Output details

Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages : Database

Skaldic poetry represents a highly complex corpus in its sophisticated diction, complex metrical forms and intricate narrative and manuscript contexts. The skaldic database (abdn.ac.uk/skaldic) began as a means for a variety of scholars working internationally on the Skaldic Project to represent and manage the connections between these features. It has since been generalized into a system for editing and publishing other textual corpora with semantically linked connections to primary materials, textual and interpretative apparatus, linguistic and lexical resources. Such linkages are not defined by other generalized text encoding projects such as TEI. The research component derives from the electronic implementation of the process of explicit linking and analysis of the physical evidence of the corpus with its scholarly and public understanding.

Developing this system required designing a working relational data model to represent the complex relationships between the text, diction, metre, lexicon, manuscripts/inscriptions and interpretative apparatus (implemented using the SQL language and MySQL software). Entering and editing this information are achieved through a web interface for editors and other contributors to the project which facilitates the semantic encoding of connections between the various phenomena (implemented through the PHP programming language for interfacing between MySQL and the web application). The contents of the database are largely publicly available through the same web interface. The interface provides different views of the text, contexts, manuscripts and more according to the needs of different end-users, including editors, skaldic scholars and the general public. Depending on the data, the output is textual, visual, statistical, geographical and interactive.

In a further development of the research, the system for managing virtually all stages of the editorial and publication process was generalized by the author to include other projects such as teaching resources, sources for pre-Christian religions, a rune dictionary and aligned textual editions (see abdn.ac.uk/skaldic/bm.php?357).

The database is designed both to make this complex poetic corpus widely accessible and to build the editorial and commentary process into one interconnected system. Its development required reconceptualising textual structures as a relational data model and implementing this as a networked database with interface. Besides designing the framework, the author wrote or reviewed some 30,000 lines of programming code/database queries. He also produced much of the content (e.g. lexicographic; analysis of diction; metrical analysis; and analytical queries), and a significant proportion of the editing itself. The claim for double-weighting reflects the scale and technical complexity of the research undertaken.