Bringing ancient texts into the digital age
From ancient Indian epic poetry and medieval texts to the relatively recent texts of Samuel Beckett, scholarly works are a vital part of society’s cultural heritage. Transcribing and coding these texts into digital form – the work of digital scholarly editors - helps keep them alive and accessible for generations to come. However, until recently no internationally accepted academic training and standards existed to advance the field of digital scholarly editing. EU-funded project DIXIT brought together experts in scholarly works from across the humanities, software editing professionals and representatives from cultural institutions to lay the foundations for establishing digital scholarly editing as a discipline in its own right. “Today, the skills and tools available have created possibilities for digital scholarly editions that former generations of editors could only dream about. Nevertheless, there is hardly any university institution able to provide the infrastructure and resources to train the next generation of young scholars and researchers in the theories and methods of this fast-developing field,” says project coordinator Andreas Speer. Digital scholarly editing bridges the gap between the modern day and classical works including James Joyce, the Hebrew bible and old medical recipes held at the Glasgow University Library. It is a fast-emerging field in the humanities including literary studies, philology, history, philosophy, information science and bibliography that involves meticulous work coding texts into archival and presentational data formats. To advance digital editing, DIXIT united ten European institutions, researchers, private sector companies including e-publishers and software engineers, and cultural heritage institutions to create The Digital Scholarly Editions Initial Training Network. The project then offered training programmes, camps and conferences in Europe which attracted a total of 800 researchers from 300 European institutions. DIXIT closely trained 12 Early Stage Researchers and five Experienced Researchers to understand the relationship between the goals of traditional scholarly editions and new computer-based methods and technologies. DIXIT drew up standards for digital scholarly editing, advancing the drive towards internationally accepted standards. It identified the best software for digital publication formats and helped established digitisation and publishing workflows, infrastructure and venues for digital scholarly editions. Their work also included exploring the design and dissemination of the works, creating toolboxes to simplify processing, pilot studies on the automated recognition of layout features to allow for the digitalisation of archival document series, and sustainability strategies for online resources. The project has enabled large amounts of documentation, teaching material and publications to be made available online. Meanwhile, the project’s website includes open access to tutorials and introductions to a wide range of theories, methods and software to analyse ancient scripts and writing materials. It also contributed to the improvement of software used for digital editing, including in collaboration with SyncRO Soft Ltd., a leading software developer of encoding tools, and advancing the widely-used encoding standard - the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) - by introducing new features and creating subsets that are adapted to scholarly practice. Even though the project is now over, Speer hopes to establish a European Graduate School for Digital Scholarly Editing within the next three years alongside the DIXIT project partners.
Keywords
DIXIT, digital scholarly editions, humanities, ancient texts, digital transformation