From the manuscript to the screen: Implementing electronic editions of mediaeval handwritten material

This paper describes the electronic editing of the Middle English material housed in the Hunterian Collection at Glasgow University Library (GUL), a joint project undertaken by the universities of Málaga, Glasgow, Oviedo, Murcia and Jaén which pursues the compilation of an electronic corpus of mediaeval Fachprosa in the vernacular (http://hunter.filosofia.uma.es/manuscripts). The paper therefore addresses the concept of electronic editing as applied to The corpus of Late Middle English scientific prose with the following objectives: (a) to describe the editorial principles and the theoretical implications adopted; and (b) to present the digital layout and the tool implemented for data retrieval. A diplomatic approach is then proposed wherein the editorial intervention is kept to a minimum. Accordingly, features such as lineation, punctuation and emendations are every now and then accurately reproduced as by the scribe’s hand whilst abbreviations are yet expanded in italics. GUL MS Hunter 497, holding a 15th-century English version of Aemilius Macer’s De viribus herbarum, will be used as a sample demonstration (Calle-Martín – Miranda-García, forthcoming).The present research has been funded by the Autonomous Government of Andalusia (project P07-HUM–02609) and by the Spanish Ministry of Education (project FFI2008-02336)

To Teach, Delight, and Inspire. Experiences with Kim Sowol’s Jindallaekkot (Azaleas) as a Printed Facsimile, Printed Scholarly Edition, Web-based Reading Text, and Virtual Reality Experience

Here we document how college students responded to a canonical book of Korean poems, Kim Sowol’s 1925 Jindallaekkot (Azaleas), presented in a variety of formats: as part of a 2014 printed facsimile, a 2007 printed scholarly edition, a reading text articulated as a web page on a tablet, and a radical refiguration as a virtual reality forest. We asked students to describe if they enjoyed and felt inspired by their encounters with Kim Sowol’s poetry in these different formats. We also asked if they felt their experiences were educational and if they engendered a desire to share Kim Sowol’s poetry with international peers. Student responses suggest that encounters with novel forms of canonical texts are enjoyable, inspiring, and created a desire to share them with international peers, especially if novel presentations are complemented by more familiar textual idioms, which students found the most educational

To Teach, Delight, and Inspire. Experiences with Kim Sowol’s Jindallaekkot (Azaleas) as a Printed Facsimile, Printed Scholarly Edition, Web-based Reading Text, and Virtual Reality Experience

Here we document how college students responded to a canonical book of Korean poems, Kim Sowol’s 1925 Jindallaekkot (Azaleas), presented in a variety of formats: as part of a 2014 printed facsimile, a 2007 printed scholarly edition, a reading text articulated as a web page on a tablet, and a radical refiguration as a virtual reality forest. We asked students to describe if they enjoyed and felt inspired by their encounters with Kim Sowol’s poetry in these different formats. We also asked if they felt their experiences were educational and if they engendered a desire to share Kim Sowol’s poetry with international peers. Student responses suggest that encounters with novel forms of canonical texts are enjoyable, inspiring, and create a desire to share them with international peers, especially if novel presentations are complemented by more familiar textual idioms, which students found the most educational

The Passing of Print

This paper argues that ephemera is a key instrument of cultural memory, marking the things intended to be forgotten. This important role means that when ephemera survives, whether accidentally or deliberately, it does so despite itself. These survivals, because they evoke all those other objects that have necessarily been forgotten, can be described as uncanny. The paper is divided into three main sections. The first situates ephemera within an uncanny economy of memory and forgetting. The second focuses on ephemera at a particular historical moment, the industrialization of print in the nineteenth century. This section considers the liminal place of newspapers and periodicals in this period, positioned as both provisional media for information as well as objects of record. The third section introduces a new configuration of technologies – scanners, computers, hard disks, monitors, the various connections between them – and considers the conditions under which born-digital ephemera can linger and return. Through this analysis, the paper concludes by considering digital technologies as an apparatus of memory, setting out what is required if we are not to be doubly haunted by the printed ephemera within the digital archive

Text and Genre in Reconstruction

In this broad-reaching, multi-disciplinary collection, leading scholars investigate how the digital medium has altered the way we read and write text. In doing so, it challenges the very notion of scholarship as it has traditionally been imagined. Incorporating scientific, socio-historical, materialist and theoretical approaches, this rich body of work explores topics ranging from how computers have affected our relationship to language, whether the book has become an obsolete object, the nature of online journalism, and the psychology of authorship. The essays offer a significant contribution to the growing debate on how digitization is shaping our collective identity, for better or worse. Text and Genre in Reconstruction will appeal to scholars in both the humanities and sciences and provides essential reading for anyone interested in the changing relationship between reader and text in the digital age

