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This chapter analyses the different ways in which metal album covers draw upon medieval media. The analysis is situated within the broad theoretical frame of intermediality, and more specifically view the process where medieval media cross the borders and find their way into metal album covers as media transformation. Four different types of media transformation are analysed, and it is argued that the medievalism of album covers can be defined in terms of media transformation. Likewise, neomedievalism is defined in terms of second-order media transformation. The album cover is described as a media patchwork, and the chapter gives examples of the patches in terms of relationship and properties.

This chapter explores how medieval signifiers function in black metal’s musical style, lyrics, and album imagery, specifically albums using woodcut engravings. It analyses how the word ‘medieval’ functions in ­discourses about those albums, including reviews, magazines, forum discussions, and YouTube comments. The analysis combines qualitative close readings with quantitative analyses of word frequencies, indicating which albums have provoked the term ‘medieval’ most. I then show which other terms are closely paired with it – descriptive adjectives, analogies and associative imagery, and various aesthetic judgments. I compare these findings with close music analyses to offer stylistic explanations for black metal’s enduring fascination with the medieval. Finally, the chapter explores how black metal’s associations with the medieval also intersect with notions of cultural purity and political controversies within medieval studies itself.

This chapter explores the potential for musical medievalism within metal, exploring the ways in which metal musicians have sought to include ‘authentic’ medieval musical languages within their music. The medieval repertoire poses many challenges even for early music specialists, and the musical idioms of metal and medieval music rarely overlap, leading many medievalist metal bands to rely instead on normative metal styles with occasional references to specific identifiable melodies. The chapter focusses particularly on the American metal band Obsequiae, who have drawn inspiration particularly from the medieval polyphonic repertoire, which required creating much more oblique musical connections. Obsequiae’s albums feature acoustic guitar and harp arrangements of medieval polyphonic works, but their metal songs likewise adopt some general qualities of medieval polyphony. The obscure nature of the connections is likely beyond many listeners, but paradoxically the lack of obvious musical medievalism can also cultivate the appearance of a deeper connection.

This chapter explores metal albums as media, and their relationship to medieval media, as well as secondary media as a resource for reception studies. Examination of metal music as media reveals broader trends in modern media representations of the medieval in respect to race, gender, and cultural identity. Albums are composite object, using different media and secondary media products. The methodology used to approach these media and which elements of an album are examined in combination have a significant effect on the results. This chapter brings together three authors to discuss and compare methodologies and make the case for a combination of contextual analogue and quantitative digital approaches.

The purpose of this case study is to describe a multi-year text encoding initiative (TEI) project that took place in the McGill University Library, Rare Books and Special Collections.

Early nineteenth century English language chapbooks from the collection were digitized, and the proofed text files were encoded in TEI, following Best Practices for TEI in Libraries (2011).

The project coordinator describes the TEI file structure and customizations for the project to support a distinct subject classification of the chapbooks and the encoding of the woodcut illustrations using the Iconclass classification.

The authors focus on procedures, use of TEI data elements and encoding challenges.

This paper documents the project workflow and provides a possible model for future digital humanities projects.

The graduate students who participated in the TEI encoding learned a new suite of skills involving extensible markup language (XML) file structure and the application of a markup language that requires interpretation.

The McGill Library Chapbook Project Web site, launched in 2013 now provides access to 933 full-text works.

Aberdeen University Library's digitisation programme has reached an advanced stage, with three projects all designed to deliver images (of a 300‐page medieval liturgical text, of the papers of a nineteenth‐century philosopher, and of 1000 Jacobite engravings) via the Web. A comparison of these projects highlights differences in image capture pathways, quality requirements and file storage solutions.