Digital Edition

The first version of the Latin treatise known now as the Leges Edwardi Confessoris was not issued by King Edward the Confessor (1042–1066), but is an anonymous composition perhaps originating in Lincoln or more generally in the northern Danelaw, and written in the 1130s. It concerns different aspects of the peace of the Church and king, as well as enforcement of the peace. It appears to derive from no written Old English texts, but instead is an original witness to contemporary law.  This is the first time it has been separately edited.

The second version of the Latin treatise known now as the Leges Edwardi Confessoris, which was not issued by King Edward the Confessor (1042–1066), but is an anonymous composition, perhaps originating in Lincoln, and expanded by the same author as the first version soon after its creation in the 1130s. Like the first version, it concerns different aspects of the peace of the Church and king, as well as enforcement of the peace, but adds chapters on the history of the laws of Edgar (king of England, 959–975), unjust execution, usury, and pledges and witnesses for sales to produce a 39-chapter treatise.

This text joins one of the earliest copies of the second version of the Latin treatise known now as the Leges Edwardi Confessoris (ECf2) with a selection of chapters taken from the Consiliatio Cnuti (Cons Cn) along with a small amount of potentially original material. The whole collection is presented in its single witness as one text, and the selection made from the Consiliatio reveals something of the agenda of the compiler. These added chapters increase the size of the Leges Edwardi by almost 50%. The emphasis of the collection is royal secular law, mostly procedural, and includes new information on suretyship. It likely dates from the third quarter of the twelfth century, though where it was created is unknown.

""In a series of blog posts at the Early English Laws website, I describe step by step the process of editing an early twelfth-century Latin law text (the Instituta Cnuti).  The link below is to the first post.

The whole series (1-4) can be found at earlyenglishlaws.ac.uk  More installments are forthcoming.""

These guidelines set out the contents of the completed editions, the list of available texts, contents of two types of proposals to edit texts for the project, additional issues for all proposers to address, and the procedure for submitting proposals and schedule for response to that proposal by the Literary Board.

"Electronic editions of literary texts -within the international Digital Humanities community- are considered as an autonomous scholarly field, which is mainly focus in the use of digital tools and methods in order to present, explore and explain literary works and related textual material in ways that are unfeasible -not only practically but even theoretically- within the traditional printed paradigm. Digital editions and related technology are not only instrumental in serving the access and process in large or remote bodies of textual material but also purpose to enrich the current textual and literary research and provide new interpretational insights into the literature.
Nonetheless, in the scholarly field of Modern Greek Literature the concept of digital editions is partially or incorrectly perceived. The reasoning behind this reality can vary: from lack of technical knowledge, lack of collaboration and coordination, to “internal obstacles” in the specific academic field such as the absence of a robust editorial strategy and the adhesion to traditional research methods.
Nonetheless, in the scholarly field of Modern Greek Literature the concept of digital editions is partially or incorrectly perceived. This paper aims also at suggesting a number of theoretical and practical steps towards the generation of electronic editions of Modern Greek Literature while attempts to offer an abstract model for a digital genetic edition of literary drafts that contain earlier stages of a Giorgos Cheimonas’ work named The builders (Oι χτίστες, 1st ed. 1979, Kedros publications). The proposed model is based on the prototype of Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project http://www.beckettarchive.org/ ."

Der vorliegende Band dokumentiert die Beiträge der Tagung "Digitale Edition zwischen Experiment und Standardisierung", die vom 6.–8. Dezember 2007 im Heinz Nixdorf Museumsforum in Paderborn stattfand. Enthalten sind sowohl die – größtenteils deutlich erweiterten – schriftlichen Fassungen der Referate als auch die Zusammenfassungen der Podiumsdiskussionen zu den drei Sektionen Konzepte digitaler Editionen, Probleme der Musikcodierung sowie Textauszeichnung bei Briefen und Tagebüchern.

It has been postulated that by continuous critical discussion of present scholarly editions a suitable standardisation of editorial practices and methods may be encouraged, and thereby may contribute – in the longer term – to synergy effects between present and prospective scholarly editions of comparable subjects, aims and purposes. – This article puts said postulate into practice, first by discussing several important (scholarly) editions of the German vernacular work Ship of Fools (Narrenschiff) by Sebastian Brant, from the 1850s to the present, as a paradigmatic case of textual tradition exclusively as hand printed matter. Secondly, certain considerations on the attempt to re-edit the Ship of Fools are made, which also aim at the inclusion of digital facsimiles as well as digital text presentations.

This paper presents a newly developed framework for online publishing of scholarly text editions based on the TEI Guidelines. At the core of our publishing framework is support for delivery of TEI-encoded documents in Drupal, a popular, fairly powerful, and modular content management system (CMS). In this article we present the TEICHI suite of modules for Drupal that we developed, as well as a prototype implementation. TEICHI consists of a collection of modules for displaying TEI files online (via XSLT and CSS), interacting with them (via JavaScript), as well as uploading, searching, and downloading them. To showcase the particular strengths and possible use cases of our framework, we compare our tool to other currently available systems. Here, we focus on those tools which are suitable for textual scholars new to Digital Humanities and the TEI who would like to use the powerful encoding mechanisms provided by the TEI but have relatively little technical expertise. Therefore, we compare the TEICHI framework specifically to the Versioning Machine (VM) and the Scalable Architecture for Digital Editions (SADE). We look at these tools from four perspectives: that of the user interacting with the digital edition or archive, of the editor encoding and publishing texts, of the administrator setting up the publishing tool, and of the programmer possibly modifying or enhancing the tool. Our more general aim here is to investigate, from the perspective of tool development in the area of online delivery of TEI-encoded documents, what could be called the “tools paradox”: there is evidence for textual scholars’ need of such tools, and a number of them are available; however, the existing tools are not widely adopted by scholars. Our findings suggest that tool development has to address two aims which seem to be mutually exclusive, that of “keeping it simple” and that of “going generic”. In fact, we suggest that tool developers need to find ways of turning these conflicting aims into concurrent aims if they want to build successful tools and broaden their user base.