dm-l March 2013

dm-l@uleth.ca

29 participants
23 discussions

Relevant Articles on Medieval Collections and Copyright
by Alison Tara Walker 30 Mar '13

30 Mar '13

Hi Folks, I'm looking for some good articles on issues of copyright pertaining to pre-modern collections for an upcoming class. If anyone has a few references, I'd be most grateful. All best, Alison Walker

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Digital.Humanities@Oxford Summer School 2013
by James Cummings 28 Mar '13

28 Mar '13

Digital.Humanities@Oxford Summer School 2013 http://digital.humanities.ox.ac.uk/dhoxss/2013/ The Digital.Humanities@Oxford Summer School (DHOXSS) is an annual training event taking place this year on 8 - 12 July 2013 at the University of Oxford for researchers, project managers, research assistants, and students of Digital Humanities. DHOXSS delegates are introduced to a range of topics including the creation, management, analysis, modelling, visualization, or publication of digital data for the humanities. Each delegate follows one of our 5-day workshops and supplements this with guest lectures by experts in their fields. This year's main workshops include: 1. Cultural Connections: exchanging knowledge and widening participation in the Humanities 2. How to do Digital Humanities: Discovery, Analysis and Collaboration 3. A Humanities Web of Data: publishing, linking and querying on the semantic web. 4. An Introduction to XML and the Text Encoding Initiative 5. An Introduction to XSLT for Digital Humanists There are a variety of evening events including a peer-reviewed poster session to give delegates a chance to demonstrate their work to the other delegates and speakers. The Thursday evening sees an elegant drinks reception and three-course banquet at the historic Queen's College Oxford. DHOXSS is a collaboration for Digital.Humanities@Oxford between the University of Oxford's IT Services, the Oxford e-Research Centre (OeRC), the Bodleian Libraries, and The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities. Questions: email courses(a)it.ox.ac.uk for answers. James Cummings Director of DHOXSS

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Fwd: Day Conference
by Torsten Schassan 28 Mar '13

28 Mar '13

Hi, the following announcement may be of interest for some here. Best, Torsten -------- Original-Nachricht -------- Betreff: Day Conference Datum: Wed, 27 Mar 2013 09:21:49 -0700 Von: Peter Shillingsburg <peter.shillingsburg(a)GMAIL.COM> Antwort an: The list of the European Society for Textual Scholarship and the Society for Textual Scholarship <TEXTUALSCHOLARSHIP(a)JISCMAIL.AC.UK> An: TEXTUALSCHOLARSHIP(a)JISCMAIL.AC.UK You are invited to a Day Conference *The Fate of the Page in Digital Environments*** With *Morris Eaves*, U of Rochester; *Patricia Fumerton*, U of California, Santa Barbara; *Laura Estill*, U of Victoria, BC; and *James Knapp*, Loyola U Chicago. Please indicate your intention to participate by April 15 by sending email to Peter Shillingsburg at pshillingsburg(a)luc.edu (the caterers need to know) April 20: 9:30 to 4:30 at Loyola University Chicago Cuneo Rm 2 For schedule and further information see attached poster and visit http://www.ctsdh.luc.edu/conferences For directions Building 18 on map at http://www.luc.edu/media/lucedu/lsc.pdf

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5th International Conference ALIENTO: Nancy – Paris 5 – 6 – 7 November 2013
by Daniel O'Donnell 26 Mar '13

