When the Electronic Boethius: Alfred the Great’s Old English Consolation of Philosophy project was formulated in the spring of 2002, the project team included Linda Cantara as co-principal investigator and Ionut Emil Iacob as software architect and chief programmer, both of the University of Kentucky; David French as digital photographer, who was at the time conservator in the Department of Collections and Preservation at the British Library; John Rice, who was then director of IT Architecture at Lexmark International; and Andrew Prescott, as liaison with the British Library and general consultant in Humanities Computing from the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Sheffield in England. By the time the grant was made at the end of the summer Cantara, who also served as the first program coordinator of the Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities at the University of Kentucky, had accepted a tenure-track position elsewhere, Rice had decided to retire from Lexmark and leave Lexington, and French had left the British Library. The success of the proposal was owing to this outstanding team.

While forced to begin without the support of three key members of the original team, the project made good progress in Fall 2002 thanks to the hard work, expertise, and imagination of Iacob and another Computer Science research assistant, Chengdong Li, who together developed a prototype EPT with stand-alone Java editing tools, including the xTagger, the Glossary builder, ImagText, OverLay, and DucType. Two doctoral students in Medieval English, Demorah Hayes and Kenneth Hawley, were instrumental in the design and development of these tools as they worked on transcriptions and glossaries. Tammy Ramsey, a masters student in Medieval English, represented the project at the annual TEI meeting in Chicago. The nascent project also benefitted from the regular attendance at our weekly meetings of Computer Science professors, Alex Dekhtyar and Jerzy Jaromczyk, who were gearing up to begin work on the NSF-sponsored ARCHway Project: Architecture for Research in Computing for Humanities through Research, Teaching, and Learning. Aidine Kiernan, who was director of IT Strategic Programs at Lexmark International, graciously agreed to serve temporarily as project manager. Andrew Prescott, in cooperation with Michelle Brown, curator of manuscripts, and Christopher Wright, head of the Department of Manuscripts in the British Library, arranged for a new round of digital photography at the Library in the spring with David Jacobs, who replaced David French in the Department of Collections and Preservation.

As the Spring 2003 semester began, we had hired Dorothy Carr Porter as the new program coordinator for the Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities, who later also served as co-PI on the project until other duties impinged. In addition to training and supervising research assistants, overseeing the day-to-day operation of the Collaboratory, and organizing the weekly project meetings, Porter worked on establishing encoding standards and tutoring student transcriptions and markup. Over the next two years many talented and diligent research assistants joined the research team. From Computer Science Anshul Jain, Aditya Tallapally, Swapna Kothapally, Qiangfeng Jiang, and Kranthi Bathula, as well as Doug Reside, a doctoral student in English with an undergraduate degree in Computer Science, all worked on programming editing tools under the Eclipse java API set up by Emil Iacob. The graduate research assistants from English, including Hayes, Hawley, Robert Callen, Elizabeth Fraser, Christopher Williams, Josuah Reid, and Jocelyn Taylor, a distinguished undergraduate in Classics and English, worked on transcriptions, encoding, and the glossary. The Electronic Boethius was greatly enhanced by the concurrent ARCHway project, especially by the selection of Eclipse as our development and production platform. To the demonstrable advantage of both, the two projects held joint meetings and programming sessions throughout the course of the ARCHway project, in addition to the weekly Electronic Boethius meetings.

In keeping with a Collaborative Research award, the Electronic Boethius has borrowed and shared resources with related external projects. We are grateful to the Dictionary of Old English project, directed by Antonette diPaolo Healey, for permission to use its resources in the reconstruction of a base text of Alfred’s prose and verse translation. We are also much indebted to the parallel project, directed by Malcolm Godden and Susan Irvine, to produce a new print edition. The Alfredian Boethius Project: Anglo-Saxon adaptations of the De Consolatione Philosophiae arranged the digitization of Oxford University Bodleian Library MSS Junius 12 and Bodley 180 for inclusion in the Electronic Boethius, and we have in turn provided our ultraviolet images of British Library MS Cotton Otho A. vi. While sharing images and complementary goals, the Electronic Boethius and Alfredian Boethius projects have maintained close contact through Godden’s annual Boethius Seminar and through joint presentations at several international meetings. Electronic Boethius has benefitted most from its sister project, ARCHway: Architecture for Research in Computing for Humanities through collaborative research, teaching, and learning, which established an architecture to put together the editing tools developed by the Electronic Boethius. We are indebted to those projects who have used and are planning to use the Electronic Boethius’s workbench of tools for image-based electronic editions, Edition Production & Presentation Technology (EPPT). We are particularly grateful to Laura Vigna, a graduate research assistant in Computer Science in Bologna University, who earned her thesis preparing one of the editing tools, under the combined guidance of her professors, Giuseppi Levi and Roberto Rosselli del Turko, and Emil Iacob.

Electronic Boethius: Alfred the Great’s Old English Consolation of Philosophy is funded by a Collaborative Research Award from the Division of Research Programs of the National Endowment for the Humanities and by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The British Library and the Bodleian Library, Oxford, have given privileged access to their collections, manuscript and curatorial expertise, and digitization facilities. The University of Kentucky provided space and network communications support in the W.T. Young Library for the Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities. The Center for Computational Sciences contributed system administration, research assistance, and participation in a lecture series. We would like to thank John Connolly, Director of the Center for Computational Sciences, and Vikram Gazula for continuing to provide system administration of the project servers.

© 2005 Electronic Facsimiles & Texts

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