Archimedes Collaboration Ongoing
Our collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science continues. The primary concentration of our collaboration is the Archimedes Project, which focuses on the digitization of Renaissance and Early Modern texts pertaining to the history of mechanics. During the past six months, we have digitized fifteen texts including several Renaissance commentaries on works of Aristotle and a Renaissance edition of Vitruvius. (Read more on Vitruvius in the article on Roman Perseus Art & Archaeology). The digitization of these works has also provided a testbed for expanding and improving the Perseus morphological analysis tools. We have, for instance, adapted the morphological analysis program to deal with texts written in Renaissance Latin and in Italian to further the research of our Berlin colleagues. We have also created electronic editions of two important Renaissance dictionaries, Thomas Cooper's Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae and John Florio's Queen Anna's New World of Words: Dictionarie of the Italian and English Tounges. Not only are these dictionaries quite important in the history of lexicography, they will also help our colleagues at the MPI understand and interpret these Renaissance texts. The presence of these lexica in the Perseus reading environment will allow scholars at the MPI to understand more fully the language of these Renaissance authors. Our work with the MPI continues. We are currently in the process of marking-up fourteen more texts including works by Leon Battista Alberti and Albertus Magnus. We are also editing a modern Italian-English dictionary to provide the framework for expanding the Perseus tools to more recent Italian texts. In addition to supporting the text digitization, the MPI has also sponsored a second post-doctoral research fellow who was trained at Perseus. Brian Fuchs has taken up residence in Berlin to edit electronic texts and to work on the technical infrastructure for future projects in the humanities and the history of science.
document placed on-line 12/29/99, LMC