Wittgenstein MS115 online (1996)

In 1996, WAB produced, on the basis of its machine-readable version of the Wittgenstein Nachlass, Wittgenstein Nachlass items MS115 and TS201 for HTML-publication on the world wide web. Originally, they were thought as samples of work in progress at WAB and were provided in order to give prospective users of the Bergen Electronic Edition a clearer impression of what the publication may ultimately look like and what it can be used for. Since publication, these web-resources are widely accessed and studied in Wittgenstein research, as examples of scholarly online publishing, and also in the general context of humanities computing. Users should be aware that both their typographic quality and functionality are determined by technical constraints set by world wide web publication, and that the edition «Wittgenstein's Nachlass. The Bergen Electronic Edition» uses other conventions and provides different facilities from those presented in the HTML-versions of MS115 and TS201.

The publications were made possible through an understanding with the Trustees of the copyright in the Wittgenstein Papers, Prof. G.E.M. Anscombe (Cambridge), Dr. Anthony Kenny (Oxford), Prof. Peter Winch (Urbana-Champaign, Illinois) and Prof. Georg Henrik von Wright (Helsingfors), and Trinity College Library (David McKitterick), Cambridge.

WAB's machine-readable version of the Wittgenstein Nachlass is designed in an encoded source format, which can be manipulated by specially designed software. The encoded source transcriptions may be presented according to a variety of filtering profiles (style sheets). Two such profiles are:

The diplomatic version: A detailed and strictly diplomatic version retains a wide range of details from the original, including deletions, overwritings, substitutions, spelling mistakes and so on.
The normalised version: A simplified and normalised version provides a 'reading' version of the original and will not include details such as deleted and overwritten text. Only the last element in text variants is rendered, spelling is corrected and normalised.

These two profiles have also been used for the web-publication of items MS115 and TS201, and consequently they are presented in diplomatic as well as normalised versions. However, limitations in the HTML format prevent making available on the world wide web a range of typographic and functional features which are recorded in the source transcriptions. In order to extend presentation possibilities, we have therefore made the samples available also as downloadable WordPerfect and PostScript files.

Item 115 legend
Item 115 normalised version
Item 115 diplomatic version
Browse item 115 normalised and diplomatic version simultaneously
Download item 115 WordPerfect files
Download item 115 Postcript files
See machine-readable version source transcription item 115: pp. start-57
See machine-readable version source transcription item 115: pp. 57-117
See machine-readable version source transcription item 115: pp. 118-149
See machine-readable version source transcription item 115: pp. 150-187
See machine-readable version source transcription item 115: pp. 187-199
See machine-readable version source transcription item 115: pp. 199-250
See machine-readable version source transcription item 115: pp. 250-end
Download machine-readable version item 115 source transcription text files