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International audience; The digital edition Letters and Texts (http://tei.ibi.hu-berlin.de/berliner-intellektuelle/?en) was from its very beginning conceived to offer the quality of a scholarly edition as well as reader-friendly text presentation for a non-scholarly audience. For each document, both a diplomatic transcription and a reading version are being generated on the basis of the same TEI document. The reading version does not contain all the additions, deletions and line breaks and hence offers a linearly readable text. Additionally, a scan of the manuscript page is presented on the same level as the transcription. Metadata, entities and XML-document are also available on that same display level.While all of these displays are available, the standard view offered in the edition is that of a scan of the manuscript on the left side and the diplomatic transcription on the right side. By offering this view of the text first, the edition engages the reader to a predetermined reading - one that, in many ways, remains in the German editorial tradition. But the kind of information it transports is not the same as what print facsimile editions do. While digital editions do a complex work in establishing the chronology of text genesis (which is made necessary by the TEI-encoding, while a print facsimile edition is not compelled to produce this kind of analysis), there is a tendency not to render all glyphs and signs with the same precision as print facsimile editions do. The reader, so the editors’ assumption, should be able to establish the connection between the scan and the transcription by his/herself.On the one hand, editors of scholarly digital editions tend, like all editors, to confront their reader with their own image. On the other hand, they try to break away from the page format, without being able to do so completely, especially in the case of editions involving scans of originals. Addressing both these challenges is not the sole difficulty. A digital edition is not only (maybe not even primarily) for humans to read, but for them to search in, through links and search interfaces. Information connection is another level of reading for which it is not so easy to anticipate how the reader will approach it – on that level too, directing one’s reader towards one’s own interpretation of the text is not necessarily helpful. But which other options do we have?Finally, scholarly digital editions address computers - at least those editions that put their XML source code at disposal. When they do so, they are built for distant reading as well as close reading. How is it possible to address all of these readers and forms of reading? This paper presents the work that has been done in the context of the digital edition Letters and texts to that aim and it shows that asking oneself for whom one edits is a key to defining one’s own editorial hermeneutics.

The paper discusses the phenomenon of text reuse in the manuscript tradition of Ethiopia and Eritrea and, by examining examples of different forms of text reuse, presents the possibilities of its encoding in TEI XML within the frame of the project Beta maṣāḥǝft. Text reuse, which consists in the implicit or explicit repetition of text, is attested in a variety of forms, including quotations, allusions, paraphrases, and cross-linguistic text reuse. The documentation of this practice contributes to the study of different aspects of the manuscript tradition, for example, to the impact and relative dating of texts, and history of their transmission. The variety of text reuse forms allows for different approaches to their encoding which are presented in this paper to illustrate the possibilities of text reuse markup within the project’s schema. Additionally, the paper discusses the concept of narrative units and its difference to the concept of text reuse, as well as the markup of a type of text reuse which involves the reference to external entities.

Trente ans après les débuts de l’édition numérique de textes médiévaux en français, le bilan est maigre et les méthodes éditoriales privilégient les éditions documentaires, dans la tradition anglo-saxonne du scholarly documentary editing. Cette contribution voudrait sensibiliser les médiévistes francisants à l’intensité actuelle des débats théoriques consacrés à l’édition numérique et à la place que peut y trouver l’édition critique. Après une mise au point terminologique, elle revient sur les raisons qui expliquent le triomphe des éditions numériques orientées vers le document, avant de rappeler que le numérique ne modifie pas l’ontologie des textes et ne disqualifie pas l’approche de la critique textuelle. Au contraire, une complémentarité est à trouver entre éditions documentaires et éditions auctoriales. Thirty years after the first digital edition projects for texts in Old and Middle French, the results are meager and editorial methods favor documentary editions, in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of scholarly documentary editing. This contribution aims to sensitize the medievalists interested in French texts and documentation to the current intensity of the theoretical debates devoted to the digital edition and the place that the critical edition can find there. After a terminological refinement, it returns to the reasons for the triumph of digital editions oriented towards the document, before recalling that the digital does not modify the ontology of texts and does not disqualify the approach of textual criticism. On the contrary, a complementarity is to be found between documentary editions and critical editions.

