Digital Critical Edition Research Articles

Digital critical edition of Čiurlionis' piano music: a case study

Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875–1911) is a key figure in Lithuanian music and art. As a professional composer and painter, he left behind over 220 paintings and 350 musical compositions. His art showcases early examples of abstract painting and serial music in Europe. However, his work and contributions to the music world are not widely known. The publication of his music was delayed for 50 years, and several different systems of cataloguing Čiurlionis' music were used, as well as different editing practices and multiple editorial versions. This complexity made the performance and further research of his music complicated for contemporary users. After a grant of the Lithuanian Research Council was received in 2022, the digital critical edition of Čiurlionis' piano music was started. It is based on the previous research done by members of a research team, when the Chronological Catalogue of Čiurlionis Music (2007) and several urtext editions were published (2010–2020). The currently developed prototype online system is a web-based application that enables users to work with all of Čiurlionis' piano music (manuscripts and previous editions), to use the digital edition for performances, and for further studies or research. The corpus of material is presented as an online digital critical edition with a catalogue, search tool and a specially developed tool for musicological and computational analysis of music scores.

Digital Critical Editions of Ottoman Turkish Poetry: The Baki Project

Digital Critical Editions of Ottoman Turkish Poetry: The Baki Project

The Visual [Re]Presentation of Textual Data in Traditional and Digital Critical Editions

The prospect of breaking free from the confines of the printed page drives much of the interest in digital critical editions; yet the format of traditional editions in print remains an effective and efficient information visualization. This paper will argue that using the data from a digital edition to [re]present the traditional format of a printed edition can illuminate the strengths and weaknesses of both platforms. In addition to making the data available in a familiar format for offline reading, a print visualization is also a useful test of the digital edition’s data model. It can also promote a shift toward thinking about textual data and its visualization (in print or on a screen) as separate concerns.

The Ladys Museum Project: A Digital Critical Edition in Phase 1 of Its Development, Now Available for Teachers and Students to Learn Collaboratively through Charlotte Lennoxs Ladys Museum (1761-62)

This announcement informs readers on how they can use, and participate in, the Lady's Museum Project (ladysmuseum.com). It discusses the work completed and the forthcoming updates planned for teachers', scholars', and students' use of this first critical edition of Charlotte Lennox's the Lady's Museum, as of spring 2022.

Sur la machinerie logique de la dialectique postclassique : le Kitāb ʿAyn al-Naẓar de Shams al-Dīn al-Samarqandī (m. 722/1322)

The post-classical (or post-Avicennan, post-Rāzian) genre of the “protocols for dialectical inquiry and disputation” (ādāb al-baḥth wa-l-munāẓara) has its more proximate origins in the famed Risāla of Shams al-Dīn al-Samarqandī (d. 722/1322). The greater part of his conceptions and methodology, however, consists in a streamlining and universalizing of the more strictly juristic dialectic (jadal / khilāf) of his teacher Burhān al-Dīn al-Nasafī (d. 687/1288); and this in turn draws on the highly logicized dialectic of Rukn al-Dīn al-ʿAmīdī (d. 615/1218) and his teacher Raḍī al-Dīn al-Nīsābūrī (d. 617/1220). At the heart of methods in this lineage, and carried forward by al-Samarqandī into the universal ādāb al-baḥth, are three truth-preserving logical relationships critical to the truth-seeking enterprise of dialectic: entailment (talāzum / mulāzama), mutual negation or exclusion (tanāfin / munāfā), and causal concomitance (dawarān). The practical elaboration of these relations reveals a logic in action—a premodern dialogical logic for living disputation praxis. In fact, so critical were these to the dialectical enterprise that al-Samarqandī devoted a specialized treatise entirely to summarizing their defining features and rules, aptly naming it the ʿAyn al-Naẓar, or “Wellspring of Rational Investigation.” In this article, and drawing upon a recently published digital critical edition, I will present an analytical outline of these core logical relations as presented in the ʿAyn al-Naẓar. Then I will address a number of points of interest in this text, grouped under six themes: the potential for cross-disciplinary advancement; notions in discursive development; significant or uniquely contributive formulations; peculiarities of content; signs of an evolving, universalist agenda; and evidence that the ʿAyn al-Naẓar was designed as an aide-mémoire for the active disputant.

