- Methodological bases
A digital edition makes digitalized versions of an original manuscript available at
one place, together with a scientific, textually critical and commented edition of a
text and necessary descriptive metadata. Digital editions of LA are processed in the
international XML TEI standard that on one hand captures the exact structural,
formal and content aspects of a source including records and administration of
various versions of individual manuscripts, while at the same time it can
efficiently supplement a given edition with superstructural, interpretative
information from a specialized database or possibly from other sources without the
need to interfere in the original text. At the same time, the process of a
preparation of an edition and the filling in of the database are interconnected in
both directions. This means that entries in the database are created or extended
within the process of an edition preparation and the other way around – information
that is added to the database later from other sources is retroactively reflected in
annotations.
- Text processing
While working with the texts, methods commonly used for a creation of an edition
are applied regardless of the form in which it is made accessible. This means that
in the beginning, the quality and availability of individual manuscripts is
assessed, and the main manuscript is chosen. After that, a qualified copyist copies
the text and based on the state of preservation of manuscripts a collation with at
least one or multiple manuscripts is done. As for the actual edition work, two forms
of processing were defined:
- Full textually critical edition
- it makes a text available based on a collation of all available manuscripts
- it creates a full, textually critical apparatus reflecting various types of differences between the manuscripts
- it creates a full, textually critical apparatus reflecting various types of differences between the manuscripts
- Interpretative edition with a reduced critical apparatus
- it makes a text available based on a collation with at least one of the side manuscripts
- its textually critical apparatus does not reflect types of captured variants
- it does not reflect orthographic variants with the exception of proper nouns and toponyms
- it does not capture authorial deletions
- it creates commentaries for easier understanding of texts and indexes for searching
The first type of edition is beneficial to literae annuae only if more significant
differences exist between the manuscripts or if drafts of the reports including
corrections made by a writer or more often by a corrector, possibly a rector of a
college, have survived. This means that the prevailing form of the LA edition will
be the interpretative edition with a reduced critical apparatus,
enriched with interpretative elements and interconnected with a specialized database
that will make further research work easier. Rules for transcription and editing of the literae annuae texts
are based on existing essays dealing with editions of early modern texts, while
at the same time they also reflect specifics of Jesuit documents, as well as the
needs of the users of an edition.
- Annotations and creation of commentaries
Besides the standard textually critical apparatus, a fairly extensive system of
content commentaries is being created for the digital edition of LA as well. It is
in the TEI format and at the same time, is also serves as a basis for indexes and
other search functions. Each commentary is interconnected with the corresponding
entry in the database, based on which a corresponding index entry is generated. The
visualization software then enables a researcher to directly access not only the
textually critical commentaries, but also the superstructural information directly
from the edition. When interpreting the texts, attention is paid especially to:
- Persons
this pertains to both persons directly mentioned in the texts, as well as to
persons identified based on their functions or roles related to the time period
and place described in the source. For instance, if the reports name
representatives of the Church or the Jesuit Order, general designations such as
“decanus Telczensis”, “decanus Slavonicensis” or “praepositus Neoreschensis” are
linked to particular people who held these functions in the given year.
Similarly, if the texts mention activities of the foundress or the nobility,
names of members of the ruling family are traced back for the general terms
“fudatrix nostra” or “illustrissimus hujatus dominus”.
- Corporations
include institutions, corporations and specific organizations (e.g. study
foundations) which are either directly mentioned in the texts or labelled with
substitute terms, or those to which the texts pertain. For instance, the musical
seminary founded by Františka Slavatová is labelled in the source with the
following terms: “seminarium musorgorum”, “convictus musorgorum”, “convictus
Angelicus”, but also simply “seminarium nostrum” or “convicus nostrus”.
- Places (geographic terms)
including an identification of a given location up to the level of the GPS
coordinates that enable to display these places on a map.
- Events
these include religious festivities (festive masses, processions), theater
performances, but also construction activities (construction of a granary,
founding of a pond), repairs of building (reconstruction of roofs, painting of
rooms, planting of forests or orchards), buying and selling of homesteads,
formation of contracts, settlement of disputes, acquisitions and repairs of
movable assets (books, furniture, liturgical objects and clothes, works of art).
