On Digitising Philosophy and Theology:
The Electronic Grosseteste
Introduction
Dr James Ginther, of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Leeds, sees similarities in the process of creating medieval manuscripts and electronic texts. Unlike the relatively mechanical process of creating a modern printed text, the appearance of the medieval manuscript and the electronic book is very much dependent on not just the author, but the scribe or designer who produces the parchment or website. To Dr Ginther therefore, the creation of an electronic resource featuring printed editions transcribed copies of the manuscripts of the thirteenth-century theologian Robert Grosseteste, is an entirely appropriate scholarly mission.
Electronic resources dealing with theological or philosophical works are perhaps not as frequent as those dealing with history or literature. While there are a good deal of philosophical websites, they more commonly feature secondary commentary and discussion rather than primary sources. There is no especial reason why this should continue to be the case. The digitisation of material that straddles a theological / philosophical divide requires techniques which have much in common with digitising a literary text, methods that have been well-established in the literary domain. This article aims to take the reader through the creation of Dr Ginther's Electronic Grosseteste, noting both the details of preparing a thirteenth-century text for the contemporary computer screen and the general stages involved in the electronic transcription of any primary philosophical text.
Figure 1 - A page from the Electronic Grosseteste website
Structuring a project
As is common in digitisation projects, one reason for the establishment of an electronic resource is to counter a relative neglect of the topic in contemporary scholarship. Academic work on Grosseteste, and much theological research as a whole, is injured by the relative unavailability of texts, many of which are out of print. The Electronic Grosseteste has been designed to help repair this problem. By creating digital versions of Grosseteste's authorial output Dr Ginther aims not only to improve access to Grosseteste texts but also to vastly improve the mechanisms for searching the texts. Dr Ginther also hopes to enhance the resource by incorporating related secondary resources on the subject of Grosseteste, which will include a searchable database of published texts on the medieval theologian and the wider fields of thirteenth-century ecclesiastical and church history.
In an ideal world, digitising the texts and placing them on the web could be done with a minimum of managerial effort. The actual conversation of the texts to electronic form, while repetitive, is not too problematic. But it is the less technical aspects of the project, such as those involving funding and copyright, which necessitate a more considered approach. As a result, Dr Ginther constructed the Electronic Grosseteste in four separate phases. The first phase, which has now been completed, was to create the website and deposit electronic versions of Grosseteste's letters and his scientific and philosophical works that are in the public domain (i.e. free from any problems of copyright). This includes 130 of Grosseteste's Epistolae, 50 of his Dicta, and philosophical works such as De Iride, De Colore and De Calore Solis. The later phases in the project will deal with depositing other texts with more problematic copyright concerns, and developing an archive of secondary sources and other material related to the study of Grosseteste. Indeed, work on the latter part of this has already commenced. When completed, the project will not just be an archive of Grosseteste's work, but a comprehensive research tool offering a variety of primary and secondary resources to scholars.
Phase 1 - The Initial Digitisation
Dr Ginther's successful application for funding to the British Academy enabled him to employ five graduate students (all in subjects related to theology, and all with the requisite IT skills) to key in the initial batch of Grosseteste texts. Scanning was also attempted, but the computer was not highly successful is interpreting the Latin and it became obvious that, for the reasonably small number of texts being dealt with here, typing in was the more efficient process. Once rough electronic versions had been created, the team undertook the essential process of proof-checking, correcting typographical errors or omissions. Each file was checked twice, Dr Ginther carrying out one of the checks. Like many digitisers, however, Dr Ginther was prepared to accept that 100% accuracy is a tricky target. Mistakes are always likely to crop up when producing a project that consists of 825 pages and over 225,000 words. He hopes that users of the resource will point out any possible errors that remain, or use the website as a forum for discussing any ambiguous transcriptions.
The corrected texts were then prepared in the HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) format suitable for distribution on the web. Once this had been done, the electronic texts were placed within a frames-based environment, giving the reader the opportunity to move quickly between letters or chapters, or even, by opening two browsers simultaneously, of comparing different sections of Grosseteste's output. Alternatively users can download the complete files and then view and print out the texts via their own word processors.
Copyright
The path of the project has been very much determined by constraints imposed by the copyright law. While, obviously, Grosseteste has been dead for several centuries most editions associated with Grosseteste have been produced within the last century, within seventy years of the editor's death, and are therefore still subject to copyright restrictions. Re-publishing such items in electronic form requires much organisational skill in overcoming the suspicions of the rights-holders (usually the publishers rather than the authors or editors of the texts), many of whom are not yet up to speed with the intricacies of publishing in an electronic medium. Exorbitant fees are often demanded. This prompted Dr Ginther to digitise public domain texts for the first phase of the project. The sources for both the letters and the various philosophical treatises were two printed compendia, one prepared by German scholar in 1912, the other part of the Rolls Series published in 1861. The age of the compendia meant that there were no problems with copyright and Dr Ginther felt that their scholarship was of a sufficient standard to warrant being used for the Electronic Grosseteste. The other major source digitised in the first phase, Grosseteste's Dicta, had been generously provided by a colleague of Dr Ginther's who had been preparing a critical edition of the said text. Taken together the Electronic Grosseteste could offer users some interesting content without having to negotiate matters concerning copyright.
