Subject: Re: [ANSAX-L] Digital Edition Interfaces
From: Patrick Conner <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 18 Mar 2009 17:25:32 -0400

Thank's Marcin.  Problem is, the site was last updated November 28th, 2007. Is EU STILL financing it? That would certainly be a powerful arm to support it. Before one could talk about how the data and processing should be separate in the interface as well as in the text, we'd probably have to go back and think about how one asserts something like edition standards. How did EETS do it 150 years ago? Dan mentioned in an earlier post that Peter Robinson commented on the lack of use the very fine Chaucer digital editions are getting, and there are lots of issues there. Literary theory seems to have greatly deemphasized the nature of the authoritative edition, so that students and even their professors don't feel the same pressure to know where to turn for citation and "definitive" ancillary materials on things like manuscript witnesses, etc. Moreover, we haven't reached a tipping point for the digitization of literary and cultural studies, so it's very easy to teach Chaucer without the digital editions. There is, in fact, so much to discuss in Chaucer that my colleagues who teach him would probably feel hard-pressed to say anything about manuscripts and the editorial tradition, except maybe to mention Ellesmere and Hengwrt. We have to think about how to get entrepreneurs, like those both here and recently named here, who have the wherewithal to undertake making such an edition to want their edition to yield to a community design at some level. That's not easy. Most folks who are putting in the bucks and the time want the baby to come out looking like them. 

It's worth some discussion, and maybe there's a grant in it somewhere for someone. 

--Pat

>>> <[email-masked]> 03/18/09 4:23 PM >>>
Hi,

On Wednesday, March 18, 2009, 9:08:06 PM, Patrick Conner wrote:

> We need a group with some authority behind it to begin to standardize
> edition interfaces. They would need some principles which would keep all
> that work from being trussed up in one or two browsers which go by the
> way. The TEI wanted to make sure that texts wouldn't be encoded into
> obsolescence; is anyone looking for ways to stabilize presentation and
> interface?

There's the Interedition project, http://interedition.huygensinstituut.nl/, ( http://interedition.huygensinstituut.nl/, ) hosted by the Huygens Institute and now financed by the EU as a COST Action, which works on a common European technical infrastructure for scholarly digital editing. It's not exactly what you have in mind, but it's close enough, I suppose.

Best,
Marcin Krygier

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  Reminder: For assistance write to Bill Schipper ([email-masked])