Eduardo Urbina, Richard Furuta, Steven Escar Smith, Neal Audenaert, Jie Deng, and Carlos Monroy
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX
Four hundred years ago, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616) published Don
Quixote de La Mancha , a book destined to become the emblem of a culture and the symbol of a nation. Despite the Quixote ’s eminent status, most people, including many
Spanish majors, know this book, not by a first hand encounter with its pages but rather through some derivative representation: an icon, image, or cultural association. There are more than 80 operas based on the Quixote , more than 200 films, and countless musical, artistic, and popular representations. This book is often seen, much talked about, and seldom read.
At the core of these derivative representations are illustrations found in the pages of thousands of editions published since 1605, illustrations we collectively refer to as the
Quixote
’s textual iconography
–the influence these illustrations have had on the popular understanding of the book and the influence the prevailing interpretive views have had on the illustrations. The potential for scholarly research focused on these illustrations would be difficult to overstate. And yet, at present there is no catalogue, in print or online, covering the textual iconography of the Quixote in a comprehensive manner. The thousands of woodcuts, engravings, etchings, drawings, and lithographs that have accompanied the text are, for the most part, a little known interpretative tradition; a much neglected critical and artistic treasure.
Two key obstacles have prevented the publication of a comprehensive collection of the textual iconography of the Quixote : 1) the rarity of and difficult access to the materials, and 2) the technical and financial difficulties in compiling and disseminating such an archive in print format. The advent of hypertext, digital libraries, and the
Internet, among other technological factors of the information technology revolution, make the impossible dream of collecting and visualizing the textual iconography of the
Quixote an achievable goal.
In this context, the Cervantes Project
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has initiated the creation of a digital archive of the illustrations that form the textual iconography of the Quixote , as permitted by copyright laws, along with the necessary interfaces and visualization tools that allow access and knowledge previously unavailable. We further envision the archive as a research repository to complement the textual and bibliographical electronic resources already present in the Cervantes Project, as well as a unique digital variorum image collection able to extend the value of our Electronic variorum edition of the Quixote
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.
The archive will provide scholars, students, and the public with worldwide electronic access to these unique and rare resources. Together with the other collection provided by
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the Cervantes Project, the iconography archive will facilitate exploration of Cervantes’ work and the influence of his masterpiece through 400 years from several perspectives: textual, artistic, critical, bibliographical, and historical.
To begin work on this digital archive, we first needed access to a suitably representative collection of illustrations. To this end, in 2001 the Cushing Memorial
Library and Archives of Texas A&M University, working in conjunction with the
Cervantes Project , began acquiring a large number of significant illustrated editions for the purpose of creating a special collection of illustrated editions of the Quixote .
Presently, the Cervantes Project Collection contains 403 editions published between
1620 and 2004, comprised of over 800 volumes from 15 different countries, making it one of the most important Cervantes collections in the United States. Timed to help celebrate the 400 th
anniversary of the Quixote , this collection was exhibited to the public in March 2005 in conjunction with a two day symposium on Cervantes, “ Don Quixote
Illustrated: Textual Images and Visual Readings” (Urbina, 2005).
In addition to the Cervantes Project Collection, the Biblioteca Nacional of Spain, the
University of Castilla-La Mancha, the Hispanic Society of America, and the Library of
Congress have contributed to the project, bringing the current total number of editions to be included in the digital archive to 425. Having assembled this impressive collection, work is currently in progress to digitize these holdings. Currently, 74 editions have been digitized, with a total of 4,053 images available. When this process is completed, the digital archive is expected to include upwards of 8,000 images complemented by innovative visualization tools (Monroy et al., 2003).
In the remainder of this paper, we discuss the steps we have taken to assemble this collection and digital archive. This includes both a high level overview of the technical aspects of this endeavor as well as a detailed discussion of the workflow between the various administrative units collaborating on this interdisciplinary effort. We also describe our strategy for automatically establishing linkages between the illustrations in the Iconography Project, our current digital collections, and future additions. We begin by sketching the scholarly context in which our work is situated.
The broad significance of the Quixote demands that we rethink current, predominantly, text-centered approaches to literary criticism. In addition to the many thousands of illustrations that demand scholarly attention, we also find that the text itself ironically claims to be based, in part, on images of the events it describes:
In the first notebook there was a very realistic depiction of the battle of
Don Quixote and the Basque, both in the postures recounted in the history… At the mule’s feet was a caption that read: Don Sancho de
Azpetia
… and at the feet of Rocinante was another one that said:
Don
Quixote . (Cervantes, Grossman, tr., 2003, pp. 68)
We have no evidence for the existence of this depiction outside of the mind of Cervantes.
