Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Summer 1993

Abstract

The rapid transmission of data in machine readable formats has for many years now been a staple of the business world. Now, in a number of fields, the same technology is being applied to scholarly subjects, including French and English literatures. The availability of primary texts ready to be read by one's own computer is almost as great a revolution in textual dissemination as the invention of the printing press. Other disciplines, in which scholars can exchange texts either on diskette or by uploading and downloading to a network, are far ahead of Spanish literature, but there is both a nucleus of expertise within the profession and an extraordinary (and growing) demand for new computerized editions of Spanish texts. The prospect of making comedia texts available in computer- readable format is at once exciting and daunting. Existing data collections and retrieval formats point out both the opportunities and the problems that may arise in undertaking such an enterprise. In addition, in undertaking the massive project of making comedia texts available in machine-readable formats, one must confront questions relating to which comedia text among many, copyrights, and administrative issues. Under the auspices of the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater, Inc., and funded by the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain's Ministry of Culture and United States Universities, a colloquium was held June 11 and 12, 1993, on the campus of Princeton University to discuss the future of machine-readable comedia texts. The participants were Margaret Rich Greer, Associate Professor of Spanish at Princeton; Sharon Voros, Professor of Spanish at the United States Naval Academy; Matthew D. Stroud, Professor of Spanish at Trinity University; Toby Paff, Humanities Specialist for Computer and Information Technology at Princeton; and Susan Hockey, Director of the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities at Rutgers and Princeton.

Identifier

10.1353/boc.1993.0016

Publisher

University of Georgia

Publication Information

Bulletin of the Comediantes

Download

Share

COinS