The difficulties involved with copyright meant that the texts were only available in the original Latin. As with critical editions, translations made in the twentieth century were still under copyright; translations created beforehand run the risk of being anachronistic, thus rendering them useless to the scholar. While Dr Ginther would like to create a site that appeals to students as well as senior scholars, developing English electronic editions of Grosseteste would require a team larger that he currently has at his disposal. The focus of the site at the moment is to reinvigorate study of Grosseteste at the very highest research levels, i.e. those users who are capable of understanding Grosseteste's Latin.
The second phase of the project, adding works by Grosseteste currently under copyright, is currently being planned. One possible method of achieving this is for the Grosseteste team to develop or commission their own translations of the original texts. However, the development of new translations, with all the intricate research and reference work this entailed, is a laborious task. Funds and time precluded such a possibility for the Electronic Grosseteste. Dr Ginther therefore had to contact the rights-holders of the various modern editions to find out what leeway he had. Unsurprisingly, many publishers were suspicious of the creation of a full text version that could act as a free replacement for their own printed versions. However, Dr Ginther offered them a situation that would not interfere with their income, and yet still provide the scholar with a helpful tool.
For the second phase of the project, copyrighted texts, such as Grosseteste's guide for parish priests, Templum Dei, will be digitised in full as the public domain texts were, but viewers will be restricted to how much of the text they will be able to read at one time. The web interface mechanism will have no browsing abilities but only search tools. Users will be invited to enter a search term, and will then be presented with the paragraphs within which this word is located. This phase of the Electronic Grosseteste is founded upon the belief that many scholars will be able to work with an electronic version and a printed version of the relevant texts side by side. The electronic version will work as a sophisticated index, referring to readers to the exact location of the excerpts they are wishing to study. Publishers are more than happy with this arrangement, which has already been used in other theological resources placed on CD-ROM. The situation is not perfect; scholars outside the western world may not be able to access printed versions, but it has given Dr Ginther the opportunity to proceed with his project.
Mark-up Language
The public domain texts have been prepared for electronic dissemination by using HTML, but the copyrighted texts will exist only in the more sophisticated eXtensible Markup Language (XML). XML offers users and creators a much more sophisticated approach to the presentation of data, allowing output to be personalised to suit the needs of individual users. XML markup is not an essential component of developing an electronic textual resource, but as its value is increasingly seen by digitisers, it is becoming more and more a part of the framework for delivering any kind of textual resource over the Internet.
Incorporating XML means marking up the original text with customised tags which define its structure and its content. A much-simplified mark-up of the beginning and very end of Grosseteste's Dicta may appear like this:
Figure 3 - An example of XML markup
An XML-based structure like this allows documentary information, such as the title of the book and its author, as well as indicating the structure of the text, i.e. breaks in sections, paragraphs and pages. Developing this has numerous benefits for both the Grosseteste team and the users of the electronic material. For Dr Ginther's team the use of XML allows them to define the boundaries for each paragraph within the copyrighted texts, and therefore control what is presented to the user. Once the computer has found the word a user is searching for it knows the boundaries of what it should be displaying. More generally, XML, as part of its makeup, is much better at delineating the structure of a text than HTML, indicating where chapters, sections, and appendices begin and end. This feature facilitates the presentation of the text, allowing its distinct elements to be laid out in a coherent fashion determined by the designer.
For the user, XML allows much more intricate searching. Take one hypothetical use for the Grosseteste writings. A medieval theologian may well refer to an ancient authority in his texts. Traditional HTML markup would allow the scholar to identify when this previous authority had been mentioned by name but not when he was mentioned indirectly, e.g. in the third person. A page marked-up in XML, where each direct or indirect mention of the ancient authority had been tagged, would be able to convey this information to the user.
Applying XML to electronic texts requires some decision making on behalf of the resource creator. A more complex mark-up will give the user the opportunity for searching out very particular concepts, but will take the digitising team longer to create. Developing a simplified XML markup will allow the project to deposit the texts quickly, but will offer the user less richness in searching the text. Balancing these two concerns is central to anyone wishing to use XML. This requires some planning on behalf of the resource creator, for he much decide which concepts users are most likely to wish to search for, and therefore which concepts should be marked up within the text.
Conclusion
The development of the theological / philosophical resource is not a straightforward task. Copyright, while not a dehabilitating problem, can cause some serious headaches and limitations on funding can make it difficult to alleviate them. Nevertheless, since its inception in 1998, the Electronic Grosseteste has furnished positive responses from a scholarly community impressed by the extended accessibility that the electronic version provides. Of those that have downloaded the public domain texts, a large majority are from Eastern Europe, especially Poland and the Czech Republic. This is quite possibly because scholars from these areas cannot get hold of print versions of Grosseteste's work. The site therefore reinforces the sense of a continent-wide discussion, a feature that was part of the intellectual landscape during Grosseteste's own time. Additionally, the Electronic Grosseteste features not only the texts of this medieval thinker, but will refer to the countless essays, editions and monographs which scholarship has produced in response to Grosseteste's thought. And unlike the printed book, this can be constantly updated, altering previous errors and, by fully exploiting the advanced search mechanisms provided by XML, bringing new ideas to light. This is the real achievement of Dr Ginther's resource, bringing together these sources to provide a comprehensive tool for the study of Robert Grosseteste.
Thanks to Jim Ginther, University of Leeds
