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@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@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@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@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-edition/ (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-editionen.html - 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@gmail.com
Personal blog: dotporterdigital.org
MESA blog: http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/projects/mesa/
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*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

 

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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)

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Journal: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/
Journal Editors: editors _AT_ digitalmedievalist.org
News: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/news/
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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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

---

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Journal: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/
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