![[obshtezhitie image]](obshtezhitie_files/logo.png){kind=logo}
Developed by: The Special Commission on the Computer-Supported Processing of Mediæval Slavonic Manuscripts and Early Printed Books to the International Committee of Slavists
Curator: Ralph Cleminson (ralph.cleminson@port.ac.uk)
Location: http://www.obshtezhitie.net
Last modified: 2009-06-08
Copyright: © 2008-09 by the Special Commission. All rights reserved.
About this site
At the First International Conference on the Application of Computer Technology to the Study of Mediæval Slavonic Manuscripts, held at Blagoevgrad, 24th–29th July 1995, it was decided to facilitate the exchange of information on this subject and related ones by means of a page on the World Wide Web. Subsequently the International Commission on Computer Supported Processing of Mediæval Slavonic Manuscripts and Early Printed Books, which was set up at the Twelfth International Congress of Slavists in Cracow in 1998, adopted the page. The page is very much dependent on the scholarly community for its content, and we appeal to organisers for information about web resources, events, and other relevent items which it would be appropriate to include. We also invite authors of electronic texts or of tools for the manipulation of textual data that would be interest to the Slavonic mediævalist to place them on this site.
Contents
- Sites Relating to Text Encoding and Interchange in General
- Slavonic Projects and Related Activities
- Electronic Editions of Slavonic and Related Texts
- News, Announcements, etc.
- Digitised Manuscripts and Catalogues
- Tools and Resources
- Electronic Publications
General
Some wider issues of text encoding are covered in the following pages:
- The TEI home page. Note in particular the Manuscript special interest Group and the modules for representation of primary sources, encoding of manuscript descriptions and critical apparatus.
- The XML Cover Pages.
- The Unicode home page.
- The ThML (Theological Markup Language) Home Page. This XML application can be thought of as HTML with additions for electronic books and rich digital libraries, with special support for theological needs.
- Those interested in early printed books in general will probably find it worth while to pay a visit to the webpage of the Oxford University Early Printed Books Project, although this has been dormant for the last few years.
- A Companion to Digital Humanities
- There is a growing list of centres, resources, organisations and other sites of relevance to humanities computing (many but not all concerned with textual or linguistic applications) accessible via the Digital Humanities wiki.
- The Digital Medievalist is an international web-based Community of Practice for mediævalists working with digital media. It was established in 2003 to help scholars meet the increasingly sophisticated demands faced by designers of contemporary digital projects.
Slavonic Projects and Resources
There is a page devoted to cyrillic and glagolitic in Croatia. Its author, Darko Žubrinić, has also provided biblographies of recent works (from 1975) on Croatian glagolitic and cyrillic manuscripts and palæography and of facsimiles of Croatian glagolitic books, manuscript and printed.
A database of mediæval manuscripts by Brana Tomić.
The Текстология.ru site includes a quantity of material of interest to the mediævalist.
The Inventory of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Digital Projects is not primarily a mediæval resource, but includes mediæval material.
The Hilandar Research Library and the Research Center for Medieval Slavic Studies at the Ohio State University are well known for their contribution to Slavonic Manuscript Studies and also for the Mediæval Slavic Summer Institute held there.
The Repertorium of Old Bulgarian Literature and Letters and the Repertorium Workstation, directed by Anisava Miltenova in Sofia.
The SLOVO Project promotes collaboration between Central and South-Eastern Europe in the study of Slavonic written language and culture, monastic heritage, and other fields.
The Bosnian Manuscript Ingathering Project, seeks to undo some of the damage to the Bosnian manuscript heritage caused by the war.
The Christian Hagiology and Pagan Beliefs Project studies Balkan religious culture and folklore on the basis of written sources.
Electronic Texts
There is an increasing number of electronic texts of interest to the Slavist.
A Corpus Cyrillo-Methodianum Helsingiense of Old Church Slavonic texts in electronic form is being prepared at Helsinki.
A number of documents have now been made available on the web by Jos Schaeken, viz
There are now two editions of the Freising Fragments on the web. One is a transcription which has been put on the web together with two Old Polish texts, various Old Prussian documents and an impressive list of publications in historical linguistics by Professor Frederik Kortlandt. The other, edited and encoded by Matija Ogrin and Tomaž Erjavec, is part of an entire site devoted to the Fragments as part of the project for Scholarly Digital Editions of Slovenian Literature.
These documents, and a growing number of others, are incorporated in TITUS (Thesaurus Indogermanischer Text- und Sprachmaterialien).
The Sofia-Trondheim Corpus includes transcriptions of eleventh-century manuscripts in pdf format.
The full text of the Church Slavonic Bible is now commercially available in a package which allows searching, comparison with other translations, etc.
The Manuscript project, directed by Viktor Baranov in Iževsk, is working on encoding early Russian texts.
The Budapest Glagolitic Fragments, first encoded using SGML in 2001, and as far as I know, the first glagolitic web publication, are now also available in XML and HTML editions.
The Life of St Paul the Simple from the Codex Suprasliensis encoded with linguistic commentary under the direction of David Birnbaum.
