Digitizing and accessing the Milan Glosses — Aaron Griffith, Utrecht University · Asynchronous talk · 17 minutes · Captions available

Taking part. Watch at any time, then bring your questions, comments and disagreements to the discussion thread below. Aaron will be checking in regularly until the symposium and during 28–29 September, and the thread stays open until 6 October. First-time commenters are held briefly for approval.

About this talk. This talk examines aspects of the digitization of and subsequent access to the Milan Glosses, our largest source of Old Irish in a contemporary manuscript. In the first, backwards-looking part of the talk I explore the steps and missteps involved in digitizing the text of the Milan Glosses, as well as of the Psalm commentary that they gloss. All of this work was part of the Milan Glosses Project (funded by FWF – Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung – project number P19137-G03), which ran from 2006 to 2011. The digitization included creating MS word, and then PDF, files of the gloss text as found in Stokes & Strachan (1901: 7–483). These files were simply digital versions of the older text. More important digitization work was done through the medium of Filemaker Pro, with which a new digital edition of the text was created with full morphological parsing and an accompanying dictionary. Accessibility was achieved through a stand-alone version of the digital database.

While much of the digitization work, originally performed 15–20 years ago, led to increased accessibility of the text in both the short- and medium-term, not all aspects have fared equally well up to the present. The second part of the talk focusses on the issues that have arisen in accessibility in the last five years. Much of these are the result of the well-known problems arising from using proprietary software (e.g. Filemaker Pro). I do not have quick-and-easy solutions to all of these problems. Nonetheless, through this conference I hope to embed the issues arising around the digitization of the Milan Glosses in the broader discussion surrounding text accessibility.

Questions outside the thread: celticlanguageresearch@gmail.com