Exposing Editing

Lots of interesting thoughts have come up on Twitter and then the TEI-L list about the future of the TEI. If you are reading this blog post in August 2011, then you might find some of those Twitter posts here and here (Twitter only searches the most recent content).

A lot of the discussion is about the future of TEI-C, the Consortium that organises TEI activities. I find organisational naval gazing boring and discussing it on Twitter is described as "kibitzing" which the dictionary tells me is to look on and offer unwelcome advice. So I would rather talk about ...

Our first attempt at using Google+ Hangout for a meeting between Birmingham, Münster and Kansas. Until now we have used Skype which requires two computers, one for the link between Birmingham and Münster, and one for the link between Birmingham and Kansas.

The interface is very good, you get a small version of each person and if you click on a person, you see a larger view. On the downside, the latency of the sound here in Birmingham (over wifi) was not very good at all. We will try again next week using the wired network. So we went back ...

The print version of the first fascicle of the Vetus Latina John edition arrived in the post today!

Here are the three of the editors, Hugh Houghton, Rosalind Maclachlan and David Parker (as well the technical officer on the project who is hidden).

Here is Philip Burton with the new edition:

Update: Another photo was taken for the news page.

Update: Wednesday 27th June 2011:

Now on official news page: Vetus Latina Iohannes: publication of first fascicle

The first fascicle of the Vetus Latina Iohannes has been published!

Work began in Birmingham on this comprehensive new edition of the earliest ...

In a JISC meeting in Manchester of linked data projects held on July 11th and 12th, various projects had looked into FRBR, but none of them actually used it. However, would FRBR be suitable for our needs as textual scholars?

FRBR stands for "Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records", it comes out of the library world. So we asked Jill Russell our 'Digital Assets Programme Manager' and expert in all things to do with digital libraries.

Jill originally wrote to us on 17th November 2008 when we started using OAI/PMH, another library standard:

Simpler "Library" needs should not hold back ...

Desk tops

We were just talking about touch tables. a typical computer claims to have a desk top. but it's a 14" screen. something six feet by three is a desk top. as a scholar I want to be able to work with two folio books, a quarto and some smaller ones all open at once.

Currently we are restricting the context of written text. in the days of the scroll the context was a single column and continuous reading. cross-referencing was limited by the difficulty of finding a passage. then the codex was invented,and cross-referencing became normal ...

Work has been proceeding in ITSEE on the Workspace for Collaborative Editing over the past nine months, although we have been so busy that we have yet to create an entry for it on our main website! This post aims to give an idea of the progress we have made.

The WCE is a collaborative project funded by the AHRC in the UK and by the DFG in Germany. Its goal is to create a suite of online tools to enable the International Greek New Testament Project and the Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung to work together on the Editio Critica ...

When I was writing the Lyell Lectures for Oxford I realised fully for the first time how useful the hierarchy of Documents Texts Works is for thinking clearly about textual editing.

We can use it for example to explore the concept of canonicity in early Christianity. When we say the First Letter of Peter is canonical, for example, we are clearly referring to the work. But a document such as the Bodmer Miscellaneous Codex, which contains 1 Peter as well as a variety of other canonical and non-canonical works could not be defined as a canonical document.

When we are ...

Over the last academic year, I have been working on, among other things, an exiting one year project called Documents Works Texts.

JISC funded the 'Document Works Texts' project under its 'Exposing digital content for reuse (jiscEXPO)' programme. What you are now reading is what is called a "final product/prototype" post which will be submitted to the review panel in Manchester.

The post has been broken up into multiple posts and pages.

Final prototype posts

Here are the new posts that form this final product/prototype post:

Who is the User?
This post examines who might want to use ...

Over the last academic year, I have been working on, among other things, an exiting one-year JISC funded project called Documents Works Texts. In this post, I answer questions set by JISC about how the project went.

Why use this thing, for what benefit?

The original proposal began with the following words written by Professor Peter Robinson:

This project begins with a request from a scholar: show me all the manuscripts which have the New Testament Greek Text of Chapter 1, Verse 1, of the Gospel of John.

(I assume the scholar here to be the leading New Testament manuscript ...

This post is a walk through of the RESTful interface site that has been created as part of the Documents, Works, Text project. Please click on each screenshot when you want to see a larger image.

Now we can get to the interesting part, the actual linked data. As explained in previous posts, based on user feedback in the workshops we held, and on the fact that the OWL libraries used more server resources than we have available. We ended up with a REST API that returns JSON formatted data. It can also return the same data in XML. I ...