<oo>→<ghe> Ghent University: Historical documents, digital approaches

Maintained by: David J. Birnbaum (djbpitt@gmail.com) Last modified: 2018-10-08T00:57:18+0000

Description and goals

This three-day hands-on workshop, Thursday, 2013-09-05 through Saturday, 2013-09-07, provides twelve hours of instruction in using eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines to encode and describe medieval manuscript materials. The instructor is David J. Birnbaum, a medieval Slavic philologist who teaches digital humanities at the University of Pittsburgh (djbpitt@gmail.com, http://www.obdurodon.org).

Workshop flyer

Before the workshop

• Download the <oXgyen/> XML editor from http://www.oxygenxml.com and install it on your laptop. You will need to request a free, fully-functional thirty-day license, which you can do at the download site.
• Read: An even gentler introduction to XML.
• In the hands-on portion of the workshop we will work with Latin and Slavonic manuscript materials. If you would prefer, you are welcome instead to bring your own materials (plain-text manuscript description or transcription).

Workshop schedule

Thursday, 2013-09-05: Introduction to XML and the general TEI infrastructure

• Session 1, 1:00–3:00. Introduction to XML (slides )
• Coffee break, 3:00–3:30
• Session 2, 3:30–5:30. Introduction to TEI (slides )

Friday, 2013-09-06: Basic TEI encoding for manuscript transcription

• Session 3, 1:00–3:00: Encoding of manuscripts using TEI (slides, by Matthew Driscoll )
• Coffee break, 3:00–3:30
• Session 4, 3:30–5:30: Encoding critical editions in TEI (slides )
  See also Section 12 of TEI P5: Critical apparatus

Saturday, 2013-09-05: Basic TEI encoding for manuscript description

• Session 5, 1:00–3:00: Manuscript description (slides )
  See also Section 10 of TEI P5: Manuscript description
• Coffee break, 3:00–3:30
• Session 6, 3:30–5:00: Taking stock
  • Sample XML projects at http://www.obdurodon.org and http://dh.obdurodon.org (student course projects)
  • What next (slides )

Documents

Charter of Count Thomas of Savoy and Countess Joan of Constantinople bestowed on the Bijloke abbey in Ghent (September 1242, DB_27064)

Prepared by Els De Paermentier

• Transcription and description (original charter and fourteenth-century cartulary)
• Original images: 1r, 1v, 2r, seals
• Cartulary image: Cartulary

Mons, Bibliothèque Universitaire, 847

Prepared by Tjamke Snijders

• Description of Mons BU 847
• Hucbald of St.-Amand, Rictrudis abb. Marchianensis: Vita (BHL 7247) (Transcription, Latin; Acta Sanctorum Mai. 3, Antwerpen, 1680, pp. 81–89)
• Rictrude, Abbess of Marchiennes (Translation, English; Sainted women of the dark ages, ed. Jo Ann McNamara, et al., Durham and London: Duke UP, 1992, pp. 195–219)
• Mons BU 847 images: 010, 011, 012, 013, 014, 015, 016, 017, 018, 019, 020, 021, 022, 023
• Douai BM 859 images: 069, 070, 071, 072, 072b, 073, 074, 075, 076, 077, 078, 079, 080, 081, 082, 083, 084, 085, 086, 087, 088, 089, 090, 091, 092, 093
• The torture of Eusebia (for transcription practice)
  • The torture of Eusebia (selection of three paragraphs [Latin edition and translation] that contain abbreviations and corrections)
  • Eusebia manuscripts (images of exact fragments of text from three different manuscripts)

Bdinski sbornik (Codex gandavensis slavicus 408)

• 4 St Petka (Parasceve) of Rome (ff. 58r–72r)
• 7 St Thais (ff. 106v–111r)
• 12 St Mary of Egypt (ff. 162r–191r)
• 14 Topography of Jerusalem (ff. 234r–241r)
• Digital images of the manuscript (hosted by the Universiteitsbibliotheek Gent)
• Bdinki sbornik project site
• Manuscript content description (Repertorium)

