Wittgenstein Nachlass Graphics

Project:About

About

History

As most Wittgenstein scholars and enthusiasts are well aware, the 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 "Wittgenstein Source" website, which, since as early as 2009, offers a static edition of Wittgenstein's manuscripts and typescripts as facsimiles and transcriptions. Moreover, since 2012, the WAB's "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 "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.

All three websites display their human-readable output by using dedicated software to index and parse the WAB's machine-readable transcriptions of Wittgenstein's manuscripts and typescripts. These transcriptions of the handwritten or typewritten material are encoded in the XML format following the TEI guidelines. While the transcriptions were originally published as part of the CD-based Bergen Electronic Edition (Oxford University Press 2000), the Wittgenstein Source, SFB, and IDP websites now allow anyone who has an Internet connection to easily browse them.

The Nachlass contains approximately 3000 graphics. Until 2022, these were represented in the Bergen Nachlass editions as character transcriptions, facsimile snippets or remade drawings stemming from different sources. The WAB had received invaluable help with the task of handling the Nachlass graphics from its transcribers and editors as well as from Michael R. Biggs and, since 2014, Hans Biesenbach.

In 2022, on the initiative of Alois Pichler, director of the WAB, the WAB and Michele Lavazza, coordinator of the Ludwig Wittgenstein Project, started a cooperation intended to redraw all graphics which at that point in time were represented by facsimile snippets or remade drawings, following a uniform style and format in an effort to "normalise" them. With funding from the WAB, the project lasted from October 2022 to April 2024 and resulted in the recreation of approximately 1000 image files which were subsequently embedded in the transcriptions. The new drawings were thus incorporated in the IDP and SFB resources.

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.

It soon started to seem desirable that the image files should also become available – i.e., browsable, searchable, and downloadable – in and of themselves, and not only as an integral part of the manuscripts. Thus, Michele Lavazza built this website (Wittgenstein Nachlass Graphics) to host the files and used data from the WAB's XML transcriptions, combined with a database-like infrastructure powered by 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 graphics that had been encoded in the WAB's transcriptions by the abovementioned combination of XML markup and Unicode characters – and their semantic tags. These were not redrawn: rather, the HTML and CSS code derived from the XML source through the WAB parser was converted to an image format using the html2image Python library. The images thus created were given a grey background to make them easy to distinguish at a glance.

Terminology

As a terminological convention, the word "figure" is used to refer to the graphics which can be encoded in the XML format using Unicode characters and rendered visually using HTML and CSS (rend="literal" in the WAB's XML transcriptions); the word "drawing" is used to refer to the graphics which cannot, and thus have to be rendered as images (rend="bitmap" in the WAB's XML transcriptions).

 

Example of a "drawing" (137,141a).

 

Example of a "figure" (115,150-a).

Scope and purpose

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

The drawings that were recreated are those that had already been included as facsimile snippets or remade drawings (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 graphics that were initially encoded as XML and Unicode are still encoded in the same way.

Additionally, this website contains a visual representation of each figure that was tagged as a "graphic" in the XML file (subtype="graphics") as opposed to a non-graphic "logic" or "maths" item (subtype="logic" or subtype="maths").

Both types of graphics 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 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 figures.

User guide

Naming conventions

The drawings published on this website are named according to the following pattern:

  • The first three digits correspond to the manuscript or typescript number according to Von Wright's catalogue and are followed by a comma; in a few cases, the manuscript or typescript number may contain additional characters (progressive letters, as in the case of Ms-153a and Ms-153b, or progressive letters and numbers, as in the case of Ts-201a1 and Ts-201a2);
  • The next set of digits (one to three) is the page number within the manuscript or typescript; this number is sometimes followed by "r" for "recto" and "v" for "verso" or by "a" and "b";
  • When more than one drawing appears on the same page, the page number is followed by a hyphen and by a progressive number.

For example, in 102,32r-2, "102" refers to Ms-102, "32r" refers to page 32 recto, and "2" refers to the fact that this is the second of multiple drawings on the same page.

The naming of the figures follows 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, 108,89-c is the third figure 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, 108,25-a is the first figure that occurs on page 25 of Ms-108, while 108,25 is the only drawing that occurs on the same page).

File formats

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

PNG is a raster format, meaning that the file consists of information that defines a grid (or map, or matrix) of flecks of colour. PNG images are easy to download and reuse in many computer programmes and print formats.

SVG is a vector format, meaning that the file consists of plain-text information describing the points, curves, colours, etc., that make up the image. SVG images are natively displayed by most modern browsers and desktop viewers, but may be less stable or lower-fidelity compared to the corresponding PNG renders. Their chief purpose is to be easily editable using vector graphics software such as the free and open-source application Inkscape (the programme they were created with), the proprietary application Adobe Illustrator, or others.

While the PNG files provided by this website are high-resolution, the SVG files may be used to export PNG files of virtually unlimited resolution.

The two files that are provided for each redrawn image have the same name, but they are distinguished by the file type extension (.png or .svg). The corresponding pages on this website (for example, File:164,29.png and File:164,29.svg) link to each other through their description box.

Viewing online

All files that are made available through this website can be viewed online.

The files may be viewed:

All these types of pages can also be accessed by using the search bar to look up a manuscript or typescript number or a file name (see the Semantic tags and searching section below).

Please note that gallery pages only list the PNG files to avoid duplicates. To access an SVG file, either click on the relevant link in the description box of the PNG file, or look its name up directly through the search bar.

Downloading

All files that are made available through this website can be downloaded.

Individual files can easily be downloaded through their expanded view in the gallery pages or through their description page.

Bulk downloads are available for individual manuscripts through a link in each manuscript's page and through the dedicated section of the homepage, where a link is also available to download all files at once.

Please keep in mind that the files on this website may be updated to implement corrections or improvements. Of course, downloaded files will not reflect these changes.

Semantic tags and searching

Each description page for a PNG image is tagged with semantic descriptors that were imported from the WAB's transcriptions by parsing the XML files with a dedicated script. For example, the drawing in Ms-101, page 28, bears the following attribute in the XML transcription:

subtype="graphics_Abbild; Mensch(en)"

And therefore has the following properties in this website:

The values of these properties are displayed in the graphic's description box. Additional property values, including service properties such as Has sort key and 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 graphics 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 graphics that match a keyword or another, please run two successive searches.

On the other hand, the Free-text search section of the Main Page, just like the search bar that appears at the top of each page in this website, provides a tool to perform unstructured searches on the title and contents of the description pages of the files.

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). It was 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.

Copyright

The approximately 1000 drawings stemming from the redrawing project and made available on this website are licenced under 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.

The rights to the semantic tags (i.e., to the relationship between the image files and the descriptors) belong to the University of Bergen, Bergen. The copyright holders (The Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge and the University of Bergen, Bergen, in agreement with Oxford University Press) released the transcriptions of a subset of the Nachlass (Ts-201a1, Ts-201a2, Ms-139a, Ts-207, Ms-114, Ms-115, Ms-153a, Ms-153b, Ms-154, Ms-155, Ms-156a, Ms-148, Ms-149, Ms-150, Ts-212, Ts-213, p.39v of Ms-140, Ms-141, Ms-152, Ts-310) under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0, meaning that the semantic tags for this specific subset of manuscripts are equally available under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0.

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