If an event relates to movable or immovable objects, a reference to the given
object or building is provided as well.
- Buildings and structures
encompass all immovable monuments, including small sacral architecture, farm
buildings and its parts, also those that were being constructed gradually within
larger building complexes. They are captured as venues of various events, seats
of corporations, objects of construction activities or victims of disasters.
This category of “buildings” also includes elements of cultural landscape and
various types of cultivated land (gardens, fields, orchards). Given the fact
that many of the buildings are mentioned as “venues”, they are also understood
as a specific type of location.
- Objects
include all movables from liturgical objects, clothes, and furniture up to
church equipment. They also encompass books, although independent rules for
their recording exist. It is so, because most of the mentioned books cannot be
identified with a particular extant copy; a similar method as for other objects
is therefore applied and a standard cataloguing entry is used in the case of
identified books.
- Terms
all terms that appear in the texts are captured, with the aim of creating their
index that would be searchable both using terms in the language of the original
text, as well as their Czech equivalents. They usually concern names of
functions, objects, activities, religious holidays and other facts that appear
in the texts under many synonymic names which are united under the most common
term (for instance the term “concionator” includes synonyms “encomiastes”,
“pangeyrista”, “sacer orator”, etc.) which also includes an explanation of its
meaning.
- TEI encoding
Within the academic community, the XML TEI format serves as a generally accepted
standard, especially for processing electronic texts and digital documents from the
field of humanities. Its basis is the universal markup language XML (eXtensible Markup Language). The TEI format is created and administered by
professionals associated in the Text
Encoding Initiative. The structure of the TEI format (last version P5) as
defined in the TEI
Guidelines focuses on describing the content structure of a document and its
metadata. It contains a complete set of elements (marks) and corresponding
attributes (properties) for encoding a wide spectrum of texts of various nature,
age, and formal organization (prose, poetry, drama, dictionaries, manuscripts, old
prints…). Using cascading styles (Cascading Style Sheets) and transformation (for instance via XSLT ), the final XML
document ca be adapted to various output formats (web, printed media, pdf, epub).
In addition to general marks for descriptions of metadata (<teiHeader>) and formal structures of texts (paragraphs, notes, bibliographical
quotations, references1), especially parts of TEI definitions designed for working
with manuscript texts and representation of primary sources. For interconnecting a
transcription and a facsimile, the method of Parallel Transcriptionis used. The reference system of the
critical apparatus is created using the Parallel Segmentation Method with a preference of a positive
apparatus, i.e. elements i.e. elements <lem> and <rdg> are
listed for all items of the critical apparatus <app>. Given the nature
of the project as well as the work with commentaries, elements labelling content
elements of a document the so-called Named Entities are important. Besides basic elements such as
<name>, <date>, <place> the following marks are used
within the project as well: <orgName> for labelling corporations,
<event> for labelling events, <objectName> for
labelling objects and <term> for labelling terms. Corresponding index
lists are created with the help of <list> elements, for instance
<listPerson>, <listOrg>.
One independent XML file is created for each year of the LA existence; the file
also includes encoding of variant manuscripts using the <listWit>
element and the @wit referencing attribute. Examples of encoding for the pilot
years of the edition LA
1702 (a full textually critical edition) and 1729 (an interpretative edition with a
reduce critical apparatus), as well as a detailed
overview of types of textual
variants,
semantic commentaries and index entries, as well as their representation using the TEI elements can be downloaded as attachments no. 3, 6, 8, 9, 10 of the certified methodology.
- E-edition
Since a direct encoding of texts in the XML editor seems difficult for the majority
of colleagues, the tool E-edition, is used for editing. This tool was developed by the
staff of the Department of
Language Development of the Czech Language Institute and it is described in "Metodice pro přípravu a zpracování elektronických edic
starších českých textů" [Methodology for Preparation and Processing
of Electronic Editions of Older Czech Texts].The E-edition is installed as a
template (eEdice.dotx) and a supplement of the MS Word text editor and it is used
for marking relevant parts of the source text and for creating textually critical
and content commentaries. The paragraph and sign styles defined in the template are
automatically converted to corresponding elements of the TEI P5 format in the
subsequent steps. The template also includes an introductory table for recording
metadata. The original version of the template was adjusted to our needs – this
means that it was adjusted for working with variant manuscripts and an
interconnection with the database was additionally programmed, so that it is
possible to simultaneously process a text of an edition and to interconnect and
update entries in the database.
