The Ideology and Technology Of Creating Online Full-Text Digital Collections of Ancient and Medieval Slavonic Literary Texts
By Victor Baranov
Journal of the Applied Mathematics, Statistics and Informatics, Vol. 3:2 (2007)
Abstract: One of the main tasks for creators of both large- and small-scale digital collections of literary texts is to provide users a convenient means of navigation to allow them to quickly find information. If the materials in the collection are unique documents (in particular, ancient and medieval), the development of a means of storage of digital copies of manuscripts is made significantly difficult by the fact that the system needs to help the user not only locate a document but also solve a concrete research goal. Currently the creation of full-text collections and libraries of ancient and medieval manuscripts of literary texts uses technology based on database interfaces and markup languages for deeply encoded documents. For both technologies there are three tasks: (a) the unification in one information system of capabilities for handling not only findings from the texts and manuscripts but also findings on small (down to the character level) and abstract (semic structure of words, characteristics of objects of thematic classes, etc.) objects; (b) the creation of systems for remote access with developed facilities for search and, in certain circumstances, for manipulation of data; (c) the necessity to create a multifunctional and user-friendly interface. An example of the creation of a full-text, multifunctional, specialized system is the Manuscript project (http://manuscripts.ru/index_en.html), based at the Udmurtia State University and the Izhevsk State Technical University. The system represents a complex of editorial, search, and research modules based on a full-text database and intended for entering, editing, storing, manipulation, and analyzing transcriptions of ancient and medieval documents with complex structure as well as for preparing queries and manipulating retrieval to prepare glossaries and concordances and publish these texts online.
Click here to read/download this article (PDF file)
