Sara Madoré was awarded a bursary to attend the Introduction to Digital Humanities strand of the Digital Humanities Oxford Summer School in 2025. To join the mailing list and learn about the next summer school sign up here. Read about Sara's experience at the summer school here:
I am a third-year PhD candidate in Medieval Studies at the University of Bristol, and my comparative project focuses on Chrétien de Troyes and the lesser-known Gautier d'Arras, authors of romances in Old French at the end of the 12th century. My research interests lie in medieval medical knowledge of mental health, literary representations of embodied emotions and patronage at the court of Champagne. I look at digital versions of medieval manuscripts, printed editions and translations of the medieval texts, and more specifically at Chrétien and Gautier’s works.
Discovering the latest technology and techniques plays an essential role in furthering my own research as I believe I can be more efficient using digital techniques to analyse my primary sources. Studying lesser-known authors requires delving into rarefied textual material: only two romances from Gautier survived the passage of time. Using computational and technological methods can be beneficial in optimising time investment and developing new approaches and perspectives. Therefore, I was extremely happy to be able to take part in the 2025 Digital Humanities Summer School organised by the University of Oxford, thanks to a bursary. I have never taken a course in Digital Humanities, and I was delighted to be enrolled in the online strand ‘Introduction to Digital Humanities’. Having the chance to bring together interdisciplinarity, Digital Humanities and Medieval Studies thanks to the framework offered by the Oxford Summer School, this course enabled me to ensure that my project can be as impactful as possible.
Thanks to the platform Canvas, I have been able to participate in the course and to asynchronously watch the videos of the strand. Canvas is extremely easy to use, and the resources were very accessible. Links to resources quoted during the presentations and documents, such as slides and captions, have been made available as soon as the Summer School ended. I particularly found the keynote lectures stimulating, and Andrew Cusworth’s seminar ‘Machining the Archive’ fascinating. Coming from a French academic system, I really enjoyed all the French references used to help us think about archives and digit[al]isation: Derrida (‘nothing is less reliable, nothing is less clear today than the word “Archive”’, in Archive Fever: a Freudian Impression), Foucault (‘the Archive is the first law of what can be said, the system that governs statements as unique events’, in The Archive) and Pierre Nora (‘Modern memory is, above all, archive. It relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image’ in Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire). As I study medieval literature, I also was interested in Cusworth’s spectrum of the ‘print revolution’, from manuscript culture to print culture.
I hope to be able to participate again to the DHOxSS next year, either online or in-person. I also thank the University of Oxford for the bursary and for allowing me to take part in this amazing Summer School!
