TEICHI and the Tools Paradox. Developing a Publishing Framework for Digital Editions
Abstract and Figures
This paper presents a newly developed framework for online publishing of scholarly text editions based on the recommendations of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). At the core of our publishing framework is the idea of providing support for delivery of TEI-encoded documents in Drupal, a popular, fairly powerful, modular, and easy-to-use Content Management system (CMS). We present the TEICHI suite of modules for Drupal we developed as well as a prototype implementation. TEICHI consists of a collection of modules for displaying XML/TEI files online (via XSLT and CSS), interacting with them (via Java Script), as well as uploading and retrieving (search, download) 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, scholars 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.
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... We decided therefore to examine a number of generic edition-building programmes and services. These were TEI archiving, publishing, and access service (TAPAS, Flanders and Hamlin, 2013), scalable architecture for digital editions (SADE, Vanscheidt, 2018), Ediarum (2010), Text Encoding Initiative computer-human interaction (TEICHI, Pape et al., 2012), Versioning Machine (VM, Schreibman, 2016), edition visualization technology (EVT, 2016), and Juxta Editions (2015). However, our analysis of their capabilities revealed that none of them supported more than two of the above-mentioned interactive features. ...
... Its capabilities seem to resemble TAPAS, although this is unclear from the available documentation. Pape et al. (2012) who review SADE in more detail report that it is difficult to set up. ...
... TEICHI (Pape et al., 2012) publishes in the Drupal content management system (CMS). It consists of a search, viewing, and download module. ...
Although most would agree that the future of the scholarly edition lies in the digital medium, it is the print scholarly edition that is still more often cited and read. The production of digital scholarly editions (DSEs) is still seen as an experimental field whose methodology has not yet settled to the extent that a digital editing project can be approached with the same confidence as the making of a print edition. This article describes an experimental conversion of a print scholarly edition—Giacomo Leopardi’s Idilli by Paola Italia (2008)—into a DSE. This posed a challenge due to the complexity of its internal evidence, but was also relatively short and suitable for an experimental edition. Our objective was to assimilate into a web-based DSE all the information contained in the text and apparatus of the print edition. We also sought to discover whether the making of a DSE today that could fully utilize the affordances of the web, would necessarily place a significant technical load on editors who are more accustomed to solving textual problems. We review briefly a number of generic tools for making DSEs and describe two attempts at making our own DSE of Leopardi’s Idilli: a wiki edition whose primary purpose was pedagogical and a DSE based on the software used to make the Charles Harpur Critical Archive (Eggert, 2019, Charles Harpur Critical Archive. http://charles-harpur.org). We compare these experiences and draw conclusions about the prospects of making DSEs today.
... Most current efforts in this direction seem to be based on extending the Drupal CMS for working with TEI documents. 3 The most technically advanced of these initiatives is at present probably TEICHI, the environment initially developed for the publication of Bérardier de Bataut's Essai sur le récit (Pape, Schöch, and Wegner, 2012). One of the promising aspects of the TEICHI approach is that different parts of a work can be uploaded as separate XML files, which creates the possibility of multiple people working concurrently on an edition of the same work. ...
While the digital edition has made enormous progress since the advent of the web, there is also much that we still don't know how to achieve. I examine a number of editions and some things they have taught us. Then I discuss a few open questions regarding digital editions: how to involve volunteers in the creation and upkeep of the edition, how to lower the cost of creating editions and how to deal with threats to their longevity.
... La necesidad de herramientas que faciliten, a editores menos experimentados técnicamente, ofrecer en línea sus trabajos, es un asunto tratado recurrentemente en el ámbito de las Humanidades Digitales y del estándar TEI, en particular (Flanders y Hamlin: 2013). El módulo de TEICHI para Drupal se ofrece en este sentido como un framework para publicación de ediciones digitales que ayuda a superar las barreras entre un texto ya etiquetado y la publicación en línea (Pape et al.: 2012). ...
En los libros que pertenecieron a Arthur Schopenhauer, entre ellos, sus libros españoles, se encuentran anotaciones manuscritas, marcas de lectura, glosas y dibujos. Nos referimos a un tipo de específico de anotación conocida en inglés como author’s marginalia. Muy pocos se editan debido a la complejidad de una edición; incluso en el creciente mundo digital suponen un reto, pues casi siempre van unidas al contexto en el que surgen, la materialidad del libro. Este artículo ofrece una propuesta general que busca justificar su utilidad, los criterios de etiquetado elegidos (XML/TEI) y el entorno de publicación (Drupal implementado con el modulo TEICHI)
... The Drupal content management framework provides a highly customizable interface for collaborative content authoring and publication. It is widely used in the digital humanities community: for example, in TEICHI (Pape, Schöch, and Wegner 2012), Saint Patrick's Confessio, 1 and in tutorials such as Drupal for Humanists. 2 There are over 20,000 modules available for various versions of Drupal that extend the functionality of a Drupal site; the Islandora project maintains a core Islandora module, and Islandora solution pack modules for both Drupal 6 and Drupal 7. ...
