Reflecting the Influence of Technology on Models of Text in Scholarly Digital Editing Josfeld, Julia ; Simpson, Grant Leyton 2019-07-31 Zentrum für Informationsmodellierung - Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities, Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz Austria Zentrum für Informationsmodellierung - Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities, Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz Austria GAMS - Geisteswissenschaftliches Asset Management System Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 2019 Graz o:tei2019.170

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en theory of digital editing digital scholarly editing textual ontology 2019-09-02T08:46:38Z julia.josfeld@uni-goettingen.de;grantleyton.simpson@uni-goettingen.de

Short Paper Abstract, TEI 2019

Reflecting the Influence of Technology on Models of Text in Scholarly Digital Editing

By Julia Josfeld and Grant Leyton Simpson (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen)

Abstract:

There are many resources that aim to help scholars first starting out in the field of digital editing. Courses on XML, XPath, and XSLT, introductions to TEI, tutorials on how to use common software suites, and many more convey a grounded understanding of the technologies involved in this increasingly relevant field. However, one aspect that has received less attention so far is how our application of these technologies influences our approach to and understanding of “text”.

In the complex digital medium, the “text” of an edition consists not only of a reproduction of the original source or sources and a number of scholarly apparatuses, but also includes the various layers of infrastructure that make it accessible to potential users. Depending on which choices editors make regarding these infrastructures, the resulting edition will inherit their structural possibilities and limitations, which in turn will dictate constraints on the model of text that can be used. While these underlying influences can sometimes go unexamined, since they appear simply as immutable requirements of the chosen technology, they nevertheless shape the underlying theoretical framework that an editor will work from. It is crucial, therefore, that we use careful discussions of the technologies (e.g. TEI) and their intersection with the material of our editions to elucidate the underlying model possibilities and allow for fruitful and positive decision making.

To illustrate this point, we will show how the application of TEI shaped the model of text we were working from in our digital editing project, the Electronic Corpus of Anonymous Old English Homilies (ECHOE), and how we were able to come to a more nuanced theoretical framework once we started interrogating our base assumptions inherited from this technology.