ITH: Seminarier Vårterminen 1998

The New Ibsen

Espen S. Ore,
Senter for humanistisk informasjonteknologi,
Universitetet i Bergen

Abstract

Many projects presented at humanities computing conferences and other meetings over the last five-six years are concerned with computerizing texts. These texts may be collections, either of an author, a genre, or some other grouping, and the texts may exist as manuscripts, typescripts, or printed books. Typical for most of these projects, such as for instance the work being done at the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen is that the project aim is to enter the texts and use descriptive markup. "Descriptive" is here used with a wide sense of meaning.

In Norway a national project on Ibsen's work began last year. This project will produce digitized facsimiles of all manuscripts, letters etc. and encoded versions of the same material. So far this is Yet Another Digitized Classic. However, this project also offers something else: one of the main goals is to establish a (or "the") new Ibsen text. This is in itself a traditional edition philological project of the kind that has been done for hundreds of years. In this project we mix the computerization and the traditional philology.

For a project like the new Ibsen text project it is necessary to decide upon an edition-philology policy. Simplified one can say that the choice has been between "German" or "text-sociological" editorial principles and "Anglo-saxon" or "intentional" principles. In Scandinavia two projects well under way (the Strindberg project in Sweden and the Kierkegaard project in Denmark) have chosen different strategies. In a preliminary phase in the Ibsen project it has been decided to follow the "text-sociological" principles, the same choice that was made in the Kierkegaard project.

In my presentation I plan to show how the computerization part of the project and the editorial part are supposed to cooperate, how the project is organized, end to explain the choices that was made regarding the editorial principles.

Tel.: 033 - 16 40 75, Fax: 033 - 16 40 05
E-post: Jan.Buse@hb.se eller Mats.Dahlstrom@hb.se