Abstract
The production of digital critical editions of texts using TEI is now a widely-adopted procedure within digital humanities. The work described in this paper extends this approach to the publication of gnomologia (anthologies of wise sayings) , which formed a widespread literary genre in many cultures of the medieval Mediterranean. These texts are challenging because they were rarely copied straightforwardly ; rather , sayings were selected , reorganised , modified or re-attributed between manuscripts , resulting in a highly interconnected corpus for which a standard approach to digital publication is insufficient. Focusing on Greek and Arabic collections , we address this challenge using semantic web techniques to create an ecosystem of texts , relationships and annotations , and consider a new model – organic , collaborative , interconnected , and open-ended – of what constitutes an edition. This semantic web-based approach allows scholars to add their own materials and annotations to the network of information and to explore the conceptual networks that arise from these interconnected sayings .
Highlights
The TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) XML format has been widely adopted as the standard encoding for marking up textual data with semantic content [Mylonas & Renear, 1999; Pierazzo, 2011; Sperberg-McQueen, 1991]
Ongoing consultation with manuscript scholars provided formative evaluative feedback for further developments. These included technical collaborations with the Islandora team in Prince Edward Island, Canada, with whom we developed a TEI to RDF mapping for automatic extraction of the RDF triples inherent in the TEI markup and the triples encoded in elements [Jordanous, Stanley & Tupman 2012, Tupman, Jordanous & Stanley 2013]. This mapping was deployed in the Islandora Critical Editions Solution Pack, a repository-based software tool for managing digital editions produced by the Editing Modernism in Canada (EMIC) project in conjunction with the Canadian company Discovery Garden
The first evaluative method identified by Brank et al (2005) is to compare the ontology to an existing ‘golden standard’; in our case we identified in Section 3.1 that the best candidate for an existing ‘golden standard’ in this domain is the FRBRoo ontology
Summary
The TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) XML format has been widely adopted as the standard encoding for marking up textual data with semantic content [Mylonas & Renear, 1999; Pierazzo, 2011; Sperberg-McQueen, 1991]. It has long been realised that philosophical, moral and scientific ideas have travelled, both within and beyond their own cultures, through the transmission of complete texts, but in collections of citations and summaries. These collections survive in abundant medieval manuscripts, which are not very rewarding to publish; and it is not easy to illustrate such processes within the confines of print.
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