The early editions of the Quixote contain no illustrations, and the first edition containing an illustration was published in 1618, after Cervantes’ death. Despite this, as the passage
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above would indicate, the Quixote “is a novel conceived in strongly visual terms” whose iconification precedes the work and vision of the illustrators (Riley, 1988).
Importance of Images
One reason for the neglect and lack of appreciation of the iconography of the Quixote is the continued primacy of the written word over images and other media in current literary study. There is, however, a growing recognition of the critical role illustrations and images play in understanding many texts and the inadequacy of purely typographical representations of those texts for scholarly work. At least four categories of relationships between the textual and visual components of these works can be identified
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.
In the first category are works in which the textual and visual components were designed together and must be considered as an integrated whole for the full meaning of the work to be understood. This is exemplified by the poetry of Emily Dickinson in which the meaning of the poems is often visually designed. The second category is composed of works in which illustrations provide the author’s interpretation of his own writings. The illustrated novels of Dickens and Thackeray in the 19 th century fall into this category. The third category involves text that represents and interprets an image. The picture-poems often found in gift books and annuals of the 19 th
century, especially those of Elizabeth Landon, typify this category.
These three categories are unified by the fact that the author of the text is directly aware of and relating to the visual component. In the textual iconography of the Quixote we find a fourth category. In this category the visual component is a representation and/or interpretation of the text by artists unknown to the original author of the text. This is by no means unique to the Quixote . The illustrated manuscripts and stained glass windows depicting scenes from the Bible, or the artwork and sculptures depicting Greek mythology are also clear examples of this category. Much like the popular understanding of the Quixote today, people throughout history have often come to know texts more by their visual depictions than by reading their words. Indeed, even the characters of the
Quixote appear to anticipate the dominance of their future iconographic representation over their textual representation. In one scene at an inn, Don Quixote imagines his future depiction in paintings after observing paintings of Greek myths. His humble squire makes a surprisingly accurate prediction:
I’ll wager, said Sancho, that before long there won’t be a tavern, an inn, a hostelry, or a barbershop where the history of our deeds isn’t painted. But I’d like it done by the hands of a painter better than the one who did these. (Cervantes, Grossman, tr., 2003, pp. 923)
With nearly 400 years of illustrative history and hundreds of artists, the body of illustrations that form the iconography of the Quixote vastly exceeds any collection in the first three categories in both quantity and variety. These illustrations carry with them a wealth of information about the historical, cultural and literary contexts in which they were created; information that helps to place the text of the Quixote within the diverse cultural, aesthetic, and historical contexts through which it has journeyed and which have helped to shape our current understanding of the text at both the popular and scholarly levels.
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John Harthan observes that “book illustration is like a hand-mirror in which one can see reflected great historical events, social changes and the movement of ideas down the centuries.” He later comments on the significance of the Quixote in this context, noting that “A history of modern book illustration could almost be written in terms of this perennially popular classic alone” (Harthan, 1981). The significance of book illustrations for expanding our understanding of the human experience and the Quixote ’s place at the forefront of book illustration begs for a sustained scholarly investigation of its textual iconography. Yet, our recognition of the potential benefits of studying these illustrations brings back the painful awareness that we still lack a comprehensive catalogue of these illustrations and the tools that would support scholarly inquiry.
History of Iconography projects
The current lack of such a catalogue is not entirely due to scholastic oversight or lack of effort. Attempts were made in 1879 and 1905 to offer a representative sampling but the coverage was very limited in both cases; amounting in the former to 101 illustrations from 60 selected editions (Riera, 1879), and in the latter case to 611 facsimile images of title pages (Henrich, 1905). A far more ambitious attempt was made in 1946, on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of Cervantes’ birth, by Juan Givanel Mas y “Gaziel”
(Agustín Calvet) in their Historia gráfica de Cervantes y el ‘Quijote’
, wherein 77 illustrations are reproduced and analyzed in some detail (Givanel, 1946). But without a doubt the best and still the only critical study identifying and describing the illustrations of the Quixote is H. S. Ashbee’s 1895 catalogue of his own collection of plates and illustrated editions, entitled An Iconography of ‘ Don Quixote’ , 1605-1895 4 .
Ashbee was a dedicated and knowledgeable collector and his book is an indispensable reference and the obligatory point of departure for any research on the subject.
