Monumenta Frisingensia - a Digital Edition of the Oldest Slovenian Text

Monumenta frisingensia – the 10th century
Freising Manuscripts (Slovenian: Brižinski
spomeniki) – are the oldest written Slovenian text and also the oldest Slavic text written in the Latin alphabet.
The manuscripts consist of three religious texts,
comprised within the Codex latinus monacensis 6426 (Munich State Library). The Monumenta frisingensia
(MF) were written in a script based on Carolingian
minuscule after AD 972 (MF II and MF III probably before
1000) and before 1039 (MF I most probably by 1022 or 1023). The provenance of the MF is either Upper
Carinthia or Freising (now in Austria or Germany
respectively); in any case, they were used in the Carinthian
estates of the Freising diocese.
Slovenian historians, linguistic and literary scholars
consider the MF to be the very first document of early Slovenian language. This is the reason why these manu
scripts bear an outstanding importance not only for
the scientific comprehension of the development of
Slovenian language and literature but also for Slovenian
national identity and historical consciousness. In this
respect Monumenta frisingensia represent the genesis and the beginnings of Slovenian national individuality.
The digital edition of the Monumenta is based upon
a printed one (the critical edition by the Slovenian
Academy of Sciences and Arts), which encompasses a complex apparatus with facsimile, diplomatic, critical and phonetic transcriptions, translations into Latin and
five modern European languages, and a dictionary
covering these transcriptions and translations (plus Old
Church Slavonic). This edition furthermore contains introductory studies, apparatus, a bibliography and an index of names.
The MF are preserved in one single manuscript only. For this reason, the traditional philological and critical task – to examine the ms. witnesses – is not possible in this case. On the contrary, it is of great importance that the edition is founded on the opposite concept: on that of reception. In what way the MF were studied, understood and published? What were the main differences between the transcriptions and editions? Can a digital edition grasp at least crucial points of their research during the two centuries from their discovery, 1806–2006?
For this reason, besides all the components of the
printed edition, the digital one contains a selection of earlier diplomatic and critical transcriptions (in full text) and enables parallel views to compare them. This is of considerable importance as the Frisingensia were often a subject of polemical scientific interpretations, especially with regard to the place of their origin and their linguistic genesis. The edition should, therefore, enable a pluralism of readings and understandings as well as a hierarchy of proofs and ascertainments. By inclusion of all major transcriptions of the Freising Manuscripts since the very
first diplomatic transcription in 1827 (P. Koeppen),
the e-edition offers a panoramic retrospective of 200 years of research of these precious manuscripts. Such a retrospective, evidenced by historical transcriptions themselves, can reveal cultural and philological history of the Frisingensia.
As another extension, specific for digital edition, we decided to include the digitized audio recordings of the read manuscripts and integrate the segmented audio
files to both phonetic transcription and modern Slovenian
normalization. The scope of this audio extension is to
offer a reconstruction (based on historical linguistics)
of medieval Slovenian speech which can be sensibly juxtaposed and compared with transcriptions. We plan to publish a pedagogical adaptation of this e-edition as well, aimed for school-reading, where audio component with the archaic pronunciation can produce a clear image of historical development of the Slovenian language.
Such materials present significant challenges for
encoding, esp. the high density and variety of markup, extreme parallelism (per-line alignment between the text views), and special historic and phonetic characters used in the transcriptions.
The paper details our methodology used to turn the
printed edition (plus extensions) into a Web edition with a standardized encoding, extensive hyperlinking, and multimedia capabilities. We concentrate on the following issues:
- Structuring of materials in a text editor
- Adoption of standard solutions: Unicode/XML/XSLT/TEI-P4/
- Collaborative practices using fast prototyping
and cyclical improvement: up-converting to XML–TEI --> down-converting to HTML --> proofs,
corrections --> re-applying the up-conversion …
Our presentation details these issues, and highlights
the most challenging aspects of entire process, where
the central goal is to enable a complex and lively
communication with the 10th century Monumenta
frisingensia.
Acknowledgments
The Monumenta Frisingensia e-edition was prepared (and is freely available on-line) within a collaborative project “Scholarly digital editions of Slovenian literature”
(http://nl.ijs.si/e-zrc/index-en.html). It is a joint project of the Institute of Slovenian literature (Scientific Research
Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and
Arts, Ljubljana) and the Department of Knowledge Technologies (Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana). The
project was undertaken to provide an application of
traditional text-critical principles and editorial technique to the publication of selected Slovenian texts in the digital
medium. Among these editions, the current digital
edition of the MF occupies a superior position.
References
Bernik F. et al., ed. by (2004). Brižinski spomeniki.
Monumenta frisingensia. Znanstvenokritièna izdaja. Založba ZRC, Ljubljana.