26 Mar '13

5th International Conference ALIENTO: Linguistic and intercultural analysis of short sapiential statements and of their transmission East/West, West/East Nancy – Paris 5 – 6 – 7 November 2013 Ethical and moral concepts between the three cultures This 5th edition, which concerns the construction of the database, will focus on the way in which the three cultures in the Iberian Peninsula in the Middle Ages interpret, translate and conceive such key concepts as, for instance, charity, alms, equity, prudence and speech. What semantic content is transferred from one culture to another, how the appropriations and the re-appropriations (i. e.: semantic calques and metaphorical transfers). What ethical or moral concepts are easily or arduously translatable and why. What are the complex architectures or networks that interconnect these concepts within a given culture and how these architectures or networks differ or not from those in the neighbouring culture (a Latin term may contain senses coming from semantically close terms from the donor language due to cultural affinity or language contact. We will consider as well the incorporation of Arabic semes into the Spanish language of the Middle Ages, the choices made by the translator from Arabic into Hebrew, the translation equivalences which might have occurred at that time). We will address the question of the semantic circulation by starting from the semantic contents of the concepts that shape the moral and ethical ideas in the sapiential texts that were exchanged in the Iberian Peninsula, between the 11th and 15th centuries. These texts are the core material of the research project ALIENTO. We will focus also on the dictionaries, the compilations, the philosophical anthologies (contemporary or not) which give a reading of the conceptual arborescence (or organisation) specific to each culture. If we address the linguistic and automatic treatment of the data, we could consider the question of the ontologies as they are developed and questioned today by semanticists and computer researchers. Workshops will be dedicated to problems concerning the encoding of the texts and to questions related to the linguistic description of the languages of the corpora, namely Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, Spanish and Catalan. Articles will be published in the journal: ALIENTO – Echanges Sapientiels en Méditerranée Abstracts should be submitted by July 15th, 2013 to: Marie-Christine Bornes Varol Professeur des Universités (INALCO - Paris) CERMOM EA 4091 Porteur du projet ALIENTO www.aliento.eu 00 33 (0) 1 40 05 98 83 varol(a)noos.fr Marie-Sol Ortola Professeur des Universités (UdL Nancy) Directrice adjointe de l’équipe « LIS » EA 7305 Porteur du projet ALIENTO www.aliento.eu 00 33 (0) 3 83 73 83 01 marie-sol.ortola(a)univ-lorraine.fr Description of the ALIENTO project (Linguistic and intercultural analysis of short sapiential statements and of their transmission East/West, West/East) In the ninth century, the rich Arab tradition of the adab finds its way into Spain, or rather al-Andalus, a country that played a prominent role in the exchange of knowledge from the East to the West in the 11th and 12th centuries especially via the monasteries in the North of the Iberian Peninsula. It is also in al-Andalus where the adab literature meets the Jewish sapiential tradition of the Midrashic literature. New collections are composed, including original works from the 10th and 11th centuries, and from the 12th century on, exempla and philosophers’ sayings are translated into Hebrew, Latin and the Romance languages. Much of this complex heritage is found in the extensive Spanish paremiological literature, which is at its highest in the 16th and 17th centuries, as well as in contemporary Spanish, Judeo-Spanish and Maghrebian collections of proverbs. Although the main lines of these exchanges are well-known, we still lack specific information on the circulation of these short sapiential statements (our basic research units) as well as on the successive translating choices made by the translators, their cultural reinterpretations or the importance of some loanwords over others. If sapiential textual filiations and translation sequences should be treated cautiously, this is particularly true of the sapiential statements to be found in these texts. Due to the difficulty in understanding them, these volatile elements, whose categorisation varies with time and cultures, have never been the subject of a comprehensive textual study which could recount their sources, circulation and evolution across the different spoken or written languages of the three cultures living in the Iberian Peninsula in the Middle-Ages. The paremiological studies have mostly produced compilations of proverbs (thesauri), critical editions and erudite studies, dedicated to a single work, a single language or a single culture, except for the remarkable ground-breaking work on the Philosophical Quartet (1975) by D. Gutas. The few existing databases are for the most part monolingual contemporary corpora of paremiae or otherwise have a translation-based perspective. Therefore the aim of the ALIENTO project is to work out concordances, even partial, close or distant connections, in order to reassess inter-textual relations by comparing a great quantity of data and by interconnecting encoded texts written in different languages. This is why the project, which needs a close interdisciplinary collaboration between computational researchers (ATILF), linguists and specialists in literature (MSH Lorraine + INALCO and the international network of collaborators), will develop a piece of software transferable to other similar texts to be used with a large reference corpus made up of 8 related texts 582 pages for an estimated 9,570 sapiential statements, which circulated in the Iberian Peninsula (in Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish and Catalan). The produced software will extract and connect short sapiential statements through concordances generated by the specific encoding system scientifically developed and explained in an encoding manual XML-TEI. ATILF will create a multilingual interrogation programme (in French, Spanish and English) of the matched data and will give access online to the ALIENTO corpus annotated texts via the CNRTL in order to ensure a permanent archiving of the texts. At the end of the project we will have:  a body of texts in a multilingual corpus, digitised, tagged in XML/TEI and publicly accessible, linked to a set of data about the texts and their authors.  a set of short sapiential units with their XML/TEI annotations, accessible free of charge.  a trilingual questioning interface that will display the concordanced statements contained in these works, with information that could be used to study them, irrespective of the language.  an encoding methodology and a piece of software for matching data that could be used with other similar corpora. Considerations arising from the project: The aim of the project consists in reviewing the role of the Iberian Peninsula in the transfer and exchange of the sapiential knowledge from the East to the West and from the West to the East in the Middle Ages by studying the brief sapiential statements they contain (maxims, sentences, proverbes, aphorisms). The raised issues are: 1) Which are the precise links between the exchanged sapiential texts between different languages, different cultures and three religions in the Iberian Peninsula (and Provence) in the Middle Ages? 2) What changes were brought about by the translations, re-interpretations and readings, contained in the numerous works and compilations written between the 9th and 15th centuries? 3) Starting from the ancient sapiential sources, how do we get to the modern and contemporary Mediterranean collections of proverbs -- Daniel Paul O'Donnell Professor of English University of Lethbridge Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4 Canada +1 403 393-2539

