HDAK00211U DAN; AFLYST Digital diplomatics. Working with electronic texts

The course both serves as an introduction to the field of diplomatics (the discipline that studies the genesis, forms, and transmission of archival documents) and as a general introduction to digital philology or how to work with – and to produce – electronic texts/editions.

Medieval charters are very well suited as the empirical basis for such an introduction. The texts are quite short, but contain -- nonetheless -- a variety of information, which can be annotated in different ways and linked to external resources (e.g. of linguistic/lexicographic, historical and geographical nature).

The charters will therefore form the basis for our introductory course in working with electronic texts. It should however be stressed that the knowledge built up during this course could easily be applied to other text genres.

The philological part of the course will not least give the student an introduction to the field of diplomatics, including a short introduction to

palaeography (the study of ancient writing) and the study of texts in a manuscript culture.

The more technical part of the course includes a crash course in programming with a focus on text manipulation (primarily in Javascript) and textual markup, e.g. in XML. We will discuss the concept of digital editions (and how they differ from their printed counterparts), how to produce such editions, and what we could put into them.