-----Original Message----- From: Murray McGillivray mmcgilli@ucalgary.ca To: Digital Medievalist Community mailing list dm-l@uleth.ca Date: Tue, 29 Jun 2004 10:36:24 -0600 Subject: Re: [dm-l] palaeography and computing
<snip> The thing that would be most helpful, actually, is a universally accepted "controlled vocabulary" for paleographic description, either verbal or in terms of graphical metrics (or ideally both), on which we could build descriptive structures in XML or whatever. I don't think paleographers are close to having that. **********
Last year I went through the introductions to several Old English facsimiles (Vercelli Book, Hatton 20, Junius 11, Royal 7 C xii; and Ker's Catalogue - whatever was easily available at UK) in an attempt to glean such a controlled vocabulary. It was an interesting experience - paleographers seem to have different terms to describe the same forms, and I found that many terms were rather vague and only made sense when I actually saw the letter in question (ascender "rises well above the bow" or "projects slightly to the left"). And these lengthy descriptions are not always suitable as markup.
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