|
Wittgenstein
Nachlass
In
November 2000, the Bergen Electronic Edition of the
entire Wittgenstein Nachlass, the approximately 20,000
pages of manuscripts and typescripts that he left
to his literary trustees, was published on CD-ROM
by Oxford University Press.
I
was a researcher at the Bergen Wittgenstein Archive
for a month in the summer of 1993, and returned there
in the summer of 1995. I have kept in contact with
the project throughout its development, and was a
beta tester for the current software. The edition
includes both high-quality color pictures of every
page in the papers, and a sophisticated and extremely
full transcription of the source text, which can be
displayed at customizable levels of sophistication,
first draft only, final version only, all variant
forms, etc. The reader can not only search and collate
words in all the usual ways, but can also search the
database of diagrams ;every one of the several thousand
diagrams and drawings that are an integral part of
the writing.
The
principal aim of this presentation is to show some
of what the Bergen Electronic edition can do, and
illustrate how it opens up new ways of reading the
history of philosophy. I'll show how hyperlinks tie
the search results and the source text, so that searching
and reading are no longer separate activities. I'll
also illustrate some interesting examples of revision
and editing, and how one can trace the various stages
in which a paragraph was revised as it moved from
one manuscript and typescript to another.
As
part of the corpus is in English, most illustrations
will be in English, and no knowledge of German will
be presupposed. Hypertext is both philosophically
and computationally fascinating; this will be a test-drive
of the latest model.
For
further information about the Bergen Edition, go to
http://www.hit.uib.no/wab/
|
