Digital Scholary Editions as Interfaces

Roman Bleier, Martina Bürgermeister, Helmut W. Klug, Frederike Neuber, Gerlinde Schneider, Roman Bleier, Martina Bürgermeister, Helmut W. Klug, Frederike Neuber, Gerlinde Schneider

• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783748109259
• eBook ISBN: 9783748115762
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Interfaces are important elements of digital scholarly editions as they allow and direct the interaction of users with the online content and they facilitate the access to and exchange of data and information. Some interfaces are created for the human user (GUI), others for machine interaction and data exchange (API). Both aspects of interfaces and their roles in digital scholarly editing were discussed at a conference in 2016 organised by the Centre for Information Modelling at the University of Graz and the Digital Scholarly Editions Initial Training Network DiXiT. This volume includes a range of papers presented at the conference that highlight the diverse views and approaches towards interfaces in the digital scholarly editing community.

The Interface in Practice

Interfaces in Digital Scholarly Editions of Letters

Stefan Dumont

Abstract

Digital Scholarly Editions as Interfaces, edited by Roman Bleier, Martina Bürgermeister, Helmut W. Klug, Frederike Neuber, Gerlinde Schneider. Schriften des Instituts für Dokumentologie und Editorik 12. Books on Demand, 2018, 109–131.

Like no other text type perhaps, the scholarly edition of correspondence has benefited from digital methods in the past fifteen years. Firstly, the graphical user interface enhances the accessibility and usage of edited letters in a significant way. Secondly, by providing and using application programming interfaces, much better than a printed edition the digital scholarly edition addresses the characteristics of the medium “letter”. This article discusses these developments against the background of the discussions in scholarly editing in the 1980s and 1990s and shows the best practices today for interfaces in digital scholarly editons of letters.

1 Introduction

Letters are relevant historical and literary sources for many disciplines and have thus been made available to research in scholarly editions for a long time. Yet, they constitute a type of text on their own with particular characteristics which influence their presentation in scholarly editions.

Letters usually contain quite heterogeneous content referring to the most diverse present or past events, persons, publications, or topics. Because of this great variety of topics, it is often complicated for the modern reader to determine the relevance of a letter or of a set of letters for his or her own research without having read them all. Unlike scholarly papers, reviews, newspaper articles, books, etc., letters do not contain a title which would give users a first impression about what contents to expect (Mücke 89–90; Csáky et al. 84).

Besides the heterogeneity of content, another characteristic feature of letters is that in general they were written with a certain recipient in mind. First, this may entail that certain issues discussed cannot be easily understood by the modern reader, because they were only explained to the extent required for the conversation between the writer and the intended recipient. The modern reader often lacks the background knowledge needed to fully understand what has been written. Providing this knowledge by identifying the persons, publications, events, etc. mentioned in a letter is an important task of scholarly editions (Leuschner 184). Furthermore, the concentration on one recipient results in a special subjectivity of letters: the writer might share opinions or events with one specific recipient, which he or she would talk differently about, if at all, to a different recipient. Thus, the context of a letter is important, i.e. the specific relationship of the correspondents, the character of their correspondence so far, or the different ways used by one author to describe or judge similar issues towards different correspondence partners (Bischof 293; Mücke 89).

This leads to another characteristic of letters: often (though not in all cases), one letter is part of an entire exchange of letters, i.e. of a certain “dialogue” between two (or more) correspondents. The researcher has to be aware of this dialogue. Equally important is that the letter has to be considered as part of a larger correspondence network in which information and opinions circulated and were (or deliberately were not) exchanged (Allroggen and Veit 142; Le Guillou 196).

Finally, the physical properties of a letter have to be taken into account when determining its characteristics. Is the writing legible and clean? Or was the letter drafted in a hurry and the writing object to later corrections and additions? Which kind of paper was used? Does the way the sheet of letter paper is segmented (i.e. the layout) indicate if the letter is meant as a formal, conventional document or as a brief note between friends? This materiality has increasingly been considered significant since the beginning of the 2000s, which was also reflected in the discourse of scholarly edition studies and editorial practise (Richter, “Goethes Briefhandschriften digital” 65).

