Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories, Models and Methods Elena Pierazzo
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Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories, Models and Methods Elena Pierazzo To cite this version: Elena Pierazzo. Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories, Models and Methods. 2014. <hal- 01182162> HAL Id: hal-01182162 http://hal.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/hal-01182162 Submitted on 30 Jul 2015 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destin´eeau d´ep^otet `ala diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publi´esou non, lished or not. The documents may come from ´emanant des ´etablissements d'enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche fran¸caisou ´etrangers,des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou priv´es. Copyright 1 Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories, Models and Methods Elena Pierazzo, Université de Grenoble ‘Stendhal’, France 2 Contents List of Figures and Tables Acknowledgments [TO COME] Introduction 1 Traditional and Emerging Editorial Models 1.1 Traditional Editorial Models: an Overview 1.2 Digital Editing, Digital Editions 1.3 Digital Editorial Models 1.3.1 Phylogenetic 1.3.2 Social Editing and Social Editions 1.3.3 Crowdsourcing and Editing 1.4 The Source-and-the-Output Model: Paradigmatic Editions 1.5 Raising the Stakes: Interactive Facsimiles and Gamification 1.6 Functional Analysis of Digital Scholarly Editions: an Edition Is What an Edition Does 2 Modelling (Digital) Texts 2.1 Modelling and the Edition 2.2 Modelling Texts and Documents 2.3 The Material and the Immaterial Text: more on Dimensions 2.4 Expanding the Work: Versions and Derivative Works 2.5 Other models 2.6 A Born-digital Model: the OHCO Model 3 Modelling Text Transmission: from Documents to Texts, and Return 3.1 Textual Transmission: a Communication Model 3 3.2 Theories and models of transcriptions 3.3 Returning to the Document: the Success of Digital Documentary Editions 4 What’s on the page? Objectivity and Interpretation in Scholarly Editing 4.1 Record and Interpretation 4.2 Objectivity in Textual Editing 4.3 The Digital Facsimile and the ‘Real Thing’ 4.4 A Faithful Representation 4.5 Markup and Interpretation 5 Work and Workflow of Digital Scholarly Editions 5.1 Modelling the Edition 5.2 Computing the Edition: the Two Paths and the Third Way 5.3 The Role of Standards in Textual Editing: the Text Encoding Initiative 5.4 Editorial Work, Collaborative Work 6 The Publication of Digital Scholarly Editions 6.1 Work in Progress 6.2 The Shape of the Digital 6.3 Dual and Hybrid Publications 6.4 How Much Information? Open Source Publications 7 Using Digital Scholarly Editions 7.1 Readers and Readings: the Audience of Scholarly Editions 7.2 Editorial Formats and the Nature of Texts 7.3 Readers and Users of Digital Scholarly Editions 7.4 Looking for New Models: the Critical Apparatus 7.5 Interface Design: Principles 4 7.6 A Standard User Interface? 7.7 Are User Interfaces Necessary? 8 Trusting the Edition: Preservation and Reliability of Digital Editions 8.1 Data and Metadata: Standards, Formats and Preservation 8.2 Preserving Data, Preserving Interfaces 8.3 Preserving Data: Digital Repositories 8.4. ‘Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe’: Redundancy and Preservation 8.5 Open Access and Preservation 8.7 Trusting Editions: Heraclitean Editions 8.8 Trusting Digital Editions? Peer Review and Evaluation of Digital Scholarship 9 The Present and the Future of Digital Scholarly Editions 9.1 A glance toward the future 9.2. Ethics of Digital Editions Index 5 List of Figures and Tables Figures 1.1 Abbreviation of ‘domino’ 2.1 Conceptual model of texts and documents 2.2 Conceptual model of texts and documents (UML) 2.3 Conceptual model of texts, documents and works 2.4 Guillaume Apollinaire, Calligrame – Catalogue of the exhibition Léopold Survage - Irène Lagut (1917) 2.5 The materiality and immateriality of textual theories 2.6 The materiality and immateriality of editorial models 2.7 The FRBR model (FRBR 1998, p. 13) 2.8 The Pluralistic Text (Sahle 2013) 3.1 Letter ‘A’ 4.1 Cod. Sang. 189, p. 76 4.2 Cod. Sang. 189, p. 76 (2) 5.1 A simple wireframe 5.2 Workflow of editing (Rehbein and Fritze, 2012, p. 52). 