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Digital Scholarly Editing and Textual Criticism

Hof van Liere Prinsstraat 13, Antwerpen, Belgium

The production of digital critical editions is a crucial issue for anyone working on texts written in pre-modern times, philologists, historians, philosophers etc. Yet, there are many different practices, and concepts behind the digital representation of a critical apparatus are difficult to grasp. Besides, there are still very little tools supporting the creation and processing of digital critical editions. The workshop includes talks and presentations by philologists and DH specialists introducing and discussing the very nature of critical editions as well as the digital representation of a critical apparatus. Furthermore, the state-of-the-art in terms of automatic collation tools and methods for processing and publishing digital critical editions will be assessed.

DiXiT 3 / ESTS 2016

Hof van Liere Prinsstraat 13, Antwerpen, Belgium

As digital publications are reaching a stage of maturity and scholarly editors are becoming increasingly aware of the seemingly endless possibilities of hybrid or fully Digital Scholarly Editions, the impact of the digital medium on the field of Textual Criticism has become undeniable. As a result of this ‘digital turn’, textual scholars are now faced with new challenges and opportunities that have called for a re-evaluation of the field’s established theoretical and practical framework. For the thirteenth annual conference of the European Society for Textual Scholarship (ESTS), organized in association with the Digital Scholarly Editing Initial Training Network ‘DiXiT’, we intend to face this new direction in textual scholarship head-on, by focussing on the recent developments in textual scholarship that are instigated by this reassessment of the theories, practices, and methods of scholarly editing in general, and of the Digital Scholarly Edition (DSE) in particular.

Lecture Series: Elien Vernackt

S.R.231 Rodestraat 14 (via ingang Lange Winkelstraat), Antwerpen, Antwerpen, Belgium

The Magis Bruges Project

In her talk, Vernackt will discuss the digitisation of a famous sixteenth-century map of Bruges, the development of a database, and a collaboration between different parties from both the academic and the GLAM sector. The MAGIS Bruges project responds to a variety of research interests and touches upon different issues within and outside the Digital Humanities community.

Lecture Series: Greta Franzini

S.A.202 Prinsstraat 13, Antwerpen, Antwerpen, Belgium

Text Reuse, Digital Breadcrumbs, and Historical Data.

In her talk, Greta Franzini will discuss the case studies and activities of eTRAP. This project investigates the phenomenon of text reuse in order to advance automatic detection on historical data. Historical texts pose numerous challenges to automatically detect reuse. These challenges are, among others, the fragmentary survival of works, inconsistent referencing, but also the diachronic evolution of language. Unlike modern texts, where sources are consistently quoted and cited, historical texts are not always so transparent, thus opening up exciting opportunities for intertextual research.

Lecture Series: Erik Kwakkel

S.A.206 Prinsstraat 13, Antwerpen, Antwerpen, Belgium

Something Old, Something New: Medieval Manuscripts and Digital Reserach Methods

In this talk, Erik Kwakkel shows how the study of medieval manuscripts can benefit from a digital approach. He presents two case studies: 1) How medieval script is studied in a quantified manner, using modest statistical research; 2) How MA-XRF, an x-ray technique, enables us to look inside early-modern bookbindings, revealing (and reading) medieval fragments that are hiding inside. These two examples will be taken as representatives of two common types of Digital Humanities research: one using digital techniques to do traditional research more efficiently, the other producing results that could not be gained in traditional research.

Beckett Digital Manuscript Project Training Workshop

S.D.014 Prinsstraat 13, Antwerpen, Antwerpen, Belgium

A Workshop on Digital Scholarly Editing, sponsored by the European Research Council (ERC), the Digital Scholarly Editions Initial Training Network DiXiT (Marie Curie ITN), and the University of Antwerp; organised by the Centre for Manuscript Genetics.

Lecture Series: Wido van Peursen

S.D.019 Prinsstraat 13, Antwerpen, Antwerpen, Belgium

A Statistical Approach to Syntactic Variation. The Case of the Hebrew Bible

In his talk, Wido van Peursen shows how combining traditional scholarship with a computational approach permits us to explore linguistic variation in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament from new perspectives. The Old Testament provides a diverse and most compelling field of study. It has a complex composition history that, according to many scholars, stretches out over a period of more than a millennium. Naturally, this corpus of texts presents a great linguistic diversity. For long, researchers have attempted to understand and explain this diversity in all its facets. The promising results of quantitative methods show once more how Digital Humanities can provide a major contribution to an ongoing discussion; respecting, but also improving an honourable scholarly tradition.

Lecture Series: Jeroen De Gussem

S.R.218 Rodestraat 14 (via ingang Lange Winkelstraat), Antwerpen, Antwerpen, Belgium

The Exalted Expert vs. The Exact Experiment: Authorship Attribution, Stylometry and Literary Theory.

In his lecture, Jeroen De Gussem confronts traditional methods of authorship attribution with more recent computational methods for determining the authorship of a text. He addresses a number of practical and theoretical issues. Take a so-called “stylome”, a collection of features in an authors’ personal language use which can be quantified as data and visualized in attractive figures. Can computational formalism (or perhaps computational stylistics) capture “style” by focusing on such a stylome? Where does computational stylistics succeed where traditional stylistics have failed, and vice versa? Are computational stylistics as “objective” (or “unsupervised”) as they purport to be, or do our results only reflect the answers we were hoping to find?

Lecture Series: Peter Robinson

S.B.004 Prinsstraat 13, Antwerpen, België, Belgium

How to Make Digital Editions of Chaucer and Everyone Else

The explosion of interest in the use of digital tools for making scholarly editions, combined with enthusiasm for crowd-sourcing, has led to a proliferation of on-line tools for the making of scholarly editions. Transcribe Bentham and similar enterprises promise a scholarly heaven. We can imagine a massive cohort of enthusiastic and skilled amateurs transcribing manuscripts which we, the scholarly leaders, can use to make editions after our own dreams. This talk will question this vision: is this practical? do we have, can we have, tools to realize this dream of scholarly editions made by all? Is this even desirable? And what might we have to change in our own practice to make this vision real?

Lecture Series: Tom Deneire

S.R.218 Rodestraat 14 (via ingang Lange Winkelstraat), Antwerpen, Antwerpen, Belgium

Digital Special Collections: a Rare Book Librarian’s Perspective on Digital Research

Special collections libraries have by no means missed the digital turn. On the contrary, curating materials that are mostly copyright free and dealing with reproduction reqeusts on an almost daily basis, special collections libraries are excellent partners for digitization projects and digital research. Conversely, this implies that digital scholarship on rare books, manuscripts, maps and prints has a lot to gain from the librarian’s perspective. Understanding how physical objects are digitized, how different items are catalogued, and how to extract data and metadata from library systems offers clear heuristic and methodological gains for digital research. This presentation will discuss such a librarian’s perspective starting from the Special Collections of the University of Antwerp Library. It will explain the library’s digitization process and digital platform, analyze its metadata structure and export formats, and finally offer some research suggestions for data mining and other digital scholarship.