Il 15/03/2013 11:36, Pierazzo, Elena ha scritto:
Hi Roberto,
While there are many things you said I heartily share, I disagree when you said that the "data is the edition" and that the role of the software is only to extract data to present it to the user. I think there is as much scholarship in the interface as there is on the data, in particular if we use standards such the TEI that allow us to encode the same things in different ways (abbreviations and expansion, errors and corrections, etc.): the way we select these features and the way we present them tells loads about our vision and understanding of the text and have enormous consequences in the reception and impact of our scholarship. This, of course, makes things more complex as we are bound to preserve the data and the interfaces…
I think it was quite clear mine was a provocation of sort.
Getting back to the main object of the thread which was generated by Dot's excellent article: I don't think people don't use digital scholarly editions because they may disappear any day soon, I think they do not because we -- the editors -- have organised them around what we want to do with them, and have forgotten to ask the readers what they want instead. People read on screen all the time: Kindles and iPad and the eBook market boom shows this very clearly, they simply don't read scholarly editions on the web. I think there is a reflection to be had here on the way we deliver our scholarship and on the centrality of our interfaces. Thanks again to Dot for drawing our attention to this.
There are *many* reasons why digital scholarly editions aren't used as much as we'd like, lack of proper user feedback (and, as a consequence, lack of easy to use interfaces) is just one of them. The problem is that with Kindle/iPad/tablets in general ebooks have found a suitable medium, the same wasn't and still isn't true with digital editions + browsing software + computer monitors (unless you shift focus from "reading" to "consultation", than they're more than fit for the purpose). Getting the software "right" for a computer is an order of magnitude more difficult than writing an ebook reading software, doing so for a tablet will be even more difficult I'm afraid. Which doesn't mean we shouldn't start looking into it, on the contrary.
R