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

--
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
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--
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
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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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