Dear DH Community and Friends of Literature, I have some questions and I would like to hear your thoughts: What are your thoughts on scholarly digital editions? Is a particular feature that you would to see? What makes a good edition according to your experience? Is it the UX, the features, the visualizations, etc? #dh #digitalhumanities #digital_editions #discussion
Dear DH Community and Friends of Literature, I have some questions and I would like to hear your thoughts: What are your thoughts on scholarly digital editions? Is a particular feature that you would to see? What makes a good edition according to your experience? Is it the UX, the features, the visualizations, etc? #dh #digitalhumanities #digital_editions #discussion @dh @DHd @publicDH
1. Transparency: how easy is it to retrace all the decisions that the editors made and examine the evidence that they used? For this you need to make the sources available, and ideally link sections of edited text with the relevant parts of the sources.
2. Interoperability: how easy is it to use your edition in a research project for automated processing along with many others? For this you need an API or a way to download everything in a convenient format.
dear @benjamingeer thank you for taking the time to respond. Very thoughtful points indeed.
1. Regarding Transparency: I guess your comment suggests also a form of intertextuality for enriching data.
2. Regarding Interoperability: I wonder if you have experienced limitations on the information available on github too
@demigrigo About transparency, we were inspired by the Frankfurt Hölderlin edition of 1975, which presented manuscript facsimiles that were connected (spatially) with their transcriptions, so you could easily check the transcriptions yourself. We implemented a user interface with different visual layers (facsimile, transcription, edited text, translation) that you could switch between.
@demigrigo Each sentence or paragraph of the transcription was linked to a specific outlined part of the facsimile, and each annotation was linked to the relevant part of the transcription. We wanted to make it easy for readers to check the editors' work, or to make a new edition by modifying an existing one, without having to start from scratch.
@demigrigo You can see an example here of an edition that was developed as part of this project: https://beol.dasch.swiss/ I don't know what's happening with it now, but my brilliant former colleague Sepideh Alassi would be the person to ask https://dhlab.philhist.unibas.ch/en/persons/sepideh-alassi/
@demigrigo I think that if you don't have a big budget, just putting all the data on GitHub is definitely better than nothing. Web sites tend to become obsolete or unmaintained very quickly, but data files in a standard format will probably still be usable decades from now.
@benjamingeer Thank you very much for the eloquent answer, I feel that with your input colleagues would consider and plan their next steps accordingly.
@demigrigo @benjamingeer
The Manifest for Digital Editions ( https://www.i-d-e.de/publikationen/weitereschriften/ ) might give you other insights (more theoretical) and certainly https://ride.i-d-e.de/ can give you a lot of insights into what others do and how they evaluate what others others do.
@gvogeler @benjamingeer Thank you very much for taking the time to respond. Any source of input can help the community.
@benjamingeer @demigrigo that sounds great! Is this project (still) available?
(I know Bernoulli Euler Online you mentioned later, bit this edition/interface/site is not as capable as what you outlined)
@dta_cthomas @demigrigo It looks like it's still there: https://www.dasch.swiss/dsp-app There were some problems with funding and management, and several of the core developers left, including me, so I don't know the current status of the project, but Sepideh Alassi would know https://dhlab.philhist.unibas.ch/en/persons/sepideh-alassi/
@demigrigo A few years ago I worked on a project that tried to represent everything in an edition (text, annotations, metadata) as RDF data in a graph database, so you could make a web site with a nice user interface, but also have an RDF-based API that allowed you to do complex searches (like "find all the texts that mention someone who was born after 1750"), as well as download everything as interoperable RDF data (or TEI/XML) based on standard ontologies.