Contributors

LIZA BLAKE is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto, with research interests in the intersection of literature, philosophy, and science; women writers; textual editing; and book history. Her work is published and forthcoming in SEL, ELR, PBSA, JEMCS, Criticism, and postmedieval. She has edited Margaret Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies: A Digital Critical Edition (https://library2.utm.utoronto.ca/poemsandfancies/), and she is one of the General Editors of The Complete Works of Margaret Cavendish, under contract with Punctum Books. KATHERINE GILLEN is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University–San Antonio and author of Chaste Value: Economic Crisis, Female Chastity and the Production of Social Difference on Shakespeare’s Stage (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). She is currently working on a monograph exploring intersections of classicism and racial whiteness in early modern drama, and she is coediting an anthology of Shakespeare appropriations set and staged in...

Popol Wujs: Culture, Complexity, and the Encoding of MayaCosmovisión

AbstractThe Popol Wuj is one of the most important, commonly studied, and widely circulated Indigenous literary works from colonial Mesoamerica. By some accounts, there are 1,200 editions of the work published in thirty world languages, all of which trace back to a single manuscript—itself a copy of an earlier Mayan work. To protect their work from being destroyed by colonial officials or Inquisitional authorities, the original K’iche’ authors of the Popol Wuj had to embed their ways of knowing in a language and narrative structure that could not be detected by Spanish readers. Each edition of the Popol Wuj therefore helps to uncover different elements of the cosmovisión that is embedded in the text. This article draws from recent collaborative efforts to prepare a digital critical edition of the Popol Wuj based on the editorial standards and scholarly conventions of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). By comparing and contrasting the advantages and drawbacks of this edition relative to printed works and digital editions, we suggest how methods from the digital humanities can shed new light on texts like the Popol Wuj.

The critical edition between digital and print: methodological considerations

This contribution explores the world of digital critical editions by proposing reflections on the methodology that can be used for their production. The first part analyses the positions of various scholars on the digital critical edition and its definition. In particular, the relationship between digital critical edition and digital scholarly edition is explored. The criteria used to build Sahle's and Franzini's catalogues help to understand both the concept of digital scholarly edition and the state of the art of digital critical editions in the classical context. Subsequently, the constituent elements of the digital edition are taken into consideration and how they can be integrated with the critical edition method. Elements such as the choice of mark-up language and tools for creating an interface in relation to the text are an integral part of the digital critical edition process. For this reason, they need a thorough reflection on their characteristics and their use. Finally, we focus on the potential of the digital critical edition and how it differs from the printed critical edition, proposing new ways of transmission and scientific communication of philological work, starting from the critical apparatus to the use of images as components of the editions and the possibility of collaborative editions.

Un’esperienza al di fuori di EVT. L’edizione digitale dei documenti dell’abbazia di S. Maria della grotta sul portale internazionale Monasterium.Net

The paper describes context, development, methodology, tools, problems and plans for the future of the research activities which have already originated the collaborative digital critical edition of the documents of the Abbey of S. Maria della Grotta (2018). This edition aimed at experimenting with the editor of the Monasterium.Net platform and was developed by an international group of editors. Its main function was to test the real and current possibilities of producing critical editions of documents online and to address the problem of the full recognition of digital products of this kind within the relevant scientific community. Naturally, this function implies also the search for a practical solution to interrogate and interpret the data it contains.

Voltaire’s Incomplete Works (and Why They Will Stay that Way)

The Complete works of Voltaire published by the Voltaire Foundation were begun in 1968 and will be completed in 203 volumes in 2021. In so far as discoveries of manuscripts and editions will continue to be made, this monumental edition is necessarily incomplete. But it is also incomplete in another more profound sense. Eighteenth-century editions of Voltaire present an often unstable version of the text; Voltaire cultivates an open and fluid style, making frequent use of self-quotation, and blurring traditional generic boundaries; Voltaire's characteristically slippery authorial posture, making frequent use of anonymity and pseudonymity, adds further instability to the œuvre. For all these reasons, Voltaire's works present a particular challenge to the critical editor of a print edition – a challenge that perhaps can only be fully met in a digital critical edition.

