Thursday, October 13, 2011

Digital Editions Session Part 1

The presentation of Marie Bisson's project of a Digital Edition of works by Thomas Le Roy was interesting to me especially because it is still pretty virtual - just like our project, still ringing with several layers of technicalities before you can really say what it is going to look like. But the added value of comparing 3 versions of not so identical texts seems to appeal to the more experienced colleagues in the room.

I could see that Marie Bisson chose to have the values of her tags in French. We decided to switch from German to English in our own tagging at a pretty early stage for reasons of readability of the xml-file. I will have to ask Marie Bisson why she kept the French...(the only presentation of the project you can find only is also in French)

And now to Faust: a titanic project at last!!
The first paper by Gerrit Brüning and Katrin Henzel presented the multiple encoding of the same information as 2 sides of the same medal. In this huge genetic edition, textual and documentary transcript are kept in different files containing different markups (markup rules are documented on a wikipage). In order to synchronize contents, an algorithm was developed to ensure automatic collation. Gregor Middell and Moritz Wissenbach then went into the technicalities. Looks like the Faust editors do not only know some mephistophelian tricks, but also Chapter 20 of the Guidelines almost by heart.

It is impressive how the several work steps are being identified to reach the publishing objectives. Obviously, as the speakers mentioned, it is NOT something you can try at home by yourself but need some serious institutional backup to realize.

During the discussion, Werner Wegstein asked an interesting question (at least interesting for us) about the different scripts (ha!) but I was pretty disappointed by the complicated answer (still no clear solution for us in sight...)

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