About

Aims

Wardrops’ Collection Online aims to stimulate different approaches to linguistic, literary, historical and socio-cultural studies of documents represented in the Wardrop Collection and to foster a fuller understanding of context that they represent. WCO comprises the digital collection of texts encoded in accordance with Text Encoding Initiative (TEI).

A digital collection

To deliver the WCO collection in an efficient and timely manner, we avoided developing new software or applications. Instead, we used technologies already used worldwide for the representation of digital content. The collection uses open standards for creating and preserving digital texts. The collection is edited and annotated manually and will evolve collaborative editing based on the interests of the research community.

Some texts are linked to digital images hosted by Digital Bodleian with purpose to help scholars interested in the source documents. If the checking against the original text reveals any incoherence, we will be grateful to update materials in accordance to the corrections submitted to the editor.

Texts can be downloaded in ePub format and re-used in accordance with Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Main Objective

The main objectives of the project are as follows:

  • to provide critical online edition of manuscripts, which includes the production of a diplomatic transcription, physical description and supporting commentary for each document;
  • to prepare .xml files needed for the further publishing this edition to the web with free worldwide access at no charge to the end-user;
  • to equip .xml files with special tags indicating persons, places and dates in the published materials, which will be used for the linking purposes;
  • to stimulate the use of these materials for research purposes and to develop additional tools for the future analysis of Georgian collections online.

Methodology

The WCO builds on the texts annotated in accordance with Text Encoding Initiative (TEI P5) version. Transcription and markup of texts is carried out against the primary sources and/or images of primary sources available in Bodleian and includes thorough description of edition, publication, sources, encoding etc. in accordance with scheme used by Bodleian Libraries for cataloguing issues and amended by annotation of texts, named entities (geographical and proper names) and their referencing to Wikidata (for the annotation guidelines see Editorial Guide). The texts of manuscripts are linked to images via International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF). The annotation is implemented in Oxygen XML Editor; the .xml files are stored in the open source native XML database eXist-db, processed by TEI Publisher and connected to open source HTML site via iframe.

A research project

The Wardrops' Collection Online aims to allow scholars to provide more sophisticated searches in a corpus of annotated texts. The focus of WCO is to provide processing of Georgian texts from the viewpoint of digital scholarship and to facilitate interdisciplinary approaches to Georgian materials abroad.

For this purpose we have used different tabs for the presentation of text (currently, metadata, original text, user-friendly text, photomaterial):

  • The metadata offers information about the source, a brief summary of text, text's identifier, physical description etc.;
  • The original text reproduces the text as it is represented in source document strictly defending the script (Asomtavruli, Nuskhuri and/or Mkhedruli) used;
  • The user-friendly text reproduces the text in user friendly mode in Modern Georgian;
  • Photomaterial is hosted by Digital Bodleian and linked to the texts from within .xml files.

We hope that over time, the WCO research project will facilitate new approaches to the processing and understanding of Old, Middle and Modern Georgian texts.

A website is compiled in 2019. The public beta stage of WCO began on 1 December 2019. We continue work on the project and please, do not hesitate to contact us at irina_lobzhanidze@iliauni.edu.ge about the contents, functionalities or design.

Copyright information

The host and the copyright holder of photomaterial is Digital Bodleian; it means that this material can be distributed or reproduced only for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Terms & Conditions of Bodleian Libraries.

The .xml files are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which allows users to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, to remix, transform and build upon the material. The main restriction is that material shall not be used for commercial purposes and in case you use it, you must distribute your contributions under the same license.

In future all contributions to WCO will be submitted to the editor for review at irina_lobzhanidze@iliauni.edu.ge and distributed under the same license.

If you want to cite material from the Wardrops' Collection Online, please, copy and paste the following information: Lobzhanidze, I., ed. Wardrops' Collection Online. Wardrops' Collection Online, 1 Dec. 2019 (v1). Web, http://manuscript.iliauni.edu.ge/

Financial Support

The project Wardrops' Collection Online is carried out within the framework of Joint Research Programme of the University of Oxford and SRNSFG in Georgian Studies.

Cooperation

We are cooperating with the Ilia State University to access NoSQL database and to make .xml files available online.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.