K. Sarah-Jane Murray
"The Charrette
Project" and ARTFL:
Collaboration
Plan
In our meeting yesterday, we discussed how we might foster a (long anticipated) collaboration between "The Charrette Project" and ARTFL. This brief report summarizes the major points of our discussion, and outlines the plan of action we all agreed to.
I.
Overview of the Major Components of "The Charrette Project"
In its current state, "the Charrette Project" has two major components:
1) The online archive: manuscript images and diplomatic transcriptions
Our site (http://www.princeton.edu/~lancelot) provides access to color images (jpeg) of the eight surviving manuscripts of Le Chevalier de la Charrette, diplomatic transcriptions of these manuscripts and finally, as a reference tool, the Foulet-Uitti critical edition. These files are linked together so that the user can easily switch from one transcription to another, and from any given transcription to the corresponding color image (or vice-versa).
Future project: we would like to be able to search the new xml transcriptions, and provide the user, for example, with a list of all the occurrences of a type of punctuation (ex: &punt1;).
2) A linguistic commentary, and a rhetorico-poetic commentary
Two databases have been constructed to store the information collected by the Charrette team. These databases, which are both based on the text of the critical edition, are not yet online (and we hope that ARTFL will be able to help us make them available to our users)
A. The Linguistic Database
This MS ACCESS database provides a lexico-grammatical analysis of each word in the critical edition. We broke the text of the critical edition into a list of words, assigned a unique identifier to each word and this serves as our primary key. We also indicate, for each word, its line number and position in the line, as well as the corresponding dictionary form (DFORM) in Foerster-Breuer's Wörtebuch. A number of properties are then assigned to each word.
B. The Rhetorico-Poetic Database
We analyzed Chrétien's use of five rhetorico-poetic figures (chiasmus, oratio, adnominatio, rich rhyme, enjambment) and recorded this information in an ORACLE database using a text-tagging tool developed by Dr. Rafael Alvarado (alvarado@princeton.edu).
The goal of these databases:
As Dr. Molly Robinson points out in her summary of the lexico-grammatical analysis (http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/projects/charrette/documentation/), "the objective of the linguistic commentary and indeed of the entire Charrette Project is not to provide an authoritative, canonical study to be read, observed, and quoted. Rather, our most prized goal is to provide users with the means to ask their own questions, thus opening the poetic work to a potentially unlimited exchange of questions, answers, and interpretation. Such an exchange, we believe, revives the excitement and promise of philological study."
What does this mean? Ideally, we would like our user to be able to ask the following types of question:
"Show me all the occurrences of the noun dame when it participates in both a rich rhyme and at least one chiasmus. I want to see with which word(s) dame rhymes, and I want to see all the components of the corresponding chiasmus."
or
"Show me all the occurrences of the verb voloir in the future tense, when it appears at the beginning of a verse line, but after an enjambment, and in the midst of an oratio recta
II. Where do we go from here? > Tentative Collaboration Plan
We decided that, for the time being, we would focus on making the
linguistic and rhetorico-poetic analysis available to the public (this allows
us to work solely with the text of the critical edition, which we can link
to the XML transcriptions: we don't have to worry about making the XML transcriptions
searchable). Here is the basic outline of our plan of action:
1) SQL Tables: Orion Montoya
I have provided Orion with a copy of the linguistic database (in MS
ACCESS), and have arranged for Dr. Rafael Alvarado (alvarado@princeton.edu)
to ftp a copy of the rhetorico-poetic data to the thyme server (I expect
this to arrive by the end of the weekend). Orion will collate the linguistic
and poetic databases and examine how we can make it possible for a web-user
to query the information collected by the Charrette team.
2) XML Transcriptions: Robert Voyer
I have provided Robert Voyer with a copy of the XML transcriptions
and the Charrette DTD (the Charrette team is in the process
of proofing these transcriptions, and will send Robert updated files in the
near future). Robert and I will meet on Monday and discuss how to proceed.
3) Foulet-Uitti Critical Edition: Mark Olsen/ SJ Murray
Over the weekend, I will work through the SGML files of the Foulet-Uitti critical edition and make a number of updates suggested to me by Mark (add information about page numbers in the printed edition, episodes, etc.), so that the text of the critical-edition is "Philologic-ready."
! The current goal is to link parts 1, 2 and 3 together
!
4) Mirror
Site: Glenn Roe
Glenn is taking a look at the Charrette account on arizona.princeton.edu,
and will set up a mirror site (http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/projects/charrette/mirror).
III. Towards a long-term collaboration with ARTFL
I spoke with Prof. Uitti (kduitti@princeton.edu) this morning, and he has given his approval for our plan of action. I am sending him a copy of this document. I will also send a copy to Prof. Morrissey.
I sincerely hope that our meeting this week will initiate a long-term collaboration with the Charrette Project, and that this collaboration will be beneficial to us all. I am convinced that the tools you have developed will help make the bulk of information we have collected over the last few years available to the public. At the same time, I would hope that our collaboration will help to enrich ARTFL's "holdings." I have seen on your site that you have a number of Old French works, especially Provençal poetry). These works--which are interesting, to be sure--are perhaps outnumbered by your "holdings" in other areas. Furthermore, they are presented in the form of critical editions. I suspect they would be even more useful to medievalists who would like to use ARTFL for sound, philological work if diplomatic transcriptions were also available. Integrating "The Charrette Project" into ARTFL might serve as a first step in that direction.