The Санкт-Петербургский Корпус Агиографических Текстов offers a growing number of mediaeval lives of Russian saints, available in both pdf and xml format. The latter uses a modification of the TEI DTD and is not Unicode-conformant.
The Библиотека Фронтистеса site includes links to some of the above, and also electronic transcriptions of published editions of some other manuscripts.
Current Affairs
Unicode 5.1 was published on 4th April 2008. It includes for the first time a number of cyrillic characters used in mediæval texts. There are some additions to the main cyrillic block (U+0400-04FF), but most of these concern modern non-Slavonic languages, as do all those in the cyrillic supplement (U+0500-052F). Most of the early characters are to be found in the Cyrillic Extended B block (U+A640-A69F). Some further punctuation marks have been added which while not specific to cyrillic or glagolitic may be of use to those working with these scripts. The Cyrillic Extended A block (U+2DE0-2DFF) contains a set of cyrillic superscript letters which were added to meet the requirements of modern Church Slavonic typesetting where superscription is obligatory and governed by strict orthographic conventions, which mean that the superscript characters are not interchangeable with their ordinary equivalents. These characters are not recommended for use in transcribing mediæval texts which do not follow these rules, for which it is preferable to indicate superscription by markup.
One further Old Cyrillic character, Reversed ц, is currently on track for inclusion in the standard. (It has been accepted by the Unicode Technical Committee and is awaiting balloting by the relevant Working Group of ISO.) The Commission may be able to offer some technical advice on the preparation of future proposals; in any case it is strongly recommended that consensus should be achieved both on the need for a particular character and its suitability under the Unicode criteria before a proposal is initiated.
The 14th International Congress of Slavists took place in Ohrid on 10th–16th September 2008. Among the round tables or “thematic blocks” held during the congress there was one on Digital resources for the Study of Early Slavic Manuscripts, organised by members of the Commission. Members of the Commission also produced a “white paper” on Character Set Standardisation for Early Cyrillic Writing after Unicode 5.1, with an associated table of Early Cyrillic Characters in Unicode, and now also published in Scripta & e-Scripta 6, 2008, p. 161-193. These documents express the views of the Commission and are intended partly as a response to the “Proposal” prepared during and following the conference on Standardisation of the Old Church Slavonic Cyrillic Script held at the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts on 15th–17th October 2007, but also more generally as a review of the current state of Unicode and a statement of its design principles with particular reference to the needs of Slavonic mediævalists.
Digitised Manuscripts and Catalogues
The State Public Historical Library in Russia has produced an online catalogue of its early-printed books.
There is an excellent online catalogue of Rumanian printed books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: not yet fully comprehensive, but already a very useful resource, and also with links to a number of Rumanian research libraries.
The University Library in Ljubljana provides descriptions and facsimiles of the thirty-four manuscripts in the collection of Jernej Kopitar (1780-1844)
The Holy Trinity St Sergius Lavra provides descriptions and facsimiles of its manuscript collection, now in the Russian State Library.
The National and University Library in Skopje provides descriptions and facsimiles of its manuscripts. This site requires the latest version of Java and will not work in all browsers.
Цифровая библиотека "Книжные памятники Сибири" includes digital images of manuscripts (including the collection of M.N.Tichomirov), and also some modern material.
The Рукописные памятники Древней Руси site has now expanded to include not only the Novgorod Birch-Bark Letters in reproduction and transcription, but also digitised editions of Russian Chronicles and a small but growing number of digitised editions of Russian Manuscripts.
The National Library of Serbia has made available digital images of manuscripts, not only its own but also those of the Patriarchate of Peć and of the Dečani Monastery, and of a few early-printed Serbian books.
The Digital Library of the National Library of Bulgaria includes a large selection of manuscripts, especially those of interest for their ornamentation. This site requires the DocuWare reader, which may be downloaded free from the manufacturers.
Resources
An on-line glossary of Old Church Slavonic by Oscar E. Swan, digitised by David Birnbaum. It is recommended to read the introductory page before using it.
Our own Resources Page contains fonts, XSLT scripts, etc. that may be of use to researchers working with mediæval Slavonic texts. Authors of such resources are invited to host them here.
Electronic publications
- Scripta & e-Scripta
- Polata K″nigopis′naja
- Arheografski prilozi, vols.22-30
- The Библиотека Фронтистеса site includes electronic editions of various books on linguistic, literary, religious and other subjects, including A.A.Alekseev’s Текстология славянской Библии and Песнь Песней в славяно-русской письменности, G.A.Voskresenskij’s Древнеславянское Евангелие: Евангелие от Марка по основным спискам and Древнеславянский перевод Апостола и его судьбы до XV в., S.M.Kul’bakin’s edition of the Hilandar Leaves, palæographical studies by A.I.Sobolevskij, V.N.Ščepkin and I.A.Šljapkin, and much else.
- The electronic publications of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Russian Literature (Пушкинский дом) include some by the its Department for Old Russian Literature, among them the first twenty-six volumes of its Труды and other editions of and works about Old Russian texts.
Mailing List
The Slav_MSS_List mailing list is at the disposal of all wishing to disseminate information or engage in discussion relevant to our field. To avoid unwanted mail, only list members are allowed to post to the list. One may join the list at the list page.