The Census database provides written documents referring to the antiquity basically as quotations of texts, i. e. only the paragraph describing or mentioning the antique monument is recorded, and the closer or broader context the paragraph comes from is not evident for the user of the database.
The electronic full text edition which is linked to the Census database was developed in order to compensate this deficit. The individual quotations in the Census database have been linked with the full texts provided. The user reaches the respective passage in the text, and thus can see the direct context which the quotation has been taken from, and read the complete document.
The full text edition provides even more facilities: from the full text, all monuments mentioned can be directly reached in the Census database. The antique monuments in the text are highlighted in colour and linked to the database. For a quick identification of the monuments whose names do not immediately indicate the present term used, or vary from present knowledge, the index listing all monuments with the normalised "Census name" may be useful. To the right of the main text an extract of the index appears, listing all the monuments mentioned on the displayed page.
Monuments which, according to the current state of research, are imaginative inventions, or cannot be identified clearly, are also marked, but not linked with the database.
As a pilot project for the full text editions of the Census, three texts of the Mirabilia Urbis Romae have been edited and made available. The edition has been set up in XML format and most closely corresponds to the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative TEI.
