Oxford LibGuides: Resources for medievalists in Hispanic Studies: Tools for medieval texts

Working with medieval texts

Working with medieval texts can raise some particular challenges. The following tools have been selected and evaluated by Amaranta Saguar García (DPhil student, LMH) as essential for students in medieval studies.

Collation software

After transcription, either paleographic or semi-paleographic, medievalists are frequently confronted with the collation of several witnesses of a text. The following software has been developed to aid collation.

CollateX
CollateX was developed for the collation, analysis and publication of texts preserved in multiple witnesses. The current version of the software can manage up to 2000 versions of a text. It also has a regularisation tool which can be used to produce a file containing the word equivaences, without altering the original transcription files. Collate can produce output files for print or electronic publications.
JUXTA
Juxta is an open-source tool for comparing and collating multiple witnesses of a text. The software allows users to set any of the witnesses as the base text, to add or remove witness texts, to switch the base text at will, and to annotate Juxta-revealed comparisons and save the results.

Fonts

Medieval writing is characterised by the frequency, abundance and variety of abbreviations and special characters. Although most medieval characters are covered by the Unicode standard, these are not always represented in commonly-used fonts such as Times New Roman, Arial and Calibri. This can increase the difficulty of adequately transcribing medieval texts. Although it is possible to use macros to solve this problem, a more user-friendly alternative is to use a typeface which includes all the relevant medieval characters. Currently, there are two independent projects which have created TrueType fonts for medievalists.

Medieval Unicode Font Initiative (MUFI)
The Medieval Unicode Font Initiative (MUFI) was founded in 2001 to solve the problem of the encoding and display of special characters in medieval texts in the Latin alphabet. Several MUFI compliant fonts are continually being developed, and many are now available as freeware.
Junicode
Junicode is a Unicode font for medievalists, currently containing 3096 characters in the regular style. Italic, bold, and bold italic styles are less complete.

Transcription software

Transcribing digital texts can be a difficult task. Unless you have a desktop with two screens, you will either resort to cascading windows, or flicking from one screen to another. Transcription software can facilitate this kind of work immensely.

Transcript 2.3
Transcript 2.3 is program which divides your screen into two parts. In the upper half you can see the text you are transcribing, and the lower half is a text editor. You can resize the windows as you wish. From within the editor you can move the upper image around, and also navigate back and forth within your document.