Florentine Codex (Facsimile Edition) review

[Jesse Lovegren]

To corroborate intohuey Wright's story:
My library agreed to purchase a set of the DVD's, and they are, as Dr.
Wright has said, not professionally pressed and do not read in my laptop.
 The desktop in my office, however, can handle them.  For those who get the
DVD's you will want to transfer them to a hard drive for reliable access.
 It is good that there is now a digitized version of the 1979 facsimile
edition, but I do not think that the publisher can feel much pride in
offering this resource, whose presentation leaves much to be desired, at
such a high price.

On Sat, Oct 3, 2009 at 3:52 PM, David Wright <dcwright at prodigy.net.mx>wrote:

> 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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>


-- 
Jesse Lovegren
Department of Linguistics
645 Baldy Hall
office +1 716 645 0136
cell +1 512 584 5468
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