The EPT (Edition Production Technology) is designed, as James says below, as "a tool for assisting less-technical resource creators to develop more sophisticated electronic editions." It is designed and developed through the Electronic Boethius and ARCHway Projects (both with PI Kevin Kiernan) at the University of Kentucky.
The EPT enables an editor to:
1) Create a project by importing digital images, transcript (which can be a pre-existing XML document, or a text document with no markup), and a DTD or set of DTDs. (Details on what I mean by "set of DTDs" - not TEI tagsets! - can be found by following the tutorial links on the demo site, see below).
2) Insert markup into this project through user-friendly, completely configurable markup templates. In the EPT the editor views text & image side-by-side, and the markup software includes functionality for connecting pieces of text with the corresponding image sections.
3) The full version of EPT includes additional tools for more advanced editing - collation (tools for both types - comparing versions of the same text, and describing the structure of the physical object), statistical analysis, paleographic description, glossary development.
There are obvious start-up costs involved here - it's not simple to get started. You'll need to have your images and transcript (though it is possible to transcribe-as-you-go, if you import a blank text file into a new project). You'll need to have your DTD, and if you're concerned about overlapping markup you'll need to divide that DTD into smaller, well-formed DTDs (the demo example projects come with such DTDs, based on TEI, which you're welcome to use as-is and extend for your own projects). You'll also need to do a fair amount of configuration. On top of this, you'll need to learn to use the software, which has a fairly steep learning curve. Once the project is created and the software has been configured to suit the project, though, any editor comfortable with point-and-click technology should be able to create the electronic edition.
For a nifty article on using the EPT to help solve an editorial problem, see Kevin Kiernan's article "The source of the Napier fragment of Alfred's Boethius" in the inaugural issue of the Digital Medievalist journal (http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/article.cfm?RecID=5).
For the history of the EPT, and a discussion of the early aims & developments of the software and the relationship between eBo and ARCHway, see the article "The ARCHway Project: Architecture for Research in Computing for Humanities through Research, Teaching, and Learning" (Kiernan et al.), forthcoming in Literary and Linguistic Computing (abstract at http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/fqi018?ijkey=a2FHqg7XTTUL MJz&keytype=ref - full text is available online if your library subscribes to LLC online). Note that this article is based on our presentations at ACH/ALLC 2003 so some of the specifics are out of date.
For a working demo, including text projects and tutorials for getting started with your own projects, visit http://rch01.rch.uky.edu/~ept/download/
The source code for the EPT is being released in stages, corresponding with the finishing dates of the two supporting projects. The ARCHway Project finished at the end of January, and the source code for that project, the "Development EPT", will be released very shortly. The Development EPT is a general version of the EPT. It lacks some of the editing functionality in the Stable EPT - it has the basic image-text linking, but lacks the more specialized tools described above in #3. The Development EPT is designed to be extended - if you have access to computer science support (an RA with experience coding JAVA, especially using the Eclipse development platform), you can extend the Development EPT to serve the particular needs of your individual project. I will post to the list as soon as the Development EPT code is available.
The "Stable EPT" is under continuing development by Kevin Kiernan and Emil Iacob through the Electronic Boethius project. The code for this version is not yet available, but if you're interested in more information about this version please contact Kevin at kiernan@uky.edu.
James mentions our upcoming presentations and demos at ACH/ALLC (14-18 June, Victoria Canada). If you're attending the meeting, you'll have plenty of chances to see the software and talk with us about how EPT might suit your projects. Put us on your schedule!
Thursday, 2:30 pm: Paper, Emil Iacob and Alex Dekhtyar, "Concurrent Markup Hierarchies: a Computer Science Approach" [http://mustard.tapor.uvic.ca/cocoon/ach_abstracts/xq/xhtml.xq?id=174]
Friday, 9:00 am: 3 paper session, "The Edition Production Technology (EPT) and the ARCHway and Electronic Boethius Projects" [http://mustard.tapor.uvic.ca/cocoon/ach_abstracts/xq/xhtml.xq?id=176]
Friday, 2:30 pm: 2 demos, "Edition Production Technology: an Eclipse-Based Platform for Building Image-Based Electronic Editions" [http://mustard.tapor.uvic.ca/cocoon/ach_abstracts/xq/xhtml.xq?id=178] and "The ARCHway Software Infrastructure: a Demo of a Platform and Utilities for Building Applications for Electronic Editions" [http://mustard.tapor.uvic.ca/cocoon/ach_abstracts/xq/xhtml.xq?id=177]
If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask!
Dot
********************************** Dorothy Carr Porter Program Coordinator, Research in Computing for Humanities 3-51/3-52 William T. Young Library University of Kentucky Lexington, KY 40391 859-257-9549 http://www.rch.uky.edu **********************************
-----Original Message----- From: dm-l-bounces@uleth.ca [mailto:dm-l-bounces@uleth.ca] On Behalf Of James Cummings Sent: Friday, June 10, 2005 9:13 AM To: Digital Medievalist Community mailing list Subject: [dm-l] EPT
Dorothy C. Porter wrote:
I find it useful - and I was unaware of this site. I usually use the
Unicode charts, but that can be tedious (since there are now five charts for the Latin alphabet).
Thanks, Dan, for a great bookmark!
While I know you're listening Dot, can you tell us more about EPT? I enjoyed your paper in Kzoo about it, and have been meaning to try it out and/or investigate it further. Is there a downloadable demo or summat?
I'm not so worried about the potential problems over overlap, but its use as a tool for assisting less-technical resource creators to develop more sophisticated electronic editions.
I've noticed there are a number of presentations mentioning it at ACH/ALLC this year, and I'll be attending most of them.
-James