Lab #2: Reverse Engineering the Medieval Bestiary

I chose to look into the Medieval Bestiary, a searchable database that draws from images and text compiled from medieval bestiaries in manuscript. The site proclaims to deal with all things medieval + animal, and there’s lots of tabs and pages to click through!

Sources

The raw data used in this project comes directly from manuscripts housed in a variety of university and other libraries. The site features a tab dedicated to the source manuscripts, as well as a digital text library. Much of the information in the “Beasts” tab, which makes up the core of the project, is interpretive or summative. A lot of that metadata is informed by secondary sources, which are also transparently listed in a bibliography.

Process

I’m doing a bit of research into nightingales for a different project, so I found the fact that the site lists every instance — name, image, description, all in context — of a particular beast in the manuscripts incredibly helpful. For every beast, there are tabs to view the sources that the site author used in creating its descriptive blurb, a bibliography of secondary sources pertaining to the beast, a list of all of the bestiary manuscripts that mention it, and a gallery of images from the manuscripts. Genuinely extremely useful. All of that is just the “Beasts” part of the site; there’s also an encyclopedia for browsing all terms related to medieval animals and a page where scholars can request to have their own articles posted.

Presentation

The site is organized by tabs nesting into one another — the home page has a list of tabs at the bottom, most of which link to different search functions, and once you’ve narrowed down to a particular entry, it’ll have another set of tabs with different categories of information on the entry. It’s not beautiful nor immediately intuitive (that is, it’s hard to get a sense for exactly how much information there is from the home page and first set of tabs), but it’s not overly complicated at all. The layouts are simple, and generally they’re either a ton of text or a ton of images (they’re not blended together in a visually pleasing ‘multimedia’ way), but I find this to be a utilitarian tool — function over form.

If I’m not mistaken, this site was created in 2002 (!) and is still up to date as of 2022, so it does prompt me to wonder what the processes behind maintaining a project like this for such a long span of time are like. I’m sure it helps that it deals with medieval manuscripts, which we don’t get a ton more of from year to year, but there must be logistical questions about keeping the site up to date with secondary sources and with general Web standards as time goes by. Visually, it looks slightly outdated at this point in time — does that matter?

This site was created by a scholar — an independent one, interestingly enough — which makes sense given how obviously functional and useful it is for research. I could see it being less appealing to the general public, since the onus is on the user to seek out the interesting stuff (in contrast to sites like the Google trends food one, which picked out interesting or easily understandable data points to display on the front page).