Digital Editions of Early Modern Women's Writing

Abstract: Martine van Elk on Mary Wroth's Poetry: An Electronic Edition, The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, and Margaret Cavendish's Poems and Fancies: A Digital Critical Edition

Medieval Glosses as a Test Subject for the Building of Tools for Digital Critical Editions

The thirteenth-century Latin corpus of the Oxford gloss has challenging features. A digital scholarly edition of this corpus necessitates innovative solutions that on the one hand account for the complex structure and content of the text and its manuscript transmission, and on the other hand convey these data comprehensibly to the reader. There are still few user-friendly tools which allow scholars to encode a digital critical edition easily, particularly its critical apparatus, in TEI XML. In this article, I document my approach to editing a digital corpus of philosophical glosses, and explain the tools I am using and customizing to make available to a larger public of digital scholarly editors, especially in the field of medieval studies.

The theoretical, methodological and technical issues of digital folklore databases and computational folkloristics

The study examines the problems and possibilities presented by the digitization of national folklore archives and collections in the wider context of folklore archiving and digital humanities. The primary goal of the study is to present a problem-oriented and critical overview of the available digital databases containing folklore texts (WossiDiA, Sagragrunnur, ETKSpace, Danish Folklore Nexus, Nederlandse VolksverhalenBank, The Schools’ Collection, etc.), and of the analyses conducted on these using computational methods. The paper first presents a historical overview of the conceptualization that went into the creation of folklore databases (genre-centered, collector, and collection-centered approaches), followed by a discussion of the practical, technical, and theoretical aspects of digital content creation (crowdsourcing, markup languages, TEI, digital critical editions, etc.). The study then takes a look at the new digital tools and methods applied in the analysis of digitized folklore texts (text-mining, network theory methods, data visualization), and finally places databases and computational folkloristics within a larger theoretical framework.

Computer - Assisted Processing of Intertextuality in Ancient Languages

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 .

Daniel Apollon, Claire Bélisle and Philippe Régnier (eds.), Digital Critical Editions

Born of the French-Norwegian collaborative network “Digital Publishing and Reading”, Digital Critical Editions offers nine original and thought-provoking essays (and a valuable bibliography of online resources) to address the ongoing transition from print-based critical editing to its digital counterpart. Eschewing any epochal model that insists on decisive breaks, the emphasis instead is on the uneven, gradual nature of this development: on what the editors describe, in an elegant formulatio...

Digital Critical Editions (2014) Daniel Apollon, Claire Bélisle and Philippe Régnier

Digital Critical Editions is an exciting and poignant contribution to the field of textual editing, and particularly ‘digital’ textual editing, originating from the Digital Humanities, a forum of discussion currently dominated by Anglo-American communities. While influenced by this dominance, the very welcome voices of Digital Critical Editions provide a new and refreshing consideration of the central themes of digital textual editing by drawing from relevant lesser known but deeply interesting initiatives. This volume can be divided into two parts: the former deals with the principles and current practices in (digital) editing, while the latter provides a more detailed analysis of their making. The first part begins with an insightful exploration of the history of textual scholarship from three editorial science perspectives: the first concerns itself with the pursuit of the origin of a text, the second considers its ecology, and the third its individuality. While each perspective steers scholars in different directions of enquiry, the authors maintain that it is only by combining the three that an editor can produce a complete study and guide the development of (digital) textual scholarship. The authors frame the first perspective with a recollection of the genetic approaches formulated by Lachmann and Bedier, two of the supporting pillars of the textual criticism epistyle. But even the most sturdy of pillars is subject to the fragility of its grounds; Lachmann’s and Bedier’s hunt for the archetype is hindered by a history of editorial contamination and, as Cerquiglini observed, tends to overlook the second perspective or the context of a text. The editor must turn to the text’s relationships with history, language, and society, insomuch as it is the contextual diversity that allows the editor to better define the text’s idiosyncrasies. By the same token, the text’s individuality, the third perspective, can itself be seen as the Heraclitean one in which multiple strands converge. Indeed, this pervading dualistic nature of philology, often referred to as ‘new’ and ‘old’ philology, can also be considered a matter of perspective.

