Sneak preview
The Salesian Sources Scholars edition
1 June 2014 --It is a 'sneak preview' because the work is
still very much in progress, hence not listed as such on any
sdb.org page, but it is there! Click the top image to the left
and bookmark it!
And while it says 'scholars edition', don't be put off if you
are not a scholar! You will find this web presentation of
Salesian Sources superb for simple browsing, and some of the
important metadata (extra information) is already visible for
you.
But the real value of this version of Salesian Sources in
English lies 'under the hood' and can best be accessed with
another web tool (called TAPoR, a Canadian effort) which will
give you access to all the metadata of your choice. With this
kind of information, scholars can then consider certain
hypotheses, or anyone can discover new and interesting
information.
Why not give it a try?
First of all, go
to Salesian Sources as it is now presented in this web
format. When you arrive at the page, you note that some basic
metadata (info) about this file is already visible to you.
Scroll down a bit and you could, if you wanted to, skip to the
Table of Contents and
simply access whatever part of the 'Sources' is already
complete (there is considerable 'under the hood' work going on
with metadata tagging, and so far we are only up to Part One
Section One, first 16 documents - but it will go ahead rapidly
from here on, so keep visiting!)
Instead of going to the Table of Contents, though, read on to
understand a bit more about this Text Encoding Initiative (TEI
for short) and how it can exponentially increase your
knowledge and understanding of 'Sources'. Towards the end of
that there is a link to "how to exploit TEI for Salesian Sources ...".
That is worth reading, but let's just go straight to some
results, so you get the idea.
Open up TAPoR
(Text Anlysis Portal for Research) and choose XML tools on the
left (open up the list by clicking on the +) and choose
'Extract from xml' (or go straight there by
clicking
on this link). Now put in the URL (web address) to
Salesian Sources where it asks for it: www.sdb.org/ENG/teibp/content/fonti-complete.xml.
Finally, where it says 'elements', put in the word 'date'.
Here is a pic of this process so far:
Click submit and you receive a list of text portions which
have a date mentioned. Useful, but you might want that
same info in even more useful forms. So this time choose
'Date finder' from the left under XML tools, and the only
thing you need do is ensure the URL to Salesian Sources is
still there at the top. Otherwise just run with the
default 'all dates'. Now click 'Submit' again and this
is what you get:
Now by clicking on any date you will get a list of where it is
mentioned. Choose 1870, and now you get a collection of
passages where this is mentioned. We are only up to Part One
Section One so by the time we finish, we will have much more
information on this date, but already, you can see from the
content listed that we could form a hypothesis: while the
Church-State rupture in Italy was ever more serious in 1870
and did not look like getting better, here was Don Bosco
taking two initiatives that could potentially smooth such
relationships (certainly for his own situation): he was
presenting his missionary work to the Minister for Foreign
Affairs as a benefit to humankind (thus getting government to
help him), and was founding the Cooperators to be a particular
kind of lay presence in an anticlerical Italy.
In other words (and you can read
the explanations as to how TEI for Salesian Sources works
to find out what 'elements' can give you what information),
you now have a helpful tool box to explore our sources and
fulfil at least two of the explicit desires that the then
Rector Major expressed in his Presentation: "With a collection
like this it will be much easier too, for scholars to cite and
refer to a single source text", and "It is my wish, therefore,
that this volume and its translations into various languages
can have widespread dissemination around the world."
In this case, digital humanities helps us achieve what paper
would take much longer and much more effort to achieve.