As its point of departure, this essay makes a clear distinction between genetic criticism and genetic editing. For both, the material as well as visual referent is the manuscript, specifically the draft manuscript. An argument is developed in detail that the draft manuscript is a document sui generis, is essentially “autographic” and thus ontologically distinct from all other forms and modes of “manuscript”. This brings into specific focus the editing of manuscripts. Defining manuscript editing (Handschriftenedition) as a distinct editorial mode leads to conceiving of the ”manuscript edition” anew under premises of the “autographic” singularity of draft manuscript writing. The editorial way to realize manuscript editing is to transform both the document (materiality-and-writing) dimension and the text dimension of the draft manuscript into editorial presentation and representation. This is also a way to bring manuscript editing into partnership with genetic criticism. Realization and use of the manuscript edition is conceivable in the digital medium only.

The project of editing the early Biographie W. A. Mozart’s (1828) by Georg Nikolaus Nissen (Nissen Online) began as part of the Digital Mozart-Edition (DME) at the Mozarteum Foundation Salzburg. The aim of the edition is to reveal the structure of the text by identifying the diverse sources Nissen relied on when writing the biography. These include primary sources such as original letters and documents from the Mozart family, secondary sources such as contemporary literature about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and original text written by the author and later editors. Considering the challenges that arise when creating an edition that tries to define the different strands of a text, this paper describes how XML/TEI markup was applied to encode text passages which often do not correlate with common text structures (paragraphs, chapters); document different types of sources and their authors or editors; and integrate a detailed bibliography of the sources as well as critical annotations for each single text passage.

The encoding of letters has a long tradition in the TEI but there have been no official recommendations in the TEI Guidelines on how to deal with correspondence. Two TEI customizations present exemplary models: DALF: Digital Archive of Letters in Flanders and Carl Maria von Weber—Collected Works (WeGA). These were the basis of the work of the TEI Correspondence Special Interest Group that formed a task force—consisting of the three authors of this article—for developing encoding guidelines. This article discusses correspondence theory in brief, letters as an act of communication, and how these aspects of correspondence can be expressed by TEI entities. The development of the communication-oriented concept of correspondence and its direct implementation in correspondence-specific metadata structures will be discussed. Central is the new wrapper element (correspondence description), which stores key metadata about the encoded piece of correspondence. After addressing this first question of how one should encode correspondence with the TEI, we will discuss the question of linking and interchange between projects and editions dealing with correspondence material. To facilitate this, the Correspondence Metadata Interchange (CMI) format has been developed by the TEI Correspondence SIG’s task force as a subset of . Finally, we will describe some organizational difficulties in implementing the new elements and encoding model into the TEI Guidelines in 2015.

Are the data of an edition means to a particular and privileged presentation, or is the presentation a side effect? Because of the changing nature of computer systems, with constant progression in hardware and software, the encoded texts are the most important long-term outcome of the project—the representation of the knowledge— and presentation within a particular application is destined to become obsolete relatively quickly. However, it is most often the presentation output, rather than the source data, which is published and shared. We believe this is largely because there is currently no way of expressing, in the source encoding, aspects of presentation which are seen by editors as a crucial part of their work. Given a framework for encoding processing expectations for a variety of output formats, editors would be much more inclined to share the encoded files as their prime output, and intentions for presentation would be much more likely to survive repeated technology transitions as processing tools develop and change. We believe the collision between the individuality of research and the quest for common tools that aid in the creation of digital editions will be solved not by creating another piece of specialized publishing software but rather by creating a general framework for processing TEI documents and similar, modular solutions for other tasks in the publishing workflow. Such an abstraction layer admittedly still requires some fluency in computer technologies, but far less than for setting up a publication system from scratch in a general-purpose programming language.

The encoding of letters has a long tradition in the TEI but there have been no official recommendations in the TEI Guidelines on how to deal with correspondence. Two TEI customizations present exemplary models: DALF: Digital Archive of Letters in Flanders and Carl Maria von Weber—Collected Works (WeGA). These were the basis of the work of the TEI Correspondence Special Interest Group that formed a task force—consisting of the three authors of this article—for developing encoding guidelines. This article discusses correspondence theory in brief, letters as an act of communication, and how these aspects of correspondence can be expressed by TEI entities. The development of the communication-oriented concept of correspondence and its direct implementation in correspondence-specific metadata structures will be discussed. Central is the new wrapper element (correspondence description), which stores key metadata about the encoded piece of correspondence. After addressing this first question of how one should encode correspondence with the TEI, we will discuss the question of linking and interchange between projects and editions dealing with correspondence material. To facilitate this, the Correspondence Metadata Interchange (CMI) format has been developed by the TEI Correspondence SIG’s task force as a subset of . Finally, we will describe some organizational difficulties in implementing the new elements and encoding model into the TEI Guidelines in 2015.