Despite the work and scholarship devoted to assembling these collections, their limitations as a representative sampling of the iconography of the Quixote can be illustrated by pointing out that a single edition
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(Paris, 1836) contains 800 engravings and drawings illustrating Cervantes’ story. These efforts clearly demonstrate the difficulty posed by the two previously mentioned challenges of the limited access to the materials as well as the technical and financial difficulties of assembling such a collection in a print format.
In the last few years, the critical interest in the illustrations of the Quixote has been renewed as demonstrated by the publication of three major monographs by J. Hartau
(Hartau, 1987), R. Paulson (Paulson, 1998), and R. Schmidt (Schmidt, 1999). Of equal significance is the exhibition at the Museo del Prado in Madrid entitled Images of Don
Quixote, as well as the richly illustrated and documented catalogue of the exhibition prepared by the Hispanic Society of America under the direction of Patrick Lenaghan
(Lenaghan et al., 2003), together with the current exhibition at the Biblioteca Nacional of
Spain, Biografía de un libro: el Quijote 1605-2005 ( Biografía , 2005). These studies and events demonstrate the key critical value of the illustrations and their role in the reception and interpretation of the novel. However, the contribution of these illustrations to the editorial history and critical reception of Cervantes’ novel is still largely unknown to readers and unexamined by critics. Consequently, there is an urgent need to provide a more complete and accessible resource to the rich artistic tradition of the textual iconography of the Quixote.
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Developing a resource of this scope is a significant undertaking, not only in assembling the physical collection of the editions but also in building a digital archive. The skills needed by a team creating the digital archive are broad, encompassing knowledge of technology, knowledge of the topic domain, and knowledge of information organization.
This is reflected in the Cervantes Iconography project, which represents a close collaboration among four administrative groups on the Texas A&M University campus as diagrammed in Fig. 1.
Overall project guidance comes from domain scholars—Cervantes specialists based in our Hispanic Studies Department—who provide historical, critical, artistic, and literary expertise to the project. Professional staff members from the Texas A&M University
Libraries’ Cushing Memorial Library, which houses and maintain the physical rare book collection, are responsible for collecting and maintaining the detailed metadata records that incorporate information collected from across all groups involved in the project.
Digital imaging specialists from the Texas A&M University Digital Library (TAMUDL) carry out the digitization process and provide structural metadata for the images.
Information Science researchers from the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries
(CSDL) maintain the research collection and develop tools to test new strategies for organizing, presenting, and exploring the images; they also provide technical guidance for the project.
Three separate representations of the digital archive are maintained at present—an edition master list (maintained in Hispanic Studies), a production collection (maintained in the Texas A&M University Libraries), and a research collection (maintained in the
CSDL).
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The edition master list serves as a master index and is imported by the production and research collections. To support the domain scholars who maintain this index, we have developed a Web-based administrative interface (Fig. 2). Authorized users may edit, add, or deactivate metadata records for each edition in the list. To avoid accidental loss of information, the system deactivates metadata records rather than deleting them.
Deactivated records remain in the database but are removed from the displays. For additional protection, a journaling mechanism records all modifications and a history list allows users to retrieve previous versions of the master list.
Figure 2. The editor interface for the edition master list
The production collection maintains a set of Dublin Core based metadata records, which are kept for each edition (Fig. 3) and for each image of interest within each edition
(Fig. 4). These metadata records are populated by the cooperative efforts of domain scholars, library staff, and TAMUDL staff in a process developed through a half-year series of meetings. In the process, the domain scholars are responsible for initiating the process of incorporating an edition through preparation of a workflow specification that identifies the edition and the specific contents that are to be digitized. The initial metadata fields for the edition are derived automatically from the edition master list and then augmented by library staff to detail the cataloging and administrative particulars of the edition. The edition and workflow specification is then sent to the TAMUDL, which carries out the digitization specification, names the resulting files using a consistent naming scheme, and generates image metadata fields recording the process. Two copies of the digitized images are distributed, one to the production collection and the other to the research collection. The domain scholars then further enrich the metadata by
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associating each image with information describing its relationship to the narrative and thematic structure of the Quixote , as will be described in the following section.
Figure 3. The interface for manipulating the edition metadata
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Figure 4. The interface for manipulating the image metadata
The research collection provides a Web-based “proofing” interface (illustrated in Fig.
