Christine McWebb, James Laidlaw
Creating the Internet Christine de Pizan Edition
We can safely say that we have made a lot of progress with paper editions and/or translations into modern French, English, Italian, German etc. of Christine de Pizan's works. Most of her texts in poetry and prose do exist in either edition or translation. In addition, we have the Christine de Pizan Society website (http://www.arts.auckland.ac.nz/sites/index.cfm?S=M_PIZAN ) with a wealth of information, as well as the recently completed digitization of the Harley 4431 manuscript at http://www.pizan.lib.ed.ac.uk/ . We propose to take Christine de Pizan scholarship to the next level. In other words, we would like to explore the possibility of merging digitized editions of Christine’s works with the wealth of secondary sources in a core website linked to the other Christine sites already available on line; an Internet Christine de Pizan Edition, so to speak (modeled along the lines of the existing Internet Shakespeare Edition (http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/index.html ). Many digital archiving projects such as this one are currently underway in attempts by the scholarly community to create ways of storing, mining, and retrieving information in an efficient and sustainable way. Christine McWebb is co-director of the MARGOT project where texts and images from French Medieval and Early Modern texts are published in digital format, usually in connection with a specific project (http://margot.uwaterloo.ca). She is also part of TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research, http://tapor.ca ), a large-scale project spanning thirteen Canadian universities, which serves as a tool creation and managements system and houses numerous text databases in the humanities. James Laidlaw is the director of the recently completed digitization of the Queen’s manuscript, Harley 4431, and collaborated in that capacity with other scholars. Laidlaw has also developed the Christine de Pizan Database (http://www.arts.ed.ac.uk/french/christine/cpstart.htm).
The proposed project would be ambitious and would require careful planning as well as substantial resources – human, technical, and financial. In our opinion, the Christine de Pizan Society would be the perfect place to begin discussions for this large-scale undertaking. For the workshop, we propose to demonstrate a prototype site that could serve as a stepping stone for discussions, the aim of which is to arrive at more concrete ideas and a plan for further action. Some of the items to be discussed would include (but are not limited to): texts to be digitized; type and depth of encoding; housing of the project; open source, dynamic site or closed site; funding; organizing committee; platform
Format of the workshop: 1.Presentation of prototype model; 2.Brief explanations of potentials goals and outcomes; 3.Discussion