The Archivio Storico Ricordi holds the historical records of one of the most important music publisher of all times. For almost two hundred years, beyond their main business as music publishers, the Ricordis were also impresarios, agents, and cultural organisers, and played a central and unique mediating role within Italian musical life. This role is very well documented by some 30,000 autograph letters addressed to Casa Ricordi by composers, writers, librettists, singers, and conductors, and an impressive and neatly ordered collection of around 600,000 sent letters. The whole collection will be published online bit by bit. The goal of the project is to connect the letters not only with the relevant records of the Ricordi archive (ledgers, contracts, stage designs, scores, pictures...), but also with other music archives over the web. / Das Archivio Storico Ricordi sammelt historische Materialien eines der bedeutendsten Musikverlagshäuser aller Zeiten. Über fast 200 Jahre prägten die Ricordis nicht nur durch ihre Verlagstätigkeit, sondern ebenso als Impresarios, Agenten, Kulturförderer und -manager das italienische Musikleben. Rund 30 000 an die Ricordis gerichtete autografe Schreiben von Komponisten, Schriftstellern, Librettisten, Sängern und Dirigenten sowie 600 000 von den Ricordis verfasste Briefe dokumentieren die herausragende Rolle der Verlegerfamilie. Die gesamte Sammlung wird nach und nach online zur Verfügung gestellt. Dabei werden die Schriftstücke nicht nur mit anderen Objekten des Ricordi-Archivs wie Verlagsbüchern, Verträgen, Bühnenentwürfen, Noten, Bildern, sondern ebenso mit Materialien anderer Musikerarchive im Web verlinkt.

Encoding hieroglyphic texts is time-consuming. If a text already exists as hand-written transcription, there is an alternative, namely OCR. Off-the-shelf OCR systems seem difficult to adapt to the peculiarities of Ancient Egyptian. Presented is a proof-of-concept tool that was designed to digitize texts of Urkunden IV in the hand-writing of Kurt Sethe. It automatically recognizes signs and produces a normalized encoding, suitable for storage in a database, or for printing on a screen or on paper, requiring little manual correction. The encoding of hieroglyphic text is RES (Revised Encoding Scheme) rather than (common dialects of) MdC (Manuel de Codage). Earlier papers argued against MdC and in favour of RES for corpus development. Arguments in favour of RES include longevity of the encoding, as its semantics are font-independent. The present study provides evidence that RES is also much preferable to MdC in the context of OCR. With a well-understood parsing technique, relative positioning of scanned signs can be straightforwardly mapped to suitable primitives of the encoding.

In einem kooperativen Erschließungsprojekt haben das Handschriftenzentrum der Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig und die Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden die wissenschaftliche Erschließung und vollständige Digitalisierung der Dresdner deutschsprachigen und niederländischen mittelalterlichen Handschriften begonnen.

Proefschrift Universiteit van Amsterdam. / Auteursnaam op rug: H.T. Colenbrander. - Met teksten in het Engels en het Frans. De gebroeders Limburg zijn Johan, Herman en Paul van Limburg. Met lit. opg. - Met samenvatting in het Engels.

Zugl.: Heidelberg, Univ., Diss.

Habilitationsschrift--Universität Würzburg, 1975. / Includes excerpts in Middle High German and Latin. Includes indexes. Includes bibliographical references (p. 627-638).

Coptic is the latest stage of the indigenous Egyptian language written in the Greek alphabet with some additional characters taken from the Demotic script. Due to climatic conditions many manuscripts have survived from Egypt. The bulk of Coptic manuscripts of the 1st millenium A. D. is preserved in fragmentary condition and the remains are scattered – often as single leaves or small groups of leaves – over collections on three continents. So a major aim of scholarly work is the virtual reconstruction of codices. Assigning a fragment to a specific manuscript is often not easy. It’s not only necessary to compare the script for similarities but also to take into account the contents in order to identify the manuscript of origin and the position of the leave therein. In the case of known texts which have been recorded in a manuscript as full texts a mathematical approach can be used to estimate the position of a fragment. Special problems arise with manuscripts of uncertain arrangement, e.g. liturgical codices that do not have one continuous text. They combine texts from the scriptures, hymns, prayers, or lifes of saints. In these cases reliable estimates can only be given by comparing the identified text / texts on a single leave with a representative amount of data: this means collecting and indexing as much known material as possible and arranging it according to liturgical usage. The lecture presents ways of assigning fragments by use of palaeography to known codices. An important tool is the “palaeography data base” developed in the Institut für Neutestamentliche Textforschung at Münster (INTF) as a base instrument for virtual reconstructions in the Virtual Manuscript Room (VMR) of the INTF. Furthermore, electronic tools will be shown that are a by-product of the lecturer’s PhD for identifying texts, the order of manuscripts as well as for further research.