5 and available from our Web pages at http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/cervantes ) for the purpose of allowing quick browsing and searching of the growing collection. Browsing on the collection is layered into three levels: the overview level gives an overall display of the editions in the master list; the edition level presents thumbnail versions of the images from a single edition; and finally, the illustration level displays a larger version of a single image. A search engine is provided to assist locating editions of interest (Fig. 6) based on attributes such as the publisher, country, date, and the size of the edition. The proofing interface will provide public access to the collection as it grows. Once the collection matures, long-term dissemination will be provided through the production collection.
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Figure 5. The Web-based interface for browsing the collection
Figure 6. The search engine for the Web-based interface
The separation of research and production collections takes advantage of the different strengths and roles of the project’s participants. Although the CSDL provides a degree of institutional stability, having been constituted a little over ten years ago, a research focus is inherently unstable. When active, a successful research effort concentrates on innovation; sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully, and sometimes causing great compromise to an exhibit’s stability. When completed, the funding that allowed for
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research exploration often is no longer available, leading to sustainability difficulties.
The research campus library has a historical role in and mandate for assuring long-term preservation. However it also embodies an institutional expectation for stability, making it less of a vessel for experimentation. We view the partnership between domain, research, and production as a contributor to the strength of the project.
The value of the illustrations in the Quixote textual iconography digital archive are enhanced by their innovative treatment of and relationship with the collection of electronic text available already at the Cervantes Project and by the linkages allowing connectivity between images, metadata, and bibliographic entries. In addition, the archive provides interactivity between digital images and electronic texts, from different entry points. For example, users may browse single images, images with same metadata in a given field (content), sequential images from same edition, or all images related to a particular chapter or adventure, by a particular artist or in a given edition.
A key question we face is how to provide these linkages without requiring extensive hand coding, a task that would be prohibitively expensive in both time and money. To do this, we needed to move away from the traditional positional ties to printed volumes (for example, page and line numbers), since the use of illustrations from hundreds of volumes makes the identification of a canonical pagination impossible. Additionally, the use of positional ties fails to encode critical information about the narrative context, characters and dominate stylistic devices of the text in which the illustrations are found.
An important component of our initial work, therefore, is the specification of a comprehensive taxonomy of the narrative and thematic elements of the Quixote . Table 1 shows the major categories of this taxonomy. Fig. 7 shows how this information can be mapped onto a portion of the Quixote . The taxonomy, representing the logical narrative structure of the work, will provide the addressing mechanism by which illustrations, texts, and other components can be associated with one another automatically. Through manipulation of the structure of the taxonomic elements and through specification of the desired interrelationships, hypotheses about the work can be posed and examined through coordinated inspection of text, illustration, commentary, and bibliography.
Table 1: Taxonomy of Narrative and Thematic Elements
Category
Structural
Examples part, sally, chapter, poem, letter, tale, discourse, music
Organizational episode, adventure, action, dialogue, reading, writing, voice
Sequential place, direction, time, interpolation
Narrational
Thematic character, object, animal, book, food theme, topic, motif (madness, love, chivalry, knighthood, honor, identity, justice, freedom, war, violence, play, fiction) burlesque, comic, parody, satire, irony, metafiction, moral, didactic Modal
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3.
DQ at inn {chapter} a.
DQ knighted at inn by innkeeper {action} b.
Vigil of arms and fight with muleteer {adventure} {character} {object}
# knighthood, chivalry
% parodic, burlesque
3.
On the road in search for adventures {chapter} {place/} {direction} {/place} a.
DQ frees Andrés from Juan Haldudo {adventure} {character} b.
DQ attacks the merchants from Toledo {adventure} {character}
{action}
# justice, freedom, violence
% parodic, burlesque
Notation
1, 2, 3 . . . correspond to chapter number and their main overall content as narrative structural segments a, b, c . . . indicate narrative units within chapter or chapters
# indicates principal themes, topics, motifs present in narrative segment or unit
%
{ } indicates dominant mode (parodic, buslesque, ironic, etc) indicates taxonomy category for narrative segment or unit
Figure 7: Example Taxonomy Mapping
As noted by McGann in his 2002 Lyman lecture (McGann 2002), a limitation of
Context-Free-Grammar-based text markup notations such as XML and SGML is their ability to support directly only a single hierarchy. Clearly, our narrative structure taxonomy creates multiple, overlapping hierarchies, although each separate hierarchy is itself properly nested. As Fig. 7 suggests, we will embed our taxonomy specification on top of a properly specified representation of the text, a common technique for handling overlapping hierarchies in such markup languages. Clearly, DTDs for such embeddings only guarantee that the underlying text’s specification is well-formed, requiring postprocessing to verify the correctness of structural properties of the additional elements.
