History

In 1995-97 the National Endowment for the Humanities in the USA, the SSHRC in Canada, and the British Academy in the UK each funded one researcher to produce in collaboration a revised version of the Index, the NEH specifying that at least one outcome was to be in electronic format. The project team split over producing a print or electronic version, but the NEH-funded researchers (Mooney and Dr. Elizabeth Solopova as RA) continued work toward the electronic version, extending beyond the 2-year grant on their own time. They gathered about two-thirds of the data required, and had this converted to SGML with encoding for various types of searches. The other members of original team produced a print version in 2005.

Although Mooney and Solopova extended their work on the project well beyond the NEH funded time-frame, they eventually had to bow to the demands of other funded work and put the DIMEV on the shelf. (Had the original plan been realized, the other two collaborators would have gathered the data for the London repositories and shared that with Mooney.) When Mosser and Mooney revived the project in 2008, during Mosser’s second stint as Leverhulme Visiting Professor in York, it quickly became apparent that a confluence of events in fact made the hiatus a blessing in disguise. Instead of having to wrestle with memory-stingy technologies, proprietary database software and/or primitive SGML editors, by 2008 memory and server space had become cheap, programs like BBEdit and oXygen had been developed and have proven to be a boon to projects such as this.

The conversion of the original data is complete (as of May 2011). The DIMEV contains all of the records from the original Index, its Supplement, the data collected by Mooney and Solopova, as well as records added by Mosser (the latter includes all the tales, prologues, and links of the Canterbury Tales, now assigned their own records).

Although we have not secured the major funding we hoped for to complete work on this project, we continue to work incrementally to bring this about.

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