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CORLI is a consortium of Huma-Num, the French national infrastructure dedicated to the technical support and promotion of digital humanities. The goal of CORLI is to promote and provide tools and information for good and efficient research practices in corpus linguistics, especially on spoken language corpora. Because of the time required to collect and transcribe spoken language resources, their number is limited and thus corpora need to be interoperable and reusable in order to improve research on themes such as phonology, prosody, interaction, syntax, and textometry. To help researchers reach this goal, CORLI has designed a pair of tools: TEICORPO to assist in the conversion and use of spoken language corpora, and TEIMETA for metadata purposes. TEICORPO is based on the principle of an underlying common format, namely TEI XML as described in its specification for spoken language use (ISO 2016). This tool enables the conversion of transcriptions created with alignment software such as CLAN, Transcriber, Praat, or ELAN as well as common file formats (CSV, XLSX, TXT, or DOCX) and the TEI format, which plays the role of a lossless pivot format. Backward conversion is possible in many cases, with limitations inherent in the destination target format. TEICORPO can run the Treetagger part-of-speech tagger and the Stanford CoreNLP tools on TEI files and can export the resulting files to textometric tools such as TXM, Le Trameur, or Iramuteq, making it suitable for spoken language corpora editing as well as for various research purposes.

The paper presents the KAS corpus of Slovenian academic writing, which consists of almost 65,000 B.A./B.Sc., 16,000 M.A./M.Sc. and 1600 Ph.D. theses (5 million pages or 1.7 billion tokens) gathered from the digital libraries of Slovenian higher education institutions via the Slovenian Open Science portal. We discuss the compilation, meta-data, annotation, and distribution of the corpus, which is made freely available via on-line concordancers and is openly available for research through the CLARIN.SI research infrastructure. We also present the tools for mono- and bilingual term extraction and for thesis structure annotation that were developed in the scope of the project, including the manually annotated datasets used to train these tools. This specialised corpus, large by any standards, represents a substantial and highly useful language resource for the study of Slovenian academic writing and for terminology extraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2014, the German Center for Art History Paris has had a department for Digital Humanities, which conducts its own research and supports projects at the DFK Paris by designing and implementing digital research. The projects have produced extensive data sets and have modeled space and spatial phenomena in different ways. Their results offer numerous opportunities for further research.

Watermarks are key to retracing the origins of paper manuscripts and early printed books and to understanding the context in which they were produced. TEI-P5, one of the most commonly used XML standards for digital descriptions of text-bearing objects, offers the possibility to describe watermarks, but not yet in a sufficiently detailed and consistent manner. The present article introduces a TEI-P5 customization for the description of paper and watermarks based on the International Standard for the Description of Paper, Watermarks and Paper Moulds in Relational Databases (IPHN 2.1.1). This customization provides TEI users with tools to make detailed, structured and standardized descriptions of paper, watermarks, and paper moulds. Such descriptions have the potential to improve the communication and collaboration between the different scholars working on paper manuscripts and early printed books. Moreover, once organized into a database, they can be mined in order to determine the origin and circulation of paper types. Therefore, the present customization can represent a strong asset in the study of the origins and material contexts of paper documents, handwritten or printed.

C. elegans are exposed to a variety of pathogenic and non-pathogenic bacteria species in their natural environment. Correspondingly, C. elegans has evolved an ability to discern between nutritive and infectious bacterial food sources. Here we show that C. elegans can learn to avoid the pathogenic bacteria Pseudomonas fluorescens 15 (PF15), and that this learned avoidance behavior is passed on to progeny for four generations, as we previously demonstrated for Pseudomonas aeruginosa (PA14) and Pseudomonas vranovensis , using similar mechanisms, including the involvement of both the TGF-β ligand DAF-7 and Cer1 retrotransposon-encoded virus-like particles. PF15 small RNAs are both necessary and sufficient to induce this transgenerational avoidance behavior. Unlike PA14 or P. vranovensis , PF15 does not use P11, Pv1, or a small RNA with maco-1 homology for this avoidance; instead, an unrelated PF15 small RNA, Pfs1, that targets the C. elegans vab-1 Ephrin receptor gene is necessary and sufficient for learned avoidance, suggesting the evolution of yet another bacterial sRNA/ C. elegans gene target pair involved in transgenerational inheritance of pathogen avoidance. As VAB-2 Ephrin receptor ligand and MACO-1 knockdown also induce PF15 avoidance, we have begun to understand the genetic pathway involved in small RNA targeted pathogenic avoidance. Moreover, these data show that axon guidance pathway genes (VAB-1 and VAB-2) have previously unknown adult roles in regulating neuronal function. C. elegans may have evolved multiple bacterial specificity-encoded small RNA-dependent mechanisms to avoid different pathogenic bacteria species, thereby providing progeny with a survival advantage in a dynamic environment.