Digital Humanities and Qur’ãnic Manuscript Studies: New Perspectives and Challenges for Collaborative Spaces and Plural Views

أهداف البحث: يهدف هذا البحث إلى استعراض الدراسات الحديثة حول المخطوطات القرآنية المبكرة والتي استخدمت فيها المؤلفة الأدوات الرقمية الحديثة؛ من قبيل برامج معالجة الصور، ووضع علامات على النص، وفهم المخطوطات عبر استخدام برمجيات شجرة التطور (Phylogenetic software) – ومن ثم فقد بيّنت الآثار المنهجية للتحرير الرقمي للمخطوطات وإمكانية إيجاد مساحة للتعاون تُعرض فيها البيانات كما فسرها العديد من العلماء.  منهج الدراسة: في استعراضه للأبحاث السابقة والأبحاث المستقبلية حول مخطوطات القرآن الكريم؛ يرتكز هذا البحث على النهج المعرفي الذي يقدمه لنا التحرير الرقمي لنصوص مخطوطات القرآن الكريم باستخدام نظام لوضع العلامات لترميز الإصدارات وتبادلها، ويتناول هذا المنهج بالدراسة والتمحيص. لا يقف وضع العلامات والرموز على النص عند كونهما مجرد أداتين لإنجاز المهمة السيميائية أو الرمزية، ولكنهما تعكسان وتنتجان بُعدًا سيميائيًا مستقلاً. النتائج: يتبنى هذا البحث في عرض فرضيات الدراسة أسلوب إصدارات المخطوطات بوصفه مجالًا لإمكانية مصاغة بذكاء يُتاح للقارئ من خلالها اختبار عملية نشر المخطوطة وجدلية النص. لقد طُبّقت تكنولوجيا المعلومات المستعارة من علم الأحياء وكذلك التحليل الرقمي على بعض مخطوطات القرآن، ومن ثم ثبتت مزايا تحرير إصدار المخطوطات من قيود الصفحات الخطية المحدودة والجامدة للنص المطبوع، وقدمت المؤلفة بالتالي حلاً لمشكلة عرض تعددية المخطوطات. أصالة البحث: يتضح من البحث الحديث في الترميز الرقمي والتحليل الرائد المستعار من علم الأحياء لنصوص مخطوطات القرآن أن المنظور الرقمي قادر على تقديم منهج معرفي جديد لدراسات مخطوطات القرآن من خلال منصة تتسع لكمّ ضخم من الفرضيات المتنوعة وتعترف بتجاوز الحدود الجامدة، وهو ما يمنحنا منظومة عابرة للحدود والثقافات وقدرة على العمل باستخدام أنظمة تشغيل مختلفة في ظل تعددية البيانات التي يجري عرضها بكل شفافية.Purpose: This article aims at giving an overview of recent research projects carried out by the author in early Qurʾānic manuscripts applying digital tools – in terms of imaging processing, tagging of the text and phylogenetics – thus showing the methodological implications in digitally editing manuscripts and the feasibility of a collaborative space that displays data interpreted by several scholars. Methodology: In outlining previous and future projects in early Qurʾānic manuscripts, this article is based on and discusses the new epistemological approach offered by digital editing of Qurʾānic manuscript texts by using a mark-up language to encode and share editions. The mark-up and tagging of the text are not only instruments for achieving semiotic tasks but also represent and produce a separate semiotic dimension. Findings: This research endorses the theory of manuscript editions as a field of intelligently structured possibility that displays hypotheses and allows the reader to experience the manuscript transmission and debatedness of the text. Digital philology and analysis have been applied to some Qurʾānic manuscripts proving the advantages of freeing manuscripts’ edition from the constraints of the linear, circumscribed and static page of the printed text thus offering a solution to the problem of rendering manuscript movement. Originality: This is a cutting-edge research in digital encoding and pioneer phylogenetic analysis of Qurʾānic manuscript texts. It demonstrates that the digital paradigm can offer a new epistemological approach in Qurʾānic manuscript studies through a platform that admits a great quantity of varied hypotheses and crossing boundaries. This offers a transnational and transcultural system, working with different operating systems in a plurality of transparently displayed data

TEI P5 and Special Characters Outside Unicode

1. Introduction One of the major challenges facing TEI encoders of older documents (ancient and medieval manuscripts, early print, manuscripts transcribed in modern print editions) is the range of special characters and abbreviations that they contain. This issue is especially critical for online documentary editions, where the goal is to present the digital facsimile of a manuscript alongside its electronic transcription. Many of the characters in the facsimile will have no exact cor..