Supplementary materials

XML and TEI

• The TEI Guidelines
  • Chapter 10: Manuscript description
  • Chapter 11: Representation of primary sources
• Materials from David J. Birnbaum’s Computational methods in the humanities course (see also links to his projects and his conference presentation Toward a reader-oriented theory of edition)
• Genetic editions (Elena Pierazzo)
  • An encoding model for genetic editions
  • Proust prototype

Latin paleography

• Junicode (short for Junius-Unicode) is a Unicode font for medievalists
• Latin transcription: abbreviation, punctuation, and more (prepared by Tjamke Snijders; see also A. Cappelli’s Lexicon abbreviaturarum)

Charters

(list of resources prepared by Els De Paermentier and David J. Birnbaum)

• CEI: Charters Encoding Initiative. See especially their Tag library and Diplomatic terminology, an online version of the Vocabulaire international de la diplomatique, ed. Maria Milagros Cárcel Ortí, 2. ed., Valéncia 1997 (Collecció Oberta).
• Anglo-Saxon charters. Pilot project funded by the British Academy between March and August 2005. The on-line publication is based around the XML mark-up of charters written in Anglo-Saxon England before A.D. 900.
• The registers of the Counts of Holland in the Hainaut period, 1299-1345. An electronic edition of the registers that were kept by the clerks of the Counts of Holland, Zeeland and West-Friesland during the period 1316–1345. The registers pertaining to Zuidholland, Kennemerland, Amstelland-Waterland, and Friesland are the only ones published to date, but the other regions (a total of 3,400 documents and other texts relating to the Counts’ administration) are planned for the future.
• University of Toronto Deeds project. Includes Database of dated medieval English charters (corpus of over 9.500 private Latin charters regarding property exchange from twelfth- and thirteenth-century England and Wales) and the Dater of medieval English charters, a computarized system that compares word patterns or phrases of an undated charter with a database of 6,521 dated charters and, with the help of a mathematical approximation, produces a report with a tentative date and a list of matching word patterns.
• monasterium.net, the largest cross-national virtual archive of over 350,000 medieval charters. For each charter is it possible to download the raw XML file. See the catalogue of collections and a sample charter (Chartularium Sangallense 04 (1266-1299), 1266 III 15).
• TELMA (Traitement électronique des manuscrits et des archives) of the Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes (IRHT) in Paris. See especially the TEI-based project Les chartes originales antérieures à 1121 (currently under the supervision of Cyril Masset) and the Actes royaux of Philip III.
• More information and considerations on the current developments and tools for the encoding of medieval charters can be found on the website of the Ecole des Chartes (Sorbonne, Paris), including an exemplary TEI markup schema for charters and charter corpora.
• The separate graphical visualization of the main text components of an early medieval charter is illustrated at the site of the Bayerisches Staatsministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kunst (Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte).

Manuscript description

Many on-line manuscript catalogues provide convenient search interfaces. Here are a few that go beyond that, and might be considered models for how digital manuscript descriptions can support not just more convenient access, but also new types of analysis and visualization. All provide access to the underlying raw XML.

• The goal of e-codices (Virtual manuscript library of Switzerland) is to provide access to all medieval and selected early modern manuscripts of Switzerland via a virtual library. At the moment, the virtual library contains 981 manuscripts from 42 different libraries, with more planned, and in addition to the general web site, a free iOS app is available in the Apple store. Note the integration of overview, facsimile, and formatted descriptions, and the provision of the raw XML.
• handrit.is is an analytical catalog of Icelandic manuscripts currently held in several institutions. It provides sophisticated browsing and search facilities and has an integrated personography, which provides access to biographical information about persons mentioned in the descriptions.
• The Repertorium of Old Bulgarian literature and letters provides analytical descriptions of over one hundred early Slavic manuscripts, with tools for searching by repository information and by textual content. The prototype plectogram of Physiologus texts is an early view of functionality currently under development to provide a graphic representation of textual correspondences within the corpus.