Florentine Codex (Facsimile Edition) review

[David Wright]

A few months ago I saw a post on Nahuatl about a new digital edition of the
Florentine Codex. I went to the website of the editors, the Bilingual Review
| [sic] Press, Hispanic Research center, Arizona State University, where I
found this description:

"The Florentine Codex, one of the richest surviving sources of information
on preconquest Aztec life, is now available in digital format! The
Transcendent Icon, Resplendent Quetzal project of the Arizona State
University Hispanic Research Center (HRC), in collaboration with Prof. Karl
A. Taube of the University of California, Riverside, is pleased to offer a
complete paleographic version of the codex, with full-color illustrations,
at little over cost to professionals in the discipline. The 8.5" x 11.5"
pages are in 300 dpi .TIF format, and each image is approximately 25 MB.
Smaller .JPGs (500 KB each) are included for faster browsing"
(http://www.asu.edu/brp/newandforthcoming/Florentine1.html).

Excited by the latter description, I ordered the least expensive of the two
formats, a set of 16 DVDs, for $600 US (the alternative is to buy the files
on a hard drive for $800). The discs are in three plastic boxes with the
title "Florentine Codex (Facsimile Edition)." I was disappointed to find
that "paleographic version", in this case, does not mean a machine readable
transcription, as one might reasonably expect. All of the files on the 16
discs are TIF images of individual pages of the manuscript (the JPG files
mentioned in the publicity are not present). These images were scanned from
the printed facsimile published by the Mexican government in 1979. On one of
the blank pages at the beginning of volume 1 is Karl Taube's signature,
which would seem to indicate that Dr. Taube's "collaboration" consisted in
lending his copy of the 1979 edition for scanning. Nowhere in the publicity
on the forementioned web page, nor on the packaging, is it mentioned that
this "Facsimile Edition" is a digital copy of a printed facsimile, not of
the original codex. There is nothing in the digital files other than this
copy; new text and graphics appear only on the printed inserts slipped into
the sleeves on the plastic boxes and on the disc labels.

I had a lot of technical problems trying to read the files on both my
desktop computer and a notebook. For some reason, on both machines the DVD
drives tended to freeze up and I had to reboot often to continue viewing the
files, sometimes several times for a single file, a problem I've never had
with other digital editions. One of the discs spins noisily in the
notebook's drive, heats up and refuses to be read. This has happened before
with homemade discs with adhesive paper labels like the ones in this set, I
suspect because they are a bit thicker than discs with labels printed
directly on their backs. I sent a couple messages to the publishers by
e-mail, on August 24 and September 11th, seeking a solution for the
technical problems, but I haven't yet received a reply.


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