-----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.
Dot
*************************************** Dorothy Carr Porter, Program Coordinator Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities University of Kentucky 351 William T. Young Library Lexington, KY 40506
dporter@uky.edu 859-257-9549 ***************************************
I strongly believe that a palaeographic description can not leave aside the image of the manuscript. That's why, in this perspective, the image-based edition is the most intresting one.
However a sort of textual organised description could be imagined. For instance, a "b" has usually a bow and a vertical stroke. Like a database with determined fields, to which add content information, the same could probably be though for a set of letters in a certain style.
Arianna Ciula
On Tue, 29 Jun 2004 13:04:40 -0400 "Dorothy C. Porter" Dorothy.Porter@uky.edu wrote:
-----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.
Dot
Dorothy Carr Porter, Program Coordinator Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities University of Kentucky 351 William T. Young Library Lexington, KY 40506
dporter@uky.edu 859-257-9549
dm-l mailing list dm-l@uleth.ca http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l
---------------------- Arianna Ciula arianna.ciula@kcl.ac.uk
-
Arianna Ciula -
Dorothy C. Porter