ELECTRONIC FREUD TEXTBASE PROTOTYPE

Project Details

Description

DESCRIPTION (adapted from the Abstract): The Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (CETH), in conjunction with the New York Psychoanalytic Institute (NYPI) and the Brill Library, is developing a prototype of a full text database (In English and German) of the writings of Sigmund Freud. The NYPI has provided a seed grant to begin this project in early 1995. The CETH is devoting this first section of the prototype to Freud's early writings, those before the landmark publication, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). CETH now requests a publication grant from the National Library of Medicine to create an electronic matrix of Freud's writings before 1900 (many of which were excluded from the English Standard Edition and will be available here in English, for the first time), and related works by other contemporary writers (including Breuer and Charcot). The NYPI will provide consultation on psychiatric content, library uses, and copyright permissions for the texts to be entered. This historically specific set of texts will reveal both how the development of Freud's model of brain-mind interaction informed his later, psychoanalytic writings and how that model grew out of the epistemological context of late 19th century science. The prototype will test the viability of a larger textbase of Freud's complete works, which could ultimately be used not only by neurologists and psychiatrists, but also by historians of science and medicine to access and associate Freud's writings to study Freud's works in the context of his own scientific culture. The texts will be encoded in the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) adopted by the International Standards Organization (ISO) as the standard format for the interchange of data and documents independently of the software and hardware used to produce them. This encoding, furthermore, will conform to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) implementation of SGML. The TEI represents an investment for the future, as well as a theoretically sound basis for describing the structural characteristics of a complex text and its content. For the purposes of the proposed project, TEI SGML will allow the textbase to be delivered and used with other networked information in many media, so that it can be used for medical education, scholarly research, and a wide variety of other pedagogical applications.
StatusFinished
Effective start/end date6/15/976/14/99

Funding

  • U.S. National Library of Medicine

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