AIC 53rd Annual Meeting

Multidisciplinarity draws on knowledge from different disciplines, but the context remains within those disciplines’ boundaries. Interdisciplinarity analyzes, coordinates and links knowledge between disciplines into a coherent composite. Inks&Skins https://inksandskins.org/ started as an interdisciplinary project dedicated to investigating the materiality of late-medieval Gaelic manuscripts but became so much more. The diverse groups involved expanded the research scope into that of transdisciplinarity, fully integrating the industry, conservation, manufacturing, heritage science, and scholarly research into a humanities context that transcended traditional boundaries of each of the disciplines. While multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary are additive and interactive respectively, transdisciplinary is holistic. 

Sponsored by the Irish Research Council, Inks&Skins set out with the goal of increasing our understanding of the substrate (parchment) and the composition of inks and pigments used by secular scholars who created Gaelic vellum books in the period 1100-1600.   The intent was to focus on one manuscript, the Book of Uí Mhaine, a large vellum manuscript of poetry and Irish tradition assembled c. 1390 for the Ó Ceallaigh (O’Kelly) family of Uí Mhaine in County Galway, Ireland. The synergy of more collaborating partners enriched the scope. Preservation Research and Testing Division (PRTD) Library of Congress (LC) staff, as part of an MOU with University College Cork (UCC), undertook multispectral imaging (MSI) at the Royal Irish Academy (RIA). The MSI was intended to only be on the Book of Uí Mhaine. However, engagement through sharing initial processing to read text through stains led to further manuscripts added to the docket, including Ireland’s oldest book, ‘The Cathach, a late 6th-century Psalter. Entrusting Inks&Skins with access to these precious manuscripts underlined the commitment of the Royal Irish Academy as partners in this innovative work.

Then the pandemic arrived, and we adapted to moving forward on collaborative research remotely. Data sharing challenges were but one of the barriers we had to work through. Industry partners in Ireland assisted with X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF) of the RIA manuscripts and then sent the data to PRTD for interpretation. Exhausting all we could from MSI and XRF data still left challenges with understanding the organic components of the inks and pigments in the manuscripts. PRTD staff created new ink and pigment reference samples for the Center for Heritage Analytical Reference Materials (CHARM). Utilizing instrumentation at LC, we essentially worked backwards to link fiber optic reflectance spectroscopy (FORS) reference curves with what we had captured from the MSI on the manuscripts. The addition of collaborators continued to expand the wealth of information  extracted from the data. Connecting the MSI processed images of the manuscripts with Trinity College conservators, parchmenters and creators, greatly assisted our ability to recognize tears, scraping patterns, poorly prepared skins, veining and other features related to construction techniques. Further collaborators and research partners included two doctoral fellows, archivists, calligraphers, ink-makers and Irish humanities scholars. The breadth of the collaboration was enriched by the willingness of all to listen, learn, and share ideas from diverse perspectives. The transdisciplinarity of this heritage research enabled creating new knowledge.