The 2026 edition of <Hands:On>, the digital training programme for humanities postgraduates run by Cambridge University Library and Queen Mary University of London, was devoted to colophons.
Colophons are a paradoxical kind of evidence. They can read like the intimate, unguarded voice of an individual scribe, and yet they follow strong conventions and rely heavily on formulaic language. That tension makes them a key source for book history, and it also makes them difficult to present to anyone who is not already a manuscript specialist. Once a near-universal feature of book culture across regions and writing traditions, colophons are now largely invisible in public understandings of written heritage. The hackathon took this as its problem: how can this material be meaningfully presented, explored, and communicated to different audiences?
The raw material came from the colophon database currently under development within PAMELA, which brings together the results of “Done. Pour the wine.” Language Experiments in Medieval Scribal Additions and Colophons and Innovation and Inertia: The End of Medieval Scribes. On the first day the students were introduced to the data, to the descriptive system behind it, and to a set of user personas. Each team then chose one persona and spent the week building a digital prototype that would make the colophon data genuinely useful to that particular person. Every team worked alongside a professional coder and designer, who kept the ambitions honest and the prototypes running.
The laptops were put aside for one session, when library colleagues brought out manuscripts from the Cambridge collections and showed them to the group. Several carried colophons of their own, seen where they belong: at the foot of a last page, in the hand of someone who had finally got to the end.
The fourth day was given over to a testing lab, with real users sitting down in front of the prototypes and doing what real users do: ignoring the carefully designed navigation and clicking on something else entirely. Teams had a few hours to absorb the feedback before the final day, when the prototypes were presented to an audience drawn from across the University of Cambridge.
It was not all wireframes. The group went punting, with the usual distribution of confidence and competence among those holding the pole.
Midweek, work paused for the World Cup semi-final between England and Argentina. England led from the 55th minute, and with five minutes to go a certain amount of celebration was already being drafted. Argentina then scored in the 85th minute and again in the second minute of stoppage time. It was a salutary lesson in a rule every scribe knew: do not write explicit before the last line is actually finished. Warm congratulations to our colleagues at CONICET, who were entitled to pour the wine.
Our thanks go to Cambridge University Library for hosting the week and for access to its collections, to the coders and designers who supported the teams, to the testers, and to all the participants.
Leave a Reply