The aim of the Eurasian Latin Archive (ELA, ela.unisi.it) project is to build an open-access digital platform of Latin and multilingual texts from medieval and early modern times concerning East Asia, which includes a Digital library and tools for textual and semantic analysis. Begun in March 2018 and ended in February 2020, the start-up phase of ELA (DAS-MeMo, www.dasmemo.unisi.it) had been co-financed by Regione Toscana and involves the University of Siena, the IT company QuestIT, specialized in Artificial Intelligence, and the publisher Pacini. This article seeks to explain the workflow of the project, its challenges, the first steps in building the prototype of the platform and adds some notes about further developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a student of intellectual, religious, and cultural developments in areas of the Chinese cultural sphere, my initial motivation for engaging with digital texts thirty years ago was to open up the new possibilities that the digital medium offered to researchers, without losing any of the affordances of a traditional printed edition. This requirement includes use of texts for reading, translating, annotating, quoting, and publishing, thus integrating with the whole of the scholarly workflow. At that time theories of electronic texts started to appear and the Text Encoding Initiative had already begun to create a common text model and interchange specification, based mainly on European languages. For East Asian texts, things were much more complicated because of different and quickly evolving character encoding standards, different textual traditions and approaches to text editing, as well as different institutional embedding. In this paper, I will look back at these developments, first to recount some of the history, albeit from a strictly personal perspective, but also to take stock of the situation and consider where we are now, how we got there, and what remains to be done to realize the dream of the universal digital text, easily shared and annotated, but still tractable, verifiable, and authoritative.

This article proposes use the Transkribus software to report on a "user experiment" in a French-speaking context. It is based on the semi-automated transcription project using the diary of the jurist Eugène Wilhelm (1866-1951). This diary presents two main challenges. The first is related to the time covered by the writing process-66 years. This leads to variations in the form of the writing, which becomes increasingly "unreadable" with time. The second challenge is related to the concomitant use of two alphabets: Roman for everyday text and Greek for private issues. After presenting the project and the specificities related to the use of the tool, the experiment presented in this contribution is structured around two aspects. Firstly, I will summarise the main obstacles encountered and the solutions provided to overcome them. Secondly, I will come back to the collaborative transcription experiment carried out with students in the classroom, presenting the difficulties observed and the solutions found to overcome them. In conclusion, I will propose an assessment of the use of this Human Text Recognition software in a French-speaking context and in a teaching situation.

The modelling and encoding of polylexical units, i.e. recurrent sequences of lexemes that are perceived as independent lexical units, is a topic that has not been covered adequately and in sufficient depth by the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), a de facto standard for the digital representation of textual resources in the scholarly research community. In this paper, we use the Dictionary of the Portuguese Academy of Sciences as a case study for presenting our ongoing work on encoding polylexical units using TEI Lex-0, an initiative aimed at simplifying and streamlining the encoding of lexical data with TEI in order to improve interoperability. We introduce the notion of macro- and microstructural relevance to differentiate between polylexicals that serve as headwords for their own independent dictionary entries and those which appear inside entries for different headwords. We develop the notion of lexicographic transparency to distinguish between those units which are not accompanied by an explicit definition and those that are: the former are encoded as –like constructs, whereas the latter becomes –like constructs, which can have further constraints imposed on them (sense numbers, domain labels, grammatical labels etc.). We codify the use of attributes on to encode different kinds of labels for polylexicals (implicit, explicit and normalised), concluding that the interoperability of lexical resources would be significantly improved if dictionary encoders would have access to an expressive but relatively simple typology of polylexical units.

