Proto4DigEd: How to write a DSE-handbook for different use cases and communities?

Yann Stricker, Elias Zimmermann, Reto Baumgartner

The community meetings are held online using this link, usually on the first Tuesday of each month at 17:00 CET/CEST. No registration is required to attend. We warmly invite you to propose topics info@e-editiones.org for the forthcoming meetings.

Upcoming community meetup on November 12th, 2024 at 17:00 CET by Yann Stricker (Zentrum für Digtiale Editorik, UZH), Elias Zimmermann (Romanisches Seminar, UZH) and Reto Baumgartner (Science IT, UZH).

The main goal of the Open Research Data (ORD) project Proto4DigEd funded by swissuniversities for a duration of 18 months (07.2023−12.2024) is to test and further develop prototypical workflows for digital scientific editions (DSE). As a result, we are developing a model edition and writing an extensive handbook that aims to help different use cases and communities in the conception phase of their projects.

Proto4DigEd answers to a growing need for standardisation concerning digital edition projects (Pierazzo 2019: 2014). For this aim, the project links its handbook to its model edition, using a small subset of the huge correspondence of Gaston Paris (1839-1903), one of the most influent European philologists of the 19th century.

The Proto4DigEd handbook is concerned with all stages of the data life cycle from the conception phase until the archiving of the data in a repository. The project is not intended to document new technical solutions, but focuses on a combination of easily available, long-time proofed and thus sustainable tools and on seamless transitions between them.

It focuses mainly on three solutions for the main phases of a DSE project (transcribing, editing, publishing and archiving).

    1. For the automated transcription of manuscripts (HTR) the tool Transkribus offers general text recognition models as well as the training of specific models and is at present the de-facto standard solution in DSE in the community.
    1. TEI Publisher is a publishing toolbox developed in Switzerland and Germany that is supported by a growing community and allows standardised markup of texts in TEI-XML and their online publication.
    1. The DaSCH Service Platform (DSP) allows long-term archiving and long-term visualisation of edition data. The handbook informs readers about different ways in which to use these or similar solutions, that fit the technical, personal and institutional framework of their projects.

We are organising workshops, in which we discuss and compare workflows of different projects and ask them for their best practices. The focus is on the question of how projects can learn from each other, despite their differences. Sharing experiences when deciding on certain workflows and the use of tools is proving to be particularly promising. It is particularly important to consciously reflect on which functionalities are necessary and which are ‘just’ nice to have. Our community driven handbook is based on MkDocs and will be made available on the GitLab instance of the University of Zurich from autumn 2024. The Center Digital Editions & Edition Analytics, ZDE UZH, helps in sharing the workflow and offers discussion and training to any interested project.

The meeting will take place on Teams.