The TEI schemas and guidelines have made it possible for many scholars and researchers to encode texts of any kind for (almost) all kinds of purposes, but this excellent standard is matched by an astounding diversity of publishing tools, which is particularly true when it comes to image-based digital editions. The different needs of scholars, coupled with the constant search for an effective price/result ratio and the local availability of technical skills, have led to a remarkable fragmentation: publishing solutions range from simple HTML pages produced using the TEI stylesheets (or the TEI Boilerplate software) to very complex frameworks based on CMS and SQL search engines. Researchers of the Digital Vercelli Book project started looking into a simple, user-friendly solution and eventually decided to build their own: EVT (Edition Visualization Technology) has been under development since about 2010 and has turned into a flexible tool that can be used to create a web-based digital edition starting from transcription files encoded in TEI XML. This paper describes why this tool was created, how it works, and developments planned for the future.

International audience; This paper introduces the digital edition Letters and Texts: Intellectual Berlin around 1800, which is being developed by the junior research group "Berlin Intellectuals 1800–1830" at the Institute for German Literature of the Humboldt University in Berlin. The aim of the edition is to shed new light on literary and intellectual networks in the Prussian capital city around 1800 by making accessible valuable letters, manuscripts, and other documents that have been neglected by researchers. The focus is on writers, scholars, and publishers who contributed to the intense intellectual activity in Berlin around 1800 and whose edited texts afford the reader with a deeper knowledge of their writings as well as their position within the intellectual community of their time.As we developed the concept and the editorial guidelines of the edition, we used it as a basis for the class "Introduction to Digital Humanities" given to master's students in the European Literatures degree program at Humboldt University. Besides introducing students to XML/TEI and other tools to help create their own editions, the aim was to encourage debate on the impact of digital humanities on literary studies. The fact that the digital edition Letters and Texts was still in the process of being developed had advantages as well as some disadvantages for the discussions.In the first part of this article, we present the edition in its current state, the content of the corpora, the encoding architecture, and the planned next steps. The second part describes the way this research structure is being used as a facility for teaching. We also describe how we handled questions and the implementation of suggestions arising from the edition in the classroom. General questions about the role digital humanities plays in literary curricula in Germany and what could be gained from introducing digital humanities classes to a curriculum conclude this paper.

The standard workflow for preparing digital editions for display involves writing XSL to transform handcrafted TEI into either 1) HTML for the web or 2) XSL-FO for conversion into a print friendly format such as PDF. With either method we implicitly recognize that TEI, even coupled with CSS, is not designed as a presentation technology. Many born-digital documents, however, are encoded in formats that are, such as HTML. Hypothetical future editions of such documents would most likely need to be supplemented by a document description that goes beyond the facilities of HTML to meet the needs of editors. Thus we foresee cases where born-HTML documents could be supplemented and described by TEI in much the same way as TEI currently supplements and describes manuscripts and printed books. In this paper we investigate ways that XHTML documents both with and without RDFa can be “transformed backward” into TEI. In addition to the digital edition use case, we also investigate a process for converting HTML content to TEI-based language corpora.

In Transition: Selected Poems by the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven is a publicly available scholarly edition of twelve unpublished poems written by Freytag-Loringhoven between 1923 and 1927. This edition provides access to a textual performance of her creative work in a digital environment. It is encoded using the Text Encoding Initiative’s (TEI) P5 Guidelines for critical apparatuses including parallel segmentation and location-referenced encoding. The encoded text is rendered into an interactive web interface using XSLT, CSS, and JavaScript available through the Versioning Machine (http://www.v-machine.org/). One aspect of textual performance theory I am exploring within In Transition concerns the social text network. The social text network these twelve texts always and already represent presupposes the notion of a constant circulation of networked social text systems. The network represented by In Transition is based primarily on issues of reception, materiality, and themes which engage and reflect the social nature of the text in the 1920s and now. This is to say two things: (1) that the concept of the network is not new with digital scholarly editions; and (2) that these networks in a digital edition foreground the situated 1920s history of these texts as well as the real-time, situated electronic reading environment. The argument of a digital edition like In Transition is formed as much by the underlying theory of text as it is by its content and the particular application or form it takes. This discussion employs the language of knowledge representation in computation (through terms like domain, ontology, and logic) in order to situate this scholarly edition within two existing frameworks: theories of knowledge representation in computation and theories of scholarly textual editing.