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• RE: The bottom margin

  VViews > 27-04-2017, 10:05 AM

  Quote:davidjackson
  @Anton - typographical because it relates to the layout of the text.
  The canon is the construction of the page layout.
  Raúl Rosavario created the field when he noticed the proportions inherent in early printed books. You get a lot of guff about the golden ration, 2:3 ratio and whatnot, but at its simplest, it's just planning the proportions of any page layout to make it easy on the eye. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.has some information on it, not very detailed.
  Early manuscripts also had them. You'll find similar sized margins across the pages of illustrated manuscripts - there was a specific layout plan which was adhered to across pages.
  
  Given the rather slapdash nature of the VM construction and failure to adhere to scribal training (ie, no ruling) I would not expect to find such consistency, but it does fit with what you are describing.

  
  
  Exactly.
  I had looked into this in another thread for the review of juergenw's paper, and Jan Tschichold is another eminent source on the subject of medieval page layout, the proportions of pages, text to page proportions and golden ratio considerations.
  Although most of The Form of The Book is devoted to the conventions in place after the invention of printing, he explains that
  “Printers overtook the laws of book form the scribes had been following. It is certain that there existed fundamental codes. Numerous medieval books show a surprising conformity in proportions of format and position of type area. Unfortunately such codes have not come down to us. They were workshop secrets. Only by carefully measuring medieval manuscripts can we attempt to track them down” (pp. 42-43).
  
  Tschichold explains that the question of proportions in layout was not just important within a single side of a folio, but that the open book's layout across two pages also mattered.
  
  

  

  He concludes that the only way to try and retrace the lost codes of page construction is to make measurements and look for patterns, but of course trimming makes this complicated.

• RE: The bottom margin

  voynichbombe > 28-04-2017, 12:47 PM

  Manuscript layout analysis is a popular and quite successful computational approach in digital humanities. There is a number of open source softwares and freely avialable services (alas the very promising Uni Hamburg AMAP Workbench seems to never have taken on wings, but the paper gives a good outline of available approaches). It is important the software is tied in with IIIF & TEIP5 capable sources so there is actually a way for classification.
  I happen to use Transcribus.eu for a different transcription purpose but haven't thought of subjecting the VMs to it yet, since it's encoding is based on word level, which seems unsuitable for the VMs. But layout analysis is actually a separate task, so I will give it a try.
  Generally I think that while it appears there is layout in the VMs, on a closer look it will prove to be more of a "loose analogy", like so many things VMs.
  Codicology basics tell us that manuscript space was almost never wasted, but blanks filled with notes & the like, except in herbals, where even versos would be left blank.
  In a parallel copying process (which is IMHO an important question for the VMs regarding speed) where quires would be separately handed to multiple scribes, text length inconsistencies would lead to either compression or expansion of writing density observable towards the endings.
  All of this does not happen in the VMs. Regarded in the light of "line & page as functional units" it should make us wonder if paragraphs have a wholly different function, too. In our modern understanding it would render them as separated blocks of lists, and we know that breaking lists over pages is rather impractical.
  And then there is no columnization in the VMs, and quire numbering was outdatd by 2 centuries for our ugly duckling's timeframe, so I'm afraid that in our case standards are again not really applicable for classification.
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