For those of you who are regular visitors to the Roman de la Rose Digital Library blog, you will probably be noticing some changes. In addition to a slight makeover of our blog style, the most obvious new feature is our fabulous Twitter feed in the right hand column.
Since the beginning of May our Twitter handle, @RoseDigLib, has been hosting some experiments with medieval ‘twitterature’. The project was conceived by Tamsyn Rose-Steel (@TamsynMedieval), CLIR/Mellon postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University, and utilizes the talents of poet Mike Rose-Steel (@MikeRStyping), who is a PhD candidate at Exeter University and is funded by Exeter’s ‘Bridging the Gaps’ Wiring Wittgenstein project. Guillaume de Lorris’s original poem of around 4,000 lines has been rendered into approximately 200 tweets in modern English rhyming couplets and quatrains, often accompanied by some of the stunning manuscript images that we host here on the Rose Digital Library. Follow us to enjoy this new rendering of the Rose.
To explain the philosophy behind the endeavor and how we handled the constraints on the Twitter medium, some pages will be added to this blog exploring our ideas in greater depth. The first mini-essay ‘Medieval Twitterature’ has already been posted – click on the tab under the header to start reading. We hope you enjoy experiencing this most seminal of medieval French works in a new way.