The development of digital technologies allows us to reflect on the way texts are edited and on the difference between scholarly traditional editions and scholarly digital editions (SDEs).

Patrick Sahle explains the concept of scholarly digital edition as a critical representation of historic, literary or documentary text, established and provided under the conditions of a digital ecosystem of scholarly knowledge resources. Moreover, he stresses that a digitized edition is not a digital edition since compared to a SDE it has such additional features that

a digital edition cannot be given in print without significant loss of content and functionality (2019: 27).

These additional features can be summed up by the concepts of accessibility, usability and searchability. As a matter of fact, SDEs are accessible and re-usable if it is published according to the principles of Open Access and retrievable in a variety of formats, which can be shared and reused in other projects. This is possible thanks to the semantic encoding in TEI-XML. TEI (an acronym for Text Encoding Initiative) is a standard for the representation of texts in digital form using XML (for which see 1.3 The digital epigraphic workshop). Semantic encoding allows the exploitation of multiple layers of the text for different kinds of analysis (linguistic, historical, palaeographical, metric, stylistic etc.) by underlining different textual aspects and making them searchable using the descriptive markup.

Furthermore, SDEs are richer than scholarly traditional editions due to the possibility of linking the critical text to facsimiles of witnesses (made available by libraries that are increasingly digitising their collections), according to the reference standard IIIF and occasionally aligning them to the text. Another innovation in scholarly digital editions is the presence of hyperlinks, which redirect the reader to external resources such as vocabularies or ontologies according to the Linked Open Data principles (for which see Unit I -  1.2 From user to maker). These features make the text fluid as it can potentially be implemented by anyone, who re-uses the text according to the specific purposes of his/her research; consequently, the edition becomes a process rather than a product as Sahle (2019: 29) points out, a process in which several scholars and several specialisations must collaborate. On the basis of these assumptions, the Institut für Dokumentologie und Editorik has formulated a manifest (Manifest für digitale Editionen) in the framework of the conference "Digital Humanities in deutschsprachigen Raum" (DHd2022), in order to promote shared standards for the publication of SDEs.

In this appendix, we will focus on the edition of texts transmitted by manuscript tradition. As has been observed by Paolo Monella (2018), there is a significant difference between sources transmitted by manuscripts, object of study of philology, and sources transmitted by ancient text-bearing objects, pertaining to disciplines such as epigraphy and papyrology; for more information on their digital editions, see Unit I - Digital Greek and Latin Epigraphy and Unit II - Digital Papyrology respectively. As the scholar states, if in the latter case the main focus is on the document, in its material, textual and contextual aspects, in the former case the focus is above all on the text, which is intended to be reconstructed in a form as close as possible to the author's intention and cleansed of the alterations produced by the manuscript transmission according to the Lachmannian paradigm. Therefore, Monella complains about the lack of true SDEs of manuscript-based multi-testimonial traditions, believing that this is due to the fact that classical editors are more focused on the text than on the text-bearing object. This consideration depends on the fact that the scholar understands the SDE as a complete digital transcription of all primary sources and an automated collation of those transcriptions. If computer tools can offer an invaluable help for the collation of variant readings and for the consequent study of the textual tradition, trying to reconstruct the best possible text can perhaps still remain the essential purpose of the philological activity on works transmitted by a plurality of manuscripts, thus avoiding the fluidity of text that the transcription of each individual witness necessarily entails (see Magnani 2018). In this sense, it is perhaps possible to broaden the field and identify different types of products that may fall within the typology of Scholarly Digital Edition.

Exercise

References

• Magnani, M. (2018). The Other Side of the River. Digital Editions of Ancient Greek Texts Involving Papyrus Witnesses. In N. Reggiani (Ed.), Digital Papyrology II. Case Studies on the Digital Edition of Ancient Greek Papyri (pp. 87–102). De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110547450-005
• Monella, P. (2018). Why are there no comprehensively digital scholarly editions of classical texts? In A. Cipolla (Ed.), Digital philology: New thoughts on old questions (Prima edizione). Libreriauniversitaria.it. https://iris.unipa.it/handle/10447/294132
• Sahle, P. (2016). What is a Scholarly Digital Edition? In M. J. Driscoll & E. Pierazzo (Eds.), Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories and Practices (pp. 19–39). Open Book Publishers. https://books.openedition.org/obp/3397

Further reading

• Berti, M. (2019). Digital Classical Philology: Ancient Greek and Latin in the Digital Revolution. In Digital Classical Philology. De Gruyter Saur. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110599572
• Ciotti, F., Corradini, E., Cugliana, E., D'Agostino, G., Ferroni, L., Fischer, F., Lana, M., Monella, P., Roeder, T., Turco, R. R. D., & Sahle, P. (2022). Manifesto per le edizioni scientifiche digitali. Umanistica Digitale, 12, Article 12. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2532-8816/14814