Ius Commune Electronicum

The topic of my PhD dissertation is the life and cult of St. Peter Martyr, a Dominican preacher and inquisitor from the 13th century. There are a multitude of different sources, letters, histories, Papal bulls and civil records, both edited and in manuscript form, which are available for his life. In order to better present this material, both for my organization and for the communication of my findings I developed an SQL database back-end with a Cold Fusion web interface. This system involves the making the source material into electronic texts and breaking them into logical segments. These texts are then inserted into a master table in the database and are called by a hierarchical and descriptive table structure. In this way documents are divided by type, author, date, gloss, and several other tokens.

Once the texts are in the database they are presented by a Cold Fusion web interface which can be called via a search or a table of contents. This table of contents are dynamically generated based on the document type and title tables. The documents are then presented on screen with several options. The first is language, either original or translation. This is followed by links to various versions of the document (divided by manuscript or codex). In this way the need for a textual apparatus is eliminated by the presence of the whole text of each manuscript's version. In addition to the text, the gloss (if available) is also present, with coded hyperlinks to passages in corresponding texts, for example if Gratian's Decretum cites a scripture verse, there is a hyperlink which pulls up the relevant chapter of the Vulgate, which in turn has language and codex options.

This is an open ended and scalable platform which could be used in any humanities application where source interaction and edition creation are needed, most particularly in the process of research and presentation.

It is totally in Latin at the moment (sometimes that is good security too), It is fairly straightforward.  Please use Internet Explorer, Netscape is quite difficult to work with. The system is totally functional and I am demonstrating Gratian's Decretum, Tertia Pars, Canons 1-10.  By the time of the conference I will have other examples to show.