: The Value of Books: Magnús í Tjaldanesi and the End of Manuscript Culture in Iceland
Magnús Jónsson (1835–1922), from the farm Tjaldanes in western Iceland, was among the last in a long line of book-loving Icelanders, ordinary people with little or no formal education, who spent the long winter months sedulously copying out the texts of sagas. In his hand are preserved copies, in many case two, three or even four, of nearly two hundred sagas, about a dozen of which are not found elsewhere. The lecture will look at Magnús and his scribal production.
: Everything But the Smell: Toward a More Artefactual Digital Philology
(Digital Humanities Summer Institute - UVic 2007) The paper presents some of the issues, both practical and theoretical, involved in describing and transcribing Icelandic primary sources using TEI-conformant XML, looking in particular at how the ideas of the so-called new or material philology impact upon scholarly editorial practice, and how various aspects of the text’s artefactuality, aspects which have generally (and often but not always by necessity) been overlooked in traditional printed editions, can be presented in the context of an electronic edition, without compromising the edition’s usability.