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Re: [dm-l] New article on "Medievalists and the Scholarly DigitalEdition" -- who has actually been using these editions?
by Norman Hinton 19 Mar '13

19 Mar '13

Surely there is nothing in the list "collection, annotation, preservation and presentation of the data" which distinguishes a digital edition from a non-digital edition? On Mar 19, 2013, at 9:14 AM, "Troy A. Griffitts" <scribe(a)crosswire.org> wrote: Dear all, I am the software architect at the Institut für Neutestamentliche Textforschung. I've been following this thread with great interest. The question which I believe is essential and still unagreed upon in the community is, "What is a digital edition?" I believe we can all agree on some things-- well, at least one thing which I believe should be at the core of any definition of "digital edition": collection, annotation, preservation and presentation of the raw data Beyond that, scholars will continue to rightly argue about what a *critical* digital edition actually is. But my goal as a software architect is to build solid, quality tools for problems I know need to be solved. We've been building now for the past 2 years, in collaboration with Huygens and Tara Andrews mentioned earlier, and the EU Interedition participants, a collaborative community portal software product built on, as Tony suggests, common off the shelf components when they are available-- which all have 'free' editions, and we are building our custom components, specific to our field, to live among and interact with these off the shelf products. We went live with our software about a year ago, with about 150 'internal' users. We've been polishing it up and hope to have a 'public' announcement of the tools by the end of April. I believe we've done some good work and I would certainly love for others to take advantage of our tools. Building critical mass for a software system can only improve its features and longevity. If you're at all interested, let me give you some details with some links to try so you know we're not just talk: 100% web based WYSIWYG TEI Editor with Paleography Assistance, Transcription Version Control, and Merge Reconciliation Assistance between multiple initial transcripts. (type any Greek letters in the paleography assistance box at the bottom of the transcription editor to get assistance for ligatures that contain those letters) http://ntvmr.uni-muenster.de/transcribing?docid=10001&pageid=10 Feature tagging, and image annotation, with permalink features for returning readers back to the exact view of a folio: http://ntvmr.uni-muenster.de/community/modules/papyri/?zoom=300&left=-2017&… Project management, worker coordination. and status: http://ntvmr.uni-muenster.de/indexingstatus Multifaceted search, including parameters for user tagged attributes: http://ntvmr.uni-muenster.de/liste Permalinks for search criteria: e.g., all folios between the 9th and 11th century with Illuminations and which have any text from the Gospel of John http://ntvmr.uni-muenster.de/manuscript-workspace?featureCode=Illuminations… Collation and Variant Graph of all witnesses to a section of text, with team regularization: http://ntvmr.uni-muenster.de/web/test/collation?key=John.3.16&collate=graph (mouse wheel or two finger swipe up and down to zoom in and out in the graph) Full witness, folio, and image management tools (these require admin permission so I can't send a link) Forums, Blogs, Calendars, Team Collaboration, all provided by the off the shelf portal software with which we integrate. Programmatic Web Services API for external sights to interact with the repository: http://ntvmr.uni-muenster.de/community/vmr/api/ In short, technically, we've created a suite of digital edition components as Google Gadgets that will run in any Google OpenSocial portal. We use Liferay inhouse as our portal of choice, as it the most mature portal we could find which supports OpenSocial. We get so many advantages from off the self software-- more features than our scholars could ask for, which lets us focus on the domain specific tasks for digital editions. Hope this is of interest to some. Please feel free to contact me if you would like more information. We're not quite ready to 'shrink wrap' this for easy install, general purpose critical digital edition construction, but we're working toward that. Best wishes, Troy A. Griffitts On 03/19/2013 12:24 PM, Tony Harris wrote: Hi Godfried My apologies. I didn't explain myself well enough. My PDF Shakespeare digital edition is fully interactive and quite 'whizzy'. More impressively, as OS and hardware functionality has advanced, so it has kept step remarkably well. Acrobat is a lot more powerful than we sometimes give it credit for. My comment about being 'too clever' was more directed at the use of obscure non commercial (sometimes open source systems) almost seemingly to spite equivalent commercial systems which are readily available and provide equivalent or better functionality. Such 'free' systems, although attractive on the surface because they are free, and you have access to source code, are often poorly maintained into the future. The other mistake in my opinion is to seek to reinvent the wheel in the name of research. A recently funded piece of software (which shall be nameless) springs to mind which bears a remarkable similarity to Adobe Acrobat :-). I feel a conference coming on :-). Best Tony Sent from my iPhone. On 19 Mar 2013, at 10:58, "Croenen, Godfried" <G.Croenen(a)liverpool.ac.uk> wrote: Dear Tony, Of course PDF is a very good choice as a fall-back, but as far as I can see it only produces ‘digitised’ editions, not ‘digital’ editions. What we are talking about is the longevity of what Dot has called ‘digital’ editions, that is editions which fully exploit the possibilities of the interactive medium (which you seem to refer to as ‘trying to be too clever’). The difficulty is that there is an inverse correlation between the level to which authors of ‘digital’ editions engage with and exploit these possibilities, thereby making their editions more ‘digital’ and less ‘digitised’, on the one hand, and the ease with which the functionality they are building can be maintained over the medium to long term, on the other. I am sure libraries will commit to maintaining servers etc. , as well as databases in which they have a vested interest, but I am not sure they will want to take on the commitment of having to maintain or completely rewrite the code for user interfaces for the ‘digital’ editions we are producing now, say, in 50 or 80 or 100 years time when those editions based on current technology (which right now may be standard, open-source, etc., and widely used) will not be compatible anymore with the hardware and software that will inevitably have moved on. At that point the cost in understanding the project documentation and project data, as well as the investment needed for producing new interfaces which recreate the same functionality of the no-longer-usable digital editions is going to be considerable, if only for the simple reason that few or none of the original project staff with the detailed expert knowledge will be around anymore. I think it is a little naive to think that current standards like CSS, HTML 5 and XML 2 will continue to be usuable for a very long time (and as a medievalist I am counting here in centuries, not decades). One only has to think of PostScript and SGML, standards that were recommended for very similar reasons not that long ago. Same is true for commercial companies (Dynatext is actually a case in point). And while it is true that files in SGML format can still be fairly easily converted, editions based on SGML are not going to be functional anymore. Best, Godfried Croenen From: dm-l-bounces(a)uleth.ca [mailto:dm-l-bounces@uleth.ca] On Behalf Of Tony Harris Sent: 19 March 2013 09:55 To: Jan Burgers; Center for Comparative Studies; MailList dm-l Subject: RE: [dm-l] New article on "Medievalists and the Scholarly DigitalEdition" -- who has actually been using these editions? Dear All I came from the computer industry before I came into academia and I think the problem with digital authoring (at least as I have experienced it within the academic community), is that sometimes digital authors either try to be too clever or to avoid all commercial packages like the plague. This causes them to opt sometimes for obscure readers/encoders that although ‘free’ probably disappeared soon after the edition was created. For example, a digital edition of Chaucer was authored around 1999 and used Dynatext, an SGML authoring tool. Inso the owners of Dynatext went out of business in 2002 and so of course the digital edition is largely unusable on later PCs and operating systems. In this case, the error perhaps was not converting to PDF when the writing was on the wall for Dynatext although the installed base of Dynatext was modest compared to PDF even at that time. This raises the issue of ongoing maintenance of course but see my comments later. By comparison, digital versions of a Shakespeare Octavo and the Sonnets that I purchased on CDs from the Folger library in 2000 are still working today. The PDFs are locked/encrypted to protect the authors but they are searchable, are interactive and there are various scholarly resources that are associated with the editions and which still operate just as they did when I bought them. They have worked on everything from Windows 2000, through XP through Windows 8 and various Macs and versions of MacOS without problem and without change. Given that the installed base of PDF documents runs into multiple billions, PDF is unlikely to disappear anytime soon and given that PDF is largely a published specification (which you can conform to), even if Adobe were to disappear tomorrow (unlikely), we could still read the documents into the future. TEI is excellent because it is a general purpose and extremely flexible encoding system which can be used as a base to target all sorts of output formats (including PDF). Where TEI tends to fall down is that its output filters are not always that strong and a lot more could be done to improve them so as to take advantage of the features and facilities (modern interactive graphics) that commercial standards like PDF and ePUB have to offer. The general response from the TEI group (as I have heard it expressed) is that they don’t really see these filters as their job (the ones provided are largely examples). However, the reality is that for all authoring systems, it is the final output users see which colours their perception of any underlying authoring system. Of course for the development of such filters, funding is always an issue but it seems to me that companies like Adobe could be approached to assist as it would be in their interest to enhance the standing of PDF within the academic community. Rather than treating such companies as ‘the devil incarnate’, it seems to me that more could be done to cooperate with them. To be fair, they have a lot more experience with developing file formats and encoding systems that have longevity than the academic community does. Of course Adobe have had false starts along the way, but PDF seems a good bet now as it’s been around for twenty years and they aren’t going to drop it anytime soon if they want to remain in business because they use it throughout their product lines. It is also used by governments around the world as well as by high-end publishers