This edition is made with the help of a digital tool which was newly developed over the course of the project: eLaborate. The primary goal of eLaborate is to facilitate online collaborative transcribing and editing of texts. When more and more projects started to use the tool, a second goal became the online presentation of editions, with clever digital functionalities that allow a varied, user-chosen presentation of the text, and simple searches. What you are looking at right now is a text created in eLaborateClassic, and presented in eLaborate2.
The photos shown on this website are digitalized pictures from a black-and-white microfilm. The copyrights of the photos rest with the University Library of Leiden. It is not allowed to reproduce any of these photos (other than for personal use only) without consent of the library. A full set of superb colour photos of this Martianus Capella manuscript can now be seen in their Digital Special Collections, in which gradually more and more items of their collection are freely accessible online.
The 'edition' shown in this website is best described as a 'semi-diplomatic edition': it follows the central manuscript closely, but silently resolves abbreviations, and notes corruptions wherever the editors have noted them, or solves passages which are hard to read in the Vossianus manuscript with the help of other manuscripts. Punctuation and capitals are added in most cases, following modern rules.
The edition is presented in four columns: (1) navigation, (2) facsimile, (3) transcription of De nuptiis, (4) transcription of the annotations. These columns act as panels: they can be clicked off (using the x on the top right of each column), their width can be adjusted (by dragging the arrows right or left), and they can be scrolled. You can change the content of a panel by clicking on "change panel", and choosing one of the offered options. When you have closed panels, and want them to appear again, you can add panels by clicking on "add panel" in the top bar, and decide which content should be shown by clicking on "change panel" and choosing one of the offered options. The panels will fill (more or less) the whole screen, so when using a view with only two panels (Facsimile and Annotation, for example), they will be considerably wider than when using a view with all four of them. In the Facsimile panel, you can zoom in and out, and you can enlarge the viewing pane by dragging down the arrow at the bottom.
Text and/or annotations can be searched by using the simple search tool in the top part of the screen. Wildcards such as "?" (one unknown character) and "*" (a string of unknown characters) can be used. A click in the box "Fuzzy search" will give you search results which match to a certain extent. This will allow you to work around problems of orthography, case endings or the like. The search results will be presented in a list, which can be used as a navigation list: a click on a result will bring you to the top of the page on which the result was found, and the exact place is marked yellow.
The transcriptions of the annotations frequently include remarks from the editors, ranging from plane question marks (where they could not read or understand annotations), to clever insights in textual problems, translations, variants from other manuscripts, parallels with other commentary traditions, or identifications of sources used by the glossators. These are captured in between { ... }, so as to set them apart from the transcription text. We hope to create a separate panel for these remarks in the near future.
