Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, The: Oxford, Oriel College, MS 79 (O)

This CD-ROM, with full color digital facsimiles and documentary texts of Oxford, Oriel College, MS 79 (O), constitutes the third volume of The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, an ambitious international collaborative project devoted to electronic publication of all the medieval and renaissance witnesses to William Langland's Piers Plowman. The Oriel manuscript is representative of early fifteenth-century manuscripts of Piers. The color facsimile images of every page in the manuscript are JPEG reductions of high resolution TIFF files scanned from 35 mm color slides. Every image of each text is hypertextually linked to the edited text which is itself presented in four different views: a diplomatic type-facsimile; a scribal text which includes iconic indications of scribal error; a critical text with lapsus calami corrected; an AllTags view that shows all of the editorial interventions on one screen. Complex text searches permit manipulation of the text in all four views. The browser permits expansion of the color images and intricate manipulation of color relations. This edition was compiled using TEI-conformant XML markup. Minimum system requirements: PCs:486 or later; Windows95, 98, Me, NT, XP +. Preferably a Pentium with a clock speed of 500 megahertz or more and 32 Mb of Ram are required to run the basic Internet Explorer browser: Internet Explorer, Version 6.0 + (this may be downloaded free from the Internet for users still running earlier iterations.) Macintosh users require high-end equipment (System 9 or later) running Windows emulation software. 384 Mb of Ram are required for System 9 and 512 Mb RAM for System 10.