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

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A comprehensive set of markup structures has also been created to represent the <strong>in</strong>tellectual content of
manuscripts. Deckers et al. (2009) observed that two complementary issues are <strong>in</strong>volved <strong>in</strong> relat<strong>in</strong>g
structural <strong>in</strong>formation to a transcription: first, the need to relate the text of a manuscript transcription to
the structure found <strong>in</strong> a particular edition of a work; and second, the need to encode “any structure
evident” <strong>in</strong> the actual manuscript witness that is be<strong>in</strong>g transcribed. These issues become even more
complicated, Deckers et al. argued, when comb<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g the transcriptions of multiple manuscript
witnesses of a work:
To be able to reta<strong>in</strong> per-witness structural <strong>in</strong>formation <strong>in</strong> a jo<strong>in</strong>ed document, we therefore
propose to encode all structural <strong>in</strong>formation us<strong>in</strong>g empty elements, i.e. s. When
such a jo<strong>in</strong>ed document is edited further to become a new edition of a work <strong>in</strong> its own right, the
editor(s) may (and <strong>in</strong> most cases probably will) of course decide to create a hierarchical
structure tak<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong>to account the structure of the various witnesses, but this should be a later
step. To avoid confusion, we should state that we do not <strong>in</strong>tend to provide dynamically
generated editions. While the semi-automatic jo<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g of transcriptions is a first step towards
creat<strong>in</strong>g a digital critical edition, the further steps require substantial scholarly <strong>in</strong>tervention
(Deckers et al. 2009).
The approach chosen by Teuchos illustrates the difficulty <strong>in</strong>herent <strong>in</strong> try<strong>in</strong>g to create dynamically
generated editions, particularly for works that have potentially dozens of manuscript witnesses. In
addition, structural <strong>in</strong>formation from an older exist<strong>in</strong>g edition is often used as the organizational
structure for a new edition (e.g., us<strong>in</strong>g Stephanus edition page numbers for an OCT edition of Plato).
Deckers et al. thus proposed a hierarchical system that used s with a “special value of
“external” for the unit attribute” that made it clear an external reference system was be<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong>dicated
and a specially created value of “canonical” for the type attribute. Different edition and number<strong>in</strong>g
schemes were referred to us<strong>in</strong>g an “ed” attribute, the hierarchical level of the reference used a subtype
attribute, and the actual reference used a “n attribute.” Def<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g this level of encod<strong>in</strong>g granularity is
important for it means that multiple canonical reference systems from different editions, or even
multiple number<strong>in</strong>g schemes from one edition, can be encoded for one manuscript text. This system is
also used to encode the content structure of <strong>in</strong>dividual manuscript witnesses, but a value of “<strong>in</strong>ternal”
is used <strong>in</strong>stead of “external” for the unit attribute, with type values of “present” for numbers actually
found with<strong>in</strong> the text and “implied” for numbers that are no longer found <strong>in</strong> the witness. F<strong>in</strong>ally,
Deckers et al. suggested that the “ed” attribute could be used to <strong>in</strong>dicate manuscript siglum as well as
edition names.
While future work for the Teuchos project <strong>in</strong>volves the creation of detailed codicological manuscript
descriptions and transcriptions of <strong>in</strong>dividual manuscript texts, Deckers et al. expla<strong>in</strong>ed that they first
focused on structural encod<strong>in</strong>g, s<strong>in</strong>ce they considered “this an important step <strong>in</strong> provid<strong>in</strong>g fuller access
to digitised manuscripts for textual scholars, and a necessary prerequisite for cumulative and shared
scholarly work on the primary text sources <strong>in</strong> a distributed digital environment.” As do the Interedition
and the Virtual Manuscript Room, the Teuchos project wants to create a distributed environment that
will let many scholars contribute their expertise and share their edit<strong>in</strong>g with others. A recent
presentation by Vertan (2009) has offered some further technical details on this <strong>in</strong>frastructure that is
be<strong>in</strong>g built, and stated that Teuchos is work<strong>in</strong>g with CLARIN as one of their collaborative research
projects, “MLT-Cphil-Multil<strong>in</strong>gual Language Technology for Classical Philology Research.” Vertan
described Teuchos as a “Knowledge Web‐ Based eResearch Environment” <strong>in</strong> which knowledge work
is supported through knowledge organization, semiautomated <strong>in</strong>formation extraction, the management