Digital methods and medieval studies. Week one: reacting to Burdick et al preface and chapter one
text to come here
Scholarly Digital Editions
I am a twenty-year veteran of the making of scholarly editions in digital form, as editor, toolmaker, teacher, commentator, theorist and publisher.
Latest posts
Setting up the revised Collation Editor: file structures
In an earlier post, I explained some of the history behind the Collation Editor, and our use of it in Textual Communities. At last, I am updating the Collation Editor embedded into TC! The Collation Editor has two major dependencies: On Python, for a series of critical tasks run through a Python server; On CollateX, for the actual collation. The first task was to create a version of the Collation…
Setting up the revised Collation editor: some history (2023)
I am a huge fan of the "Collation Editor", built by Cat Smith of the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing (ITSEE) at the University of Birmingham, with substantial input from Troy Griffitts, now at The Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Lower Saxony. Some history is required. The roots of the Collation Editor lie in my Collate software, written for the Macintosh…
In praise of staticSearch
Over the last few weeks, I have worked intensively with staticSearch to integrate it into our forthcoming publication of Edvige Agostinelli and Bill Coleman's digital edition of Boccaccio's Teseida . You can see the near-complete prototype at http://inklesseditions.com/TeseidaStatic/ . Note that this is still a prototype only, and the address will change as we move to full publication; please DO…
Setting up staticSearch for our projects: nested files and multiple search entry points
I now realize (a week later!), after looking at the staticSearch projects listed in the documentation two things I did not know before, two things where our projects differ (it seems) from all other StaticSearch implementations to date: staticSearch assumes (or at least, all the listed projects appear to follow this model) that all the pages to be searched are held in the same folder as the root…
Setting up staticSearch for our project: the search results
In the last post, we integrated the search page into the header of our pages. Now, we need to deal with the search results. staticSearch by default places the search results in the <div id="ssResults"> element. But as part of our set up, we hid that element. Instead, we want the search results to appear in a different place on the page: in a <div id="searchContainer">. So how do we do this?…
Setting up staticSearch for our project: integrating the search box into our pages
In earlier posts, I describe the background to the decision to use staticSearch and my experience of getting it to work. In this post, I describe how we are winding staticSearch into our editions. By default, staticSearch places everything it uses into a <div id="staticSearch"> element. So your core search page, typically the "index.html" file at the root of your document collection, has to…
staticSearch and Me: getting started
In another post , I explain the background to my work in making digital scholarly editions in relation to the Endings project, and how this led me to staticSearch. In this post, I describe my use of staticSearch, in hope that it might help others who, like me, want to include a seach engine in their online resource. I am using a Macintosh MacBook Pro, running Ventura 13.4 in July 2023 as I write…
The Endings Project and the Canterbury Tales Project (and also, Boccaccio and Dante)
At last, after many years, we (ie, me and a few other people) are getting ready to unleash on the world a whole series of digital scholarly editions. We have already released the second edition of Prue Shaw's Commedia , now at www.dantecommedia.it . We are now contemplating a third edition of that. Soon to come are Bill Coleman and Edvige Agostinelli's edition of Boccaccio's Teseida . And then the…
Fun with Fonts. Junicode, Unicode, and ꝑ
If you see a character looking like a p with a bar through the descender in the title of this post, and you see it here too ꝑ , then ... read on. And if you don't, then read on (and let me know!) Thirty years ago, when myself, Tim Berners-Lee, Lou Burnard and the web were much younger, every "special character" was a challenge, and a potential triumph or failure. "Special" meant something beyond…
Getting Started with Textual Communities
Welcome to the temporary home of Version 2 of Textual Communities ("TC"), at textcomtest.usask.ca . This address will change when we are ready to go fully public with TC. Until then, this is a sandbox version, and all data may disappear at any point. If you just want to see what TC can do: choose a community from "Public Communities", and "View". Sample files You can get the sample files used in…
The history of Collate
Historical note This post was first published as part of the series of blogs detailing the move from Collate 2 to CollateX. I reproduce it here, in the run-up to the Munster Collation Summit on October 3 and 4, 2014, which might formally mark the final, irrevocable, irredeemable death of Collate 0 - 1- 2. 0 false 18 pt 18 pt 0 0 false false false February 6, 2007 The History of Collate Filed…
Collate 2, and the design for its successor: CollateXML (now, CollateX)
Historical note: the contexts of this document The article which follows was posted on the Scholarly Digital Editions blog in a series of entries from February to June 2007. There were two contexts for these original blog posts: The age, and impending death, of Collate 2 , the computer-assisted scholarly collation program I had started writing in the late 1980s. This had achieved some success, at…
Why digital humanists should get out of textual scholarship. And if they don't, why we textual scholars should throw them out.
Three weeks ago, when I was writing my paper for the conference on Social, Digital, Scholarly Editing I organized (with lots of help -- thanks guys!) at Saskatoon, I found myself writing this sentence: Digital humanists should get out of textual scholarship: and if they will not, textual scholars should throw them out. 0 0 1 17 103 Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Ed 1 1 119 14.0…
The Woodstock of the Web: Geneva 25-27 May, 1994
Background: about this article (27 July 2013) In 1994 I was based in Oxford University Computing Services, clinging post-doctorally to academic life through a variety of research posts at the intersection of computing and the humanities (creating the Collate program with Leverhulme support, starting off the Canterbury Tales Project with minimal formal support but lots of enthusiasm, advising…