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Hi everyone:
I have a few questions that I would like to ask those of you have,
are, or
are considering electronic editing of medieval manuscripts, and recording paleographical information about the manuscript(s). I'm working on a
project
that has a focus on paleographical description, and I'm very
interested in
seeing what other projects are doing on this front. Is there a
standard? Is
a standard approach to paleographical description possible, given
differing
concerns, uses, etc.?
There are two very interesting articles which touch in part on this in the Spring issue of DM, which is currently being mounted on the server and should be available after proofing by the end of next week. In alphabetical order:
Arianna Ciula, "Digital palaeography: using the digital representation of medieval script to support palaeographic analysis"
and
Kevin Kiernan, "The Source of the Napier Fragment of Alfred's Boethius" (which I know Dot is familiar with).
Ciula's article is the closest in relevance: it describes a quantitative approach to describing letterforms using a software tool, the System for Paleographic Inspections (SPI). In fact it discusses the question of (qualitative and quantitative) paleographic description directly and has a nice bibliography.
Kiernan's article is less directly concerned with description, but (to simplify greatly) uses imaging software to assess the authenticity of the Old English "Napier Fragment". It also has a nice bibliography
Dot Porter wrote:
First, a brief description of your project.
What paleographical information are you interested in? Letter forms,
abbreviations, ligatures, other?
- What is your purpose for recording these differences? Searching, display,
counting?
- How are you recording this paleographical information? Markup (TEI or
other), entities, Unicode characters, other?
You can reply directly to me, or to the list. I will synchronize all results of this little questionnaire and report back to the list. I think this would also be a good way to start populating the "Fonts, Characters, and Glyphs" section of the DM Wiki.
Amen to that.
-dan
Thanks! Dot
Dorothy Carr Porter Program Coordinator, Research in Computing for Humanities 3-51/3-52 William T. Young Library University of Kentucky Lexington, KY 40391 859-257-9549 http://www.rch.uky.edu
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