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Now that the heavens and earth are both appeas'd, |
OCTAVO
A few words from our top Gizmo Correspondent, Colin Burrow
The American publishers Octavo have begun a series of electronic reproductions of early modern books, which combine the pleasures and detail of a photographic facsimile with the convenience - say it, pastability - of e-texts. So far they offer Hooke's Micrographia, Newton's Opticks, Shakespeare's Poems (1640), with a variety of goodies planned for future publication, including Johnson's Dictionary, Harvey on the circulation of the blood and Vesalius's De Humani Corporis Fabrica. The focus is on texts with a large visual component, but they are also promising some more texty texts such as Areopagitica in the near future.
What do you get? Well, the great thing about the series is that the texts come as PDF files which can be viewed with an Adobe Acrobat viewer. This is free, small, quite fast, and many people will have it anyway installed on their systems. It enables you to view the volumes in near-photographic quality (you can see things like show through from the previous page, splodges of ink, torn corners, even the indentations made by individual pieces of type -- although real bibliographers might grouse at the lack of good shots of watermarks). You can also zoom in, scroll down, and navigate through the volume by means of hyperlinks. Rudimentary keyword searches are possible as well as more sophisticated proximity searches. And you can paste text from what appears to be a photograph into a word-processor. Pages can be viewed in three levels of detail: Print (which is black and white and works fast), Browse (which is in decent colour, but which disables text copying), Read (which is in good colour quality and which enables copying text) and Examine (which is extremely high detail, with pixels only becoming visible at 800x magnification). Examine mode is slowish on a Pentium 166, but Read mode lets you, well, read. And Octavo have cleverly made it look as though you are turning the pages as you move through the volume.
The limitations are mostly those of the Adobe Acrobat Viewer. Copying text works quite well, except that if you copy the bottom half of one page on an opening you also as far as I could tell have to copy the text at the bottom of the facing page. Sometimes text pasted from the 1640 Shakespeare's poems lost its line-endings. But one can live with this once one knows it's a problem. There are nice touches: a problem with the 1640 volume is finding which of Benson's combined and retitled sonnets correspond to the numbers in Thorpe's Quarto. Octavo get round this by having a side bar which lets you hop to the poems in their 1609 numberings.
This is good stuff. And it is cheap: the Shakespeare volume is 25 US dollars plus 3 dollars postage. Now think of a wish list (Milton's Poems 1645, the Jonson Folio, Herrick's Hesperides ...). Me, I'm waiting for the Vesalius: can't wait to see all those bodies pulling their flesh off, and all for 75 US dollars...
To find out more, visit http://www.octavo.com.
ARTS AND HUMANITIES DATA SERVICE
The Joint Information Systems Committee of the United Kingdom's Higher
Education Funding Councils (or rather, the JISC of the UK's HEFCs) fund
this attempt to collect and catalogue and offer good quality electronic
resources on-line. Those who are in love with the Internet's fragmented
side and who enjoy picking up a text of Milton in Perth and then a text of
Marvell in the other Perth won't see the point of it, but there is
something to be said for a body which considers the best ways of creating
publicity, access, and protocols for serious research resources which have
often taken a lot of effort to produce. Also, the one thing education
systems need is lots of committees, as any member of the NAFH working group
of the PTTP committee of CERES can tell you.
So far the literary material is basically the Oxford Text Archive and the link from AHDS sends you straight there. We already have a link to OTA on our web page so that's not a great advance. The History materials are more impressive although AHDS again acts as a central linking hub. One of CERES' most oft-repeated sententiae is that there is a lot of potential here and it could become a wonderful resource (particularly in this case for its interdisciplinary possibilities) BUT that depends on the contributions made by people like us. At this stage the food for thought here is mainly for those who are thinking of putting resources on-line themselves. Find the AHDS at http://ahds.ac.uk.
NEW ISSUES OF EMLS AND RENAISSANCE FORUM
Early Modern Literary Studies 4.1 is out, based at
http://purl.oclc.org/emls/emlshome.html. Articles include...
Renaissance Forum 3.1 is out, based at http://www.hull.ac.uk/renforum. Articles include...
MONTPELLIER EARLY MODERN ENGLISH DOCUMENTS (MEMED)
...is at http://alor.univ-montp3.fr/MEMED/.
Currently this service is offering A Declaration of the Sentence and Deposition of Elizabeth, the usurper and pretensed Queen of England (1588), The Pater Noster, the Creed, and the commandments of God in English, with many other godly lessons, right necessary for youth and all other to learn and to know, according to the commandment and injunctions given by the authority of the king's highness through this his realm (1538), and William Elderton's A New Ballad declaring the dangerous shooting of the gun at court (1579).
All of these are in HTML format although it is planned that all documents will eventually be offered in RTF format as well (RTF will be more easily accommodated by your word-processing software). More transcriptions are underway.
Also now based at the University of Montpellier is the home-page of the Societe Francaise Shakespeare: http://alor.univ-montp3.fr/serinf/SFS/. This has details of the Society, and details of its activities and congresses since 1979.
The Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches sur la Renaissance Anglaise has a large collection of Shakespearean videos which have been catalogued at http://alor.univ-montp3.fr/serinf/CERRA/Shakespeare_Multimedia/ . The list gives a lot of information about each film and could help solve those 'who was that guy who played Macduff in that weird version which was all dark' questions.
ABRAHAM COWLEY ON-LINE ARCHIVE
New images are being added all the time at http://etext.virginia.edu/kinney/.
At present this site, maintained by Daniel Kinney, has two texts by Cowley - The Third Part of the Works of Mr. Abraham Cowley Being his Six Books of Plants (1689), and Translation of the Sixth Book of Mr. Cowley's Plantarum (1680) - which can be read and searched. It also has many pictures of Cowley, his works, and of many related sources.
As one would expect given its affiliation to the Electronic Text Center at Virginia, this site is sensibly organised and the reproductions are very good. The archive is introduced at http://etext.virginia.edu/kinney/about.html.
BIDS AUTOJOURNALS
Find out about this service at http://www.bids.ac.uk/news/autojnls.html. The deal is that BIDS will e-mail the Contents Pages of journals when they
are catalogued at BIDS - which is very frequently. If you love browsing the
periodicals shelves then this will spoil your fun, but do you really catch
everything of interest? Really?
One wonderful feature is that you can customize your own list of journals from the huge list at BIDS. Although it can take quite a while to trawl through and choose the ones you want, this can be very useful as it points to which periodicals aren't there. BIDS is great, but it is not perfect. Then again, the MLA Bibliography doesn't do this (or we don't think it does anyway). If your institution is with the programme, enjoy!
MORE RENASCENCE EDITIONS
Rachel Speght's A Mouzell for Melastomus (1617), a reply to a misogynist tract, is available from Renascence Editions at the URL: http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/rachel.html. Also now available is Mortalities Memorandum at
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/mortal.htm. Sowernam's Esther hath hang'd Haman and the Countess of Pembroke's translation of Antonie are in progress.
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For further information on CERES, please write to Gavin Alexander or Raphael Lyne.
This page is maintained by Andrew Zurcher, and was last updated on
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