Specifically for the Cervantes Project , an XML schema, compatible with the TEI
DTD, is being created representing the complex and highly significant interrelationships of episodes and adventures traceable throughout the entire text of Don Quixote as identified and tagged in our narrative taxonomy. In the first phase of the textual iconography project, one base text of the Quixote is being fully encoded in TEI XML.
Given the bilingual nature of our site and the international scope of its users, we next plan to encode J. Ormsby’s English translation, already available in our digital library of electronic texts. Since this mark-up represents the various episodes, adventures, themes and motifs present in the narrative, these texts will immediately be cross-linkable.
Additionally, the notation will provide the reference points that will allow the subsequent edition-independent encoding of our images, as well as the incorporation of other key editions, both by our own team but also by others. Further, the taxonomy will enable the
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development of more powerful and specialized searching and visualization interfaces to the collection.
The extraordinary popularity of Don Quixote is reflected in the many manifestations that have been produced, some retaining only limited fidelity to the original text’s narrative structure. The images, translations, films, and operas already noted are but a few of the kinds of representations that have been created.
6 The wide variety and large number of textual and non-textual representations of the Quixote suggest a need for an encoding scheme that can be applied independently of edition and of place by specialists in their own topical areas that will in turn afford the automatic identification of linkages among these separately owned and maintained content components. We expect that beyond our iconography-related application, the Quixote narrative structure taxonomy will address this need, enabling the distribution of the effort needed to produce collections that combine the efforts of many single collectors.
A number of factors have come together to make our project possible: 1) the obvious and urgent need to create electronic online access to rare collections and unique image resources until now impossible to achieve, 2) our existing collaborations with the
Biblioteca Nacional of Spain and the University of Castilla-La Mancha, 3) the presence at
Texas A&M University of a core and focused collection of illustrated editions of the
Quixote , 4) the academic support and computer infrastructure provided by the Cushing
Memorial Library and the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries, 5) the scholarly experience and technological expertise developed over the last eight years by the members of the Cervantes Project in previous projects, and 6) the propitious event of the centenary and the renewed interest it brings to all aspects of Cervantes scholarship. Taken together these circumstances present a unique and valuable opportunity.
The digital images, electronic databases, hypertextual archive and visualizations tools to be created will be fully accessible free of charge through customized interfaces at the
Internet portal of the Cervantes Project , as well as, in Spanish, through the portals of the
National Library of Spain and the University of Castilla-La Mancha.
The interpretative tradition represented by the textual iconography owes its existence to the gradual tendency in the textual history of the Quixote to complement and amplify the text with multiple paratextual elements such as portraits, biographies, maps, documents, and, of course, illustrations, in an apparent effort to make the Quixote a more accessible and better understood and appreciated classic, thus allowing readers to see, and thus to know, not only the never read but also the never seen in the parodic text, the world first imagined by Don Quixote.
The wide interdisciplinary interest in the Quixote throughout the centuries, its canonical and seminal status in the creation of the novel as a genre, its traditional inclusion in world literature courses, and its iconic status in Hispanic culture, are all factors insuring that the audience for the reference materials to be made available by our proposed project will be large, constant, and varied. It includes scholars in literary and book history interested in evaluating the reception and development of the written and visual text, students of the novel and of illustrations researching the role and function of iconography in narrative, and curious readers interested in seeing and appreciating for the first time a rich artistic tradition.
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Ashbee, H.S. An Iconography of Don Quixote, 1605-1895 . Aberdeen: University Press,
1895.
Biografía de un libro: el
Quijote. Madrid: Biblioteca Nacional, 2005.
Catálogo de la exposición celebrada en la Biblioteca Nacional en el tercer centenario de la publicación del
Quijote. Madrid: Biblioteca Nacional, 1905.
Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quijote de la Mancha , Francisco Rico, Director. Barcelona:
Biblioteca Clásica, 1998. 2 vols;
Don Quixote . English translation by Edith Grossman
(New York: HarperCollins, 2003).
Cervantes Project . http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/cervantes
El Quijote ilustrado: Modelos de representación en las ediciones españolas del siglo
XVIII y comienzos del XIX
. Madrid: Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte-Real
Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, 2003.
Exposición cervantina en la Biblioteca Nacional para conmemorar el CCCXXX aniversario de la muerte de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra . Madrid: Biblioteca Nacional,
1946.