Early music and the Music Encoding Initiative

The Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) is a collaborative, open-source project focused on building a comprehensive framework for the creation of electronic formats that support encoding of symbolic music notation and other associated data and metadata. The MEI community strives to create scholarly standards for digital musical analysis, criticism and editorial work similar to those available for textual material. The community includes practitioners from a diverse range of related disciplines including musicology, music theory, music librarianship and music technology, each contributing to ongoing discussions and tools for building digital critical music editions. This article provides an introduction to music encoding and MEI in the context of early music.

La edición crítica digital de textos teatrales. La Estrella de Sevilla como ejemplo

Este artículo da cuenta del proceso que se está llevando a cabo para la creación de una edición crítica digital multilingüe y multimedia del texto áureo La Estrella de Sevilla. Partiendo de una reflexión sobre qué es una edición crítica digital, se pasa por el análisis de diversos proyectos de edición de textos teatrales hasta llegar a cuestiones prácticas sobre el marcado de los textos que forman esta edición.

Weberiana. Heft 21 (review)

Weberiana. Heft 21. (Mitteilungen der Internationalen Carl Maria von Weber Gesellschaft.) Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 2011. [236 p. ISBN 9783862960231. i28.] Music examples, illustrations. It has been over fifteen years since Michael C. Tusa first reported to Notes on the inauguration of the Weber-Studien, describing its first issue and, by implication, the Carl Maria von Weber Gesamtausgabe (WeGA), to which it is parallel publication, as bringing a refreshing focus on sources to field that has all too often been content to rely on the bibliographic and biographic work of the nineteenth century (Notes 52, no. 2 [December 1995]: 468). With the stated goal of creating complete edition of Weber's musical works, letters, writings and diaries by 2026 (the second centenary of the composer's death), the WeGA was indeed embarking on an ambitious project when it was constituted in 1992. Furthermore, year earlier related organization had been founded: the Inter - nationale Carl-Maria-von-Weber Gesell - schaft, which supports and assists in directing the work of WeGA, and which since 1992 has published Weberiana, an annual publication containing scholarly contributions from its members and reports on the work of the WeGA. Now that we are little more than halfway to that 2026 goal, perhaps this is an excellent time to assess WeGA's progress and review the most recent issue of Weberiana. As detailed in the Arbeitsberichte section of Weberiana, the most striking aspect of the project is its digital portion. One example of this is the digital editions that WeGA has been developing with the Edirom project (a project that specializes in the development of digital critical editions of music) to create critical editions of Weber's music on DVD. The software is designed for both the musicologist and performer, being capable of simultaneously presenting variant readings as well as facsimilies of the sources themselves. The DVD also contains complete letters and other primary documents that relate to the score. Further, when installed onto computer, the edition may be updated to include any future developments in the software and additional links to related sources as they surface. Another example of the society's digital work is the new website, http://www.webergesamtausgabe. de (accessed 10 January 2012), where all of Weber's letters, writings, diaries and documents will eventually be made available to the general public. Already fair number of these are present and completely searchable; some of them (and eventually all of them) with built-in links to pages describing works and people mentioned by Weber in them. Clicking on name's link leads to page where brief bio graphical information, iconography, and links to further named figures can be found. This new resource is very exciting, although it does give one pause to also see links to Wikipedia articles given for each figure. Finally, the WeGA is light years ahead of many other societies in terms of digital presence: by maintaining text that adheres to TEI (text encoding initiative), it is part of growing consortium of projects seeking interconnectivity with the goal of reaching across all discipline boundaries in order to build complex descriptions of historical facts that have never before been possible (p. 134; translations throughout this review are mine). Apart from the digital projects, the Arbeitsberichte section also describes the WeGA's paper-based publishing, which is continuing apace. In 2010 alone, three volumes appeared in the WeGA: piano scores of incidental and concert arias as well as overtures (ser. 8, vol. 7), the vocal score of Silvana, WeV. C.5a (ser. 8, vol. 1), and concertos and concertinos for clarinet and orchestra (ser. 5, vol. 6). While fewer than half of Weber's works had appeared in the WeGA by the midway point to 2026, and while one may be particularly eager to see editions of the big operas (Der Freischutz, Euryanthe and Oberon), if the WeGA can manage to keep up this pace, it will surely catch up in short order. …

