The School of Salamanca Text Workflow: From the early modern print to TEI-All.

Since its beginning in 2013, the Salamanca Project has been developing a text editing workflow based on methods and practices for sustainable and scalable text processing. Sustainability in text processing encompasses not only reusability of the tools and methods developed and applied, but also long-term documentation and traceability of the development of the text data. This documentation will provide an important starting point for future research work. Moreover, the text preparation must be scalable, since the Digital Source Collection comprises a relatively large mass of texts for a full-text digital edition project: in total, it will involve more than 108,000 printed pages from early modern prints in Latin and Spanish, which must be edited in an efficient and at the same time quality-assured manner.

In the following, I will introduce the sequence of stages that each work in the Digital Source Collection goes through, from locating a suitable digitization template in a public library to metadata and the completion of a full text in TEI All format, enriched with the project’s specifications. Continue reading “The School of Salamanca Text Workflow: From the early modern print to TEI-All.”

TEI XML to Zenodo service published: Automatic depositing the project’s TEI files at a long-term archive

The idea: automatic depositing the project’s TEI files at Zenodo

[Update 2023-01-25: There is a recording of an e-editiones workshop. However, the TEI2Zenodo platform mentioned in the article and in the workshop is unfortunately no longer reliably available.]

We have been using the github-zenodo integration for a while already with our source code releases. This allows us to deposit our code, update the deposit with new releases and get a persistent identifier for each of the versions. Since we are facing similar requirements for our TEI XML files, I have investigated how we could take profit of this or a similar mechanism. The crucial difference is this: The integration as it is makes deposits from releases/snapshots of the whole github repository, i.e. of all the files that are in the version control system. This is good for software, where all the files depend on each other and make sense only in the context of an encompassing application. But for our TEI sources, it would be better to have deposits for individual files (and persistent identifiers for them) rather than for the collection as a whole.

So I have developed a “TEI2Zenodo” service (in the following just “t2z”) that can take care of uploading our files to zenodo. The idea is that a project or an institution that regularly wants to commit TEI XML files to long-term archival can host an instance of it and do its uploads via this instance. I have used it to upload 16 of our source TEI files automatically from our github repository.

Continue reading “TEI XML to Zenodo service published: Automatic depositing the project’s TEI files at a long-term archive”

(Deutsch) Entwicklung der Webanwendung (v2.0)

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Ein Bericht von David Glück und Andreas Wagner

Am 1. März 2018 wurde die Version 1.0 der Webanwendung im Rahmen eines Beitrags von Andreas Wagner und David Glück bei der Konferenz „Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum 2018“ als freie Software veröffentlicht und der wissenschaftlichen Community zur Verfügung gestellt. Seitdem wird die Webanwendung in Open Source und mit einem laufenden Versionierungs­modell weiterentwickelt. Sowohl die Webanwendung als Ganze als auch die einzelnen Releases der Anwendung sind seitdem nachhaltig archiviert und über DOIs zitierbar.1 Ebenfalls 2018 wurde die auf der Webanwendung aufbauende Digitale Quellensammlung des Projekts erstmals einem fachwissenschaftlichen Publikum präsentiert und (in Verbindung mit der Publikation von Francisco de Vitorias Confessionario, des ersten Textes der Digitalen Quellensammlung) als Forschungsplattform veröffentlicht. Im März 2020 haben wir die Version 2.0 der Webanwendung veröffentlicht. Im Folgenden wollen wir einen Überblick über die wichtigsten Entwicklungen seit der erstmaligen Veröffentlichung geben. Continue reading “(Deutsch) Entwicklung der Webanwendung (v2.0)”

What’s in a URI? Part I: The School of Salamanca, the Semantic Web and Scholarly Referencing

Starting from experiences of the the philosophical and legal-historical project “The School of Salamanca. A digital collection of sources and a dictionary of its juridical-political language”, this article discusses an experimental approach to the Semantic Web.1 It lists both affirmative reasons and skeptical doubts related to this field in general and to its relevance for the project in particular. While for us the general question has not been settled yet, we have decided early on to discuss it in terms of a concrete implementation, and hence the article will also describe preliminary goals and their implementation along with practical and technical issues that we have had to deal with.

In the process, we have encountered a few difficult questions that — as far as we could determine — involve (arguably) systematic tensions between key technologies and traditional scholarly customs. The most important one concerns referencing and citation. In the following, I will describe a referencing scheme that we have implemented. It attempts to combine a canonical citation scheme, some technologies known primarily from semantic web contexts and a permalink system. Besides the details of our particular technical approach and the very abstract considerations about risks and benefits of the semantic web, I will point out some considerable advantages of our approach that are worthwhile pursuing independently of a full-blown semantic web offering.

Continue reading “What’s in a URI? Part I: The School of Salamanca, the Semantic Web and Scholarly Referencing”