A facsimile page from a medieval manuscript can be made interactive: laid flat on a table and wired underneath with conductive tape it can respond to touch. A visitor could press a line and hear the page read aloud in Latin, then in English. Press an illuminated initial and music starts underneath it. The program driving all this is simple enough that a visitor can open it during the session and change what the page does, introducing visitors to the idea that code can be a medium for creative work.
This project would happen in conjunction with the Trinity Library, and is inspired by the ChroniCode project at Glasgow’s Mitchell Library. In June 2026 they set up an exhibition of this sort, using Scratch and a Makey Makey, and found visitors quickly moved from triggering the page to rewriting it (one child turned a fifteenth-century chronicle into a game controller).
The Trinity library has extensive holdings and are very keen to see the output of such a project turned into an exhibition. Several projects are possible in this area and I’m happy to discuss them with an interested student. Examples include:
- In ChroniCode, every page had to be prepared and programmed by hand, by someone who knew what they were doing. On possible project would build the authoring and development tools that would make a page into a touchable interactive object: marking off regions for activity and creating printable physical templates to support adding the conductive materials.
- Designing research instruments to evaluate how people attending the exhibition experience it (as a view on historical manuscripts, and on the possibilities of coding)
- The project could also explore alternative ways of interacting with the exhibit using technologies like conductive ink, NFC or camera-based detection, etc.