In image-Based Electronic Edition of Alfred the Great's Old English Version of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy

Alfred the Great’s Old English translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy survives in two
manuscripts, one from the tenth and one from the twelfth century, and in an indispensable
seventeenth-century transcript and collation of the earliest manuscript, which was badly damaged by fire in
the eighteenth century. The confusing manuscript tradition, the catastrophic damage to the principal
manuscript, and the easy recourse to the late transcript, have conspired to lead modern editors into producing
two major editions, one in prose and one in verse, neither one remotely approximating the manuscript
testimony. An image-based electronic edition makes it possible to restore much of the damaged tenth-century
manuscript and produce the first prose-and-verse edition of it.
British Library Cotton Otho A. vi, the earliest manuscript of Alfred’s Boethius, is also one of the
three manuscript testbeds for the ARCHway Project. The collaboration of computer scientists and specialists
in Old English will produce not only practical, modular, extensible tools for non-technical humanities editors
to construct complex electronic editions, but also complementary interfaces for scholars, students, and other
interested people to make full use of them. Using digital images as the foundation for the Electronic Boethius,
we will use these tools to encode searchable glossaries, transcripts, and edition, all linked to the images. Users
at all levels will thus have unprecedented access to high-resolution representations of the damaged and
fragmentary folios that survive.
The Glossary Tool allows the editor and research assistants to create from a preliminary XML source
encoded only for folio lines and edition lines (prose or verse), an exhaustive sorted wordlist with line
locations. We then compile the glossary from this wordlist using custom-made templates for each part of
speech. These templates permit us to perform complex, comprehensive, XML tagging without even seeing
any tags. The resulting XML-encoded glossary is thus fully searchable, and may be reformatted for HTML or
any other kind of useful display through XSL transformations.
A complementary Tagger software now under production similarly allows the editor and research
assistants to provide pervasive, extremely complex, XML encoding for the transcript and edition, again
without the necessity to consult the encoded XML file. The custom-made software, specifically designed to
relieve scholars from having to learn markup or face a forest of angle brackets, correctly nests all tags behind
the scenes, silently avoiding on behalf of the humanities editors the creation of invalid or non-well-formed XML encoding. The editor views in one window the more ultimate source of all the markup in the manuscript
folio, and tags a transcript of it in another window using clickable element buttons. The tagging
comprehensively covers everything from paleographical features to minute physical description of the fire
damage to editorial conjectural restorations and emendations. The resulting tagged file is, like the glossary,
fully searchable and open to any number of displays. By including coordinates for all tagged parts of an
image, searching the xml and the image proceed simultaneously.
Other custom-made tools will provide methodical tagging for other specialized purposes. For
example, the editor can easily prepare paleographical descriptions of the scribal letterforms by using
templates for specific letters. These individually tagged letterforms can provide students with easy access to
paleographical illustrations, which are usually omitted in scholarly editions and sparsely included even in
paleographical treatises. Another facility, an image “overlay” device, allows the editor to superimpose any
combination of images digitized, for instance, by daylight, fiber-optic, and ultraviolet, to disclose readings
rendered obscure or illegible by fire-damage. Users of the completed edition will have access to this device to
conduct their own research of these collected images. These specialized tools are all intended to function
together, and ultimately to transform the editor's EPT workbench into a virtual reading room for the intended
users of the electronic edition.
We will illustrate the process of assembling a scholarly edition with the workbench, tools, and
materials we are designing and developing, and discuss how we intend to make it available for widespread
use for other humanities projects. The image-based scholarly edition of Alfred’s Boethius will comprise a
complete collection of all manuscript images intricately linked to edition, transcript, glossary, and apparatus
files to allow users to view, read, compare, study, and search in an electronic environment that maintains and
encourages connections between text and image. Editorial glosses, emendations, restorations, punctuation
marks, paleographical notes, codicological analyses, and bibliographical materials should all be linked to
relevant portions of the manuscript from which the scholarship emerges, taking advantage of the strengths of
the electronic medium rather than remaining bound by the typical structure and organization of traditional
scholarly editions in printed books. The apparatus, for example, should be pervasively available “Help”
whenever and wherever pertinent information relating to the edition, transcript, and glossary files, and their
associated images, is required. In this way editorial interventions become completely transparent by the
availability of high-resolution images alongside corresponding textual notes, explanatory notes, and
bibliographical materials.
While it should provide a variety of views and configurations of the edition, transcript, and image
files, the user interface for the scholarly edition should also allow users to search exhaustively the collection
for words, substrings, grammatical properties, poetic features, and in fact anything that may be of interest.
The search facilities for the Electronic Boethius and all the other texts under the aegis of the ARCHway
Project will be as functional as the ones developed for the Electronic Beowulf, but will not be bound to a
closed system. Like all the other tools in the EPT workbench, these facilities too will be modular,
interoperable, and extensible.
The Electronic Boethius Project is funded by a Collaborative Research Award from the National
Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and is sponsored by The British
Library and the Bodleian Library, Oxford, who are providing digital images of the relevant documents.
REFERENCES:
Primary Sources
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• Oxford Bodleian Library MS Junius 12.
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