From a philological point of view, the project has brought to the attention a very little known text of Medieval French literature, that represents an important piece in the context of the literature culturally linked to the novels of antiquity. Its manuscript tradition is characterized by remarkable linguistic variation, textual variants and a wide geographical distribution and therefore represents an exceptional example for the theoretical reflection on the concepts of: variant, critical edition and documentary edition. The complexity of the problems related to this tradition means that, beyond the results obtained in this first phase, the project is open to further developments: the next step will be the elaboration of a critical edition model.
From a technical point of view, the implemented encoding system presents a series of advantages:
a. it is easily manipulated in an IT perspective because the text is completely formalized and therefore machine-readable;
b. it will allow to experiment the most complex encoding system for a critical edition, which is regarded as the best methodology but is not applied for lack of adequate tools to produce the code;
c. it will also facilitate the enrichment of the edition with a linguistic encoding.
The main problem in creating such a complex encoding is the lack of ergonomic tools allowing to realize this code within a reasonable time, standardizing the production and then multiplying the examples: the risk is indeed to produce complex but isolated prototypes. The prototype-editor developped doesn’t have the ambition to present itself as the tool par excellence, but it represents at least a concrete example of an alternative to current practice. The most widespread tools don’t allow the realization of a so complex encoding in a reasonable time because the code is completely typed by the encoder. In this regard, one can often observe a discrepancy between the official declarations and the practice in the realization of the projects: often, especially with large textual corpora, each team works with some personal solution to automate at least part of the encoding process. The digital editions production is difficult, the problem is known but there is no official discussion about.
All the technical solutions adopted represent innovations that it would be desirable to engineer and test in different contexts, to be able to make solid tools available to the community. In particular, the operating principle of the editor, currently from .txt to .xml, could be the basis of an implementation allowing a simplified conversion from .xml (the encoding language) to .html (the web visualization language). This conversion represents a very problematic moment in the process of creating a digital edition, and it is currently based on a very complex and now obsolete language, .xslt. These tools would interest any humanist engaged in the production of a digital edition, especially in the case of a very complex encoding, and whatever the nature of the text: the field of the tools available to the digital humanists is still open, and the demand for efficient tools is very strong.
