLOODY DIFFICULT TO CREATE IN MS WORD.
An exel table would be fine. Lovely. But difficult to print out and bind into a thesis.
So we have lots of individual one-page tables, which have to be prevented from binding themselves together and aligning cell widths (the Homilies column, for example, having been squashed up when there are no homilies on the page, so as to make space for Institutes).

And then I discover that you can't footnote a table.

This, people, explains why no one has made a user-friendly Manuscript Description of Cotton Nero A.i.
But I will not be defeated! When I am done, the Reader will be able to flick through my table with ease!
Sigh. The Reader will be me, and whatever unfortunate souls mark the thing. Oh, the futility.

Comments

[niamh-sage.livejournal.com]

Eh? You can't footnote a table? If you describe your problem a bit more, maybe I can help (I've got a fair bit of MS Word experience (and Excel too, if that's any help).

[blackbuttoneyes.livejournal.com]

That is a pretty awesome project, actually. It sounds insanely frustrating but very rewarding when done =D

Re: I am an ARTS STUDENT. I should not have to draw tables.

[tarimanveri.livejournal.com]

Ah, but you're a medievalist, ergo you will have to draw tables. All my major research projects to date have involved massive tables - the latest being my current research and associated ~150 pages of excel spreadsheets, one day to be a full-blown database.

As far as your table problems, I think you should be able to make the table in excel and import it into word. It sounds like you have other people who know more about it than me helping you, though, so good luck!

[(Anonymous)]

A couple thoughts:
1) This does sound like a great project!

2) For footnotes: try endnotes instead. They wouldn't mess up the page formatting, because they would come at the end of all the tables, probably on the last page.

3) I worked on Cotton Nero A.i last semester (and recently went back to the project to pull it together for a conference paper), and such a description sounds great. I worked from the facsimile by Loyn and spent a great deal of time with Ker's Catalogue, but both are getting a bit outdated, and not everyone has the ability or time to spend poring over a facsimile in a special collection. I would assume these are the descriptions you say already exist--if you know of other extensive descriptions that I may have missed, I'd love to get the citations from you, though.

3) I think it's high time to update manuscript descriptions in general. You yourself have noted the frustration with Ker, and clearly the other descriptions you've alluded to were not good enough for your purposes--so you've created your own. I was talking to a colleague who went to a conference Elaine Treharne was keynote speaker, and she discussed problematic issues of older scholarship like this. She apparently discussed Ker's odd way of describing (although praising his massive contribution to the field, of course--he'll never really be obsolete), and pointed toward the need for new, fresh looks at manuscripts and creating new, fresh descriptions. Perhaps your tables do justice to this idea, and could be presented as a case-study/example in describing manuscripts in such a light. Perhaps, in this way, it could be very valuable as a published work to the greater medieval scholar community.

4) Could I possibly get a copy of this tremendous document when it's compiled? I know you say that you're afraid you might be the only one to use it, but it actually sounds greatly useful--and I'm sure I'm not the only person who would think so. (Hence see number 3.)

Good luck with it!
B. Hawk

[ahsavka.livejournal.com]

The MS docs are pretty well integrated with each other -- you can make your table in excel, then copy it and paste it into your word doc when you're done. Then you can insert footnotes after it's been pasted in. That's what I did in my thesis. (Alas, battle data -- lots of tables.)