Bracton Online

Bracton Online is a re-keying project that is being conducted by Harvard's Law School. Taking the text of a book or document, re-keying is re-typing it using a word processor, allowing it to be seachable online. In this case, the law school is re-keying a book that is considered an important part of English legal history. Bacton: De Legibus Et Consuetudinibus Angliæ or Bracton on the Laws and Customs of England, is a book that is attributed to Henry of Bratton that's supposed to describe rationally all of English law. The book is available in Latin, however, English translations are also. This particular project has re-typed both the Latin and English versions of the book.

The book was sent to a professional keyeing house, where the text was double keyed- in other words, the same text is retyped by two different people and the issues are then compared and the appropriate corrections are made.

According to the site, "The HTML used in the two electronic versions of Bracton is generated from SGML text tagged according to the TEI-Lite standard" The features that were tagged were only those that could be identified by those who do not have any special knowledge fo Bracton or Latin.

Tagging- "Most of the tagging was done by the keying house. We did identify some highly repetitive and easily automated tagging which could be omitted from the spec given to the keying house; this was a cost saving measure, as we were paying by the keystroke. This tagging was later inserted via a simple Perl script, and included such things as adding an explicit tag for each line break (we had asked the keying house to preserve but not tag these), and adding the PLACE=FOOT attribute for all the notes. One drawback of having the keying house do all of the tagging was that we were limited to tagging those features which could easily be identified by people unfamiliar with Bracton."

The site is set up so that you have two options of viewing the text. One, using HTML allows the user to access both the Latin and English at the same time. For those only wanting one language, the languages are available in sepearte web sites as well.

The selection procedure was simple- it used the book by Samuel E. Thorne, which contains both the latin and english translation. Because it is only one book that is being re-keyed, the selection mist likely went into chosing what edition of the book would be used. They chose it because they say its to this man they owe the modern understanding of the text.

This appears to be a project for reseachers or those familiar with the Bracton, as its main feature is the search option that scans and searches the text.