Peter Robinson & Barbara Bordalejo
By the end of the week, you should be able to use the Textual Communities environment at www.textualcommunities.org to carry out the major phases of making an edition of a text in many versions:
- Gathering and displaying images of many manuscripts, page by page
- Creating structured full-text transcriptions of each manuscript page
- Collating the texts of the transcriptions, to make a record of the differences and agreements among the witnesses
- Making an online edition to present all this.
One of the most difficult tasks in the scholarly world is to make an edition from a text in many versions. It is also an area where digital methods show immense possibilities, as computers offer ways of managing large quantities of structured data, of exploring the data, publishing the results, and working with other scholars to do all these things.
This one week workshop will teach how to use the Textual Communities environment to carry out every stage of preparing a scholarly edition of a text in many versions. Students will learn how to gather images of many versions of texts together, to transcribe their text into TEI/XML, how to collate the versions and prepare an apparatus, how to use phylogenetic, variant database and other tools to analyze the agreements and disagreements between the versions to create stemmata and other visualizations, and how to publish the edition online. Models of the kind of edition which users will be able to make can be seen at www.sd-editions.com (for example, Dante’s Commedia at http://www.sd-editions.com/AnaAdditional/CommediaEx/CommediaExhome.html; part of the Canterbury Tales at http://www.sd-editions.com/TCPub/WBP/) and at www.dantecommedia.it.
The course will be taught in two repeated one-week blocks, in nine classes over five days.
- Introduction. What are: texts, documents, works and how Textual Communities treats them. The architecture of Textual Communities. Analysis of the text to create a base TEI/XML text structure for each witness to be edited, with image references and base TEI Header
- Validation and upload of first witness files to textual communities Gathering and online presentation of witness images (from manuscripts, printed books, etc) from multiple sources.
- Upload of single images one at a time; or upload of multiple images by IIIF manifest, or from a zipped folder of images; referencing of other online images, linked to witness
- Linkage of text and image files. Commencing transcription of text files using TEI/XML: base text structure.
- Transcription: treatment of abbreviations, scribal revisions, marginalia, multiple columns, other phenomena
- Recruitment and management of a large team of project partners in multiple roles (transcribers, approvers, co-editors, collators etc.
- Introduction to collation, using the Collation Editor built into Textual Communities: regularization, variant setting. Export of completed apparatus created by the Collation Editor in multiple forms. Introducing NEXUS files and Phylogenetics.
- Creating an online edition using the MakeEdition tool
- Completing the edition. Adding commentary, introductions, etc.
Prerequisites
- No knowledge of TEI or XML or Javascript / HTML or existDB or XSLT or any other specialized technologies needed. A knowledge of basic TEI/XML, and of javascript / HTML is an advantage but not necessary
- Access to existing digital edition materials would be useful. These could be online, or in the form of files on your computer.
- Participants should bring their own laptops, with whatever existing images and transcripts they have.
To prepare for this class, you should look at the following items, all accessible in the TC WIki:
Creating and Implementing an Ontology of Documents and Texts (ADHO 2018)
The Principles of the Textual Communities Project
The Background to the Textual Communities Project
Some links:
Links to articles about collation and variants:
https://zenodo.org/record/4075671#.YRQCKNNuc-Q
https://zenodo.org/record/4035346#.YRQDFtNuc-Q
Version comparison tools:
EVT: http://evt.labcd.unipi.it/
TEI CAT: http://teicat.huma-num.fr/
VERSIONING MACHINE: http://v-machine.org/