Islandora is an open-source software framework developed since 2006 by the University of Prince Edward Island's Robertson Library. The Islandora framework is designed to ease the management of security and workflow for digital assets, and to help implementers create custom interfaces for display, search, and discovery. Turnkey options are provided via tools and modules ("solution packs") designed to support the work of a particular knowledge domain (such as chemistry), a particular content type (such as a digitized newspaper), or a particular task (such as TEI encoding). While it does not yet have native support for TEI, Islandora provides a promising basis on which digital humanities scholars could manage the creation, editing, validation, display, and comparison of TEI-encoded text. UPEI's IslandLives project, with its forthcoming solution pack, provides insight into how an Islandora version 6 installation can support OCR text extraction, automatic structural/semantic encoding of text, and web-based TEI editing and display functions for site administrators. This article introduces the Islandora framework and its suitability for TEI, describes the IslandLives approach in detail, and briefly discusses recent work and future directions for TEI work in Islandora. The authors hope that interested readers may help contribute to the expansion of TEI-related services and features available to be used with Islandora.
This paper briefly discusses markup, metadata and evaluation issues that arise when projects do not include a critical edition adjudicating different variants, but instead incorporate multiple, full diplomatic transcriptions. When used naively, such corpora will cause duplicate results that are hard to discern in quantitative studies, and in cases of incomplete, unexact or fragmentary parallel witnesses, substantially complicate the decision about what users actually want to have. Using a case study on Coptic manuscripts, the paper suggests that as a provisional strategy, documents should be partitioned as finely grained as necessary such that each section's parallel witness status is encoded, and that for each parallel set, it can be useful to define a redundancy metadatum which identifies the 'best' candidate for quantitative study among the available choices.
Se revisa y discute el concepto de edición digital académica (EDA), así como las diversas denominaciones empleadas para hacer referencia a la misma. El estudio indaga en el alcance de los estándares de calidad planteados para este tipo de edición y explora los softwares para la publicación. Se completa el trabajo con un análisis evaluativo de una muestra de aplicaciones, profundizando en sus características, en los condicionantes sobre las interfaces de usuario a las que dan acceso y en su adecuación a los estándares. Las conclusiones insisten en la urgencia de evaluar de forma crítica y sistemática el software de edición. Se destaca positivamente el desarrollo paulatino de software abierto e interoperable, asentado en la codificación de los textos siguiendo la Text encoding initiative (TEI), que optimizan la reutilización y preservación de los datos. Sin embargo, la perdurabilidad de las interfaces web y la sostenibilidad de estos proyectos digitales requieren infraestructuras de investigación adecuadas, para lo que se propone promover sinergias con bibliotecas y editoriales tradicionales, entre otros mediadores. Por último, para avanzar en la adecuación de los modelos de edición al paradigma digital, se subraya la necesidad de consensuar patrones de visualización de EDAs, por parte de la comunidad académica, así como de emprender estudios de usuarios que garanticen la adaptación de las EDAs al público objetivo al que se dirigen.
This paper presents the work undertaken by the Capitularia project to integrate a collaborative editorial workbench into the open-source content management system (CMS) WordPress. It introduces the reasons for selecting WordPress as the project’s CMS, the workflows established (including a sophisticated XSL-scripting pipeline), as well as three plug-ins created to integrate certain functionalities. The Cap-X2WP plug-in facilitates XSL transformations of XML files to HTML directly within the WordPress framework. The Cap-PaGer plug-in is used to generate WordPress pages automatically based on the XML files located in specific folders on the server. Their publication status can be administered via a special interface added to the general WordPress dashboard at a moment’s notice. Whereas the aforementioned plug-ins facilitate the daily work of the staff members in the general management and enhancement of the project’s website, the Cap-Coll plug-in eases the specific editorial task of collating texts by including the CollateX algorithms in a WordPress plug-in. The report concludes with a brief perspective on the possibilities for further developments.
This article shows how, with a focus on user-friendliness and a bottom-up approach, the digital work environment ediarum was successfully developed. With ediarum, researchers can comfortably encode and edit in TEI, as well as publish their results in an online or print edition. This solution, developed by the TELOTA initiative of Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, is based on three software components: eXistdb, Oxygen XML Author, and ConTeXt. These components are combined, supplemented with additional functions, and tailored to fit a project’s needs. After a pilot run, ediarum has been implemented for multiple internal and external research projects. The experience that was gained and our self developed program components are available to the Digital Humanities community.