Hartau, Johannes. Don Quijote in der Kunst: Wandlungen einer Symbolfigur . Berlin:
Mann, 1987.
Harthan, John. The History of the Illustrated Book: the Western Tradition . New York:
Thames and Hudson, 1981.
Henrich, Manuel. Iconografia de las ediciones del Quijote de Miguel de Cervantes :
Reproducción en de las portadas de 611 ediciones con notas bibliográficas
. . . 3 vols.
Barcelona: Henrich y Cía., 1905.
Lenaghan, Patrick, Javier Blas, and José Manuel Matilla.
Imágenes del
Quijote : Modelos de representación en las ediciones de los siglos XVII a XIX
. Madrid: The Hispanic
Society of America-Museo Nacional del Prado-Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San
Fernando-Calcografía Nacional, 2003.
Mas, Juan Givanel.
Catálogo de la exposici ón de iconografía cervantina . Barcelona:
Biblioteca Central, 1944.
Mas, Juan Givanel, y “Galziel”.
Historia gráfica de Cervantes y del
Quijote. Madrid:
Plus Ultra, 1946.
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McGann, Jerome J. "The Rationale of Hypertext." Electronic Text: Investigations in
Method and Theory . K. Sutherland, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon P-New York: Oxford UP,
1997) 19-46.
McGann, Jerome J. Textonics, Literary and Cultural Studies in a Quantum World .
Lyman lecture, National Humanities Center, October 3, 2002.
Monroy, Carlos, et al. “Text, Images, Knowledge: Visualizing Cervantes and Picasso.”
Proceedings of the Visual Knowledge Conference . Ed. John Frow. Universisty of
Edinburgh, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, 2003. Accessed 2003.
<http://webdb.ucs.ed.ac.uk/malts/other/VKC/dsp-all-papers.cfm>
Paulson, Ronald. Don Quixote in England: the Aesthetics of Laughter . Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins UP, 1998.
Riera, P. Iconografía de Don Quijote ; reproducción heliográfica y foto-tipográfica de
101 láminas elegidas entre las 60 ediciones, diversamente ilustradas, que se han publicado durante 257 años…destinadas a la primera edición de Don Quijote.
Barcelona, 1879.
Riley, E. C. “
Don Quixote
: from Text to Icon,”
Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes
Society of America 8, special issue (1988): 103-15.
Schmidt, Rachel. Critical Images: The Canonization of Don Quixote through Illustrated
Editions of the Eighteenth Century . Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1999.
Urbina, Eduardo, et al. Don Quixote Illustrated: An Exhibit in Celebration of the 4th
Centenary of the Quixote. Texas A&M University, 2005. Published by the Wind River
Press, Austin (March 2005).
1 The Cervantes Project is an ongoing long-term project and research initiative dedicated to the development of a comprehensive digital archive based on the works of Miguel de Cervantes
(1547-1616), the cornerstone of Hispanic letters and one of the world’s most influential authors.
In partnership with the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries and the Cushing Memorial
Library and Archives, a division of the Texas A&M University Libraries, our goal is to create an online repository of textual, documentary, bibliographic and visual electronic resources to serve the needs of students and scholars interested in Cervantes’ life times and work, and focused in particular on the study of Don Quixote de la Mancha (<http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/cervnates>).
2 The Electronic variorum edition of the Quixote project was funded by a grant from the National
Science Foundation Information Technology Research program (2000-2003) and as a special project of the Digital Library Initiative (DLI2) (Urbina et al., 2002; Furuta et al., 2001; Hu et al.,
1999)
3 The first three of these categories are derived from examples provided in “The Rationale of
HyperText” by Jerome McGann (1997).
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4 H.S. Ashbee, An Iconography of Don Quixote, 1605-1895 (Printed for the Author at the
University Press, Aberdeen; Issued by the Bibliographical Society, 1895). It includes at the end
23 full-page engravings from the Madrid 1782 Ibarra edition, newly engraved by Alejandro
Blanco, and a portrait of Cervantes by L. Alenza engraved also by A. Blanco, dated 1844.
5 The two-volume edition illustrated by Tony Johnnot (Paris: Dubochet, 1836-1837) with 800 xylography vignettes and engravings.
6 Examples of unusual representations derived from Don Quixote can be found in the collection of popular images at http://www.uclm.es/ceclm/CentenarioQuijote/index.htm, which includes illustrations taken from playing cards, chocolate boxes, lottery tickets, and stamps, among others.
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