CTI Textual Studies L i t e r a t u r e

Can you point me to examples of the electronic presentation of textual differences among editions of the same work?

Thank you for your query. A couple of questions might be relevant here. Are you looking for software which might assist you in collating as well as presenting textual variants? Do you have a preference for CD-ROM or online presentation?

At one extreme lies the Wife of Bath's Prologue on CD-ROM published by Cambridge University Press. This provides access to around 58 witnesses to the text. It is possible to click on any line in the base text and see all the variant readings of that line, one can then click on a variant line and see the full transcription of the witness. Finally, every folio of every witness is accompanied by a digital image of that folio. See further http://info.ox.ac.uk/ctitext/publish/comtxt/ct12/fraser.html

The production of this CD-ROM made heavy use of Collate, Mac software for the collation of up to 100 witnesses. If you're interested in computer-assisted collation then have a look at http://info.ox.ac.uk/ctitext/enquiry/tat04.html

More simple presentations include:

• the different mss of Wilfred Owen's 'Dulce et Decorum est' at http://info.ox.ac.uk/jtap/tutorials/manuscript/ (really a tutorial on the basics of constructing a critical edition)
• hypertext edition of The Book of the Duchesse at http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~scriptor/duchess/start.htm (includes comparative view of texts and folio images)
• a scholarly electronic edition of the works of Christopher Marlowe (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/Texts/Marlowe.html) - an excellent and extenisve presentation which is part of the Perseus Project.
• the poems of Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads (currently 'Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman' and 'We are Seven') at http://is.dal.ca/~tetro/ww2/welcome.html - an interesting presentation of variant texts, though frames can be difficult to navigate.
• the electronic archive of Piers Plowman at http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/piers/tcontents.html (1994)
• also at Virginia a report on the construction of an electronic edition of the Life of Adam and Eve - http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/anderson/iath.report.html
• polyglot edition of Luke's Gospel at http://138.87.135.33/bibl-eng/bible.htm (Old English, Middle English, Early-Modern, and Modern English). See also the Polyglot Samuel at http://138.87.135.33/bibl-span/samuel.htm
• Digital Variants Project at http://www.ed.ac.uk/~esit04/digitalv.htm - project to trace the writing process which led to a finished edition (uses contemporary writers)

Finally, just today an advert for a new application to assist the creation of a critical edition fell into my inbox. See http://www.oeaw.ac.at/~kvk/cte/cte_e~1.htm (Classical Text Editor) and a DOS-based package which I've never used can be found at http://s.top.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/cet.htm (Critical Edition Typesetter)

(MF)

HTML Author: Mike Fraser
Document created: 26 March 1998
Document last modified:

The URL of this document is http://info.ox.ac.uk/ctitext/enquiry/lit07.html