Users may view all versions of a poem in parallel display, or any one witness in
its entirety.
Single Poem, All Versions
To view poems in parallel display, select that option from the Digital Temple homepage. There are three tables of
contents offered as drop-down menus at the top right. Select, for example,
"The Pearl" from the alphabetical menu.
On the left is a diplomatic transcription of Williams MS. Jones B62 (w); on
the right is the first of two images pertaining to the poem as it appears in
that witness. Select "Inline notes" from the drop-down notes menu (the
default is "Hide notes") and a set of annotations will appear on the right,
pushing the Williams image to the center. Click on "New Version" twice and
the Tanner (b) and 1633 (ed1) transcriptions will appear.
Depending on the size of your monitor, you may have to zoom in or out (using
the "View" menu in your browser) to enlarge or shrink the text and/or to
preserve actual lineation. Another way of creating more space on the screen
is to select either "Popup notes" or "Hide notes" from the drop-down menu at
the top, at which point the inline notes panel will disappear and the
transcriptions panels will widen. If you select "popup notes," the
annotations will be accessible through note links anchored to the lines to
which their contents pertain. A note may now be accessed simply by dragging
your cursor over its linking "note." (There is no need to click).
You may also hide or show line numbers by un-checking or checking the box at
the top.
The transcription panels may be displayed in whichever order you prefer by
using the dropdown "Witness" list in each panel. You may also choose to
eliminate one or two of the panels by clicking on its X in the upper right
corner.
Horizontal lines in the transcriptions correspond to page breaks in the
source. Below and to the right of any one such line is a page identifier
(e.g., fol. 15v or fol. 22r or, in the case of the first edition, p. 53)
linked to the page's corresponding image file. You can open only one image
at a time. The image can be enlarged and/or dragged around within the
applet, and the applet itself can be dragged around and repositioned on the
screen. If only one version panel is open, the image applet snaps to the
screen as a panel (the VM's default setting). Whether as an applet or panel,
the image viewer scrolls along with the text, an especially useful feature
for longer poems. Images are derived from large high-resolution TIFF files
and therefore susceptible of high magnification without pixilation or other
forms of distortion.
The underlying code-base includes modernized spellings and orthography
accessed simply by dragging your cursor over a given word.
An annotation for a given line pertains to all versions except where
otherwise indicated (i.e., where the note is accompanied by one, or possibly
two, letter indicators—w (Williams), b (Tanner), or ed1 (1633), or
b and ed1—in which case the note pertains only to that (or those)
version(s)).
Discrete Witness Display
Return to the homepage by clicking on "The Digital Temple" at the top and
select "Discrete Witnesses." Now select either "Williams MS. Jones B62,"
"Bodleian MS. Tanner 307," or The Temple: Sacred Poems
and Private Ejaculations.
The critical notes in the discrete-witness view have been suppressed (because
they are designed to be read alongside all versions of a given poem). Here
we have simply a diplomatic transcription alongside high-resolution
images.
As with the parallel view, there are two drop-down tables of contents, one
linear, the other alphabetic.