Usage statistics (through March 2009)

Since the launch of the site on September 2008 through March 2009, the Rose team has noted the following usage statistics:

• 14,112 visits from 112 different countries or territories
• The top five countries represented (in order): United States, United Kingdom, Canada, France, Spain
• 11,205 absolute unique visitors
• 21% of these visitors have returned to the site
• 314 of these visitors have used the site 9-14 times
• 192 of these visitors have used the site 15-25 times
• 605 of these visits lasted between 10-30 minutes
• 82 of these visits lasted over 30 minutes

We experienced a spike in visits in late March after someone (not a member of the Rose team) registered the Rose Digital Library on StumbleUpon. Starting in April, we have refined the analytics to gather more fine grained statistics such as visits to individual folios or pages on the site. We will report on these new statistics as we gather them.

Major site update

Below is a list of the changes. Later posts will give more detailed explanations of the new features.

Help document:

• Content updates
• Layout fixes
  

Collection spreadsheet: New feature!

• Mined manuscript descriptions to create spreadsheet
• Tabular view with Google visualizations
• Downloadable in CSV format for use with local spreadsheet applications
  

Illustration titles: New feature!

• Tabular view of titles, average position, and frequency.
• Data generated from image tagging

Extant manuscripts:

• Moved to tabular Google visualization
• Link to view in Google docs
  

Narrative sections: New feature!

• Poem divided into sections. Each section has an id, a description, and a Lecoy range.
  
• Tabular view of ids, titles, and Lecoy range
• Click on section id to search for folios containing that section
  

Narrative mapping: New feature!

• A manuscript is mapped by finding the start and end of each section in that manuscript.
• The mapping may be done manually, which takes a long time, or automatically.
• The automatic mapping takes as input a description of the book structure and guesses the column of the section start/end.
  
• Only a few manuscripts are mapped so far.
• The sections can be searched by title and id.
• Section in the current page can be displayed to the right of the page turner.
• Manual mapping includes a transcription of the first line of each section.
  

Character names: New feature!

• List of characters in the poem
  

Miscellaneous:

• Lecoy number always displayed with leading L
• Display date when site last updated
• Navigation on left reworked
• Rubrics that are transcribed when describing the book structure for automatic narrative mapping are searchable
  
• Normalization of illustration titles in image tagging
• Hit enter in text box to do advanced search
• Additional and updated French translations
• Guessing names of printed book folios works better.
• Finer grained tracking of site usage with Google analytics.
• Mention contactus email when internal error occurs
• Summary book descriptions added
• More manuscripts cropped for page turner
• Google visualization api used for tabular views of site. Click on column title to sort (unless sort is disabled for that table)
  

Known issues:

• Webkit (Safari, Chrome) layout problem with header being offset.
• Tabular Google visualization sometimes has columns misaligned. Click on column title to fix.

Usage statistics (through February 2009)

Since the launch of the site on September 1, 2008 through February 28, 2009, the Rose team has noted the following usage statistics:

• 9,216 visits from 100 different countries or territories
• The top five countries represented (in order): United States, United Kingdom, France, Spain, Canada
• 6,902 absolute unique visitors
• 25% of these visitors have returned to the site
• 267 of these visitors have used the site 9-14 times
• 160 of these visitors have used the site 15-25 times
• 458 of these visits lasted between 10-30 minutes
• 72 of these visits lasted over 30 minutes

The Walters Art Museum and the Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University recently hosted a reception in honor of the Roman de la Rose exhibition at the Walters. We will soon post photos from this reception on the blog.

Update

Images of a 15th century Roman de La Rose in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (The Philip S. Collins Collection, 1945-65-3) have just been added to the site. The manuscript's 75 miniatures are thought to have been painted by two artists in the workshop of the Maître Francois, illuminator of a French translation of Augustine's de Civitate Dei now in Paris (BnF, ms. fr. 18-19). This Rose has elaborate floral and foliate marginal borders and its bâtarde text incorporates the cleric Gui de Mori's additions and revisions to the poem. There are also many marginal inscriptions added by a reader in the 16th century.

News

11 manuscripts from the Bibliothèque nationale have just been added to the digital library. A Rose in the University of Manchester's John Rylands University Library and one at the University of Pennsylvania are now up as well. We are in the process of cropping images and adding scholarly content. There are new codicological descriptions of two manuscripts, Penn 906 and Walters 143, and more to come. We are also improving the French language site by offering new translations of pages, and would appreciate feedback on these or on any aspect of the project.

This gives us a total of 26 manuscripts and 2 early printed books digitized so far. Check back as we continue to add manuscripts through 2009!

Extant manuscripts

Currently, no one can say with certainty exactly how many Rose manuscripts exist or where they are located, and thus we are working to create such a list. A number of factors make this a difficult task: manuscripts change names and hands over time; manuscripts are lost, destroyed, or stolen; manuscripts sometimes appear briefly on the market and are sold to anonymous owners; fragments exist in libraries around the world, and some of these have never been mentioned in publications; sometimes it is hard to know what to count as a Rose manuscript (there are, e.g., early translations into other languages, manuscripts containing only excerpts from the Rose, and copies of a prose version of the Rose). 

With the help of users of the digital library our list of manuscripts is being corrected and expanded. We would particularly like to thank Heidrun Ost for sending us changes. If you know of a Rose manuscript or fragment not given here, e-mail Prof. Timothy Stinson at tlstinson@gmail.com, and it will be added to the list.

Usage statistics (January 2009)

For the first four months of the Roman de la Rose Digital Library (through December 31, 2008), we have noted the following usage statistics:

• 5,373 visits from 89 different countries or territories
• The top five countries represented (in order): United States, United Kingdom, France, Spain, Canada
  
• 4,108 absolute unique visitors
• 24% of these visitors have returned to the site
• 124 of these visitors have used the site 9-14 times
• 52 of these visitors have used the site 15-25 times
• 268 of these visits lasted between 10-30 minutes
• 36 of these visits lasted over 30 minutes

We have received the images for 11 new manuscripts from the Bibliothèque nationale de France system which will be added soon to the Digital Library.