Unity and Diversity: Finding Common Ground Among Separate Anglo - Saxon Digital Projects.

The Centre for Computing in the Humanities (King’s College London) (CCH) is currently engaged with members of the Department of History at KCL, and the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic in
Cambridge in the development of three digital projects related to Anglo-Saxon England. The Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England (PASE) has been under development since 2000 and has recently gone online at www.pase.ac.uk. In addition, CCH has been involved more recently in two other projects with Cambridge: AsChart – a project
investigating the creation of formal digital transcripts
of Anglo-Saxon legal charters and then making them available digitally, and the eSawyer project, which will make available online the wealth of materials which
was originally collected and published in the magisterial Anglo-Saxon Charters: an Annotated List and Bibliography
by Professor Peter Sawyer and which is now being updated
in light of more recent scholarship. Both AsChart and eSawyer are an outgrowth of the work of the British
Academy and Royal Historical Society’s Joint Committee on Anglo-Saxon Charters. In addition, these projects have informal connections with other projects involving CCH or Cambridge that work with materials from the Anglo-Saxon period. LangScape (Joy Jenkyns, Oxford) aims to make accessible information about the boundary clauses found in legal documents that describe the
borders of property, and the Corpus of Early Medieval Coin Finds at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
On one hand, these various projects should be connected
to each other – they all cover materials that come from the Anglo-Saxon period in England. On the other, they involve significantly different approaches to the
materials – in both a technical and a scholarly sense. PASE strives to record information from sources written in Anglo-Saxon times about all Anglo-Saxon individuals (great and small) and non-Anglo-Saxons important in the Anglo-Saxon world, and is strongly centred on its relational database. Aspects of its technical and conceptual
framework are described, with other prosopographies in which CCH is involved, in Bradley and Short 2005.
AsChart is in some ways a classic textual edition
project, exploring the use of TEI markup for the texts of the charters that fall within its mandate. ESawyer, which has grown out of the both the pioneering work of Prof. Sawyer in the 1960s, and from more recent scholarship,
provides bibliographic information about the charter
manuscripts and editions including, for each, a standardised
summary of its content, a list of manuscripts where it has been preserved, a list of printed editions and translations, and a summary of scholarly commentary that has been published. Technically, ESawyer data has been stored in a structured database (FileMaker), but work is now
underway to use XML-based markup to represent its
materials.
At first glance, the jumble of technologies and the
technical and scholarly issues that the bringing together of these three projects involves might seem to present an insuperable challenge. However, the use of the XML and/or relational databases is, we believe, in the case of all three projects appropriate – PASE (for reasons described in Bradley and Short 2005) interprets its resources in a highly structured form, and takes advantage of the rich interconnectedness of these objects that can, at least at present, be best developed and manipulated using the
relational approach. AsChart, as a largely classic textual
edition project, needs to take advantage of the rich
expressive power of TEI markup over its texts. ESawyer is mostly a bibliographic project and sits in-between – containing structured material for which a relational-like database approach has provided benefits, but also finding that the relational model does not entirely suit several aspects of its bibliographic materials (although neither does XML).
Scholars interested in charter texts may well wish to move between these three projects. Having found an
individual of interest in one charter text, for example, a scholar might well wish to see where else, if at all, the same individual turns up in other textual sources.
Alternatively, a scholar who comes to the charter
materials through an individual of interest may wish to consult the ESawyer information on that charter to get a sense of what scholarly commentary about the text is available. Connections between the character texts are fortunately well established because the “Sawyer
Number”, created by Peter Sawyer in the 1960’s,
continues to represent a definitive identifier for the charter
texts. Thus, all four of our projects here, and many others, use the Sawyer number in this way and at the document level, the connections between the different projects are well established. However, other connections are potentially
more difficult. Another clear link should be between people that appear in the sources and the PASE prosopography. Because both the AsChart project and PASE involve the same scholars, there is general agreement about who is who in the PASE and AsChart project, and part of the task in AsChart markup is, as a result, to formally connect references to names in the text to appropriate individuals in PASE. However, the link to individuals in the other Anglo-Saxon projects mentioned above – in spite of the strong spirit of collaboration that has characterised our work together so far – is not so straightforward. The Coin hoard project grows out of a different kind of research
strategy to identify individuals, and in some cases
strategies to map the hoard project’s prosopographical materials to PASE’s will present difficulties. In addition,
identifiers for place and pieces of property (as
possessions) figures in the PASE database, and ways to link between PASE and LangScape (which has place
and property a central focus) still have to resolved.
Furthermore, even the reading of the texts varies between
LangScape and AsChart in a few significant places. Thus, there will be hard collaborative work necessary if these projects are to find ways to fully link together in ways that best benefit their respective users.
Digital collaboration between independent entities has been an important subtask in the computing world for a few years. Work on digital ontologies (which aim to
develop a common vocabulary and shared significance of key ideas within a community), and web services and related technologies such as WSDL (which provide mechanisms
to allow separate systems to exchange formal data) have begun to tackle some of the problems, although primarily for the business community. Our Anglo-Saxon projects have also begun to tackle the issues of sorting out at least informally common ontologies and exploring the various formal mechanisms to query and exchange data between projects, and they have begun to experience the technical and administrative problems that similar work, elsewhere, has also experienced. In this paper we will be reporting on these issues.
References
Bradley, J. and Short S. (2005). Texts into databases: the Evolving Field of New-style Prosopography. In Deegan, M (ed) Literary and Linguistic Computing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vol 20 Suppl 1:3-24.
Corpus of Early Medieval Coin Finds. Fitzwilliam
Museum, Cambridge, Available at http://www.
fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/coins/emc/
LangScape, Language of Landscape: Reading the
Anglo-Saxon Countryside. http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/langscape/content/index.html. The principal investigator is Joy Jenkyns (Oxford and KCL).
Prosopography of Anglo-saxon England. http://www.pase.ac.uk. The co-directors for this project are
Janet Nelson FBA (King’s College London) and
Simon Keynes FBA (Cambridge)
Sawyer, P. (1968). Anglo-Saxon Charters: an Annotated List and Bibliography, London: Royal Historical Society Guides and Handbooks 8.
Erik Christensen E., Curbera F., Meredith G. and Weerawarana S. (2001). Web Services Description Language (WSDL) 1.1. W3C online publication at http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl