4.1133 Edition Software (3/108)
Elaine Brennan & Allen Renear (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Thu, 7 Mar 91 17:15:34 EST
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 4, No. 1133. Thursday, 7 Mar 1991.
(1) Date: Mon, 04 Mar 91 21:53:36 +0000 (79 lines)
From: Dominik Wujastyk <ucgadkw@ucl.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: 4.1114 Q: Database & Collation SW for Editions
(2) Date: Wed, 06 Mar 91 15:38:26 CST (9 lines)
From: Michael Sperberg-McQueen <U35395@UICVM>
Subject: Re: 4.1120 Software: Editions
(3) Date: Tue, 5 Mar 91 22:34 EST (20 lines)
From: <BURT@BRANDEIS>
Subject: software for editions
(1) --------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 04 Mar 91 21:53:36 +0000
From: Dominik Wujastyk <ucgadkw@ucl.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: 4.1114 Q: Database & Collation SW for Editions
> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 4, No. 1114. Saturday, 2 Mar 1991.
> Date: Fri, 1 Mar 91 02:42:25 EST
> From: markt@umd5.umd.edu (Mark Turner)
> Subject: computerizing an edition of Shelley
> I am posting this query for my colleague Neil Fraistat and his
> collaborator Donald H. Reiman, who are looking for help in
> computerizing a critical edition of the complete poems of
> Percy Bysse Shelley. Please send responses to
> Professor Fraistat (nf5@umail.umd.edu) and to me (markt@umd5.umd.edu).
> We are planning a critical edition of the complete poems of Percy Bysshe
> Shelley. This decade-long, multi-volume project involves the collation
> of perhaps fifteen texts or more, including several manuscripts. The
> collation of a half-dozen of these variants will appear in an apparatus
> at the bottom of the page; the collation of these plus the remainder
> will appear in an appendix at the end of each volume. The types of
> variables we want to reflect in the apparatus will differ in each of
> these instances; the bottom of the page should include additions,
> deletions, and changes in word choice and punctuation. The more
> comprehensive historical collation in the appendix will involve these
> kinds of changes plus changes in line indentation and capitalization.
As far as I know, there is only one tool available that will do what
you want. It is called COLLATE and has been written by Peter Robinson
(peterr@vax.oxford.ac.uk) as the core of the Oxford "Computers and
Manuscripts" project. It runs on the Macintosh. Peter can tell
you much more about COLLATE than I can. All I can say is that
I saw one short demonstration, and was extremely impressed. Peter
has a background in editing as well as programming, so he knows what
he's doing.
The COLLATE program can collate the text of up to 100 manuscripts.
These have to be typed onto disk, using certain simple conventions.
You can prepare these texts on any machine, as long as you use the
required tags, which are plain ASCII.
As for output, COLLATE can write out the texts and variants in several
ways, but Peter has written in to COLLATE the ability for it to
write out texts with the appropriate tags for the EDMAC system.
EDMAC is a set of TeX macros for formatting critical editions of almost
arbitrary complexity. EDMAC was written by John Lavagnino
(lav@edu.brandeis.cc.binah) and myself, and we have recently published
an overview of EDMAC in the journal TUGboat: Communications of the TeX
Users Group, issue 11(4), 1991. A book giving full documentation of
the internals of EDMAC (with disk) is in press. The TUGboat article
has example pages of texts from different types of edition (even a
Sanskrit text), so you might like to look at it to see if it would meet
your needs.
COLLATE comes with EDMAC and OzTeX, a free implementation of TeX for
the Mac.
EDMAC and OzTeX are certainly free; I think COLLATE is too, but
check with Peter.
I believe, as I said, that the combination of COLLATE and EDMAC is
the only set of tools that currently exist for doing what you need.
Oh: I just thought of TUSTEP from Tuebingen, by Wilhelm Ott. That
would do it too, but you would (at present) be tied to using the
typesetter at Tuebingen. TUSTEP is very powerful, though, as has
been used to produce many complex editions.
Dominik
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(2) --------------------------------------------------------------16----
Date: Wed, 06 Mar 91 15:38:26 CST
From: Michael Sperberg-McQueen <U35395@UICVM>
Subject: Re: 4.1120 Software: Indexing, Cyrillic, Editions (3/56)
Indexing software: Joel Elliott's description sounds just like CINDEX,
developed by one of the historical-critical edition projects for the
works of the 'founding fathers' [sic] and now available in a PC version
from the Newberry Library here in Chicago. I don't have any more
direct information. -Michael Sperberg-McQueen
(3) --------------------------------------------------------------22----
Date: Tue, 5 Mar 91 22:34 EST
From: <BURT@BRANDEIS>
Subject: software for editions
EDMAC, a set of macros for formatting scholarly editions in the TeX
formatting system, is available through the public domain. Contact
John Lavagnino (LAV@BRANDEIS) for details.
On indexing software: The indexing capabilities of wordprocessors are
useful only if one is indexing the document one is going to put out
on one's own printer. They don't help much if one is constructing an
index from page proofs. I know that in the CP/M world there is a
public domain program called Indexer which will help one make indexes
from page proofs. It is probably on Simtel20. I got it through the
CP/M user's group of the Boston Computer Society.
Note card software: A standby for collating and sorting notes in the
CP/M world was Pro-Tem's NOTEBOOK. I think they must have MS-DOS
versions by now