Friday, June 11, 2010

Slavic manuscript digitization

A PROJECT to digitize Slavic manuscripts:
Building Digital Library For South Slavic Manuscripts

Thursday, 10 June 2010 12:04

Written by Eurasia Review

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From 2000 the Department of Old Bulgarian Literature in the Institute of Literature at BAS created the unique template for Slavic manuscripts encoding – TSM (Template for Slavic Manuscripts) in XML format. The Repertorium Initiative (head: Senior Researcher Anissava Miltenova, web page: http://clover.slavic.pitt.edu/~repertorium/) is an XML format database containing analytical descriptions of more than 300 Slavonic manuscripts. The corpus is utilized for text search and automatic construction of typology of mediaeval miscellanies. The project participates in the Text Encoding Initiative (member since 2003), cf. http://www.tei-c.org/Applications/.

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The project aims at the following main objectives. Most importantly at activating the cooperation between Southeast Slavic countries and Central Europe in the field of medieval Slavic studies, especially as far as the Balkan written cultural heritage is concerned. Participants from five countries construct a network between institutions, which is directed towards researching the Balkan monastic culture and presenting the Slavonic culture from a comparative perspective. During the project execution we intend to organize a workshop on the implementation of computer applications in medieval studies and especially in the description and analysis of written heritage (principles and methods, terminology, architecture of data, etc.). In the frames of the workshop, a roundtable on monastic culture is to be included. One of the expected considerable effects of the project is the development of international standards for the computer encoding of the Slavic written heritage. Its goal is to create a common platform for electronic publishing. The most important outcome of the project will be the construction of the web page (SLOVO-ASO.cl.bas.bg) containing the results from the existing research for the Balkan written heritage and culture presented in relevant software.
A number of Old Testament pseudepigrapha have been preserved in Church Slavonic. For other manuscript digitization projects, go here and follow the links.