Facta & Verba

About Facta & Verba
Facta & Verba: research results
1. NEW An annotated hypertext edition of Suetonius' Vita Augustus
2. Hypertext edition of Boethius' Consolatio Philosophiae using JavaScript (hence requires Netscape 2.0):
  - Boethius' Text
  - James O'Donnell's Commentary
  - W.V. Cooper's Translation (Books 1 and 2 only)
  - concordance on Books 1-5.
3. An HTML concordance on Vergil's Aeneid IV
4. The annotated You shall know joy beyond all you ever hoped to hear
Facta & Verba: work in preparation
1. The Atticus Encyclopedia

1. About Facta & Verba

Facta & Verba is a laboratory that investigates the automatic processing and presentation of data. On this Website, a few of our results are shown that focus on classical literature. The scope of these projects is to design databases from which hypertext versions of classical texts can be generated with pointers to e.g., commentaries, dictionaries, related texts, etc.

You are kindly invited to send any comments or suggestions to joostkok@euronet.nl

2. Facta & Verba: research results

2.1. James O'Donnell's Commentary hyperlinked with Boethius' Consolatio Philosophiae hyperlinked with W.V. Cooper's translation

The commentary of Professor James O'Donnell's and his Web version of the Consolatio were edited for storage in a database that holds the information on text, translation, anchors and notes. By application of Perl scripts, output of the database is converted to HTML versions of

Boethius' text containing hypertext links to
Professor O'Donnell's commentary which links on to
W.V. Cooper's translation (Books 1 and 2 only)
a concordance on Books 1-5. (N.B.This sample uses frames and JavaScript, hence requires Netscape 2.0 or higher. This format is entirely due to ideas expressed in the Web Concordances designed and implemented by Rob Watt (Department of English, University of Dundee).

Editorial changes with respect to the original version are documented as well.

2.2. An HTML concordance on Vergil's Aeneid IV

An HTML hypertext version of a concordance on book IV of the Aeneid is demonstrated here. The source text was obtained from the Dante FTP site. This TeX source was processed for input in a relational database that generated the HTML documents. The "spines" document offers the opportunity to select a subset of all the 2,732 distinct words used by Vergil in book IV. The blue-arrow buttons are hypertext links that open up the relevant volume of the concordance. With each word, its occurrences are listed that all 4,527 hyper-link directly to the relevant place in the complete text of book IV.

Due to space limitations set by my provider, the complete concordance cannot be demonstrated here: it takes about 3.4 Megabytes. Anyone interested in using the complete version can contact Facta & Verba at joostkok@euronet.nl

2.3. The annotated You shall know joy beyond all you ever hoped to hear

As an exercise to obtain experience with the problems sketched in 2.1 and 3.1, a hypertext version was created of Clytaimnestra's famous monologue on telecommunications in archaic times. Contrary to modern folk lore, the fundamentals of Internet were not devised by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency but by the Achaian army during the Trojan war. Read all about the backbone from Troy to Argos in Aischylos' Agamemnon 266–316.

All links were applied by hand, which was a nasty job to do. However, after ten to twenty lines some system became apparent in selecting and naming the anchors. This result provided at least some perspective of a structural approach.

3. Facta & Verba: work in preparation

3.1. The Atticus Encyclopedia: One of the most intriguing sources of knowledge about the last decades of the Roman republic is, of course, Cicero's body of letters to, amongst others, Atticus. Due to all the names-dropping and gossiping, these letters are screaming for hypertext annotations...