3. Report on new developments with the skaldic web site

The web site <skaldic.arts.usyd.edu.au> has a number of new features. Almost all editors have been contacted recently and given a password for the new restricted area of the site. If you have not been given a password or are having problems, please contact me by email.

All the Jón Helgason kartotek in Copenhagen has been entered into the web database, covering about 80% of the corpus, as well as information on the rest of the non-runic verse in the corpus. On average, there are about three references to manuscript pages per stanza, and the majority of these are linked to digital facsimiles of the manuscript refered to. The database is continually being updated and expanded, with the database of the ONP Registre soon to be incorporated.

A new font developed for the project is available on the web site, called ReykholtTimes. There are significant compatibility issues with three Icelandic characters (ñ ã ÿ) in most fonts, specifically, that they do not transfer well (or often not at all) between Macs and PCs. This becomes a major problem in collaborative projects such as our own, as documents are regularly transferred between different platforms for those involved to edit and review. To solve these problems, editors should start using the new font. ReykholtTimes also adds some extra letters for transcriptions, fixes a number of problems found in ReykjavikTimes and is more standardised than that font. It is available on the web site at <skaldic.arts.usyd.edu.au/restricted/fonts>, along with instructions on how to use it. Documents already created in ReykjavikTimes need not be converted to ReykholtTimes.

The web site will also include updates to the Editors' Manual before the revised edition is published. Some updates have arisen from the requirements of producing the edition electronically. An overview of these changes is given in the document Guidelines for the Electronic Encoding of the Skaldic Corpus, tabled at the York symposium and available at <skaldic.arts.usyd.edu.au/guidelines/guide.html> (please note that this is a discussion document and does not reflect the final agreed guidelines).

The new guidelines reflect a significant change in the process of producing the edition since it was first conceived, namely, that contributors will be producing material to be encoded in a machine-readable form, rather than producing material in the form to be published. In practice, this does not mean much of a change from the previous process. The main differences stem from the need to clarify certain features of the edited material: references to manuscripts, texts and published works; different types of poetic diction (e.g. new brackets are to be used for glosses of heiti); and the structure of kennings (complex kennings will be bracketed to show their structure). In some cases, such as the bracketing of kennnings, the new notation will not appear in the published edition, but is there to assist those encoding the edited material.

Tarrin Wills <tarrin.wills@arts.usyd.edu.au>

References