1991:2 - Universitetet i Bergen

A NEW PROGRAM FOR INTERACTZVE
COLLATION OF LARGE MANUSCRIPT
TRADITIOIVS
Peter M.W. Robirtson
Version I of Caliare. a new program I have written with be ditficutties
of medieval vemacuIar traditions in rnind, is now available. CoIlate
aims to help scholars in the preparation of a critical edition based an
many souzces. It can colllate sirnuItaneously up to n hundred tcxts. It
can deal with richly marked-up tex& (wilh special matment for ditorial
comrnents ernbcddcd in the text, locatian marken, editorial expansions
and separate colladon of punctuation). It providcs powerful facilities
to allow ihe scholar LO tailor the collation and it can output in many
different iormats.
The design of Cellate was based on my experience of collating
forty-six rnanuscripts of the two neo-Eddic Old Norse poems Grdugaldr
and Ej6lsvinnsmdl. Collate works interactivcly with the callation being
written to a window as Lhe scholar watches. The seholar may intervene
at nny point to aIter the co1lation. using eithcr of the tools "Set Variant"
or '"egularisen. "Set Variant" allows the scholar to over-nile the coIlation
offered by Coilate and impose his own coIlatbn, even wriling a variant
that does not appcar in the sources into rhe collation. Collare includes
a particularly powerful regularisation facility, derivcd from my smggies
with the bighly individual orthographies and spelling systems of Icelandic
scribec. "Rcgularisen enables che schoIar to inlervene to regularise any
word or phrase in any source at any poinr. Thc rcgularisarion can be
se[ for a particular word at every point in every source, or for that
word oniy at that place in har source, or various olhcr combinazions.
Collate will record all variants set and cvcry rcgularisalian made and
remember them next time it runs, The schotar can adjust the collation
in oiher ways, swilching the base text, suppressing agreernenls with
the base text and colIating punc~uation tokens separately,
Some idea of how Collale works can be seen from the iolIowing
screen:
86 HUMAM~SKE DATA t91