Digital Scholarly Edition
Table of Contents
This workshop aims to teach Digital Humanities and Library and Information Science students the basics of transcribing and annotating texts by using TEI-XML – a set of tags developed by the Text Encoding Initative for the digitization of text-based documents with long-term preservation in mind. By doing so, it goes a long way towards serving the needs of Humanities scholars with a more qualitative approach to digital text analysis – to put it in the terms of our introductory session on Text for Humans, and Text for Computers.
What is a Digital Scholarly Edition?
The two main areas where TEI-XML is probably the most widely used, are the (digital) library on the one hand (where staff often use TEI-XML to catalog and describe – if not actually transcribe – the library’s collections), and the research field of Textual Scholarship on the other. For Textual Scholars, the Digital Scholarly Edition (DSE) is often viewed as the pinnacle of scholarly output in the field, and it probably comprises the single most advanced use of TEI-XML and adjacent technologies in existence at the moment. That is why we will use this Digital Scholarly Edition as a our entry point into learning more about the TEI. And why we start our workshop with an introductory lecture that explains what a Digital Scholarly Edition is, exactly.
While this lecture is usually taught live, it is based on a lecture I recorded in 2022 as part of a standalone MA course called ‘Digitala Metoder’ (Digital Research Methods) I co-taught at the University of Borås, and that I have used in various courses since. Autodidacts, or students looking for a quick refresher, can find and (re)watch that original video below.
Case Study: The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project
After our introduction to Textual Scholarship and Digital Scholarly Editing in general, a closer look at a good example of a Digital Scholarly Edition might help may clarify things even more. The example I’ve chosen is the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, which is co-directed by Dirk Van Hulle, my supervisor back when I was a PhD student.
As a ‘Genetic’ edition (designed with the principles of Genetic Criticism in mind), the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project focusses on editing Irish Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett’s source- and draft materials, with a view to analyzing his writing process. Besides demonstrating some of the tools, views and functionalities in the edition’s interface (all generated on the basis of documents transcribed in TEI-XML), this quick tour through the BDMP also serves to briefly demonstrate the kind of impact the study of draft materials may have on our understanding of published works.
The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, 2011–
Because copyright restrictions still apply to its source materials, users can currently only gain full access to the whole of the edition through an institutional or private subscription that helps pay for its license. Despite these limitations, the editors do offer access to some free features and sample documents, to demonstrate the edition’s potential. The examples I used in my demonstration are all taken from these free features, to help students try it out for themselves. Specifically, the example is taken from draft documents pertaining to Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape / La Dernière Bande. You can also (re)watch this demonstration in the second half of the video posted below.