Project:About: Difference between revisions

As most Wittgenstein scholars and enthusiasts are well aware, the [https://wab.uib.no/ Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen (WAB)] maintain a rich collection of online resources related to Ludwig Wittgenstein's ''Nachlass''—including for example the [https://wittgensteinsource.org "Wittgenstein Source" website], which, since as early as 2009, offers a static edition of Wittgenstein's manuscripts and typescripts in facsimiles and transcriptions. Moreover, since 2012, the WAB's [https://wab.uib.no/sfb/ "Semantic faceted search and browsing" (SFB) website] allows readers and researchers across the globe to search, filter and display individual remarks from the ''Nachlass'', or collections thereof, based on their content or relevant metadata. And, since 2016, the WAB's [https://wab.uib.no/transform/wab.php?modus=opsjoner "Interactive dynamic presentation" (IDP) website] makes it possible for users to view entire manuscripts or typescripts, or collections thereof, in a linear or diplomatic style, while dynamically selecting which sets of information to display.

In 2022, on the initiative of Alois Pichler, director of the WAB, the WAB and Michele Lavazza, coordinator of the [https://wittgensteinproject.org/ Ludwig Wittgenstein Project], started a cooperation intended to redraw all graphics which at that point in time were represented by remade drawings or facsimile snippets, following a uniform style in a "normalised" format. With funding from the WAB, the project lasted from October 2022 to April 2024 and resulted in the recreation of [[Project:Statistics|approximately 1000 image files]] which were subsequently embedded in the transcriptions as they became available. The drawings were made by Michele Lavazza and graphic designer Sara Lavazza under the supervision and coordination of Alois Pichler. Precious help and consultancy was provided by Michael Biggs, Rune J. Falch, and Daphne Bielefeld. The new drawings were thus incorporated in the IDP and SFB resources.

It soon started to seem desirable that the image files should also become available – ''i.e.'', browsable and searchable – in and of themselves, and not only as an integral part of the manuscripts. Thus, Michele Lavazza built this website ([[Main Page|{{SITENAME}}]]) to host the files and used data from the WAB's XML transcriptions, combined with a database-like infrastructure powered by [https://semantic-mediawiki.org Semantic MediaWiki], to make it possible to search and filter them by description tags as well as by manuscript number. In this task, he received help from Frederic Kettelhoit and continued working in cooperation with Alois Pichler.

Finally, at this stage, it became clear that an added value would be provided by the fact of also offering the visuals that had been encoded in the WAB's transcriptions by the abovementioned combination of XML tags and Unicode characters – and their semantic tags.

As a terminological convention, the word "figure" is used to refer to the graphics which can be encoded in XML using Unicode character and rendered using HTML and CSS;  the word "drawing" is used to refer to the graphics which cannot, and thus have to be rendered as images.

This website contains high-quality, "normalised", redrawn visuals that correspond to the hand-drawn – or, occasionally, typed – graphics from the manuscripts and typescripts in Ludwig Wittgenstein's ''Nachlass''.

The visual items that were recreated are those that had already been included as facsimile snippets or redrawings (as opposed to encoded as XML and Unicode) by the WAB as of October 2022. In other words, the scope of the redrawn graphics has not changed since the early phase of the work to transcribe the ''Nachlass'', and the visuals that were initially encoded as XML and Unicode are still encoded in the same way.

Additionally, this website contains a placeholder for each item, encoded in the transcription as XML and Unicode (<code>rend="literal"</code>), that was tagged as a "graphic" in the XML file (<syntaxhighlight lang="xml" inline="">subtype="graphic"</syntaxhighlight>) as opposed to a non-graphic "logic" or "maths" item (<syntaxhighlight lang="xml" inline="">subtype="logic"</syntaxhighlight> or <code>subtype="math"</code>).

Both types of visual items are tagged with semantic descriptors which make it possible to search them and filter them based on their content.

The purpose of this website is to provide the general public as well as researchers and publishers with a set of normalised drawings and figures that can be browsed and freely reused (see the ''[[#Copyright|Copyright]]'' section below); moreover, it aims to make this corpus easier to navigate by allowing users to look up keywords that will produce a set of results that includes both the drawings and the placeholders.

The graphics which are published on this website as images are named according to the following pattern:

The placeholders for items that are encoded in the transcriptions as XLM and Unicode follow a partly different pattern. After the digits that refer to the manuscript or typescript number and those that refer to the page number is always a hyphen followed by a progressive letter.

For example, [[:File:108,89-c.png|108,89-c]] is the third graphic encoded in the transcription as XML and Unicode that occurs on page 89 of Ms-108; and even when only one occurs on a given page, the suffix "-a" is present to prevent situations where the numbering of this type of objects would conflict with that of the other type (for example, [[:File:108,25-a.png|108,25-a]] is the graphic item encoded as XML and Unicode that occurs on page 25 of Ms-108, while [[:File:108,25.png|108,25]] is the only graphic that was redrawn as an image on the same page).

For each redrawn image, two files are provided: a PNG render and an SVG source.

* Individually, through a description page that can be viewed by clicking on the name of a file in a gallery page or on the "More details" button which appears after clicking on an image in a gallery page.

The values of these properties are displayed in the image's description box. Additional property values, including service properties such as [[Property:Has sort key|Has sort key]] and [[Property:Is rendered as|Is rendered as]], can be viewed by clicking on "Browse properties" in the left sidebar menu when on the description page of a PNG image.

The ''Structured semantic search'' section of the [[Main Page]] allows users to search for images that match one or more keywords for each of these properties. Please note that the search results will only include the graphics that match ''all'' keywords; if you wish to look up the images that match a keyword ''or'' another, please run two successive searches.

The semantic descriptors are based on the WAB's taxonomy for Wittgenstein's graphics and musical, mathematical and logical notation. The taxonomy was authored by the WAB in cooperation with Michael R. Biggs (graphics and musical notation; see his catalogue in ''Minerva – An Internet Journal of Philosophy'' 2 (1998)), Peter Philipp, Lawrence Goldstein and William T. Boos (mathematical and logical notation) and first published in the ''Bergen Electronic Edition''. The scholarly search for meaning in the graphics was conceived as comparable to the search for the meaning of words in a dictionary: first the words are arranged by their form (alphabetically), after which they are presented in context to reveal their use. Thus users of the graphical taxonomy can search for a graphic based on its form, after which it can be viewed in context with the text to determine its use.

The approximately 1000 image redrawings stemming from this project and made available on this website are licenced under [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Creative Commons Attribution 4.0]. This means that the image files can be freely downloaded without asking for permission or paying a fee and can be reused for any purpose, including commercial, provided that the authors, editors and copyright holders are credited, if possible with a link to this website.