Christophe Plantin
Archival materials

Archival materials

The ARCH.122 archive, kept in the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, the very place where Christophe Plantin practiced his profession, contains a block of 586 sheets of instructions addressed to the printer for the edition of Missals.

Made both to allow access to the sources but also to serve as a tool to analyze them in the future, we tried to make it work like a classic viewer.
You can use the navigation buttons to go to the right to access the different versions of the text. Among them is first a diplomatic transcription, intended to transmit the text as it was written. Then, there is a “modern” transcription, voluntarily adapted to a contemporary Spanish. Finally, by pulling the navigation bar on the right, you will find a translation into French, a choice made for practicality and to limit errors as much as possible.

Created with the CodePen platform, which allows you to see in real time what is encoded, its creation required the use of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. On the viewer, you can select one of these three languages to access the content of the created coding, reuse it or modify it at your convenience for your own project. The arrow buttons added on the left and right sides have been installed in anticipation of the addition of other sheets of the collection, where the same presentation will be found. Also, you will be able to zoom out in by selecting the 0.5x to have a more global vision of the different pages.

This first page of the archive represents an example of what can be achieved in the long run. This particular aspect of our digital object could open up new perspectives both in terms of analysis and valorization, such as the realization of an electronic edition encoded in TEI-XML.

See the Pen Archival materials by Johanna Saadoune (@johanna-saadoune) on CodePen.