Production
The edition is a work in progress; as of fall 2016, we have accomplished 80% of our original goals and we are looking for ways of expansion and enhancement. All of the manuscripts have been identified and digital copies have been linked to the site. The transcriptions are complete for the base manuscripts. The English translation is complete.
Most of the manuscript images come from Gallica at the Bibliothèque nationale française, and they are freely available online.
Each transcription has been reviewed by two parties (Ramey and Sapp) but we are seeking a third party to verify transcriptions.
By using the JuxtaEditions platform, we aimed to make our edition open-access. The manuscript transcriptions were marked up using TEI to make them machine-searchable. The platform also allowed for manuscripts to be compared to see variations from manuscript to manuscript.
Unfortunately, in fall 2015 the Juxtaeditions site stopped functioning properly, and further updates were rendered impossible. By spring 2016, the site was no longer serving up the data properly. Thus in fall 2016, Robert Zhang was brought on board to recreate the website from scratch, hand coding it in HTML to reproduce the functionality of the Juxtaeditions site. At that point, we also identified ways to enhance the site with new ways of comparing and manipulating the textual data.
We wanted to give the feel of the manuscript in our transcriptions, so we made some editorial decisions on how to indicate scribal abbreviations. At some point, scholars may wish to study abbreviation use in medieval texts, so we felt that rendering these choices visible was an important element of our edition.
While this is not an exhaustive list, to the left is a guide to some of the abbreviations and how we resolved them: