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 The
aim of this project is to give access to the Latin poetry of 50 major German
writers of the early modern period. The corpus will comprise about 50.000
pages of printed text which will be presented in two ways:
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Standard editions published in the 16th, 17th
or 18th century will be made available through digital facsimile images.
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Full text transcriptions marked up according
to the principles of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEILITE.DTD) will be
presented in XML format and made accessible through field searching. The
text will be linked throughout with the corresponding image files.
The
WWW publication is designed to overcome major obstacles that up to now
have hampered research into this important area of early-modern poetry:
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Difficult access to the original editions
most of which are rare today.
-
Scarcity of modern editions and reprints.
-
Lack of word indices, concordances and dictionaries
of individual authors as well as of Neo-Latin literature at large.
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Lack of guides to Neo-Latin poetry.
Note:
"Camena" is the Latin equivalent of the word "Muse". Like "Musa", it can
denote works of poetry.
Easy access to Neo-Latin literature is particularly desirable since interest
in these texts is not limited to one discipline alone. Besides Neo-Latin
studies many branches of research on the early modern period will benefit
from an accessible corpus of Neo-Latin poetry.
The
project has been endowed with a grant from the DFG
(Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft = German Research Council, Program
Retrospective Digitization of Library Materials).
The following limitations should be borne
in mind:
-
Our choice of authors and editions depends
upon the availability of copies that we can scan with our modest
equipment or get scanned at a modest price.
-
Text transcription and encoding is being carried
out by a team of young Latinists with no prior experience in this field.
-
The object of CAMENA is digitization, not
editorial work. We cannot establish critical editions, of course, nor even
carefully examine all the texts transcribed. Also, mark-up is limited to
50 tags selected from the several hundred SGML elements defined in the
TEILITE.DTD.
Since the full text files are accompanied
by facsimile text images, transcription and mark-up do not make any effort
to reproduce the varieties of spelling and layout. Our standardized versions
are designed to facilitate automatic text retrieval as well as comprehension.
The
project encompasses the poetry of authors who spent most of their active
life in regions that today are part of Germany. In very few cases a broader
geographic definition has been applied, including e.g. Königsberg
and Silesia. In order to avoid overlap on possible parallel projects in
neighbouring countries, we do not adopt the early-modern notion of "Germania".
Letzte Änderung: 30.
Mai 2000
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