Extending the DSE: LOD support and TEI/IIIF integration in EVT

Current digital scholarly editions (DSEs) have the opportunity of evolving to dynamic objects interacting with other Internet-based resources thanks to open frameworks such as IIIF and LOD. This paper showcases and discusses two new functionalities of EVT (Edition Visualization Technology), version 2: one improving the management of named entities (f.i. personal names) through the use of LOD resources such as FOAF and DBpedia; the other, providing integration of the published text with digital images of the textual primary sources accessed from online repositories (e.g. e-codices or digital libraries such as the Vaticana or the Ambrosiana) via the IIIF protocol

Introduzione

The IV Convegno annuale dell’Associazione Italiana di Informatica Umanistica e Cultura Digitale, took place in Turin, December 2015, with topic “Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage: which relation?”. The organizers aimed to find similarities and points of contact between the wide landscapes of the Digital Humanities and the Cultural Heritage. It's worth to notice how the latter actually applies tools and methodologies belonging to the former, but a strong and long-term relation between the two fields has not yet been set. Such a lack of communication is due to the green research field of DH in Italy, and to its low acceptance in Academy. Nonetheless, researchers of DH often access libraries, archives and museums in order to accomplish their research tasks, and their methods present lots of similarities

Between Innovation and Conservation: The Narrow Path of User Interface Design for Digital Scholarly Editions

In 2016, the Edition Visualization Technology (EVT: evt.labcd.unipi.it/) team started the design phase necessary for the development of the next version of this tool aimed at easy publishing of TEI XML-based digital editions: the current version (EVT 1.2), in fact, only supports diplomatic transcriptions linked to the corresponding manuscript images; EVT 2.0 will fully support critical editions encoded according to the TEI parallel segmentation method. To reach this goal, a completely new approach based on the AngularJS framework and the MVC (Model View Controller) architectural pattern was necessary because the old architecture, relying on XSLT 2.0 transformations, was no longer flexible enough to meet all the UI and navigation requirements of critical editions. Furthermore, during the design phase we decided that in some cases keeping a layout inspired by traditional printed editions would be a great help for our final users. After a long but interesting development process, a beta version of EVT 2 is out: we believe that the UI layout and solutions we devised are both effective in the short term, for all the projects that will adopt EVT, and a significant contribution to the theoretical discussion revolving around the very concept of DSE