and other users too numerous to mention here. It seems to me that we need to accept that commercial standards like PDF, given their huge installed base are here to stay for the long-term, have proved their worth in industry and commerce and perhaps we should reconsider using them for digital authoring. Either that, or let’s really put some serious work into the TEI export systems so that digital editions exported from a TEI base reflect the full functionality of the target format and the interactive graphical features of the hardware platforms that are available at the time. Tony Harris From: dm-l-bounces(a)uleth.ca [mailto:dm-l-bounces@uleth.ca] On Behalf Of Jan Burgers Sent: 19 March 2013 08:08 To: Center for Comparative Studies; MailList dm-l Subject: RE: [dm-l] New article on "Medievalists and the Scholarly DigitalEdition" -- who has actually been using these editions? Dear medievalists, Perhaps I may add one consideration to the discussion. I am an editor of sources who has published paper as well as digital editions, and I see the advantages of the latter for the user. Of course, text editions are a special type of publications: edited by specialists, meant to last for decades or even centuries (it is not that rare for a medievalist to use a seventeenth-century edition of a medieval chronicle), and in fact only consulted by other specialists (no matter how often a casual passerby has a peak in a bookstore or on a website). But I am also a historian, and therefore I know that all things must pass, although some things are more durable than others. I think we can safely assume that a text edition printed on paper will be on library book shelves all over the world a hundred years from now; I strongly suspect that our modern digital products by then will have evaporated, or will be inaccessible for the ordinary user. I am aware that durability is high on the agenda these days, but we all know how fast the technological developments go. I suspect that in the near future it will be increasingly difficult to have enough commitment and money from the decision makers and the scholarly community to store the old digital stuff and keep it working on the new machines. Jan Burgers. From: dm-l-bounces(a)uleth.ca [mailto:dm-l-bounces@uleth.ca] On Behalf Of Center for Comparative Studies Sent: maandag 18 maart 2013 9:53 To: MailList dm-l Subject: Re: [dm-l] New article on "Medievalists and the Scholarly DigitalEdition" -- who has actually been using these editions? Dear Peter, I thank you very much for the extremely useful figures you have collected. I am an out-and-out supporter of digital editions, and yet I am afraid you underestimate the "contacts" a book can have in a library or even in a bookstore. I suppose that the figures of use of paper books, if we could count them, and mainly the number of actual readers (not just "visits", that can come many times from the same user) would and will be bigger than the figures of equivalent digital editions, but I have no evidence of that. So the only data we can correctly compare are the sold copies. That said, we all have to do digital editions, whatever it may mean, and given the anarchy that is distinctive of the web, no one can determine what a digital edition must be: we can just propose methodological requirements for what we would accept to call *critical* digital editions and see which models become successful or authoritative. All the best, Francesco Stella ----- Original Message ----- From: Peter Robinson To: MailList dm-l Sent: Monday, March 18, 2013 4:43 PM Subject: Re: [dm-l] New article on "Medievalists and the Scholarly DigitalEdition" -- who has actually been using these editions? Dear everyone there is a missing elephant in these discussions. What evidence do we have that these editions are being used? who is using them? Rather to my surprise, there seems remarkably little 'hard' data about exactly how many people are using these editions. So here is an attempt to provide some real statistics on their use. 1. Web statistics for edition use. I have statistics dating back to last October (2012) for two substantial 'scholarly digital editions' (to use Patrick Sahle's convenient description) online: a. Barbara Bordalejo's Origin of Species Variorum, http://darwin-online.org.uk/Variorum/ Over six months, this has had 2995 unique visitors (nearly 500 a month, or around 16 a day), paying 3727 visits and looking at 15801 pages. Maybe most interesting: 280 of those visits accounted for nearly half of all page views, with 280 visits (about 1.5 a day) being longer than 10 minutes as the reader appeared to look at page after page. To put this in perspective: one suspects that more people have looked at this site, and used it intensively, than have used Peckham's printed Variorum in over fifty years. b. The database/virtual library of books (mostly) printed in or about Japan before 1650, at http://laures.cc.sophia.ac.jp/laures/start/ Over six months, this has had 1935 unique visitors (over 300 a month, or around 10 a day), paying 3494 visits and looking at 27070 pages. Maybe most interesting: 441 of those visits accounted for well over half of all page views, with 441 visits (over two a day) being longer than 10 minutes as the reader appeared to look at page after page. 2. Statistics for CD-ROM/DVD/internet sales. Here are the figures for digital editions, etc, sold by Scholarly Digital Editions since 2001: Publication Date Copies sold (approx) Hengwrt Chaucer Digital Facsimile 25/10/2000 320 Bayeux Tapestry Digital Edition 31/10/2002 2500 Hengwrt Chaucer Standard Edition 3/11/2003 80 Caxton’s Canterbury Tales 8/10/2003 150 Miller’s Tale 5/5/2004 110 Parliament Rolls of Medieval England 5/5/2005 560 Nun’s Priest’s Tale 3/5/2006 70 Monarchia 