3D Reconstruction and Digital Visualization of the South of the Royal Palace in Great Preslav

The report presents the film 10th century. The South of the Royal Palace in Great Preslav. It consists of two parts – 10th century. The Royal Palace in Great Prelsav. The Square with the Pinnacle and The Ruler’s Lodgings. 3D and virtual reconstructions of an architectural ensemble – part of the Preslav Royal Court unearthed during archaeological researches are used in the film. 3D documentaries have already gained popularity around the world and are well received by both scholars and the public at large. One of the distinguished tourist destinations in Bulgaria is Great Preslav – capital of the mediaeval Bulgarian state and a significant cultural center of the European Southeast in 9th–10th centuries, too. The first part of the film is created with the financial support of America for Bulgaria Foundation and the second – with the funding of Bulgarian National Science Fund at the Ministry of Education, Youth and Science. A team of almost 20 members worked on the film, including computer specialists, professional actors, and translators in the four main European languages – English, German, French and Russian, Trima Sound Recording Studio. In the first part of the 3D film are shown a segment of the Royal Palace, the square with the water pinnacle and the adjacent buildings – an important structural element of the town-planning of the Preslav Court center in the 10th century. In the second part the accent is the southern part of the Royal Palace in Great Preslav, where the personal residence of the Preslav ruler’s dynasty is situated. The work on the virtual reconstruction was done by Virtual Archaeology club at the Mathematical School, Shumen. Due to the efforts of its members it is now clear how the square in front of the southern gate looked like.

Medieval Sources and Present-Day Folklore Materials on Saints in an Electronic Encyclopedia

This paper discusses the variety of the digitized content of an electronic encyclopedia on the veneration of saints according to Bulgarian sources. The emphasis is on medieval Slavonic Church manuscripts and on present-day records of Bulgarian folklore narratives and songs. The combination of these sources provokes discussion of the so-called folklore Christianity and adds new dimensions to the understanding of the role of the cults of saints for culture and of the religiosity of the Bulgarians.

Computer Processing of Medieval Slavic Sources in the Institute of Literature at BAS Repertorium Project (1994–2004)

Mixed-content miscellanies (very frequent in the Byzantine and mediaeval Slavic written heritage) are usually defined as collections of works with non-occupational, non-liturgical application, and texts in them are selected and arranged according to no identifiable principle. It is a “readable” type of miscellanies which were compiled mainly on the basis of the cognitive interests of compilers and readers. Just like the occupational ones, they also appeared to satisfy public needs but were intended for individual usage. My textological comparison had shown that mixed- content miscellanies often showed evidence of a stable content – some of them include the same constituent works in the same order, regardless that the manuscripts had no obvious genetic relationship. These correspondences were sufficiently numerous and distinctive that they could not be merely fortuitous, and the only sensible interpretation was that even when the operative organizational principle was not based on independently identifiable criteria, such as the church calendar, liturgical function, or thematic considerations, mixed-content miscellanies (or, at least, portions of their contents) nonetheless fell into types. In this respect, the apparent free selection and arrangement of texts in mixed-content miscellanies turns out to be illusory. The problem was – as the corpus of manuscripts that I and my colleagues needed to examine grew – our ability to keep track of the structure of each one, and to identify structural correspondences among manuscripts within the corpus, diminished. So, at the end of 1993 I addressed a letter to Prof. David Birnbaum (University of Pittsburgh, PA) with a request to help me to solve the problem. He and my colleague Andrey Boyadzhiev (Sofia University) pointed out to me that computers are well suited to recording, processing, and analyzing large amounts of data, and to identifying patterns within the data, and their proposal was that we try to develop a computer system for description of manuscripts, for their analysis and of course, for searching the data. Our collaboration in this project is now ten years old, and our talk today presents an overview of that collaboration.

The Odrysian Kingdom – a Concept of an Interactive Multimedia Application for Educational Purposes

The presentation of cultural heritage is difficult comprehensive and constantly updated topic. Researchers often focus more on the different techniques to digitize artifacts of cultural heritage. This work focuses on the overall shape and structure of future multimedia application whose specificity is determined by the topic - Odrysian kingdom. Below is presented a concept for structure and content-based information available for individual kings from Odryssae dynasty. Special attention is paid to the presentation of preserved artifacts associated with the reign of specific rulers. The main concept of multimedia application dedicated to the Odrysian kingdom, it is to be used in teaching programs related to cultural heritage and history of antiquity in universities. The aim of designers is that it can be modified easy for use in museums also.

Cataloguing the Slavonic Manuscript Collection of the Plovdiv Public Library – Problems and MARC 21* Solutions

MARC 21 (‘Machine-Readable Cataloguing’) is a US library standard established worldwide and recently translated also in Bulgarian (those parts used most by librarians in their everyday work). The Bulgarian translations are freely available on the NALIS website (http://www.nalis.bg/) under the Library Standards Section, where also an Online Multilingual Dictionary of MARC 21 Terms can be found. All these works are approved by the US Library of Congress and published on its MARC 21 website under Translations (http://www.loc.gov/marc/translations.html#bulgarian).