<em>Uncle Tom's Cabin</em> in Our Time

A review considering the following works: Uncle Tom's Cabin in the National Era. Presented by the Harriet Beecher Center. http://nationalera.wordpress.comitable-of-contents/ The Norton Critical Edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Edited by Elizabeth Ammons. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 2010. XVIII 4- 616 pp. $15.75 paper. Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly. Edited by David S. Reynolds. Facsimile of the Splendid Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. XXXiii 608 pp., 126 illus. $24.95 cloth. Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Reading Revolution: Race, Literacy, Childhood, and Fiction, 1851-1911. By Barbara Hochman. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. XV + 377 pp., 40 illus. $80.00 cloth/$28.95 paper. Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America. By David S. Reynolds. New York: Norton, 2011. xiv 351 pp., 43 illus. $27.95 cloth/$17.95 paper. Uncle Tom's Cabin. Prod. Vera Mattlin Jiji. 1983; 2010. DVD. $19.89. In June 2011, more than one hundred scholars gathered at Bowdoin College to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Harriet Beecher Stowe. They heard and discussed papers that covered a wide range of topics, including the author's later works, her relationships with Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, her transatlantic connections, and Japanese translations of Uncle Tom's Cabin. They attended roundtable discussions of topics such as access to the archives at the Harriet Beecher Center in Hartford, Connecticut. Participants (including two of Stowe's descendants) saw performances of Stowe's works and even enjoyed a walking tour of her neighborhood in Brunswick, Maine. Arranged by the Harriet Beecher Society in conjunction with the Maine Humanities Council, the Maine Women Writers Collection, and Bowdoin College, the conference was the centerpiece of the prolific scholarly activity on and her famous novel in recent years. The online publication of the National Era serialization of Uncle Tom's the two print editions, two monographs, and the DVD of the staging of George Aiken's dramatization of Uncle Tom's Cabin under review here have all appeared since 2009, the year of the publication of my in Her Own Time as well as the Broadview edition of Uncle Tom's edited by Christopher G. Diller. A quick search of this brief time period in the MLA Bibliography reveals the publication of some thirty-five new articles and book chapters on the author and her best-known work. Three of these print articles are in languages other than English, and one is a selection from a digital critical edition of the novel in the new, entirely online journal Scholarly Editing. Moreover, one collection of essays moves away from the main event: Beyond Uncle Tom's Cabin: Essays on the Writing of Harriet Beecher Stowe, edited by Sylvia Mayer and Monika Mueller, both scholars at German universities. Without doubt, new scholarship on and Uncle Tom's Cabin is both transatlantic/pacific in nature and technologically sophisticated. As Tillie Olsen noted in Silences, Stowe was thirty-nine before she got to Uncle Tom's Cabin--at last. She wrote it in magazine serial installments--in between--when weary with teaching the children and tending the baby and buying provisions and mending and darning; much of it on the kitchen table (206). The rest of the story is well known. The book was a runaway best-seller, read by people all over the world, including Queen Victoria. Late in his life, William Dean Howells wrote that as a teenager he broke [his] heart over Uncle Tom's Cabin, which he first read as it was published in installments in the antislavery newspaper the National Era (51). A young Henry James saw a dramatic version of the novel, staged by P. T. Barnum at his American Museum in New York in 1853. Although many African American readers, such as Frederick Douglass, saw the value of the novel in attracting attention to the antislavery cause, others objected, feeling that knew little of the actuality of slavery. …