3/5/2006 60 Leiden Armenian Lexical Textbase (internet) 21/2/2008 36 Canterbury Tales Digital Catalogue 10/5/2010 16 Commedia 1/12/2010 16 (This will appear in an article in the next few months). In addition to these figures: 61 internet access licences have been sold to institutions for the Parliament Rolls, and some 10 individual online licences. Some points emerge from this. First, these figures very strongly support Dot Porter's observation, that digital editions of historical materials have achieved far more use than of literary materials. Our runaway bestsellers, the Parliament Rolls and Bayeux Tapestry, have done far better than our literary materials. The exception appears to be the Hengwrt Chaucer -- but that is, we suspect, used much more to teach about manuscripts than to teach Chaucer. The very few copies sold of the Commedia is sobering: this is probably our outstanding publication, in terms of sheer scholarly weight, and yet has sold very few copies. Overall: the figures suggest that for literary works, there is much more eagerness on the part of editors to make scholarly editions in digital form than there is of readers, to read them. However, the success of our historical publications (and of the online publications noticed above) shows that without doubt, there is no reluctance to use digital materials online, or in CD-ROM/DVD-ROM, per se. The problem with lack of enthusiasm for digital editions of literary works is not, we have to conclude, because they are digital. well, make what you will of this Peter Am 17.03.2013 18:28, schrieb Patrick Sahle: Dear all, Scholarly Digital Editing? I've just published three volumes on this topic: http://www.i-d-e.de/schriften/s7-9-digitale-editionsformen rough translation of titles: Digital Scholarly Editing Part I: The legacy of typography Part II: Survey, theory and methodology Part III: Notions of text and textual encoding - the distinction between digitized and digital scholarly editions (DSE) is an important aspect in the definition of scholarly digital editions (SDE); see most recently http://prezi.com/mdt8efbe3o3a/patrick-sahle-what-is-a-scholarly-digital-edi… (hope to elaborate on that in a forthcoming article); the main point here is, that there is a fundamental paradigm shift in thinking the scholarly edition in a typographic setting or in a digital information environment - should we make a distinction between digital scholarly editions (DSE) and scholarly digital editions (SDE) ? - yes, because it describes two different processes or at least different accentuations - DSE emphasizes that we still follow the idea of scholarly editing but transform it to the digital world - SDE emphasizes the relation to other forms of digital publishing which are augmented by the dimension of scholarly criticism - no, because it should lead to the same results: editions that are truly scholarly AND truly digital - is the edition its content or its presentation? - if the presentation is arbitrarily generated from underlying data, then it has some logic to say, that the data is the edition. On the other hand this would not fit well to the common notion of an "edition" as some form of publication. I think, a SDE must comprise both: the data and some form of publication of that data. What constitutes a particular edition is the definition of its subject together with a personal or institutional creatorship (or responsibility). Edition of X by Y. The edition may then have different forms of presentation (online, print, eBook, relaunched online version after some time), which may also be "versions". - do we really have a problem with the acceptance of digital editions? - first, I take up, what Andrew wrote... - "Compared to a printed book, they're miserable to read, since they tend to be designed first for technical analysis, and any attention to typography is typically a very low priority" - I'm not sure whether I'd agree on that. I find most SDEs quite readable. But yes, we're still in the incunabula age of digital texts. Good digital typography still has to evolve. Anyway, I'call a lot of the editions listed in my catalog "readable": http://digitale-edition.de/ - "There's no guarantee in many cases that citations made from digital editions will be stable." - but this is a known problem which we discuss for at least ten years now. And the solutions are quite clear: PID/PURL-systems, fine granularity of adressable objects in editions, institutional committments for the long-term support of SDE, versioning etc etc - "It's far easier to put a good printed edition together than a good digital edition, especially because of the lack of standard, user-friendly tools." - true, but the underlying problem is that SDEs are far more complex than tradional edition (as regards content, methods, technical aspects) - and that's why generic tools are so hard to build - "There is no standard way of presenting online critical editions (whereas most printed texts are published in series that follow a style guide)." - important point that the community has to address; but I see these publications series coming up; just some arbitrary examples: http://elec.enc.sorbonne.fr/ - http://www.sd-editions.com/index.html - http://www.hab.de/de/home/bibliothek/digitale-bibliothek-wdb/digitale-editi… - http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/ - "Delving into academic politics, publishers hate them and many universities don't count digital projects toward tenure." - traditional publishers will not solve the problems of SDEs - academic interest groups are starting to deal with the problem of credibility of digital work (the German Historians Union has just set up a working group on digital scholarship with a subgroup on crediting digital work in tenure