Learning from the Past : The Women Writers Project and Thirty Years of Humanities Text Encoding

In recent years, intensified attention in the humanities has been paid to data: to data modeling, data visualization, ?big data?. The Women Writers Project has dedicated significant effort over the past thirty years to creating what Christoph Schöch calls ?smart clean data?: a moderate-sized collection of early modern women?s writing, carefully transcribed and corrected, with detailed digital text encoding that has evolved in response to research and changing standards for text representation. But that data?whether considered as a publication through Women Writers Online, or as a proof of the viability of text encoding approaches like those expressed in the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines?is only the most visible part of a much larger ecology. That ecology includes complex human systems, evolving sets of tools, and a massive apparatus of documentation and organizational memory that have made it possible for the project to work coherently over such a long period of time. In this article we examine the WWP?s information systems in relation to the project?s larger scholarly goals, with the aim of showing where they may generalize to the needs of other projects

Volume 35, Number 1, March 2015 OLAC Newsletter

Digitized March 2015 issue of the OLAC Newsletter

Towards an Interoperable Digital Scholarly Edition

Recent proposals for creating digital scholarly editions (DSEs) through the crowdsourcing of transcriptions and collaborative scholarship, for the establishment of national repositories of digital humanities data, and for the referencing, sharing, and storage of DSEs, have underlined the need for greater data interoperability. The TEI Guidelines have tried to establish standards for encoding transcriptions since 1988. However, because the choice of tags is guided by human interpretation, TEI-XML encoded files are in general not interoperable. One way to fix this problem may be to break down the current all-in-one approach to encoding so that DSEs can be specified instead by a bundle of separate resources that together offer greater interoperability: plain text versions, markup, annotations, and metadata. This would facilitate not only the development of more general software for handling DSEs, but also enable existing programs that already handle these kinds of data to function more efficiently

Digital Humanities and Libraries and Archives in Religious Studies

How are digital humanists drawing on libraries and archives to advance research in the field of religious studies and theology? How can librarians and archivists make their collections accessible in return? This volume showcases the perspectives of faculty, librarians, archivists, and allied cultural heritage professionals who are drawing on primary and secondary sources in innovative ways to create digital humanities projects in the field

Graph Data-Models and Semantic Web Technologies in Scholarly Digital Editing

This volume is based on the selected papers presented at the Workshop on Scholarly Digital Editions, Graph Data-Models and Semantic Web Technologies, held at the Uni- versity of Lausanne in June 2019. The Workshop was organized by Elena Spadini (University of Lausanne) and Francesca Tomasi (University of Bologna), and spon- sored by the Swiss National Science Foundation through a Scientific Exchange grant, and by the Centre de recherche sur les lettres romandes of the University of Lausanne. The Workshop comprised two full days of vibrant discussions among the invited speakers, the authors of the selected papers, and other participants.1 The acceptance rate following the open call for papers was around 60%. All authors – both selected and invited speakers – were asked to provide a short paper two months before the Workshop. The authors were then paired up, and each pair exchanged papers. Paired authors prepared questions for one another, which were to be addressed during the talks at the Workshop; in this way, conversations started well before the Workshop itself. After the Workshop, the papers underwent a second round of peer-review before inclusion in this volume. This time, the relevance of the papers was not under discus- sion, but reviewers were asked to appraise specific aspects of each contribution, such as its originality or level of innovation, its methodological accuracy and knowledge of the literature, as well as more formal parameters such as completeness, clarity, and coherence. The bibliography of all of the papers is collected in the public Zotero group library GraphSDE20192, which has been used to generate the reference list for each contribution in this volume. The invited speakers came from a wide range of backgrounds (academic, commer- cial, and research institutions) and represented the different actors involved in the remediation of our cultural heritage in the form of graphs and/or in a semantic web en- vironment. Georg Vogeler (University of Graz) and Ronald Haentjens Dekker (Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, Humanities Cluster) brought the Digital Humanities research perspective; the work of Hans Cools and Roberta Laura Padlina (University of Basel, National Infrastructure for Editions), as well as of Tobias Schweizer and Sepi- deh Alassi (University of Basel, Digital Humanities Lab), focused on infrastructural challenges and the development of conceptual and software frameworks to support re- searchers’ needs; Michele Pasin’s contribution (Digital Science, Springer Nature) was informed by his experiences in both academic research, and in commercial technology companies that provide services for the scientific community. The Workshop featured not only the papers of the selected authors and of the invited speakers, but also moments of discussion between interested participants. In addition to the common Q&A time, during the second day one entire session was allocated to working groups delving into topics that had emerged during the Workshop. Four working groups were created, with four to seven participants each, and each group presented a short report at the end of the session. Four themes were discussed: enhancing TEI from documents to data; ontologies for the Humanities; tools and infrastructures; and textual criticism. All of these themes are represented in this volume. The Workshop would not have been of such high quality without the support of the members of its scientific committee: Gioele Barabucci, Fabio Ciotti, Claire Clivaz, Marion Rivoal, Greta Franzini, Simon Gabay, Daniel Maggetti, Frederike Neuber, Elena Pierazzo, Davide Picca, Michael Piotrowski, Matteo Romanello, Maïeul Rouquette, Elena Spadini, Francesca Tomasi, Aris Xanthos – and, of course, the support of all the colleagues and administrative staff in Lausanne, who helped the Workshop to become a reality. The final versions of these papers underwent a single-blind peer review process. We want to thank the reviewers: Helena Bermudez Sabel, Arianna Ciula, Marilena Daquino, Richard Hadden, Daniel Jeller, Tiziana Mancinelli, Davide Picca, Michael Piotrowski, Patrick Sahle, Raffaele Viglianti, Joris van Zundert, and others who preferred not to be named personally. Your input enhanced the quality of the volume significantly! It is sad news that Hans Cools passed away during the production of the volume. We are proud to document a recent state of his work and will miss him and his ability to implement the vision of a digital scholarly edition based on graph data-models and semantic web technologies. The production of the volume would not have been possible without the thorough copy-editing and proof reading by Lucy Emmerson and the support of the IDE team, in particular Bernhard Assmann, the TeX-master himself. This volume is sponsored by the University of Bologna and by the University of Lausanne. Bologna, Lausanne, Graz, July 2021 Francesca Tomasi, Elena Spadini, Georg Vogele

