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Comment by sharpn | Hacker News Reader

When not hacking, I love investigating the marginalia (doodles in the margins) of medieval Italian, English & Irish manuscripts. Google's book scanning project is awesome for this. Ten years ago I couldn't have imagined having uninterrupted access to this stuff, ever.

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  I love investigating the marginalia (doodles in the margins) 
  of medieval Italian, English & Irish manuscripts.

Sounds interesting. Care to share some of your findings, or maybe the methodology you employ for your research.

My findings would be a bit esoteric for this arena, arcane stuff about when Italian music scholars started using counterpoint, previously unknown ancient Irish nature poems by bored medieval monks etc. And I'm only just evolving my methodology to the google books stuff - it's actually formatted quite badly if you want to read the pages (scans are bigger than my screen) but is still a lot quicker than travelling to a university library & trawling through parchments (when you're allowed).

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