Clare Hall Research Fellow Dr Anthony Harris has been awarded a two-year funded research project from the British Academy Neil Ker Memorial Fund. This prestigious, highly competitive, award is made annually in memory of Neil Ripley Ker CBE FBA (1908–1982) who is well-known for his important catalogues of ancient manuscripts.

Working initially with Bodleian Imaging Services, Dr Harris will be managing a full digitisation of a late eleventh century Anglo-Latin (French) manuscript of early science (computus) Bodleian Library MS Bodley 309. He will then be using this digitisation, along with other published scholarship, to construct a digital catalogue and digital bibliography which is eventually expected to be published open access via Digital Bodleian. The work will be undertaken at the Bodleian Library (Oxford) and Cambridge University Library special collections where Dr Harris will be working as an independent, digital humanities researcher and blogging about the project. The manuscript is extremely important in the field of early computus (the calculation of the date of Easter) and Dr Harris first came across it while working on his PhD (Cantab) which looked at that area of medieval ‘science’. He is hoping that open scholarly access to these digital resources will help to preserve and protect the physical manuscript for the future.

Read more about Dr Harris here.