Upon finishing, the word documents are – in cooperation with colleagues from the
Czech Language Institute –, via a series of XSLT transformation, converted to XML
files that subsequently undergo a final revision in the Oxygen editor. An overview of the used styles
and their conversion to TEI as well as examples of editorial work in the E-edition
template for the pilot years 1702 (a full textually critical edition) and 1729 (an interpretative
edition with a reduce critical apparatus) are available for
downloading as attachments no. 1, 2, 5 of the certified methodology.
- The BBDR Database
As for a database for storing data used in the E-edition, or rather data excerpted
from edited texts, the Bio-Bibliographical Database of Members of the Religious Order
Living in the Czech Lands in the Early Modern Age (BBDR) is used. The database
was created in 2010 and it is designed as a place for gathering information on life
in monastic communities. Its basis is the modified Clavius library system respecting international librarian standards
MARC21 and UNIMARC. Initially, biographical information and its sources were
accentuated. Subsequently, the database developed into two main modules: the
database of main authorities (= database of 17th and 18th centuries members of
religious orders in the Czech Lands, that is biographical) and the catalogue of
manuscripts (= database of narrative historiographical sources of 17th and 18th
centuries monastic provenience, that is bibliographical). Other bibliographical
modules are the catalogue of old prints and the catalogue of books which fulfill
only a supportive function, though.
In addition to the above-mentioned modules, the digital edition also uses modules
of geographical authorities and corporations. The module of subject authorities was
newly adapted, so that terms and functions connected with the life of the Jesuit
community (including for instance recording of religious holidays), as well as
information pertaining to buildings and other movable and immovable property
mentioned in the annual reports, could be registered in the database as well. All
entries in the database have a sophisticated system of aliases, so that it is easier
to search not only according to synonymic terms in Latin, but also according to
their Czech translations and various variants of local and personal names (aliases).
For instance
- Telč - Telcz - Teltsch
- Ignatius de Loyola - divus Patriarcha Noster Ignatius - Sanctus Patriarcha
Noster - Ínigo López de Loyola - Ignác z Loyoly
- Daemon - Diabolus - Ďábel - Malignus spiritus - Spiritus malignus
- seminarium musorgorum - seminář svatých andělů - hudební seminář - convictus musorgorum - convictus Angelicus
- Preparation of digital images of the manuscript
If allowed by the existing legislation, the electronic edition of litearae annuae
also contains digital copies of the individual preserved manuscripts. The
applied visualization system EVT enables interconnecting a text with a digitalized
picture of the original, either at the level of pages (with the help of the <pb>
element), or at the level of lines (<lb>). However, digitalized versions
obtained or acquired at memory institutions must be formally adjusted and
unified for the purposes of web publishing. An open-source program Scan
Tailor is used for this purpose – this program is used for batch processing
of visual data and it enables to perform the following operations:
- to adjust page orientation (by turning it by 90 or 180 degrees)
- to divide a folio into separate pages (a two-page is split into two independent pages)
- to detect and cut empty edges around a text
- to align lines thanks to a slight turning of a picture
- to set output parameters of pictures (format, size, DPI resolution)
The chosen program has the advantage that it can detect adjustments of a picture
on its own and apply them to all files within a folder. If some of the files
contain non-standard elements, the individual steps can be adjusted manually.
- Publication and visualization
In order to publish a literae annuae edition, an open-source visualization
tool Edition Visualization
Technology (EVT) – developed by a team led by Professor Roberto Rosselli Del
Turco at the University of Pisa – is used. The EVT is a simple and easily modifiable
application for making digital editions created according to the XML TEI standard
available online. It offers its users a comfortable research environment, enabling
them to easily perform content and index searches, as well as tools for a collation
of individual manuscripts and for working with a textually critical apparatus. How to work with the EVT, as well as its functions, are described in more detail on an independent page.
