Piers--Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

It has been my good fortune and pleasure to have worked in the company of computer specialists who have understood the special needs of a humanist incompletely computer literate. Special thanks are due to John Unsworth, Director of IATH and my colleague in the English Department, to Associate Director Thornton Staples, to IBM systems man Oludotun Akinola, to UNIX specialist Karen Dietz, as well as to Shawn Carnell, Susan Gants, Ross Wayland, and Pete Yadlowsky, all of whom helped me over many technical and conceptual hurdles, some of my own creation, with unfailing competence, courtesy, and charity. Jason Haynes has helped me in innumerable ways, most recently by providing the HTML markup for this report. Special gratitude is due as well to Christie D. Stephenson, Assistant Fine Arts Librarian at the Fiske Kimball Fine Arts Library, who oversaw the production of the color digital images from slides, and to David Seaman, Director of Electronic Texts, and his helpful staff, for assisting with the production of images from the flatbed scanner and for answering my limitless questions. I am deeply indebted to John Price-Wilkin, who helped me create a DTD for both the Archive and SEENET and taught me to appreciate the elegant complexity of SGML.

My co-editors of The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, Robert Adams, Eric Eliason, Ralph Hanna, and Thorlac Turville-Petre, have done a great deal of the work that went into the report, writing sections, checking transcriptions, conferring on a myriad of questions small and large. I look forward to many years of collaboration with them on this project.

IATH generously supplied me with equipment, travel monies, and funds for purchasing color images of the manuscripts. Its monies have made it possible to hire a number of talented graduate students from the English and Classics departments at the University of Virginia. They, in spite of never having worked before with medieval handwritten documents and in most cases without initial knowledge of Middle English, have worked faithfully over many months in learning medieval hands, Middle English, and (often) new computer programs. I am grateful to Christopher Copeland, David Cox, Jack Chafin, Monique Dull, Alexander Luhrmann, Stephen Ramsay, Nancy Renwick, and Dominique Woodall for many hours of labor on an exacting task. I am grateful to Gail Duggan, who has worked on this project forty to fifty hours a week since September.

I am grateful to the staffs of the manuscript departments of the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; The British Library, London; Cambridge University Library, Cambridge; Corpus Christi College, Oxford; and Trinity College, Cambridge, all of whom provided photographic copies of manuscripts. For manifold kindnesses beyond any professional responsibility, grateful thanks is given to Dr. David Cooper, Librarian of Corpus Christi College, Oxford; to Mr. D. J. Hall, Senior Under-Librarian, Cambridge University Library; to Mr. David J. McKitterick, Librarian, Trinity College, Cambridge, Dr. Andrew Prescott, Curator, The British Library, and Dr. Patrick Zutshi, Keeper of Manuscripts and University Archives, Cambridge University Library. Grateful thanks are due as well to Mr. S. C. Albert, Director of World Microfilms, for permission to reproduce images from Trinity College, Cambridge, MS B.15.17.

Finally, of course, all of us at IATH are grateful to the IBM Corporation for the generous grant of funds and equipment that made all of this possible.

Last Modified: Monday, 27-Aug-2001 16:23:54 EDT