Manuscript Desk

The Manuscript Desk is a virtual research environment (VRE), in which students and interested researchers are able to upload any digital facsimile of a manuscript and transcribe it according to the standards of the Text Encoding Initiative’s guidelines. The tool can also be used to compare different versions of a text and make an automatic collation, resulting in an apparatus that highlights the variants. It is intended that following a testing phase, the Manuscript Desk will be made available to the research community as a tool that can be shared and that brings together various research groups. It has already undergone extensive testing and use at Antwerp University with a number of DARIAH pilot projects. It is currently being tested at Ghent University. There is further interest from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.