Year: 2022

Back to analog: the added value of printing TEI editions

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(Talk given at TEI 2022 conference in Newcastle University, https://zenodo.org/record/7101456)

The topic of this year’s TEI conference and members’ meeting — “text as data” — addressed a growing amount and diversity of textual data produced by the humanities projects. With the increase of data there is also an expanding need for its quality assurance. Several research data projects have already assigned specific teams to tackle the task of standardizing the continuous quality management. I refer, for example, to the task area “Standards, Data Quality and Curation” within the NFDI4Culture consortium, or the KONDA project at the Göttingen State and University Library. The XML data production is in fact a process of a continuous validation, correction, and improvement, involving, inter alia, ODD, RelaxNG, and XML Schemata; custom Python and R scripts; the XSLT, XQuery and Schematron routines integrated into a test-driven development frameworks such as XSpec.

In my talk I addressed a rather unconventional way of testing the TEI data, namely printing it. TEI production workflows frequently presuppose HTML and PDF export, the issue I focused on is the diagnostic value of such prints for the quality control.

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Salamanca Colloquium: Luis de Molina on African Slavery

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On Wednesday, May 11, 14.30, we invite all interested researchers to the next Salamanca Colloquium which will focus on “Luis de Molina on African Slavery“.

Jörg Tellkamp (UAM, Mexico City), together with Daniel Schwartz (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem): “Luis de Molina on slaves as subjects of rights”

Anne-Charlotte Martineau (CNRS): “Reading Molina’s Disputationes on slavery through an international legal lens“

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

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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.”

New Publication: “Travelling Scholastics” – The Contribution of Salamanca Scholastics to the Emergence of an Empirical Normative Authority in Early Modern Period

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Text: José Luis Egío

The “discovery” of America, a continent without precedents in the history of the Western culture, had a major impact on the way in which knowledge was produced by European scholars. Topics such as the impact of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century geographical discoveries on early modern Iberoamerican natural history, cosmographical, and medical knowledge and the parallel extension of empiricist imperial techniques in the Iberian monarchies during the sixteenth century have been already well established in historical research. On the contrary, scholars have approached only superficially the way in which other “discoveries” – of peoples, customs, practices, and normativities – affected legal thought.

Analysing in detail the writings of jurists and moral theologians trained at Salamanca or at the recently created Spanish American Universities, José Luis Egío shows in his most recent publication how the experience of the foreign lands became Continue reading “New Publication: “Travelling Scholastics” – The Contribution of Salamanca Scholastics to the Emergence of an Empirical Normative Authority in Early Modern Period”

New Publication: “International Law” according to the Spanish Scholastics (cf. Brill Companion)

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The character of the law of nations is a complex issue for authors of the School of Salamanca. There are debates about the ground of its validity and of its obligatory force. In particular, authors re-worked the just war doctrine, elaborating notions of self-defense, of punishment and of what we would call today humanitarian intervention. However, the discussions did not limit themselves to the single issue of legitimate use of military force: while the Spanish Scholastics identified criteria of such legitimate use, they also ventured to establish sets of precise, substantial norms and rights, both of states and individuals. Thus, topics as the freedom of the seas and certain subjective rights of natural persons, such as the right of access to citizenship, must feature in a discussion of Salmantian notions of the law of nations.

These issues are discussed extensively in a contribution to a collective volume that has appeared recently:

Andreas Wagner: “International Law”, in: Harald Braun, Erik De Bom and Paolo Astorri (eds.): A Companion to the Spanish Scholastics. Leiden: Brill, 2022. https://brill.com/view/title/31552

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