The Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway recently initiated a three-year project that will result in a website where all manuscripts by the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch will be published. The collection belonging to the museum consists of a major part of Munch’s complete artistic oeuvre as well as a near complete collection of his letters, diaries and notes. The textual material consists of more than 12,000 pages. A complete, authorized and commented publication of the manuscript material has been in great demand for a long time, both in Norway and internationally.

Special types of text

Among the 12,000 pages of manuscripts, there are several types of text, but two of them elude the straightforward process of transcribing and encoding. The two types are:

For both types of text the new module “Digital Facsimiles” in chapter 11 of the TEI Guidelines offers a solution and thus changes the near impossibility of representation to a radical opportunity. We use the Image Markup Tool, developed by Martin Holmes at the University of Victoria, which makes the task of encoding the files and building web views a swift, fun and easy one. There are quite a few of these types of text in the arts and the humanities, and because of searching it is still necessary to transcribe. Earlier this meant either leaving the text incomprehensible because it lost its context, or making the encoder’s task insurmountable when trying to represent the structure of e.g. an income tax form. Now these types no longer form problems: Representation in context and searching are surprisingly easy to achieve.

Linking texts and works of art

It is hard to separate the literary from the private in Munch’s writings. Most of his written production – from literary journals to letters – is integrated in his rhetorical emphasis on an inseparable unity between life and art. Throughout this heterogeneous material he constantly refers to the same childhood memories, love stories, broken friendships and intrigues. But just as Munch’s works of art put into play the relationship between the private memory and the universal experience, the reader of his writings will find that the line between fiction and reality is hard to establish.

We aim therefore at connecting the artist and the writer and make his texts available for study and thereby hopefully broaden the understanding of Munch, his life and oeuvre. A major challenge in this task is the existence of several versions (which often are created years apart) of both works of art and texts. Munch’s “The Scream” is a world famous icon, and the lithograph (in its many versions) is well known, but it is not commonly known that Munch also wrote several texts describing the situation that is depicted. How should we encode, annotate and present this web of connections and associations, how to connect the works of art and the texts and open them up for investigation?