Subject: Re: [ANSAX-L] Junius 11 and Beowulf and such
From: "Dan O'Donnell" <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 18 Mar 2009 14:13:18 -0600

It's not the DVD or CD format--although using a CD or DVD does bring 
with it some technical limitations over online publication. It has to do 
with the software being used to process the content.

If you're talking about Martin Foy's Bayeux Tapestry edition, then it 
was published on CD-ROM, in fact. In his case it will work on Windows 
98+ and Mac System 7.0 (you need a "Classic Mode" if you run it in OS 
X+). I don't think it will work on Linux (a market share roughly similar 
to Mac), because I think it uses Shockwave, a technology that was 
written for Windows, was partially ported to Mac, and not ported (or 
even emulated) on Linux.

My edition of CH runs on anything because it is pure HTML. You can't get 
full text searching on anything other than windows, however, because the 
full-text searchable version is processed by Greenstone Digital Library 
software (while Greenstone normally runs on anything, the version that 
works on CD-ROMs requires windows).

In the case of Muir's edition (like a number of editions from SEENET), 
the problem is that the programming was written for a specific browser: 
Microsoft's Internet Explorer and takes advantages of features (and 
bugs) that exist only in that browser. This means  these editions will 
never run on Linux (Microsoft won't port the programme to Linux), cannot 
be ported so that they run on-line without complete rewriting (the 
software is client-based rather than server-based), and may have trouble 
with Macs--since Microsoft IE is not a native Mac application and is 
written to take advantage of specific features of the Windows OS.

Kiernan's edition of Beowulf has some client-side programming, but this 
is written in a standard java and, if I remember aright, works on all 
OSs including Mac and Linux.

I wrote a column about this a while back for Heroic Age 
(http://www.heroicage.org/issues/7/ecolumn.html), with another 
reflecting on some of the issues involved in what I would consider 
overdetermining the digital editorial text: 
http://www.heroicage.org/issues/8/em.html. A related piece that covers 
some of the same ground as both is in the Blackwell Companion to Digital 
Literary Studies: 
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/view?docId=blackwell/9781405148641/9781405148641.xml&chunk.id=ss1-4-2&toc.depth=1&toc.id=ss1-4-2&brand=9781405148641_brand

This is something digital scholars have got to work out. We are in 
effect still living in the browser wars of the late 1990s when everybody 
else has long moved on (Facebook doesn't care what operating system you 
use). Peter Robinson pointed out in an article in Digital Medievalist 
that digitally published scholarship of the first rank--such as some of 
the manuscript work in the Canterbury Tales Project--was not being cited 
nearly as frequently as it deserved (nor having nearly the appropriate 
impact). Obsolescence within a half decade really should not be 
happening in the internet age, the primary feature of which (IMO) is the 
separation of content and processing.

-dan
Erilar wrote:
> I've been following this discussion and happened to wonder why these 
> programs are CDs.  Is the format so much better than DVD?  I ask 
> because I have a Bayeux Tapestry DVD that's quite interactive and 
> happy to work on just about anything, or so it seems.  I'm not sure it 
> would work on a digital TV system, but it works on both my old and new 
> Macs and says it works on Windows 95 or later. Does this format hold 
> less information than a picky CD??
>
> Mary Loomer Oliver
> Germanic philologist, medieval enthusiast
>
> http://www.chibardun.net/~erilarlo
>
> *********************************************************************
>  Reminder: For assistance write to Bill Schipper ([email-masked])

-- 
Daniel Paul O'Donnell
Associate Professor of English
University of Lethbridge

Chair and CEO, Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org/)
Founding Director, Digital Medievalist Project (http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/)
Chair, Electronic Editions Advisory Board, Medieval Academy of America

Vox: +1 403 329-2377
Fax: +1 403 382-7191 (non-confidental)
Home Page: http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/

*********************************************************************
  Reminder: For assistance write to Bill Schipper ([email-masked])