EPU - About this Project

Guide to the Site

The Emblem Project Utrecht Website consists of two parts. The first part is accessible through the menu of top of the page. Here you will find the links to the editions of the 25 emblem books, the link to the search page, our compare option, the bibliography and a link to the project information (including our technical and editorial guidelines). The menu on the left gives access, once you have chosen a particular emblem book, to one of the 25 editions.
You can always return to the welcome page by clicking the Emblem Project Utrecht icon from the menu on the left side of the window. Incidentally, the Amor picture which we use as the Emblem Project Utrecht logo has been taken from the frontispiece of Heinsius's Emblemata Amatoria .

Guide to the Editions

Once you have chosen a book there are several options to explore it. All of the options are available on the left-hand side of the window:

the front page: this is the default view you'll be presented with after having selected a book;
the editorial introduction: to all books which we present we have added a brief introduction which introduces the book and the procedures we followed in digitizing it;
a concordance page: for each book and each language within each book, we generate lists of words, with their number of occurrences, the contexts where they appear, hyperlinked to the locations in the texts.
all picturae page: on this page, small images of the picturae enable direct visual access to the emblems. The emblem motto 'pops up' when the mouse pointer is placed over an image. The page is probably especially useful to those who have studied a book before, and now return to study a specific emblem;
all facsimile images: the browse option will take you to the first facsimile (emblem or otherwise) in the book;
the emblem book contents: the table of contents lists all the book's emblems, and all other original texts (dedication, introductory poems, etc.);

Besides reading and exploring the selected book, using the menu on top of every page gives you access to:

all other emblem books
a search page, which gives you the opportunity to search through all texts and images of all emblem books ;
a compare page, which gives you the opportunity to compare any two emblems
the emblem bibliography: views available include:
- by author/editor: selecting a name will take you to a list of that person's entries in the bibliography;
- by title, with authors/editors and year: you'll be presented with a list of all titles, sorted by title;
- by category: the bibliography has been subdivided into some very broad categories (emblem study, emblem edition, bibliography, etc.). The bibliographical items derived from the Cats edition have simply been categorized als 'cats';
- links to websites: a number of websites have been described in the bibliography; a separate view on the bibliography lists those;

Guide to the Emblems

For each of the emblems, we'll present you with some, most or all of the following information:

the full text;
the picture (in small and large format);
links to page images (with thumbnails);
translations of the texts into modern English and/or Dutch;
a selection of relevant literature;
a selection of pictorial motifs (where applicable, hyperlinked to a list of other emblems from the same book showing the same motif);
a list of sources and parallels, linked to the bibliography and, where possible, to an online edition of the emblem referred to;
a list of local references (references to this emblem on the Emblem Project Utrecht website);
the Henkel and Schöne characterisation of the emblem (where applicable);
other information and research notes.

Restrictions

About the web browsers we support and the HTML standards we use: We try to make the site work on modern standards-compliant browsers. Everything should work as intended on Firefox, Netscape (7.0 and up), Mozilla and Internet Explorer (5.0 and up).
About other system settings: The preferred font for these pages is Arial (fallback to Verdana). The preferred screen resolution is at least 1024 * 768.
Finally, about browser settings: the standard menus use Javascript. We try to provide an alternative for those who prefer not to use Javascript. The preferences page and the book-level search pages won't work if you don't use Javascript. In a future version of the site, we'll remove the dependence on Javascript. Some of the navigation depends on the ability to store cookies. The cookies we use are temporary. They're stored in the browser session, but not written to disk.

Guide to Quick Access Keys

It is not strictly necessary for you to know about this. However, if you are a regular visitor to the EPU site, it may help to know that you can use some keyboard keys to accelerate navigation.
The keys should be pressed (on Windows) in combination with the alt-key. On the Mac, use the cmd-key.
On the emblem pages, these keys will have the following effects:

n
(next)
will take you to the next emblem or text
p
(previous)
will take you to the previous emblem or text