This article provides a brief overview of currently-available digital resources for learning to understand and use the TEI Guidelines. It reflects on and analyzes these resources and their audience through the results of a survey intended to inform future support from the TEI Consortium for novice users. Increasing numbers of students look online for self-directed and task-based tutorials, and increasing numbers of scholars in the humanities recognize the TEI Guidelines as a standard tool for publication and analysis. In this context, the author designed the survey presented in this paper to solicit qualitative feedback from both experienced and aspiring practitioners in the field concerning their skills, needs, and goals, pedagogical as well as technical. The article suggests revising and expanding TEI community resources, proposing possibilities for their new form and functionality.
This article provides a detailed analysis of the current state, needs, and desires of members of the TEI community working with manuscript material, based on the results of a survey carried out by the authors. An analysis of the survey results provides insights into the practices, problems, and limitations of the community utilizing the TEI for manuscript encoding. The results demonstrate the existence of a steep learning curve for the TEI, where many practitioners are self-taught and where learning-by-doing dominates; there exists a long gap between the first encounter with the TEI and its actual use in projects. Survey results highlight the need for user-friendly, bespoke tools facilitating the processing, analysis, and publishing of TEI-encoded texts. Feedback on the Guidelines themselves reveals aspects that do not fully meet the needs of those encoding manuscript material. To better address these needs, a strengthening of the Special Interest Groups is proposed.
The field of human-computer interaction (HCI) offers designers and developers of interactive systems a large repertoire of methods for ensuring that their systems will be both usable and useful. This article offers a brief introduction to these methods, focusing on the ways in which they may need to be adapted and extended to take into account the characteristic properties of systems that include some sort of AI. The discussion is organized around three types of activity: understanding users'needs, interaction design, and evaluation. Copyright © 2009, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. All rights reserved.
Most programs today are written not by professional software developers, but by people with expertise in other domains working towards goals for which they need computational support. For example, a teacher might write a grading spreadsheet to save time grading, or an interaction designer might use an interface builder to test some user interface design ideas. Although these end-user programmers may not have the same goals as professional developers, they do face many of the same software engineering challenges, including understanding their requirements, as well as making decisions about design, reuse, integration, testing, and debugging. This article summarizes and classifies research on these activities, defining the area of End-User Software Engineering (EUSE) and related terminology. The article then discusses empirical research about end-user software engineering activities and the technologies designed to support them. The article also addresses several crosscutting issues in the design of EUSE tools, including the roles of risk, reward, and domain complexity, and self-efficacy in the design of EUSE tools and the potential of educating users about software engineering principles.
Digital Humanities (DH) and Digital Library (DL) projects are complex systems that require specialized programming skills. Many encoders cannot take their work to the next level by transforming their collections of structured XML texts into a web searchable and browsable database. Often teams of text encoders are able to encode their texts with a high degree of sophistication, but unless they have funds to hire a programmer, their collections far too often remain on local disk storage away from public access. < teiPublisher > aims to relieve some of this burden by providing the tools to manage an extensible, modular and configurable XML-based repository which will house, search, browse, and display documents encoded in TEI-Lite on the world wide web. < teiPublisher > provides an administrative interface that allows DL and DH administrators to upload and delete documents from a web accessible repository; analyze XML documents to determine elements for searching and browsing; refine ontology development; select inter and intra document links; partition the repository into collections; create backups; generate search, browse, and display pages; customize the interface; and associate XSL transformation scripts and CSS stylesheets to obtain different target outputs (HTML, PDF, etc.).
This article addresses the need for TEI display tools. In order to illustrate the need for display tools, we begin with a
brief review of the tools that are currently available, summarizing in particular those listed on the TEI Wiki Tools page.
We then turn to a discussion of our work on the development of the TEIViewer (http://teiviewer.org), a simple, JavaScript-driven, portable display tool designed to facilitate the online representation of and interaction
with elements and attributes described within select modules of the TEI P5 Guidelines and encoded as layers of data and metadata
in TEI-XML documents. We explain how the TEIViewer works by describing the interactions between the XML source layer, the
display layer generated via XSL, and the interactive layer powered by jQuery and CSS; and we explain why we chose the jQuery
JavaScript library to manage the Viewer's functionality as well as the advantages of this decision. Finally we describe current
implementations and plans for release.
This document is made possible in part by financial support from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency; Directorate General XIII of the Commission of the European Communities; the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Direct and indirect support has also been received from the University of Illinois at Chicago, the Oxford University Computing Service, the University of Arizona, the University of Oslo, Queen's University (Kingston, Ont.), and Ohio State University. We acknowledge assistance with software acquisition from the following firms: SEMA Group and Yard Software (for Mark-It and Write-It), Software Exoterica (for CheckMark and Xtran), SoftQuad, Inc., (for Author/Editor and RulesBuilder), Electronic Book Technology (for demonstration copies of DynaText), Xerox Corporation (for Ventura Publisher).
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