This site © 2007 by the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, CB3 9DP
Alpo Honkapohja
University of Helsinki
Email: ahonkapo at mappi dot helsinki dot fi
The paper introduces my PhD project which is making a digital online edition of manuscript O.1.77, located at Trinity College Cambridge.
O.1.77 is a late Middle English pocket-sized medical handbook, which according to codicological and dialectological analysis dates c. 1460 from London or Westminster. The manuscript contains ca. 15 medical texts, in English and Latin, on a variety of subjects, ranging from uroscopies, to plague treatises, alchemical texts and astrological charts. It shares some texts, common watermarks, and illustrations with a number of Sloane group manuscripts (1118, 1313, 2320, 2567, 2948, 2566) in the British Library and MS 19 in Boston Countway Library of Medicine (Voigts 1990, Taavitsainen 2004).
My edition will include the MS O.1.77 in all, and give equal attention to Middle English and Latin texts in the codex, making it the first digital edition to fully represent the multilingual aspects of late Mediaeval scientific and utilitarian manuscripts. As far as I know, there are no editions of the Sloane group manuscripts.
Reliable editions should reproduce features of the manuscript as accurately and faithfully as possible, convey them in as flexible a form as possible, and keep any editorial interference transparent (see e.g. Lass 2004). My editorial principles involve making a distinction between document, text and context, meaning the actual physical manuscript, its linguistic contents, and the historical and linguistic circumstances surrounding its production.
All these levels will be encoded into a user interface which will allow the researcher to work flexibly with various aspects of the text and document, select the ones which he or she needs while ignoring the rest, and even have access to the annotated document and add new layers of tagging. The encoding standard used will be based on and compliant with the latest incarnation of the TEI XML standard (P5, published 1.11.2007). XML can be converted to other formats and viewed on a wide range of software platforms.
I am part of the Digital Editions for Corpus Linguistics (DECL) project, at the Research Unit for Variation and Change in English (VARIENG). The DECL project aims to bridge the gap between historical manuscript studies and corpus linguistics, by developing editions which combine detailed representation of manuscript reality with the flexibility of search tools developed for linguistic computing.
References