The Repertorium Initiative: Computer Processing of Medieval Manuscripts

The application of computer technologies to store, publish and—most importantly—investigate written sources belongs to the most promising tasks at the boundary
between the technical sciences and the humanities. The Repertorium Initiative was founded in 1994 at the
Department of Old Bulgarian Literature of the Institute of Literature of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh (US). The Repertorium is a universal database that incorporates
archeographic, paleographic, codicological, textological,
and literary-historical data concerning the original and translated medieval texts distributed through Slavic
manuscripts between the eleventh and the seventeenth centuries. These data include both parts of actual texts
and the results of their scientific investigation, with
particular attention to the study manuscripts typology, a traditional aspect of philological scholarship that has been reinvigorated by the introduction, through the
Repertorium Initiative, of computational methodologies.
The descriptions and examples of real texts are based on the XML (Extensive Markup Language), an informatic standard that incorporates special “markup” characters within natural language texts. The markup tags demarcate certain parts of the texts (elements) and signal what the data represents, simplifying the identification and
extraction of data from the text not just during conversion
for rendering (the most common procedure in humanities
projects), but also during data-mining for analysis. The most recent model of description of manuscripts in an XML format derived from the TEI (Text Encoding
Initiative) guidelines has been developed by Andrei
Bojadzhiev (Sofia University), following five main
principles, formulated in the context of the project by David J. Birnbaum in 1994:
1. Standardizing of document file formats;
2. Multiple use (data should be separated from processing);
3. Portability of electronic texts (independence of local platforms);
4. Necessity of preservation of manuscripts in electronic form;
5. The well-structured division of data according to
contemporary achievements in textology, paleography
and codicology.
he working team in the Institute of Literature has already developed a digital library of over 350 electronic documents.
Since its inception as a joint Bulgarian-US project over ten years ago, the Repertorium Initiative has expanded to include a joint Bulgarian-British project describing
Slavic manuscripts in the collection of the British Library
(London), as well as a project with University of
Gothenburg (Sweden) concerning the study of late medieval
Slavic manuscripts with computer tools. The Repertorium Initiative has grown not only in terms of its geography
and its participants; it has also come to include a unique
set of possibilities for linking the primary data to a
standardized terminological apparatus for the description,
study, edition, and translation of medieval texts, as well as to key words and terms used in the bibliographic
descriptions. This combination of structured descriptions
of primary sources with a sophisticated network of
descriptive materials permits, for example, the extraction of different types of indices that go well beyond traditional
field-based querying.
In recognition of the ground-breaking achievements of The Repertorium Initiative, its directors and principal researchers were appointed in 1998 by the International
Committee of Slavists (the most important such international association) to head a Special Commission for the Computer Processing of Slavic Manuscripts and Early Printed Books. Other evidence of the achievements of this project include, the organization three international conferences (Blagoevgrad 1994, Pomorie 2002, Sofia 2005) and the publication by the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences of three anthologies (1995, 2000, 2003). The Internet presence of the Repertorium Initiative is located at http://clover.slavic.pitt.edu/~repertorium/ .
Because the Repertorium Initiative goes beyond manuscript studies in seeking to provide a broad and encyclopedic
source of information about the Slavic medieval
heritage, it also incorporates such auxiliary materials as bibliographic information and other authority files. In this capacity the Repertorium Initiative is closely coordinated
with three other projects: the project for Authority
Files, which defines the terms and ontology necessary for medieval Slavic manuscript studies; Libri Slavici, a joint undertaking of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and the University of Sofia in the field of bibliography on medieval written heritage; and identifying the typology of the content of manuscripts and texts with the aid of computational tools. All three of these share the common structure of the TEI documents and use a common XSLT
(Extensible Stylesheet Language for Transformations)
library for transforming documents to a variety of formats
(including XML, HTML [Hypertext Markup Language], and SVG [Scalable Vector Graphics]) thus providing a sound base for the exchange of information and for
electronic publishing.
The relationship among the three projects could be
described in the following way:
1. The Repertorium Initiative is a innovative from both philological and technological perspectives in its
approach to the description and edition of medieval texts. It takes its metadata for description from its Authority Files and its bibliographic references from the Libri Slavici.
2. The Authority Files project gathers its preliminary
information on the basis of descriptions and prepares
guidelines in the form of authority lists for the use the metadata by researchers.
3. Libri Slavici accumulates its data from various
sources, including descriptions and authority files, and shares common metadata with both of them.
4. Visualization of typology is radically new non-textual
representations of manuscript structures. This
development demonstrates that computers have done more than provide a new way of performing such
traditional tasks as producing manuscript descriptions.
Rather, the production of electronic manuscript
descriptions has enabled new and innovative
philological perspectives on the data.
The future of the Repertorium Initiative is to continue integrate into a network full text databases of medieval Slavic manuscripts, electronic description of codices, and electronic reference books with terminology. Preserving the cultural heritage of European libraries and archives,
it provides for data and metadata search and retrieval on the basis of paleographic, linguistic, textologic, and
historical and other cultural characteristics. The connections
among the different subprojects thus lead to a digital
library that is suitable for the use of a wide community
of specialists, and, in the same time, continues to inspire related new projects and initiatives.
References
Miltenova, A., Boyadzhiev, A. (2000). “An Electronic
Repertory of Medieval Slavic Literature and
Letters: a Suite of Guidelines”. In: Medieval Salvic Manuscripts ans SGML: Problems and Perspectives. Sofia:“Marin Drinov” publishing house, 44-68.
Miltenova, A. Boyadzhiev, A. Radoslavova, D. (2003). “A Unified Model for the description of the Medieval Manuscripts?”. In: Computational Approaches to the study of Early and Modern Slavic Languages and Texts. Sofia:“Boyan Penev” Publishing Center, 113-135.