Encyclopedia

The Ency­clo­pe­dia sub­sys­tem con­tains bio­graph­i­cal and bib­li­o­graph­i­cal infor­ma­tion (“bio entries”) on poets, trans­la­tors and schol­ars in com­par­a­tive stud­ies. Unlike the research works included in the “Stud­ies” sec­tion of the Library sub­sys­tem, bio entries are not per se sec­ondary lit­er­a­ture — rather they rep­re­sent meta-infor­ma­tion of a spe­cial kind: it is sup­plied by the pro­ject par­tic­i­pants and makes up a dis­tinct log­i­cal sec­tion of the infor­ma­tion sys­tem.

Struc­ture of bio entry:

• Main name
• Other name forms
• Dates and places of birth and death
• Brief char­ac­ter­i­za­tion
• Bio­graph­i­cal infor­ma­tion
• List of author’s main works
• Sec­ondary lit­er­a­ture

Lists of name vari­ants allow the users to spec­ify pos­si­ble spelling of the author’s name, includ­ing the vari­ants not found in the CPCL indices. Bib­li­o­graph­i­cal lists (the entries’ two final sec­tions) con­tain ref­er­ences to the rel­e­vant pri­mary and sec­ondary sources, includ­ing those found in the Library.

The Ency­clo­pe­dia sub­sys­tem is under con­struc­tion. In future, the bio entries could be invoked from an author’s name in the indices and in the meta­data. This sub­sys­tem will even­tu­ally cover all the names found in the indices of the Cor­pus and Library sub­sys­tems, which will enable the lit­er­ary com­par­a­tivist to use it as an ency­clo­pe­dia of its own kind (hence its name).