Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 356.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2000 10:44:27 +0100
From: cbf@socrates.Berkeley.EDU
Subject: Re: 14.351 errors in e-books; XML & proprietary formats
The net makes possible a new modality of scholarship, a modality which
allows the collaboration of scholars at both the "originating" and
"receiving" ends to the benefit of the entire scholarly community
The Virginia e-books project is one such example. Let me offer two more.
For over twenty years a group of scholars has been engaged in creating a
union database of the primary sources for medieval Iberian literature
(Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese) called PhiloBiblon. PhiloBiblon will
continue for the foreseeable future. Had we decided to wait until the
database was "finished" our colleagues would not be able to use it until
some time in the 21st century. We have made it available on CD-ROM and,
about three years ago, over the net
(http://sunsite.Berkeley.EDU/PhiloBiblon/phhm.html).
In its current version it is both incomplete and inaccurate. We know
that. Nevertheless, it represents our best efforts and it is still
useful. As scholars with more specialized knowledge use the database, they
let us know about errors and provide additional information, whose souce
we acknowledge.
Similarly, Columbia and Berkeley have been engaged for the past four years
on the Digital Scriptorium project (now joined by the Huntington Library,
New York Public Library, the U. of Texas, and a number of smaller
institutions), whose purpose is to digitize representative pages from
_every_ medieval MS in both collections along with as much information as
we have about each MS. In many cases, especially with regard to fragments,
we have no idea of the identity of the text. We have chosen to include
such fragments in the image database to make them as broadly available as
possible in the hope that specialists will be able to identify them and
even lead us to other fragments from the same MS.
The best is the enemy of the good. Even incomplete information is better
than no information.
Charles Faulhaber The Bancroft Library UC Berkeley, CA 94720-6000
(510) 642-3782 FAX (510) 642-7589 cfaulhab@library.berkeley.edu
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