“Standing-off Trees and Graphs”: On the Affordance of Technologies for the Assertive Edition

Starting from the observation that the existing models of digital scholarly editions can be expressed in many technologies, this paper goes beyond the simple opposition of ‘XML’ and ‘graph’, It studies the implicit context of the technologies as applied to digital scholarly editions: embedded mark-up in XML/TEI trees, graph representa- tions in RDF, and stand-off annotation as realised in annotation tools widely used for information extraction. It describes the affordances of the encoding methods offered. It takes as a test case the “assertive edition” (Vogeler 2019), in which the text is considered in a double role: as palaeographical and linguistic phenomenon, and as a representation of information. It comes to the conclusion that the affordances of XML help to detect sequential and hierarchical properties of a text, while those of RDF best cover the representation of knowledge as semantic networks of statements. The relationship between them can be expressed by the metaphor of ‘layers’, for which stand-off annotation technologies seem to be best fitted. However, there is no standardised technical formalism to create stand-off annotations beyond graphical tools sharing interface elements. The contribution concludes with the call for the acceptance of the advantages of each technology, and for efforts to be made to discuss the best way to combine these technologies

Early modern Oxford bindings in twenty-first century markup

Purpose – The Bodleian Binders Book contains nearly 150 pages of seventeenth century library records, revealing information about the binders used by the library and the thousands of bindings they produced. The purpose of this paper is to explore a pilot project to survey and record bindings information contained in the Binders Book. Design/methodology/approach – A sample size of seven pages (91 works, 65 identifiable bindings) to develop a methodology for surveying and recording bindings listed in the manuscript. To create a successful product that would be useful to bindings researchers, it addressed questions of bindings terminology and the role of the library in the knowledge creation process within the context that text encoding is changing the landscape of library functions. Text encoding formats were examined, and a basic TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) transcription was produced. This facilitates tagging of names and titles and the display of transcriptions with text images. Findings – Encoding was found not only to make the manuscript content more accessible, but to allow for the construction of new knowledge: characteristic Oxford binding traits were revealed and bindings were matched to binders. Plans for added functionality were formed. Originality/value – This research presents a “big picture” analysis of Oxford bindings as a result of text encoding and the foundation for qualitative and statistical analysis. It exemplifies the benefits of interdisciplinary methods – in this case from Digital Humanities – to enhance access to and interpretation of specialist materials and the library's provenance record

Hierarchical or Non-hierarchical? A Philosophical Approach to a Debate in Text Encoding

Is hierarchical XML apt for the encoding of complex manuscript materials? Some scholars have argued that texts are non-hierarchical entities and that XML therefore is inadequate. This paper argues that the nature of text is such that it supports both hierarchical and non-hierarchical representations. The paper distinguishes (1) texts from documents and document carriers, (2) writing from "texting", (3) actions that can be performed by one agent only from actions that require at least two agents to come about (“shared actions”), (4) finite actions from potentially infinitely ongoing shared actions. Texts are described as potentially infinitely ongoing shared actions which are co-produced by author and reader agents. This makes texts into entities that are more akin to events than to objects or properties, and shows, moreover, that texts are dependent on human understanding and thus mind-dependent entities. One consequence from this is that text encoding needs to be recognized as an act participating in texting which in turn makes hierarchical XML as apt a markup for “text representation”, or rather: for texting, as non-hierarchical markup. The encoding practices of the Bergen Wittgenstein Archives (WAB) serve as the main touchstone for my discussion.publishedVersio

Document markup - Why? How?

"In this paper the author argues that markup and writing belong to related systems for storing information and/ or speech and that there is no clear border between the two. In addition he argues that marking up text done as more or less separate from ordinary writing has been used in Western scholarly work at least since the times of the library in the Museum in Alexandria and up until today. Markup means that some part of a document is identified and some statement is made about the linguistic and/ or textual status and interpretative frame of that part or it is extracted for some scholarly purpose. The ways and means by which this is done may vary. It will depend both on the aim: why exactly do we wish to identify this part of the text? And on the technology available: papyrus scrolls and reed pens make for different markup than what is done with computer stored texts. In this paper selected uses for digital text and markup are discussed with examples mainly taken from the electronic edition of Henrik Ibsen's Writings." (author's abstract

La rappresentazione digitale del testo: il paradigma del markup e i suoi sviluppi

La codifica elettronica dei testi rappresenta uno dei temi fondamentali della riflessione e della sperimentazione nel dominio dell’Informatica umanistica. Come è noto la soluzione considerata teoricamente ottimale e ampiamente diffusa nella pratica dalla comunità scientifica consiste nell’adozione dei markup language descrittivi basati su XML . Lo sviluppo e la diffusione della Text Encoding Initiative ha sancito questa scelta. XML può essere considerato sia un formalismo sia un modello di dati espresso da quel formalismo, e tale (meta)modello è appunto un albero ordinato etichettato. In altri termini XML considerato come linguaggio di modellizzazione può esprimere solo modelli la cui struttura è un albero. Il modello gerarchico si presta naturalmente a descrivere la struttura di numerosi livelli testuali scientificamente rilevanti: i livelli editoriale, morfosintattico, metrico, tanto per fare alcuni esempi, sono in linea generale descrivibili come strutture gerarchiche ordinate. I problemi emergono si pensa di eleggere XML a formalismo generale per la rappresentazione complessa dei testi in ambito umanistico e letterario. Le manifestazioni di queste difficoltà sono state comunemente rubricate come il problema delle gerarchie sovrapposte (overlapping hierarchies). Negli ultimi venti anni, proprio in parallelo con la diffusione di XML nel mondo dell’elaborazione testuale e della TEI nella comunità umanistica si sono moltiplicati i tentativi di trovare delle soluzioni definitive al problema. Le soluzioni proposte si possono dividere in due classi: soluzioni interne e soluzioni esterne al paradigma XML. Questo lavoro propone una analisi approfondita di queste soluzioni innovative e ne valuta la praticabilità in confronto a XML

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

Appropriate Use Case modeling for humanities documents

This article details a modeling methodology that is appropriate for historical, functional documents that are to be digitally represented and hosted within a software environment for humanities research. The functionality is derived from Use Case modeling that can be undertaken in consultation with the User Group. The Use Cases are an expression of the whole-system model as they embody the interaction of User, with the document, in the software environment. The encoding mechanism largely practiced within the humanities computing community is represented by the TEI, which seeks to provide a set of guidelines for encoding humanities documents. However, TEI offers no guidance in relation to creating an encoding of a document that is supportive of the software environment that will host it, the interaction mechanisms required, or the User. We argue that modeling with recourse to the Logical, the Physical and the Interaction classes enables not just the generation of an appropriate encoding scheme, but also the software to manipulate it. We situate Use Case methodology within Activity Theory and relate this to the humanities computing community. The argument is framed in relation to the creation of a digital edition of an 18th century Spanish Account Book manuscript