Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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commercial entities own the rights and the content is not available under the open-licens<strong>in</strong>g
regimes necessary for eScience <strong>in</strong> general and ePhilology <strong>in</strong> particular (Crane et al. 2009b).
Thus, the lack of mach<strong>in</strong>e-actionable contents and restrictive copyright regimes frustrate a move to
ePhilology. In addition, a cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure for ePhilology, the authors argued, required at least three
types of access: (1) “access to digital representations of the human record” such as page images of
manuscripts and pr<strong>in</strong>ted books; (2) “access to labeled <strong>in</strong>formation about the human record” such as
named entity annotations; and (3) “access to automatically generated knowledge” or the processes of
various algorithms.
Creat<strong>in</strong>g such a new digital <strong>in</strong>frastructure for philological research is one of the larger goals of
Teuchos, 526 a project of the University of Hamburg <strong>in</strong> partnership with the Aristotle Archive at the
Free University of Berl<strong>in</strong>. Teuchos is build<strong>in</strong>g a research <strong>in</strong>frastructure for classical philology, with an
<strong>in</strong>itial focus on the textual transmission of Aristotle. Work will focus on the digitiz<strong>in</strong>g, encod<strong>in</strong>g, and
description of manuscripts; develop<strong>in</strong>g a XML encod<strong>in</strong>g for manuscript watermarks; and creat<strong>in</strong>g a
web-based environment for philological work that <strong>in</strong>cludes a Fedora repository, the management of
heterogeneous data, and support for a multil<strong>in</strong>gual edit<strong>in</strong>g environment. Two recent articles (Deckers
et al. 2009 and Vertan 2009) have explored different aspects of the Teuchos project.
Deckers et al. (2009) offered a detailed explanation of the data encod<strong>in</strong>g and representation of
“manuscripts as textual witnesses and watermarks” with a focus on the former and an extensive
overview of the Teuchos platform.
In its f<strong>in</strong>al form Teuchos is to provide a web based research environment suited for manuscript
and textual studies, offer<strong>in</strong>g tools for captur<strong>in</strong>g, exchange and collaborative edit<strong>in</strong>g of primary
philogical (sic.) data. The data shall be made accessible to the scholarly community as primary
or raw data <strong>in</strong> order to be reusable as source material for various <strong>in</strong>dividual or collaborative
research projects. This objective entails an open access policy us<strong>in</strong>g creative commons licenses
regard<strong>in</strong>g the content generated and published by means of the platform (esp. digital images of
manuscripts may have to be handled restrictively dependant upon the hold<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong>stitutions’
policies) (Deckers et al. 2009).
The Teuchos project is consequently develop<strong>in</strong>g an open-source platform that can be used for
collaborative edit<strong>in</strong>g of manuscripts and creation of philological data, and the data that are created will
be made available under a CC license, although the authors noted that provid<strong>in</strong>g access to images of
manuscripts will depend on the respective policies of their own<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong>stitutions. 527 One dist<strong>in</strong>ctive
feature of the Teuchos platform is that it will support the <strong>in</strong>tegration of heterogeneous data and the
participation of different user groups.
The creators of Teuchos (Deckers et al. 2009) outl<strong>in</strong>ed a number of potential use cases that <strong>in</strong>formed
their design choices, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g (1) the provision of extensive data that facilitate the use of digitized
manuscripts such as the markup of both the structural <strong>in</strong>formation and <strong>in</strong>tellectual content of
manuscripts (this would <strong>in</strong>clude transcriptions that <strong>in</strong>dicate variant read<strong>in</strong>gs); (2) access to digital
manuscript images that are accompanied by at least partial transcriptions so that material not only
becomes more rapidly available and citable but also can be the “basis for further editorial work”; (3) a
collaborative environment for researchers; (4) a constantly evolv<strong>in</strong>g collection of manuscript
526 http://beta.teuchos.uni-hamburg.de/
527 Copyright, creative commons licens<strong>in</strong>g, and the use of digitized manuscript images has recently been explored by Cayless (2010a).