The following outlined developments of interfaces are, of course, only possible if the information on the aspects discussed above is contained in the data and can be queried. Nowadays, digital letter editions are mainly based on TEI-XML data, which can provide all the information required for the listed interfaces. Unfortunately, there are currently no standard guidelines for coding letters in TEI-XML, but the edition guidelines of the Carl-Maria-von-Weber-Gesamtausgabe³² or edition humboldt digital³³ give a good overview of the state-of-the-art in the modelling and annotation of letters. Stadler et al. can be consulted for detailed information on annotating the most important metadata of a letter.

The specifics of the letter as a particular type of text mentioned above have been long discussed in the community of editorial scholars and thus have been taken into account for the conceptual planning as well as the realization of digital editions of letters. This article will discuss these developments in order to provide an overview of the current state-of-the-art in the digital scholarly editing of letters. In so doing, it will outline particularly how digital interfaces – both graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and application programming interfaces (APIs) – help overcome the problems of printed scholarly editions of letters.

2 Graphical user interface

Just like in the printing age, presentation is an important issue of digital scholarly editions (DSE). It is only through the presentation that the letter texts, which are usually encoded in TEI-XML, become readable and can be used for hermeneutic research by resolving encoding and links. Hence, even though data is at the core of a digital edition, it cannot be imagined without its presentation (Sahle 159). In contrast to a printed scholarly edition, the presentation of the edited text is not just static, but an interface that allows readers to interact with the material. With a graphical user interface, users may select specific data from the text corpus, choose between different modes of display and follow links between different documents. Readers may also apply queries to the material which were not anticipated by the editor, e.g. via full-text search. This way, the readers actually become users of the digital edition. The graphical user interface thus is a constitutive feature of the digital edition by which the latter is distinguished from the printed and even the retro-digitized edition, if transformed only to a PDF. A scholarly edition published in PDF format does not have a graphical user interface and, strictly speaking, can thus not be considered a digital edition (Sahle 120).

In the past ten to fifteen years, the development of graphical user interfaces for digital scholarly editions (of letters) benefited immensely from the development of web technologies in general. The situation in the 2000s, when the variety of formats, scripting languages and browsers at hand was still hugely limited, has fundamentally changed by now. For example, in 2006 a primary problem was cross-browser compatibility, CSS was adapted only little by little for website design and the possible fields of application for Javascript were very limited. In 2017, when this paper was written, this situation appears completely different: apart from brand-new features, there are no major differences of processing between the different browsers any more. The spectrum of functionalities of HTML and especially CSS was extended immensely, above all to the effect that websites can now be designed with typographical elements (e.g. special fonts) to a much greater extent than before. This is specifically reflected by the development of suitable formats for fonts, their support by the respective browsers as well as the provision of free fonts. Furthermore, by now powerful frameworks are provided for Javascript which are even capable of replacing server-based software. Finally, UI frameworks are available to bring together all those functionalities and provide frequently used elements and functions/methods – as e.g. Bootstrap³⁴ or Foundation³⁵. UI frameworks significantly facilitate the development and maintenance of websites. All these aspects lead to standardization and, thus, increasing stability of digital scholarly editions – in spite of their differing designs.

Digital scholarly editions are object to numerous requirements which are reflected accordingly by graphical user interfaces. The following part of this paper will concentrate on those requirements specific to digital scholarly editions of letters based on their characteristics and the presumed areas of their usage.

2.1 Faceted search

The designs of GUIs for digital scholarly editions of letters usually reflect the fact that letters are heterogeneous in their contents and are therefore used by researchers in a largely selective manner. For cases when the use of printed scholarly editions of letters involved the cumbersome dealing with indexes and letter lists, or manually skimming through the book, there are now graphical user interfaces supporting the exploitation of scholarly editions. Users of DSEs will not just be offered simple letter lists but will additionally be provided with functionality to dynamically filter data and create lists according to their individual interests. Here, the transition from providing a small amount of simple filters to an elaborate faceted search is continuous. In all these cases, the named functionalities allow users to automatically obtain indexes of letters relevant to them. In case such lists are accompanied by regesta of letters, users may probably be even more capable of deciding which letter might be relevant for a given research question. A good example for the potential of elaborate filtering functionalities are the correspondence indices of the Carl-Maria-von-Weber-Gesamtausgabe (WeGA, fig. 1) and the ePistolarium developed at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Of course, the potential of modern web programming influences the design of these filters, meaning that certain filters may come with a design suitable exactly for their purpose as e.g. a slider to narrow down the filtered date range. Furthermore, filters may be designed to not ...

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Theorizing the Interface
• The Interface in Practice
• Evaluating the Interface
• Appendix
• Impressum