Online Scholarly Editions

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Online Scholarly Editions

• Introduction to Advanced Research
• Academic Technology Services

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Overview

• Contents
• Discussion
• Tasks
• Tools
• Design
• Resources

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Contents of an Online Edition

• Primary text
• Authorial documents in addition to basic text
• Second-party textual materials
• Editorial materials
• Logical organization and easy navigation
• Analytical tools (e.g. search engine)

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Contents gt Primary Text

• Logically selected, manageable textual content
• For example an edition of a single work, a group
  of works generically or chronologically grouped

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Contents gt Authorial documents

• adaptations
• working notes
• contracts
• tables of contents
• prefaces
• abstracts

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Contents gt Second-party materials

• For Example letters from respondents may be
  desirable in an edition of letters

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Contents gt Editorial materials

• prefaces and acknowledgments
• lists of sigla, symbols, and abbreviations
• textual essay
• textual apparatus (notes or hyperlinks)
• historical/interpretive essay
• illustrations or charts, diagrams, maps
• historical/explanatory notes
• appendices
• bibliography
• glossary
• index

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Contents gt Analytical tools

• For example a search engine

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Contents gt Organizational Tools

• Table of Contents
• Navigational Links

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Discussion

• Examples
• Rhetorical Questions

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Introduction gt Examples

• Early English Books Online
• Classic for Young People's Gulliver's Travels
• Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse
  Bibliography

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Introduction gt More Examples

• Victorian Women Writers Project
• Early English Prose Fiction (frames)
• Electronic Text Center at the University of
  Virginia

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Discussion gt Questions

• Who will read your text, why, and how?
• Who is your audience?
• Why are they reading it?
• Is it a replacement for the original text?
• How will they read it? Straight through? Printed
  out?
• Which technologies are available to you? To your
  audience?
• What is the future of this text? Is it part of a
  larger database project?

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Tasks

• Document Analysis
• Digitization
• Markup and Organization

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Task gt Document Analysis

• Define project objectives
• Explore documents context
• Define the document type
• Decide which features to encode
• (See Document Analysis chapter Creating and
  Documenting Electronic Texts A Guide to Good
  Practice)

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Tasks gt Digitizing

• Scanning
• Image capture
• Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
• Re-Keying

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Tasks gt Mark-up/Organization

• Creating pages for the web
• Organizing content
• Creating navigation for usability

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Tools gt Designer

• Web Host (personal web account)
• HTML Authoring software
• Digitizing equipment
• Browser

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Tools gt Audience

• Browsers
• Speed of Internet Connection
• Applications and Plug-ins

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Design

• Segmentation
• Organization
• Navigation

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Design gt Segmentation

• Single Document (example)
• Many Documents (example)
• Frames (example)

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Design gt Organization

• Where should the content be broken in to separate
  pages?
• In what order should the extra-textual material
  appear?

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Design gt Navigation

• Navigation with next/previous (example)
• Navigation bar with frames
• Name Anchors (within documents, notes)
• External Links

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Some examples from EN887

• Stephanie Loomis, The Hannah Swarton Project
• Elise Schindler, The Wake Island Experience
  (e-mail me for the files)

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Sources

• MLA Guidelines for Electronic Scholarly Editions
• Creating and Documenting Electronic Texts A
  Guide to Good Practice