Final Report Summary - ISLANDIA LATINA (Latin in Old Norse-Icelandic Manuscripts)
At The Department of Nordic Research the MC fellow received important training in extracting information from digitized and undigitized sources and in methods of codifying information and making it available online. The design of the ISLANDIA LATINA database went through initial technical difficulties when entering data directly into the XML-documents proved impractical and it was decided that a simplified interface needed to be constructed. For this work The Department of Nordic Research funded a technician-in-chief, Araz Yaminiana, who executed and encoded the design developed by the MC fellow in collaboration with Dr. Astrid Marner from Bonn University, who was seconded to the project for a period of six months through an additional funding scheme provided by The Department of Nordic Research. During data entry, a number of improvements and bug-fixes were carried out in constant interaction between individual members of the team. Thus far the project has identified works by 288 named Latin authors in addition to 123 anonymous works. A number of these have not previously been known to have existed in Iceland or the west Nordic area as a whole in the medieval period. New source material, entered directly from the photographic manuscript collection of The Arnamagnæan Collection, has considerably expanded the reach of registration and significantly improved the coverage and quality of the ISLANDIA LATINA database.