Digital Humanities and Libraries and Archives in Religious Studies

How are digital humanists drawing on libraries and archives to advance research in the field of religious studies and theology? How can librarians and archivists make their collections accessible in return? This volume showcases the perspectives of faculty, librarians, archivists, and allied cultural heritage professionals who are drawing on primary and secondary sources in innovative ways to create digital humanities projects in the field

The Practice and Benefit of Applying Digital Markup in Preserving Texts and Creating Digital Editions: A Poetical Analysis of a Blank-Verse Translation of Virgil\u27s Aeneid

Numerous examples of the digital scholarly edition exist online, and the genre is thriving in terms of interdisciplinary interest as well as support granted by funding agencies. Some editions are dedicated to the collection and representation of the life\u27s work of a single author, others to mass digitization and preservation of centuries\u27 worth of texts. Very few of these examples, however, approach the task of in-text interpretation through visualization. This project describes an approach to digital representation and investigates its potential benefit to scholars of various disciplines. It presents both a digital edition as well as a framework of justification surrounding said edition. In addition to composing this document as an XML file, I have digitized a 1794 English translation of Virgil\u27s Aeneid and used a customized digital markup schema based on the guidelines set forth by the Text Encoding Initiative to indicate a set of poetic figures—such as simile and alliteration—within that text for analysis. While neither a translation project nor strictly a poetical analysis, this project and its unique approach to interpretive representation could prove of interest to scholars in several disciplines, including classics, digital scholarship, information management, and literary theory. The practice serves both as a case-in-point as well as an example method to replicate with future texts and projects

Digital Critical Editing, Digital Text Analysis, and Charles R. Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer

This thesis considers why critical editions have not established themselves in the digital medium to the same extent as documentary editions and offers some potential ways to remedy this. The written thesis is accompanied by a digital critical edition of Charles R. Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, which acts as an example of and case study for the arguments set forth in the written thesis. This edition can be accessed at app.melmoththewanderer.com or at https://pacific-harbor-2932.herokuapp.com/. Documentary editions have found a secure position in the digital medium because they have a solid pre-digital theoretical foundation in the work of Jerome McGann and D.F. McKenzie; digital documentary editions have also become part of the narrative of the rise of the digital humanities. Digital critical editions, however, have neither of these advantages. Editors must instead work to create digital critical editions that can not be easily achieved in the medium of print. This thesis proposes two potential ways that this can be done. Firstly, digital critical editions can benefit by being designed as usable editions that aid users in accessing the different parts of the text. This involves a slight reconception of the critical edition in the digital medium where the job of the editor is not the establishment of a single, stable text but is the establishment of multiple views of the text. Secondly, digital critical editions will also benefit from increased interaction with the field of digital text analysis. This can be achieved in a number of ways: by making the edition’s data available in multiple formats for analysis, by topic modelling a corpus of texts contemporary to the edition’s text and making visualisations of those topic models available to the user in the edition’s paratexts as a novel way of contextualising the edition text, and finally by allowing users to interrogate the results of those topic models while they browse the core text of the edition

Genetic Criticism and Analysis of Interface Design: A Case Study

The paper proposes a methodology that combines theoretical and practical aspects from human-computer interaction (HCI) and genetic criticism to trace and analyse prototype evolution. A case study illustrates this type of enquiry by examining the iterations and the dynamics of change in the design and development of the Transviewer, an interface for digital editions. The initial assumption is that such an analysis can inform existing models in interface design and possibly provide new ground for discussion in humanistic HCI. For instance by fostering broader reflections on software production as a technological and cultural artefact and the gradual shaping of the principles and metaphors underlying the construction of a certain type of knowledge, argument, or interpretation through an interface