Exemplary editions

The following editions were chosen not only because of their quality, but also because they illustrate unusual or exemplary scholarly editing methods that transcend, in different ways, the features commonly found in digital editions.

Manuscript editions

• Digital Thoreau (https://digitalthoreau.org/) brings together scholarship on American author Henry David Thoreau. An edition of his work Walden is available as fluid text, visualized by the Versioning Machine including in-text deletions, additions and scholarly annotations.
• Faust edition (http://beta.faustedition.net/). This digital edition of Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe uses range-based text repository software combined with a graph database. The edition allows users to study the manuscripts of each version as well as to explore the genesis of the text. The material is transcribed using multiple XML files per unit, where each XML file contains a separate hierarchy: one focusing on the document hierarchy and one focusing on the text hierarchy. Within the text repository the different hierarchies are combined in a multi-layered view of the text. Source: https://github.com/faustedition/faust-app/tree/master/faust/src/main/java/de/faustedition/graph. Recommended reading is the award-winning review of the edition by dr. Tessa Gengnagel.
• Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts (http://www.janeausten.ac.uk/index.html) provides high-resolution pages images and diplomatic TEI XML transcriptions for all of Austen’s surviving fiction manuscripts. The edition has extensive editorial notes about the project’s methodology. Interestingly, in view of software sustainability issues, the project’s main page opens with a disclaimer saying that “the facsimile view of the manuscripts is currently unavailable as the display relied on the Adobe Flash player, which is no longer supported.”
• Samuel Beckett project (http://www.beckettarchive.org/). The Beckett Archive contains TEI XML editions of Samuel Beckett’s works. It uses Apache Cocoon, a publishing framework build on XML technologies, and extends the digital edition paradigm by modeling genetic editions that capture the incremental process by which the manuscripts evolved. It makes use of collation software CollateX to compare text versions “on-the-fly” within the edition environment.
• Shelley Godwin Archive (http://shelleygodwinarchive.org/) makes available TEI-encoded genetic editions of the manuscripts of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft. The reading interface provides unusual and illuminating control of the visualization of how different persons contributed text and annotations to the eventual manuscript page. The edition is based on a Shared Canvas viewer and TEI XML transcriptions.
• Vercelli Book Project (http://vbd.humnet.unipi.it/beta2/ (in beta)) is a digital edition of the Vercelli Book, a manuscript dating back to the end of the 10th century, containing miscellaneous religious works, in verse and prose. The digital edition uses the Edition Visualization Technology (EVT) framework (http://evt.labcd.unipi.it/) to render a multi-dimensional interface that supports seamless navigation and comparison of scans of the original manuscript, transcribed text, and adapted transcription.
• Edition Humboldt Digital (https://edition-humboldt.de/?&l=en) provides an online research environment for the travel journals, letters, and notebooks of Alexander von Humboldt. The TEI XML documents are stored in an existdb database; the edition is realised with XQuery, XSLT, and XPath. The metadata of all letters is searchable through the price-winning webservice correspSearch.

Special topics

• Furnace and Fuge https://furnaceandfugue.org/index.html, a digital edition of Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens (1618) with scholarly commentary. The project has for specific objectives (1) to represent both the musical score and the sound, allowing users to (de)select different voices and have the text scroll automatically along with the music; and (2) to represent the emblems of the edition, inter alia via an extensive search functionality for Emblem images.
• CantApp http://www.sd-editions.com/CantApp/GP/ allows users to experience an oral performance of the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales by Chaucher. The General Prologue, performed by Lina Gibbings, plays along to the digital facsimiles of the manuscript and the text/image linking of the app allows users to both see and hear the text simultaneously.
• Digital Mitford https://digitalmitford.org/letters.html is a both a digital edition of the works of Mary Russell Mitford and a pedagogical tool. The project is under ongoing development and used in classrooms and coding schools to introduce students to TEI, XPath, XSLT, and network analysis among others.