7.1 XML source of the last two lines of The Watsons, p. [1] 7.2 Web display of the last two lines of The Watson, p. [1], with and without styling Tables 1.1 Functional grid (Vanhoutte, 2010, p. 142) 6 2.1 Material and immaterial dimensions 2.2 Dimensions and the FRBR model 4.1 Epistemic virtues in time (Daston and Galison, 2010, p. 371) 7 Introduction Scholarly editorial practices are undergoing deep structural and theoretical changes. Such changes are connected to the adoption of computers both for supporting editorial work and for disseminating it. In spite of what was believed by earlier adopters, computers are proving to be far more than just electronic research assistants able to offer relief from ‘idiotic’ work; in fact they are leading us to question the hermeneutics and heuristics of textual scholarship. Traditional editorial practices and theories have been developed and shaped by print culture, but, after the first stage of digital editing where the assumption was that it was possible to simply transfer such practices to the new medium, new editorial models have emerged, along with new workflows. New research goals have become pursuable, with the result that even the basic assumptions that were taken for granted are open for scrutiny. Several books and articles published since the 1990s have discussed various aspects of digital scholarly editions,1 presenting case studies or particular points of view on some of the activities involved in the preparation of digital editions, but a comprehensive approach to digital scholarly editing from a methodological and theoretical viewpoint is still missing.2 In this gap this book finds its place, providing a coherent treatment of the subject, in the hope that many more contributions will follow. Digital textual scholarship is both over and under-theorized, in the sense that while there have been a lot of contributions to the fine points of this or that editorial practice, not many contributions have attempted to analyse the significance that changes introduced by digital scholarship have brought into editorial practices. Before presenting what this book is about, however, perhaps it is better to discuss what this book is not about. It does not provide an historical overview of the field, nor does it discuss how editors have come to engage with computers; others have done this before and, most likely, better than I could ever do.3 This book is not a guide to producing a digital edition either, as it does not provide explanations of how to use specific tools and techniques. Rather it investigates the changes and the methodological implications of the application of computational methods to all stages of the editorial workflow, and the impact of these on the main protagonists of such processes: editors, readers and editions. In a deep dialogue with previous publications on the topic, the book presents foreseeable lines of development in digital textual scholarship without attempting to propose a new 1 There are too many books to mention here, but they will be the objects of discussion in the chapters to come. 2 The exception to this is represented by Sahle 2013, for which see below. 3 Cf. for instance two contributions by Edward Vanhoutte, one on the history of digital textual scholarship (Vanhoutte, 2010) and the most recent one on the history of Digital Humanities (Vanhoutte, 2013). 8 editorial approach, claiming instead that the alterations in traditional editorial practices necessitated by the use of computers impose radical changes in the way we think and manage texts, documents, editions and the public. A book on digital scholarly editing: is it useful or is it an absurdity? And is editing an activity worth pursuing in the age of the Internet? The generalized access to a publication platform such as the web, and the low technical requirements that are needed to produce web content, have brought into question the necessity of selecting, controlling and ultimately editing altogether: ‘since tools are now available that make it possible for users to exploit electronic data in a variety of ways, straightforward digitization that makes data available quickly is preferable to a critical edition which is never finished, even if less scholarly value is added’ (Ore, 2009, p. 113). Yet, cultural heritage texts are complex objects which have reached us inscribed on stratified, diversified and conflicting documents that require the cultural and dialectical intermediation of expert readers: the editors. This requirement has not changed with the advent of the Web: on the contrary, the easier it becomes to publish on the Web, the larger the quantity of textual materials available, the more important becomes the guidance of the editor. Quality still matters. Any act of publication, of making available something that was not before requires judgement, evaluation and ultimately interpretation of what is worth publishing and what not, and of what is likely to better represent the text, the document or the work one is editing. Is digital scholarly editing the same as scholarly editing but in a new medium, a new methodology or a new discipline altogether? This book suggests answers to these questions by guiding its reader along the ideal ‘textbook’ timeline and workflow of the preparation of an edition: from the elaboration of abstract models of the objects to edit, to the choice of the material, to the editorial work, to post-production and publication, to the use of the published edition, to long-term issues and the ultimate significance of the published work.