The Aristoteles Latinus Database has received a major update: alongside the newly added Physiognomonica as translated by Bartholomew of Messina (ed. L. Devriese, 2019) and Books VI-X of De historia animalium as translated by William of Moerbeke (ed. P. Beullens & F. Bossier, 2021), the ALD also pilots an improved data organization and user interface. These innovations allow for closer integration with the Database of Latin Dictionaries and will gradually be implemented for the other Latin full-text databases on Brepolis too.
In the current blog post, we will highlight some of the ALD’s new features.
The new query syntax allows for more flexibility, including phrase searches and searching by lemma, all while remaining compatible with Boolean operators.
A similar improvement can be found in the more advanced tools to create a custom corpus. For example, you can search for the lemma anima in the Aristotelian translations of the thirteenth century, except for those translated by William of Moerbeke, as shown below.
If you know which Aristotelian passage is translated or commented upon, you can also navigate straight to a Bekker number.
Once you have performed your search, you can apply various filters in order to further limit the search results.
If the subdivision in sentences prevents you from finding what you are looking for, searching in a larger context can help retrieve further results (e.g. looking for co-occurrences of the lemmas dialectica and syllogismus).
In the Latin texts, the new Instrumenta tool allows you to click a word form for suggestions of translation and morphological analysis, and to click on to the corresponding headwords in the Database of Latin Dictionaries.
Each work and person (in the various possible roles of author, translator, revisor, …) is accompanied by a vocabulary tool, which allows you to look into the frequencies of word forms within the respective work(s).
The taxonomy allows you to browse through the database according to the Aristotelian work translated, the genre of the text, and the language from which it was translated.
We warmly invite you to explore the new Aristoteles Latinus Database and discover all of these – and many more! – features that have been added in the current update. Also, please do not hesitate to send us your feedback through the form you will find in the database.
If you are not yet subscribed to the Aristoteles Latinus Database, please contact Brepols Publishers at brepolis@brepols.net.
The BREPOLiS platform currently offers access to 24 databases in a broad variety of research areas of the Humanities. Because it is sometimes difficult to clearly identify the chronological demarcation of each database, we have brought them together in a convenient timeline.
A more detailed version of the timeline, including additional information on the ‘Typology’ of the various databases, the languages they cover, or the product clusters they belong to, can be downloaded here(PDF file).
6,292 records were added to the Index Religiosus. At the moment (january 2023), the database contains over 667,800 article and book records as well as 160,800 book review references.
Evolution of the number of records of the IR.View of a record of the IR
The Database of Latin Dictionaries (DLD) has been updated. This update includes the ‘Encyclopedic Dictionary of Roman Law’ by Adolf Berger (1953), as well as improvements to the other dictionaries.
Stay tuned for the new interface, which will go live in the coming weeks!