Elwood Redux: Introducing the Elwood Transcription/Text Encoding Modules as well as a Newly-revised, Browser-independent Version of the Elwood Viewer

July 17, 2013, 15:30 | Centennial Room, Nebraska Union

The ELWOOD VIEWER was created ten years ago as a tool to display the edited text and manuscript images associated with documentary editions produced by the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive (PPEA). As originally written, it contained powerful regular expression search capabilities as well as display formats to enable sophisticated analysis of the texts that it presented. ELWOOD has met with very positive reception during conference presentations and with glowing comment in reviews of individual editions produced by the PPEA, including that of one reviewer (George Shuffelton, Speculum, (85) 2010, 285), who urged that the ELWOOD VIEWER represented “a major step forward in the delivery of digital editions” that “ought to be a model for future programs of this kind.”

Although originally conceived as a general interface for electronic scholarly editions, to date ELWOOD has been available only as a dedicated viewer packaged in the PPEA's CD-ROM editions of the B-version of Piers Plowman. As such, it has not been available for use by other electronic editions . The poster proposed in this abstract highlights recent steps taken to greatly broaden ELWOOD's potential usefulness in the display of scholarly editions available over the Internet. It will also introduce its audience to a new software module developed specifically to enable editors, as well as individuals seeking relatively straightforward means to transcribe and encode manuscript texts for use in their personal scholarship, to have access to the powerful analytical tools contained in the Elwood Viewer. The poster will also introduce a version of Elwood designed to run under all major Internet browsers (the original version could only be run under Microsoft’s Internet Explorer)and enhanced with improvements that draw upon the rich image-handling capacities made possible by HTML 5.

Features that have been supported by the ELWOOD VIEWER for a number of years, including its tight linkage of manuscript image and edited text, are presented (with illustrative figures) in Lyman (2004). The added features to be demonstrated in this poster session include: the enlargement of the software's function from that of the display of single manuscripts to that of serving as an overall archive viewer possessing the capacity to compare and move quickly between edited texts of different witnesses of a work, enhanced text and markup searching capacities along with the capability to export search results for further analysis, frequency counts, organized alphabetically or by descending order of frequency, of searched works or phrases, as well as other enhancements geared to assist readers in their navigation of edited text and manuscript images.

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