austraLasia #3445
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.
Enjoy - and benefit!
Sneak preview
The Salesian Sources Scholars edition
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:
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.
Enjoy - and benefit!