The “web platform” for the correspondence between August Sauer and Bernhard Seuffert offers facsimiles and transcriptions of 436 letters, 811 post cards and one telegram exchanged by two eminent German studies scholars between 7th of July, 1880 and 2nd of September, 1926 (two weeks before August Sauer’s death in Prague), with varying – yet annotated – reliability. Since the correspondence covers a timespan of more than 46 years, it gives important insights into both the academic careers and the socio-cultural context, while covering personal matters of two academics’ lives. This review examines the digital spin-off project to a print edition as it existed until 2nd July 2020, when the site underwent a migration in a new infrastructure.

Charles Darwin’s correspondences are an invaluable resource for understanding his theories and works as well as English social life of the 19th century. About 15,000 letters are known, of which many appear for the first time in this hybrid print and digital edition of the Darwin Correspondence Project. It presents an authoritative edition of the letters from and to Darwin that is based on up-to-date scholarly standards and that is as comprehensive as possible. The completion of this project in progress is scheduled for 2022. Currently, all letters until 1875 are online with full transcriptions, and all remaining letters until Darwin’s death in 1882 are available in their metadata and summaries. Explanatory notes and extensive contextual essays provide valuable background information. The technical realisation of the project via the Epsilon framework is convincing as the edition is intuitively easy to use. It is, however, not possible to view the TEI-encoded files of the letters or to download the transcriptions and essays. With plenty of additional material, the Darwin Correspondence Project exceeds the scope of an edition and presents a widely interlinked online project that makes it a valuable and rich resource.

This review focuses on the digital edition of correspondence by the German composer Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826). In addition to his famous opera "Der Freischütz" and a huge repertory of other esteemed compositions, Weber left behind a vast number of documents that help to understand his musical works and the musical culture of the early Romantic period. The complete edition of Weber's works and documents, "WeGA" for short, has been providing transcripts and facsimilia online since 2011 including a digital edition of Weber's correspondence. The project provides a faceted search interface, dense linked data integration, open licenses, various export formats and an API as well as clear and transparent documentations. Overall, it can be seen as an example for a-state-of-the-art digital edition.

Ferruccio Busoni – Briefe und Schriften is a digital scholarly edition of letters and other writings from the literary estate of the Italian composer Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924). It aims to transcribe and richly encode these documents as well as publish them along with a critical apparatus and digital facsimiles. The project is currently work in progress – at the moment of this review – and successfully functions as a community project with contributions from university students. Despite minor shortcomings which are perfectly normal for a project in this stage, the Busoni edition leaves an excellent overall impression and stands out in regard to data quality and standards compliance.

The digital edition “Briefe und Texte aus dem intellektuellen Berlin um 1800” collects letters and texts depicting the intellectual life of the early 19th century Berlin. The transcribed letters and texts are diligently edited and richly annotated with metadata and enriched with authority control data. While an edition specific TEI-XML schema is missing, great effort is made to make the editorial work transparent and accessible. The edition faces some challenges of long time support and availability, but long term access is facilitated with the raw XML data of the digital edition being provided openly licensed and easily accessible for download.

The present paper describes a project aiming at editing University glosses of the thirteenth century copied around the Aristotelian treatises on nature. No reference edition of this corpus has been carried out. Furthermore, editions of glosses in paper or electronic form do not always meet the reader’s needs, among which the rendition of complex manuscript traditions and of the link between the glosses and the text, or a simplified interface for reading the text and the marginal and interlinear glosses sequentially. XML-TEI encoding allows to render these features and to produce outputs to paper and electronic formats, thanks to XSLT transformation sheets. The electronic format enables the editions of ancient sources to be read in new ways. Through the creation of encoding and transforming tools and methodologies, the project seeks the constitution of a resource center for scientific edition.

The review presents and compares three open source and web-based text collation tools, namely Juxta Web Service, LERA, and Variance Viewer, and investigates their suitability especially for philological work with TEI. While all tools adequately fulfill the general requirements of text collation, each of them supports individual workflow concepts and visualization methods. It is recommended that future developments consider supporting TEI standoff markup and tool modularization.

