The complete letters of Descartes have been converted to Text-Fabric in 2 stages:
- During the CKCC project in 2011, from ASCII to TEI;
- At the Humanities Cluster, in 2023, from TEI to Text-Fabric.
The source data JapAM.txt is a file created in 1998 by
- Katsuzo Murakami (University of Tokyo)
- Meguru Sasaki (École Normale Supérieure d'Hokkaido)
- Takehumi Tokoro (University of Chyuo) 1998
This file is in a private ASCII encoding using characters 32-254, with identifier JAPAM.txt.
It was received on CD by Erik-Jan Bos and in 2011 converted by
- Erik-Jan Bos, then Descartes Centre, University of Utrecht
- Dirk Roorda, then Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS)
The conversion result (file JapAM-EJB-DR.xml is XML-TEI.
The illustrations are taken from Oeuvres de Descartes, 11 vols.,, editor: Charles Adam et Paul Tannery, Paris, Vrin, 1896-1911.
More information about this conversion is in this report.
Because of the structured nature of TEI it was not very difficult or time consuming to migrate the result further to Text-Fabric.
Text-Fabric is a tool that helps to make a corpus representation suitable for computing. It can be used in Jupyter notebooks and it has a built-in corpus browser. Both interfaces
- make use of a search engine that can look for structural patterns;
- support the display of illustrations and mathematical formulas.
All in all this results in a tool by which users can research this corpus in a self-contained way on their own computer.
See transcription for how the features of the TF data are defined.
- Erik-Jan Bos Expert on Descartes and his works. Found the source data, supplied additional metadata from his own database.
- Dirk Roorda Expert in text-conversion, wrote Text-Fabric.