and promotion) - second: success on the reader's side can only be measured in comparison to the success of traditional printed editions. In comparison to the fact that those often had an extremly low circulation, were bought nearly exclusively by libraries .... - third: success on the side of the editors. We had 6 summer schools on scholarly digital editing in the last 5 years (http://www.i-d-e.de/events-des-ide). All have been overbooked. I see fewer and fewer newly starting edition projects that don't have a digital component or basis. There is some pressure from the funding bodies, that new projects and new editions have to be digital. But change takes some time. Best, Patrick Am 13.03.2013 21:01, schrieb Dot Porter: My article looking at how medievalists use and consider digital editions has just been published in Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing. It may be of some interest to folks on the list (and constructive criticism, directly to me to to the list, is most welcome!) http://www.scholarlyediting.org/2013/essays/essay.porter.html Dot -- *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* Dot Porter (MA, MSLS) Digital Medievalist, Digital Librarian Email: dot.porter(a)gmail.com Personal blog: dotporterdigital.org MESA blog: http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/projects/mesa/ MESA on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MedievalElectronicScholarlyAlliance *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* Digital Medievalist -- http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/ Journal: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/ Journal Editors: editors _AT_ digitalmedievalist.org News: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/news/ Wiki: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/wiki/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/digitalmedieval Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=49320313760 Discussion list: dm-l(a)uleth.ca Change list options: http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l -- New Book(s) out now: Patrick Sahle, Digitale Editionsformen - http://www.i-d-e.de/schriften/s7-9-digitale-editionsformen A) Cologne Center for eHumanities (CCeH) (Mitarbeiter) B) DARIAH-DE (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) (Mitarbeiter) C) Humanities Computer Science, University of Cologne (Mitarbeiter) D) Institut für Dokumentologie und Editorik (Mitglied) Post: Historisch-Kulturwissenschaftliche Informationsverarbeitung, Universität zu Köln, Albertus-Magnus-Platz, D-50923 Köln Büro: Universitätsstr. 22, Dachgeschoss links Telefon: +49 - (0)221 - 470 1750 Zur Person: http://www.uni-koeln.de/~ahz26 Digital Medievalist -- http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/ Journal: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/ Journal Editors: editors _AT_ digitalmedievalist.org News: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/news/ Wiki: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/wiki/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/digitalmedieval Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=49320313760 Discussion list: dm-l(a)uleth.ca Change list options: http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l Digital Medievalist -- http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/ Journal: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/ Journal Editors: editors _AT_ digitalmedievalist.org News: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/news/ Wiki: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/wiki/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/digitalmedieval Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=49320313760 Discussion list: dm-l(a)uleth.ca Change list options: http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l Peter Robinson Honorary Research Fellow, ITSEE, University of Birmingham, UK Bateman Professor of English 9 Campus Drive, University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon SK S7N 5A5, Canada Digital Medievalist -- http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/ Journal: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/ Journal Editors: editors _AT_ digitalmedievalist.org News: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/news/ Wiki: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/wiki/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/digitalmedieval Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=49320313760 Discussion list: dm-l(a)uleth.ca Change list options: http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l Digital Medievalist -- http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/ Journal: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/ Journal Editors: editors _AT_ digitalmedievalist.org News: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/news/ Wiki: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/wiki/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/digitalmedieval Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=49320313760 Discussion list: dm-l(a)uleth.ca Change list options: http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l Digital Medievalist -- http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/ Journal: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/ Journal Editors: editors _AT_ digitalmedievalist.org News: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/news/ Wiki: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/wiki/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/digitalmedieval Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=49320313760 Discussion list: dm-l(a)uleth.ca Change list options: http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l

