Il giorno mer, 18/03/2009 alle 14.13 -0600, Dan O'Donnell ha scritto: It's not the DVD or CD format--although using a CD or DVD does bring with it some technical limitations over online publication. It has to do with the software being used to process the content. If you're talking about Martin Foy's Bayeux Tapestry edition, then it was published on CD-ROM, in fact. In his case it will work on Windows 98+ and Mac System 7.0 (you need a "Classic Mode" if you run it in OS X+). I don't think it will work on Linux (a market share roughly similar to Mac), because I think it uses Shockwave, a technology that was written for Windows, was partially ported to Mac, and not ported (or even emulated) on Linux. My edition of CH runs on anything because it is pure HTML. You can't get full text searching on anything other than windows, however, because the full-text searchable version is processed by Greenstone Digital Library software (while Greenstone normally runs on anything, the version that works on CD-ROMs requires windows). In the case of Muir's edition (like a number of editions from SEENET), the problem is that the programming was written for a specific browser: Microsoft's Internet Explorer and takes advantages of features (and bugs) that exist only in that browser. This means these editions will never run on Linux (Microsoft won't port the programme to Linux), cannot be ported so that they run on-line without complete rewriting (the software is client-based rather than server-based), and may have trouble with Macs--since Microsoft IE is not a native Mac application and is written to take advantage of specific features of the Windows OS. Kiernan's edition of Beowulf has some client-side programming, but this is written in a standard java and, if I remember aright, works on all OSs including Mac and Linux. I wrote a column about this a while back for Heroic Age (http://www.heroicage.org/issues/7/ecolumn.html), with another reflecting on some of the issues involved in what I would consider overdetermining the digital editorial text: http://www.heroicage.org/issues/8/em.html. A related piece that covers some of the same ground as both is in the Blackwell Companion to Digital Literary Studies: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/view?docId=blackwell/9781405148641/9781405148641.xml&chunk.id=ss1-4-2&toc.depth=1&toc.id=ss1-4-2&brand=9781405148641_brand This is something digital scholars have got to work out. We are in effect still living in the browser wars of the late 1990s when everybody else has long moved on (Facebook doesn't care what operating system you use). Peter Robinson pointed out in an article in Digital Medievalist that digitally published scholarship of the first rank--such as some of the manuscript work in the Canterbury Tales Project--was not being cited nearly as frequently as it deserved (nor having nearly the appropriate impact). Obsolescence within a half decade really should not be happening in the internet age, the primary feature of which (IMO) is the separation of content and processing. -dan --------------------------------------------------------------------- Il giorno mer, 18/03/2009 alle 16.08 -0400, Patrick Conner ha scritto: Couldn't agree with you more, Dan. And CAEDMON is indeed a robust little thing. ;-) {I wink, but I mean it!] 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? --Pat --------------------------------------------------------------------- Il giorno mer, 18/03/2009 alle 21.23 +0100, mkrygier@XXXXXXXXXXXX ha scritto: There's the Interedition project, 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 --------------------------------------------------------------------- Il giorno mer, 18/03/2009 alle 17.25 -0400, Patrick Conner ha scritto: 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 --------------------------------------------------------------------- Il giorno mer, 18/03/2009 alle 23.08 +0100, mkrygier@XXXXXXXXXXX ha scritto: On Wednesday, March 18, 2009, 10:25:32 PM, Patrick Conner wrote: > 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. As far as I know, yes, and from what people more or less directly involved in the programme are saying, it definitely looks promising. What regards edition standards - if I remember correctly neither EETS or EPNS for that matter originally had them, beyond basic principles. Early EETS or EPNS volumes are so much apart from, say, volumes published in the 70s and 80s that they could use being re-edited from scratch. The main issue is the purpose of the edition. I remember an edition of AS charters prepared recently, which had historians as its primary target, hence the way the texts were edited rendered them almost unusable for linguists. Even in the Canterbury Tales Project itself there are decisions to be made concerning what could be relevant for the user, what is practical for the transcriber and for the editor, and I suppose different editorial teams have their own answers here. The exisiting CDs, at any rate, are by no means uniform. Best, Marcin --------------------------------------------------------------------- Il giorno mer, 18/03/2009 alle 23.44 +0000, Dot Porter ha scritto: To expand on Dan's comment on separating content and presentation, and also respond to Pat's thoughts on standardizing interfaces... [see Dot's message on the list] 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'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. 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. Written in haste... which unfortunately means probably with too sharp a tongue. Apologies in advance. -dan --------------------------------------------------------------------- Il giorno gio, 19/03/2009 alle 08.37 +0100, Roberto Rosselli Del Turco ha scritto: 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 --------------------------------------------------------------------- Il giorno gio, 19/03/2009 alle 07.35 -0500, Carl Edlund Anderson ha scritto: On 19 Mar 2009, at 02:37, Roberto Rosselli Del Turco wrote: > > Agreed, but I have to point out that this model will take a long > time to establish itself. It will likely take a long time to establish itself -- but if there was a positive drive to establish it, that might at least shorten the time needed. Cheers, Carl --------------------------------------------------------------------- Il giorno gio, 19/03/2009 alle 11.02 -0600, Dan O'Donnell ha scritto: Carl Edlund Anderson wrote: > It will likely take a long time to establish itself -- but if there > was a positive drive to establish it, that might at least shorten the > time needed. It's something we're thinking about at the Medieval Academy's Electronic Editions Advisory Board. In fact I'll be sketching out where we are thinking of looking into going (with all the vagueness still that that formulation implies) at the MAA meeting next week in Chicago. I think the scholarly societies should take a strong role in this kind of thing The classicists are wiping the medievalist's clock in terms of advanced digital work nowadays. Il giorno gio, 19/03/2009 alle 14.55 -0400, Foys Martin ha scritto: is anyone looking for ways to stabilize presentation > and interface? This is part of the pitch for our Digital Mappaemundi project that just got NEH funding. Providing a platform of updatable schema and an editing tool that users can adapt for scholarly editing of particular sets of images and texts beyond the original scope of medieval maps and geographic texts. ~ Martin --------------------------------------------------------------------- Il giorno gio, 19/03/2009 alle 15.19 -0400, Kevin Kiernan ha scritto: This is what Edition Production & Presentation Technology (EPPT), now called IBX (Image-Based XML), does -- see http://www.eppt.org. It is free, open-source, and based on accepted standards (XML, Java, jpeg). It lets editors create digital editions using images, transcripts, and a dtd (usually TEI, but it is schema neutral). It works on maps, artifacts, etc., in addition to manuscripts. Rather than endlessly trying to invent something else that does the same thing, it would be smart of the humanities computing community to develop a standard presentation and publication format for editions using this free suite of development tools. The reason Electronic Beowulf was able to weather the platform and browser storms is that we developed it around the browsers using standards. Kevin