Comments on: New Digital Projects I: Vernacular Aristotelianism and Digitized Archives at the Wellcome Library

By: New Digital Projects II: Vernacular Aristotelianism and Digitized Archives at the Wellcome Library « Early Modern Online Bibliography

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 02:53:31 +0000

[...] a previous post, I discussed the Vernacular Aristotelianism database featured during the first week of a two-week [...]

By: andiesilva

andiesilva — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 19:02:01 +0000

Reblogged this on The Renaissance Polyglot and commented: Below is my evaluation of the two incredible projects we got to see at Reading Publics. I would love to have your feedback and additional comments!

By: Eleanor Shevlin

Eleanor Shevlin — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 18:51:28 +0000

Let me echo Anna’s thanks for a very fine account of this new tool. As you note, that Vernacular Aristotelianism includes details about the paratextual and other material features of texts is a welcome decision. Refini and others involved in this database have established an admirable bar in terms of detail. Labor to continue this work, though, is understandably a problem.

In the days of the card catalog, some collections did have cabinets filled with such recorded details, but unfortunately many of these catalogs have been discarded. With their disposal we lost a wealth of information that online catalogs have not tended to include. Nicholson Baker’s well-known article “Discard” discusses this loss almost two decades (The New Yorker, April 4, 1994).

When a form of crowd-sourcing was proposed as a way of helping complete entries at this level of specificity, did any discussion of bibliographic expertise arise?

By: Anna Battigelli

Anna Battigelli — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 12:27:33 +0000

Thanks for this, Andie. Vernacular Aristotelianism sounds promising. You are right that finding the search button (labeled FIND) takes a moment. Searches also load a bit slowly. But it seems to have promise.

EEBO does have EEBO Interactions, which allows non-authorial details to be added by users. It would be great if EEBO Interactions had an efficient search mechanism that would allow browsers to sift through this added metadata.

Can you provide some specific instances of how searching VA works?