Cet article propose une réflexion sur les méthodes potentielles de l’analyse comparative des corpus poétiques, assistée par ordinateur. On distingue les « corpus clos », dont l’unité est garantie par la présence de certaines règles de composition dans chaque élément, des «corpus ouverts», où les critères chronologiques ou linguistiques comptent, sans prendre en considération les contraintes poétiques (ou bien le corpus est défini par l’absence d’une contrainte poétique spécifique). La pratique courante est l’étiquetage avec le code TEI, mais une description des poèmes dans la plus grande profondeur possible reste rare. Comme solution alternative, idéalisée, de poétique générative, on propose la construction d’une grille de description semblable aux «tables queneleieff» de l’Oulipo ; un exemple précoce de ce type d’approche est le traité de poétique Leys d’amors de Guilhem Molinier (xive siècle), qui contient des éléments de poétique combinatoire.

EVT (Edition Visualization Technology) is a software tool to publish Digital Scholarly Editions on the Web. Its development dates back to the start of this decade, and it can boast quite an interesting development history: it was started as a Project-Based Learning initiative within the scope of a single edition project, but it has evolved in a versatile tool valued and used by many researchers. The current development version is based on the beta that has been released in October 2017: it surely is more feature-rich if compared to the first alpha version released in July 2016, however it is still very much critical edition-oriented. A full version supporting diplomatic / interpretative editions, complete with a new, powerful image viewer and a search engine, will be released in the second half of 2019. This paper will report on EVT progress and it will also propose some remarks about its development and the research questions that it entails, namely: the problems that derive from designing an User Interface that must take into account a great number of elements interacting on different layers; the new features that will be introduced in the first stable version and the impact that they will have on the final users; the soundness of the open source development model and the relationship with other projects.

The article presents the results of a digital editing project devoted to Leo Tolstoy’s The Collected Works, developed as an open access material. Our main source is the ninety-volume critical edition of Leo Tolstoy’s texts. The article portrays the developing of a metadata structure for the texts, which were divided into three categories: literary texts, diaries, and letters. The markers derive from the mechanism of the critical edition, and the mark-up itself allows for a creation of an image of Tolstoy’s evolution as a writer. The critical edition’s index also constitutes an important source of data, which was digitised as part of the project and developed as a specialised web service. This data supports, in particular, the construction of a network of references between the people and texts essential to Tolstoy. Furthermore, the layout of references in itself might become the basis of social network analysis, a methodological technique, popular in contemporary humanities. In the final part of the article, the ‘Textograph’ is discussed – a technical platform serving to render manuscripts digital, which was developed in order to digitise Tolstoy’s manuscripts, but can also be used to work on manuscripts of other writers.

Digital critical editions hold the promise of supporting new scholarly research activities not previously possible or practical with print critical editions. This promise resides in the specific ability to integrate corpora, their associated editorial material and other related content into system architectures and data structures that exploit the strengths of the digital publishing environment. The challenge is to do more than simply create an online copy of the print publication, but rather to provide the kind of resource that both eases and extends the research activities of scholars. Authoritative collections published online in this manner, and with the same rigor brought to the print publishing process, offer scholars: the ability to discover more elusive, granular pieces of information with greater facility; tighter, more obvious and more accessible connections between authoritative versions of texts, editorial matter and primary source material; and continually corrected and expanded "editions," no longer dependent upon the print lifecycle. This paper will explore these benefits and others as they are instantiated in the recently released Mark Twain Papers Online (MTPO) (http://www.marktwainproject.org), created and published as a joint project of the Mark Twain Papers & Project at The Bancroft Library of UC Berkeley (the Papers), the University of California Press (UC Press), and the California Digital Library of the University of California (CDL). This current release of MTPO is comprised of more than twenty three hundred letters written between 1853 and 1880; over twenty eight thousand records of other letters with text not held by the Papers; nearly one hundred facsimiles; and makes available the many decades of archival research on the part of the editors at the Papers. Of particular focus in this discussion will be several key features of the system which, despite the many challenges they presented in development, were felt to be essential pieces of a digital publication that could support scholarship in new and significant ways. Those features include facets, which create intellectual structure and support serendipity; advanced search, which provides a means for researchers to apply their own analytical frameworks; citation support functionality, which serves to secure and record the outcomes of research exploration; and complex displays of individual letters, which allow detailed inspection by collocating the pieces of the authoritative object. These features together maintain the integrity and stability of the collection, while concurrently allowing for fluidity in the continued expansion of the material. In this way, MTPO hopes to succeed as a digital critical edition that will support and extend the research activities of scholars.