Subject: Re: [ANSAX-L] Digital Edition Interfaces
From: Roberto Rosselli Del Turco <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2009 08:37:00 +0100

Hi all,
guess I'll have to temporarily leave my lurking state to comment on
this :)

Il giorno mer, 18/03/2009 alle 18.11 -0600, Dan O'Donnell ha scritto:
> I'd say there is a fairly standard interface already, the browser. I 
> often think people fail to realise how powerful a piece of software 
> (when attached to the internet) that is. It is not for nothing that the 
> really big apps at the moment are all server-side (i.e. make no demands 
> on the user other than that they have a modern browser).

I agree, and I agree to your previous point (i.e. that a minimal
browser-based edition is better than a bells & whistles, obsolete in 2-3
years one). But a browser is not, per se, the perfect environment to
host a digital edition: you need to expand it to offer those
functionalities (wrt text and images) that really make it *conceptually
better* than the printed equivalent. Or you will end up with, f.i.,
hyper-textual editions with the critical apparatus inside a frame below
the edition text: surely useful and very much accessible thanks to WWW
distribution, but a lost occasion and 0 progress on the methodological
side because it basically replicates the physical counterpart, the
(neo-)Lachmannian printed edition and its space-constrained layout.

I fully agree with Pat: since we have a really good standard to *encode*
digital editions (TEI XML), it's only logical to propose standard
guidelines wrt the way we *visualize* them; we *really* need a group
with some authority behind it to begin to standardize edition
interfaces, which will also need to do a lot of theoretical work to take
fully advantage of the possibilities that the current (and future)
multimedia tools and standards present us.

> I'm a big believer in Dot's model: especially since it concentrates on 
> content--which is where our PhDs all are. The trouble at the moment is 
> uptake. We don't really have many examples of small team, refereed, 
> "published" online editions. There are hobby sites, and there are large 
> aggregations and archives, and there are some essentially self-published 
> large team projects. But there isn't really a good series of online 
> editions that combine the best of print scholarly practice (especially 
> refereeing) with online publication.

Agreed, but I have to point out that this model will take a long time to
establish itself. 

> I think myself that the client side interface is a blind alley--which is 
> why we (i.e. digital editors and consumers of digital editions) still 
> talking about Mac vs. Windows and the equivalent of IE vs. Netscape when 
> nobody else is. What we really need (and hopefully will see in the 
> future) is organisations (be they presses or scholarly societies or 
> institutions) setting up on-line series with a house style on the server 
> side.

The client-side interface surely is a blind alley, and something we
should do without as soon as possible -- but we can't just do that at
the moment. If the library doesn't give me the necessary rights to
publish my ms images on the web, which is the most frequent case, I
can't go for an ideal server-side, WWW accessible edition, unless I only
publish the textual part of my edition only. There are other limits,
again involving images mainly, so that full WWW distribution is only
feasible in some cases but not always IMHO.

Ciao

	Roberto

-- 

Roberto Rosselli Del Turco      roberto.rossellidelturco at unito.it
Dipartimento di Scienze         rosselli at ling.unipi.it
del Linguaggio                  Then spoke the thunder  DA
Universita' di Torino           Datta: what have we given?  (TSE)
 
  Hige sceal the heardra,     heorte the cenre,
  mod sceal the mare,       the ure maegen litlath.  (Maldon 312-3)

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