Encoding hieroglyphic texts is time-consuming. If a text already exists as hand-written transcription, there is an alternative, namely OCR. Off-the-shelf OCR systems seem difficult to adapt to the peculiarities of Ancient Egyptian. Presented is a proof-of-concept tool that was designed to digitize texts of Urkunden IV in the hand-writing of Kurt Sethe. It automatically recognizes signs and produces a normalized encoding, suitable for storage in a database, or for printing on a screen or on paper, requiring little manual correction. The encoding of hieroglyphic text is RES (Revised Encoding Scheme) rather than (common dialects of) MdC (Manuel de Codage). Earlier papers argued against MdC and in favour of RES for corpus development. Arguments in favour of RES include longevity of the encoding, as its semantics are font-independent. The present study provides evidence that RES is also much preferable to MdC in the context of OCR. With a well-understood parsing technique, relative positioning of scanned signs can be straightforwardly mapped to suitable primitives of the encoding.

Book Review of Ernst Dammann, Afrikanische Handschriften, Teil 1 - Handschriften in Swahili und anderen Sprachen Afrikas

Das Hauptanliegen meines Forschungsprojektes war die erneute Untersuchung der aus dem späten 3. bis 7. Jahrhundert n. Chr. stammenden griechischen medizinischen Papyri, die zwischen 1913 und 1914 hauptsächlich an einem Ort in der ägyptischen Stätte von Antinoopolis gefunden wurden. Antinoopolis bietet die Gelegenheit, diesen Dokumenten einen archäologischen Kontext zu geben, zumal die vorliegende geographische und chronologische Kontinuität einen detaillierten Vergleich der durch diese Quellen konservierten Daten begünstigt. Das Interesse an Antinoopolis aus medizinhistorischer Perspektive ist durch die diversen Heilpraktiken begründet, die von den dokumentarischen, literarischen und archäologischen Beweisstücken bezeugt werden, und deren Quantität und Bandbreite für ein ägyptisches Dorf außergewöhnlich sind. Das Ziel meiner Forschung an den Papyri ist sowohl philologischer als auch kulturhistorischer Natur. Erstens habe ich versucht, die Manuskripte wissenschaftlich zu präsentieren und ihre Eigentümlichkeiten, Charakteristika und Funktionen zu diskutieren. Ich wollte unser Verständnis dieser Fragmente durch die Identifizierung neuer Textabschnitte, die Integrierung von Textzusätzen und eine genauere Untersuchung ihrer formellen Struktur verbessern, was zu einer überarbeiteten Edition einiger ausgewählter Papyri führte. Darüber hinaus habe ich versucht, zum besseren Verständnis des allgemeinen Umfeldes dieser ägyptischen Gemeinschaft, besonders in Bezug auf religiöse Heilpraktiken im Zusammenhang mit der heiligen Stätte des Collouthus beizutragen, und die historischen und kulturellen Gegebenheiten zu untersuchen, in denen diese Texte genutzt wurden. Schlussendlich untersucht meine Forschung die Entwicklung des Kodex im Allgemeinen über den Zeitraum der späten Antike, die an verschiedenen Aspekten beobachtet werden kann. Eine der interessantesten Fragen dabei ist, wie die Texte gesammelt und präsentiert wurden, d.h. der Zusammenhang von Aufbewahrung der Papyri und ihrem Textinhalt. / The main aim of my research project was to re-examine the Greek medical papyri from the Egyptian site of Antinoopolis dating between late 3rd up to 7th century AD, discovered mostly in a single area between 1913 and 1914. Antinoopolis offers the potential for putting documents into an archaeological context, and this geographical and chronological consistency facilitates a close comparison between the data preserved in these sources. The interest in Antinoopolis, as far as the medical tradition is concerned, lies in the diverse healing practices attested by documentary, literary and archaeological evidence whose quantity and range is altogether exceptional among Egyptian villages. The objective of my research is both papyrological-philological and cultural-historical. Firstly, I have tried to present the manuscripts and discuss their peculiarities, characteristics and functions. I have sought to improve our understanding of these fragments through the identification of new portions of text, the integration of supplements and a better assessment of their formal arrangement, which resulted in the revised edition of a few outstanding papyri. In addition to this, I have tried to contribute to the evaluation of the general context of this Egyptian community, particularly as regards religious healing practices connected to the sanctuary of Collouthus, and to explore the historical and cultural circumstances in which these texts were used. Finally, my research investigates the development of the codex throughout late Antiquity, which can be observed in a number of respects. One of the most significant concerns how the texts were assembled and presented, namely the interplay between container and content.