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London Rare Books School 2018:

Digital Scholarly Editing, Day 1

Synopsis

Today will feature an introduction to the history of textual editing, an introduction to documentary editing, and an introduction to Markdown.

Aims

  • General grasp of the history of scholarly editing.

  • Understand the difference between documentary editing and other forms of editing.

  • Facility with transcribing documents in Markdown, XML and HTML.

Schedule

Time Topic Type
10-12 a.m. Brief history of Scholarly Editing Presentation, Discussion
1-2 p.m. Digital Editing Workflow; Transcription Options Digital lab
3-4 p.m. Documentary Editing Discussion
4–5 p.m. Brief Introduction to XML Digital lab

Brief History of Scholarly editing

Readings and discussions: A. E. Housman, "The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism"; W. W. Greg, "The Rationale of Copy Text".

Digital Editing Workflow

If I am interested in creating a digital edition, there are two questions that you must ponder at length before proceeding:

  1. What is my text model?

  2. What is my workflow?

The answer to (1) will vary quite a bit, depending on your documents, and what kind of edition you would like to produce. We will continue to investigate options to (1) as we move through the course this week.

The answer to (2) is a little more straightforward. Since we are concerned with "digital" editing, we need to think in terms of an appropriate computational pipeline.

Transcription Options

The beginning of the pipeline is the flexible text editor. By flexible I mean an editor that is amenable to Web publishing, and uses non-proprietary open source formatting. Many editors have used proprietary word processors to transcribe their editorial material. While that has many virtues (control of type-setting feature, to name one), it presents a lot of problems if you are trying to optimize your workflow. E.g., if you transcribe an edition in Microsoft Word, you would have to transform that document (and all of its attendant features) into XML or HTML in order to make it work as a digital edition on the Web.

For us, the common understanding is that XML files should be our edition files of record. Ideally, all documents would be transcribed in XML from the beginning, but for a variety of reasons that is not always practicable.

First we will look at the most basic of transcription: Markdown. This is lightweight web authoring at its best.

Documentary Editing

Readings and discussions: G. Thomas Tanselle, "The Editing of Historical Documents".

Brief Introduction to XML

Why encode documents in XML? Access the slides here.