It is with great pleasure that we announce the uploading of Sraffa’s Lecture Notes on the Advanced Theory of Value from the Lectures he gave at Trinity College in 1928-31. Last week Jonathan Smith and his staff uploaded all of the images, and with this blog post we unveil the Trinity 2.0 arrangement of the file.
The original images from Trinity website are here. The slideshow that arranges the material that we have been working on is here. You can get the slideshow in PDF format here. There is a video announcing it here.
With this blog post we unveil the Trinity 2.0 arrangement of the material. What is key in that arrangement is a deep understanding of structure of the archive as a collection of independent note-sets collected in what we will term ‘documents’, denoted by the Greek ‘δ’. These documents are discerned from the previous arrangements of the material, of which there are two: the original Bharadwaj-Garegnani (BG) arrangement from the 1980’s and the Wren Trinity (WT) arrangement in the 1990s. For D2/4 BG is not a factor and we only develop Trinity 2.0 from Wren Trinity. This will not be the case for D3/12 Notes on PCMC and the Trinity 2.0 arrangement of that section of the archive is very complex and interfaces meticulously BG and WT as well as consideration of Sraffa’s own pagination and structure. Indeed Sraffa’s own pagination and structure takes precedence over all else as the purpose of Trinity 2.0 is to reproduce as much as possible Sraffa’s method of inquiry and allow the reader to see for themselves the purview of matters from Sraffa’s desk; in this we reproduce the methodology and approach that Sraffa himself applied to his exposition of archives of David Ricardo, especially the letters as we saw from a previous post.
The biggest development in Trinity 2.0 is an understanding of the material in each file on two levels, (i) that of the document across the file, and (ii) that of the image-page (IP) within the document. At the level of the document each is positioned relative to the total. For D2/4 there are a total of 44 documents according to the Wren Trinity convention, and each document will be archived in terms of the total; thus 1-44 is the first document out of 44 and 3-44 the third out of 44, and so on…At the level of the image-page (IP) each will be archived relative to the total number of IP’s in the document. Taking D2/4 again as our example, the largest document is the third, which consists of 156 IP’s. The, say, 1st, 30th, and 100th IP of this third document would therefore be archived as D2.4.3-44.1-156 for the first, D2.4.3-44.30-156 for the third, and D2.4.3-44.100-156 for the 100th individual IP. The Trinity 2.0 convention also identifies the meticulous interface with the Wren Trinity arrangement as well as Sraffa’s pagination as can be seen when clicking on the above. All of this is meant to assist those readers interested in Sraffa’s archival material get a handle on the structure and content of the material.
So enjoy reading Sraffa’s Lecture Notes on the Advanced Theory of Value. Any indexing you may do please let me know so that we can coordinate efforts!