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New article on "Medievalists and the Scholarly Digital Edition"
by Dot Porter 19 Mar '13

19 Mar '13

My article looking at how medievalists use and consider digital editions has just been published in Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing. It may be of some interest to folks on the list (and constructive criticism, directly to me to to the list, is most welcome!) http://www.scholarlyediting.org/2013/essays/essay.porter.html Dot -- *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* Dot Porter (MA, MSLS) Digital Medievalist, Digital Librarian Email: dot.porter(a)gmail.com Personal blog: dotporterdigital.org MESA blog: http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/projects/mesa/ MESA on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MedievalElectronicScholarlyAlliance *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

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Digital Medievalist Journal: Issue 8 now out
by Peter Stokes 19 Mar '13

19 Mar '13

Dear all, I am very pleased to announce that the first articles of Digital Medievalist journal Issue 8 are now available at <http://digitalmedievalist.org/journal/>. The new articles focus primarily on digitisation of manuscripts, in the form of facsimile editions and 'codicology and palaeography in the Digital Age' more generally, as well as a qualitative study of the use of online manuscripts which relates to the current discussion on this list about digital scholarly editions. There are further articles in the pipeline, including one that will be available very soon on a digital edition of the medieval charters of St Denis. I want to take this opportunity to thank the editorial team for a lot of hard work, and to remind you that we are always interested in new submissions to the journal. We operate a policy of rolling release, meaning that we publish articles as soon as they are available; this means in turn that we typically have a shorter time to publication than most traditional journals, though of course this depends on the time it takes for peer review and so on. Guidelines for submission are available from <http://digitalmedievalist.org/journal/1.1/submission/>. Happy reading, and we look forward to receiving your submissions. Peter -- Dr Peter Stokes Senior Lecturer Department of Digital Humanities King's College London Room 218, 2nd Floor 26-29 Drury Lane London, WC2B 5RL Tel: +44 (0)20 7848 2813 peter.stokes(a)kcl.ac.uk

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Job: Web Developer
by James Ginther 18 Mar '13

18 Mar '13

The Center for Digital Theology is hiring a web developer. Details are at: http://www.slu.edu/jobs/job_description.php?d=2371jd jrg -- ---------- James R. Ginther, PhD Professor of Medieval Theology, Associate Chair, Department of Theology & Director, Center for Digital Theology Saint Louis University ------------------------- ginthej(a)slu.edu Faculty Page: Departmental Page<https://sites.google.com/a/slu.edu/james-ginther/> <https://sites.google.com/a/slu.edu/james-ginther/>Research Blog: http://digital-editor.blogspot.com Twitter: DH_editor <http://twitter.com/#!/DH_editor> T-PEN: www.tpen.org/ NOTE: This e-mail message may contain information that may be privileged, confidential, and exempt from disclosure. It is intended for use only by the person(s) to whom it is addressed. If you have received this message in error, please do not forward or use this information in any way; delete it immediately, and contact the sender as soon as possible by the reply option or by telephone at 314-977-4248.

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RE: [dm-l] New article on "Medievalists and the Scholarly Digital Edition"
by Jeffrey Witt 15 Mar '13

15 Mar '13

Hi All, Since I'm in the process of building my own digital critical edition (http://petrusplaoul.org) I thought I'd chime. First off thanks to Dot for a thoughtful paper and I really agree that the distinction between digitized and digital editions is not well understood in our field and that this misunderstanding lies at the heart of any resistance. I think it is special impediment to getting scholars to create digital editions or for that matter do their transcriptions TEI XML or really any kind of semantic markup, or to even understand why semantic mark-up is important. To Godfried: I agree that longevity of the presentation vs. content are two different issues. However, I think that web-based editions (because of the web's ubiquity) ensure a level of permanence that editions built on non-web-platforms do not achieve. Andrew brings up a number of good points, but I'd like to reiterate his final point: NONE OF THESE ISSUES ARE INSURMOUNTABLE. I'd be interested to hear reacting to my own attempts to create stable citations (which I'm still developing, but which is visible on my site). All changes to every lectio are tracked using GIT (source control) and particular versions are given a version tag. As the text improves, old version remain accessible through a drop down list. Simply click on the earlier version and the older version will appear. (the drop down list also includes a link to a version log which gives the user a description of the status of the current version). Thus, a user simply needs to cite the paragraph number and the version he/she is using (v. 2012.11 etc). Then if the text changes, a reader can simply select version 2012.11 from the drop dow list and they will see the exact same version that was used in the citation. You can see a couple of examples of this here: http://www.petrusplaoul.org/text/textdisplay.php?flag=dTlecture67 and http://www.petrusplaoul.org/text/textdisplay.php?flag=prollecture1 I generally feel the same way about the point that digital editions are "miserable" to read. They certainly can be. But they don't have to be, a clean uncluttered book-like view is easy enough to design and can make reading very easy and fluid. That's been my goal at least. So those are just of my thoughts. Sincerely, jaw p.s I'm still constantly working on my digital edition, so if you stay long enough, you'll be sure to find some bugs which I would be happy if you reported at https://bitbucket.org/jeffreycwitt/plaoul/issues?status=new&status=open -- Dr. Jeffrey C. Witt Philosophy Department Loyola University Maryland 4501 N. Charles St. Baltimore, MD 21210 www.jeffreycwitt.com <http://www.jeffreycwitt.com/>

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CMS Toronto Conference — Digitizing the Medieval Archive
by Digital Medievalist » News: digitalmedievalistnews 15 Mar '13

15 Mar '13

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