The Language of Landscape: Reading the Anglo-Saxon Countryside

Archaeology, English Language and Literature, History

Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)

Dataset/structured data, Text

"1. An integrated database and text base will be developed which will allow the existing resource to be input, augmented, updated and edited. Consideration will be given to the potentially conflicting needs of users, some of whom will seek a diplomatic and some a glossed text. The integrated structure will form the backbone of the Resource. 2. The material as it stands will be converted into this structure and then comprehensively revised: 1. Missing texts will be supplied, and, for perhaps one third of the charters, variant manuscript versions either substituted or added. 2. The data accompanying each text will be emended and augmented according to the latest research as listed in the updated Electronic Sawyer. 3. Each of the texts will be checked against manuscript/British Academy Anglo-Saxon Charters edition, and presented according to a consistent editorial method, transparent to the user. The precise methodology will be the result of consultation with colleagues and collaborators. The boundary clauses will be presented, inter alia, as diplomatic texts, i.e. representing the dialectal and orthographic particularities of the manuscripts; the corpus in this format will provide the primary data for linguistic studies. 4. Extensive mark-up will be added to the texts to enable users to search not only by manuscript form, but also by Old English lemma and by translated head-form. 3. A web interface will be designed to allow users to access and manipulate the materials within the Resource. 4. The Resource will be designed to complement and enhance the growing body of material available on the Website of the British Academy/Royal Historical Society Joint Committee on Anglo-Saxon Charters. Links should allow the user to navigate between an individual boundary clause in the Language of Landscape, to the full text of the charter in the electronic Regesta Regum Anglorum, to manuscript images as they appear, and to the revised Anglo-Saxon Charters: an Annotated List and Bibliography represented by the Electronic Sawyer. In turn, emendations and additions noted during the course of the project, can be fed back into the BA/RHS Charters Website, as can the marked-up texts themselves. 5. The database will also be designed potentially to link with and complement the Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England Project, the Dictionary of Old English, the Vocabulary of English Place-Names, and the Survey of English Place-Names along lines to be developed during the course of the project" (see project web site for more details).

Open Access

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