Textual criticism

• The Chronicle of Matthew of Edessa (https://editions.byzantini.st/ChronicleME/#/) offers a critical edition of this twelfth-century Armenian work, together with innovative visualizations. To see a textual stemma codicum select Editions → Book 1 → View options (drop-down on left side) and turn on Graph.
• The Institute for New Testament Textual Research (INTF) documents and studies the textual tradition of the New Greek Testament (http://egora.uni-muenster.de/intf/projekte/projekte_en.shtml). The New Greek Testament poses special challenges to automated collation because of the unusually large number of witnesses involved in textual criticism of the New Testament.
• Shebanq project (https://shebanq.ancient-data.org/). This edition of the Hebrew Bible, which won a prize from CLARIN-NL, uses a custom made text database (using a graph-like structure) and text query language (MQL). Documentation: https://shebanq.ancientdata.org/shebanq/static/docs/featuredoc/texts/welcome.html
• St. Patrick’s Confession (http://www.confessio.ie/about/hyperstack). The the St Patrick’s Confessio Hypertext Stack Project goes a long way toward providing an integrated perspective on scholarly editing and digital technology/methodology. Multiple versions of the Confessio are transcribed in TEI XML and brought together with as a multilayered edition in a HyperStack architecture. The “About”-section of the edition is particularly informative about the technichal approach.
• Dante Alighieri Commedia. The Commedia project provides various means to digitally explore and study the manuscript transmission of the poem. Full text transcriptions of seven witnesses are enriched with metrical markup and presented alongside the corresponding facsimiles. The edition includes an automated collation on word level, and the integrated VBase tool allows the user to retrieve variants in different witnesses and parts of the poem.

Large(r) text corpora

• The Old Bailey Online (https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/index.jsp) is a digitized collection of nearly 2000,000 transcribed trial records of the men and women convicted in London (UK) between 1676 and 1772. The overall project has a pedagogical orientation as it offers multiple tutorials, research guides, and teaching material. There’s an impressive range of digital projects that have made succesfull use of the Old Bailey data (available as TEI-XML or API), e.g., a linguistic corpus of spoken English from 1720 to 1913.
• Thomas Gray Archive (http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=elcc#panel_ana). The metrical and other structures underlying poetic texts constitute an annotation layer that may be difficult to integrate into a textual publication. This edition of the complete works of Thomas Grey (prose, poetry, correspondence, and the author’s reading material) is enriched with a computationally facilitated analysis of the text, with richer commentary exposed in the notes and queries.
• Peter Plaoul, Commentarius in libros Sententiarum, de Fide (https://scta.lombardpress.org/text?resourceid=http://scta.info/resource/lectio1) presents information from TEI XML transcriptions of Peter Plaoul’s Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. This edition integrates data and document views from multiple witnesses in both transcription and facsimile, and the best way to learn about it is to click on different moments in the text and experiment with the different interface widgets..

Correspondence

• Van Gogh Letters (http://vangoghletters.org/vg/) offer a subtle but powerful navigational platform for exploring Van Gogh’s correspondence, and can serve as an example of how developer perspectives and user affordances can be combined to support user-directed exploration.
• Welscher Gast digital project (http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/wgd/) is impressive for its linking of text to iconography in illustrations.
• The Darwin Project (https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/) presents a comprehensive digital edition of the thousands of letters from and to Charles Darwin. The website offers an intuitive search functionality to explore the corpus of letters as well as useful historical background in the form of explanatory notes and extensive contextual essays.
• Busoni edition (https://www.busoni-nachlass.org/en/Index) is a critical, TEI XML-based edition of selected correspondence and writings of Ferruccio Busoni. Especially interesting is that the Busoni edition is based on a dynamic exist-db app that has been developed for two other editions, illustrating that it’s possible for edition projects to share software solutions as long as these have been documented.

Suggested by Institute participants

• Furnace and fugue. A digital edition of Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens (1618) with scholarly commentary.
• Jane Austen’s fiction manuscripts The Jane Austen’s fiction manuscripts digital edition gathers together in the virtual space of the web some 1100 pages of fiction written in Jane Austen’s own hand. Through digital reunification, it is now possible to access, read, and compare high quality images of original manuscripts whose material forms are scattered around the world in libraries and private collections.
• Reading with Austen A reconstruction of the library of Edward Austen Knight, with skeuomorphic interface. (Compare to Melville’s marginalia.)

See also A catalogue of digital editions (Franzini, Terras, and Mahony, 2012) at https://github.com/gfranzini/digEds_cat and the editions discussed in Ride, a English review journal for digital scholarly editions published by the German Institut für Dokumentologie und Editorik.