The Making and Knowing Project (Center for Science and Society, Columbia University) is excited to present Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France—a digital critical edition and English translation of a sixteenth-century French manuscript of artisanal recipes. The publication of this edition marks the culmination over five years of iterative, collaborative, and interdisciplinary work by over 400 scholars and students worldwide. The transcribed, translated, and encoded text of BnF Ms Fr 640 is accompanied by research essays, field notes from recipe reconstructions in the Making and Knowing Laboratory, text-level editorial comments, a glossary of terms, search and navigation features, and raw data files for export and analysis.

In this demonstration, the Project team will present the edition and its features. Digital Lead Terry Catapano and Designer-Developer Nick Laiacona will discuss the challenges and workarounds in creating a function-rich static site, and Laiacona will present work-in-progress toward the creation of a “community edition,” an open-source customizable version of the edition infrastructure—in other words, a community software platform that other scholars and students can use to present their own texts. The Project team will conclude by demonstrating some of the textual analyses made possible by its custom semantic markup.

Equipment: Laptop (optional)