Electronic information storage and retrieval

We describe the creation of the Velikie Minei Čet’i (VMČ) Corpus supplementing the latest volume of the printed edition of the Macarian Great Menaion Reader. Instead of an independently compiled historical corpus, the VMČ corpus is entirely based on the paper edition, thus following the principle of multiple use (‘recycling’) of textual data and the work invested in edition projects. We briefly describe the procedure of extraction from the edition text, dwell on the search interface designed to facilitate sophisticated yet intuitive queries, and give examples of issues that can be much more easily researched with this resource than with the paper edition. We conclude that such a supplementary corpus is both feasible and useful and hope that in the future, more editions will be accompanied by an electronic version.

The author of the article describes the features of diachronic corpuses, created on the base of medieval Slavic codices. Their specificity in terms of compliance and transcription of the original objects is presented and the ratio of the markup standards and characteristics of Old Church Slavonic texts, specialized forms for searching and for displaying samples as well. The formation of a new applied section in medieval studies: corpus palaeoslavitic with computer tools is argumented and defined.

The article draws attention to two lesser known lines written in Glagolitic which are part of the Epilogue to Pamvo Berynda’s Triod Cvetnaja, printed in Kiev in 1631. Thanks to their typographic realisation, these two lines seem to have been mainly considered „an ornament“ or a „cryptographic“ element of the text in older literature. The article presents the Glagolitic text in standard Unicode encoding, so it becomes electronically searchable as such, along with a transliteration and a translation. It turns out that the Glagolitic text is nearly identical to the self-descriptions famout printer Pamvo Berynda had used before (although in Cyrillic). Another question put forth in the paper is the provenience of the actual printing types used in Kiev in 1631. A comparision shows that the letters look similar – but not identical – to printing type used around the same time Italy (Rome, Venice) or by Primož Trubar in the century before. The typographic quality of the Kievan types is, however, inferior.