Patrick Sahle (2016) differentiates scholarly digital editions from non-scholarly and print scholarly editions. Some of the primary differences, according to Sahle (2016), are a result of the affordances of the different mediums and the changing scholarly values that they supply; one of the results is that instead of editions claiming their primary purpose to be an authoritative reading and final statement on a subject, the moment of publication of a digital edition is quite fluid since it can be published iteratively rather than finally, in contrast to print editions. Namely, it “becomes a permanent but potentially always changing documentation of an ongoing examination and processing of the objects in question. In this way, the edition as a publication is a process rather than a product.” An example of a scholarly digital edition is the scholary edition project of Letters of Vespasiano da Bisticci [http://projects.dharc.unibo.it/vespasiano/] is part of the research activity of the Digital Humanities Advanced Research Center (/DH.arc) at the Department of Classical and Italian Philology (FICLIT) of the University of Bologna. The scientific director is Professor Francesca Tomasi, University of Bologna, Department of Classic Philology and Italian Studies.
Digital edition of the Letters of Vespasiano da Bisticci, a Florentine copyist who lived in the 15th century. The letters, sent and received and up to now tracked, are navigable through a faceted system (correspondent, date, place, signature). The edition is accompanied by philological tools for orientation and guidance (index of the words in the form of authorities, synoptic table, philological note, description of the witnesses). The letters are accompanied by contextual information (the collection of letters, the correspondents, the manuscripts produced by the school, the copyists of Vespasian, the libraries produced) necessary to insert the documents in a metatextual perspective. This edition is based on full-text transcription of original texts into electronic form. Open Access and Open Source. Part of the data underlying the digital edition is freely available for access and reuse.
A diplomatic-interpretative transcription was carried out working, when possible, directly on the original copies (witnesses). Previous editions were also evaluated, in particular that of the last publisher, but without making a timely collation. In particular, it was based on the Cagni edition, which collects most of the letters sent and received by Vespasiano da Bisticci, and lessons and additions have been reported, both in the event of an agreement and an alternative proposal. We could detect three levels of intervention on the text, which correspond to three modalities of edition (or even to three different models of the text being coded): the conservation of graphemes and paragraph features; the conservation of graphemes and the modernization of paraphematic signs; the normalization of both graphemes and paragraph signs. Particular attention was paid to autographed documents. The various phases of development of the Knowledge site: First, the XML/TEI P5 markup model is described. Then, the conversion process from the XML/TEI P5 documents into HTML documents is illustrated. Finally, the process of converting certain bits of information contained in the HTML documents into RDF statements is defined. A series of existing ontologies have been reused for describing the manuscript letters and the entities that contain their contextual information.
This project is an attempt to address the question “why map literature?”. The digital medium encourages a space for creativity and for experimentation with scholarly communication and methodologies; for example, an approach for cartographic comparison where maps and data layers can be visualized side-by-side for more intuitive explorations. The final goal is to provide a model for collaboration in which contributors with different technical skills can more readily contribute to a project, in an attempt to encourage a community of practice among literary experts that can essentially be adapted to other projects and their respective content.
Ontology Reuse is a critical aspect for the evolution of the Semantic Web since its origins. Ontology reuse aims to foster semantic interoperability between data sources and facilitate data integration tasks. A series of existing ontologies have been reused for describing the manuscript letters and the entities that contain their contextual information. In particular:
- the Biographical information vocabulary (BIO) is a vocabulary for describing biographical information about people.
- the Dublin Core Metadata Terms (DCTerms) is an ontology implementing all the metadata terms maintained by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative.
- the FRBR-align Bibliographic Ontology (FaBiO) is an ontology for recording and publishing on the Semantic Web bibliographic records of scholarly endeavors.
- the Friend Of A Friend vocabulary (FOAF) is an ontology for describing people and their relations with other people, documents, and other information objects.
- the Expression of Core FRBR Concepts in RDF (FRBRcore) is an RDF vocabulary incorporating the basic concepts and relations described in the IFLA report on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR)
- the Publishing Roles Ontology (PRO) is an ontology describing possible roles in the publication process, or in other scholarly activities or situations, held by particular agents in certain periods of time.
Obviously not all "places" mentioned in letters were points of interest in this project. In addition, some letters are very focused on a work that should be done but some there are more personal and "sentiment" or "tone" of these letters’ changes. If this information could be extracted from letters It seems could be informative for outsider's reader in order to be more familiar about some lived experiences of Vespasiano or persons he talked about.
Moreover, the problem of this SDE could be that it has not been translated, so it is difficult to use it as a case study and the fact is that Francesca Tomasi collected all the letters that Vespasiano da Bisticci sent, not the ones he received. When you collect the letters of an author it is better not only the letters sent but also the ones received. Probably we have many more letters sent by Vespasiano than those he received. In Vespasiano’s archive you have only the letters he decided to conserve. Sometimes it is easier to find the letters which have been sent by an Author, by going to libraries and archives (see: OPAC and MANUS, in the latter you can find all the manuscripts in Italian libraries).
On the other hand, this SDE is very useful and gives many possibilities to read all the gathering of all Vespasiano’s letters. You can also sort the correspondence, the places, the time. You can list documents also using signatures: the specific letter or number given to the document by the library where it has been preserved.
El Khatib, Randa, and Marcel Schaeben. 2020. “Why Map Literature? Geospatial Prototyping for Literary Studies and Digital Humanities.” Digital Studies/Le champ numérique 10(1): 7, pp. 1–22. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/dscn.381
Sahle, Partick. 2016. “What is a Scholarly Digital Edition.” In Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories and Practices, edited by Matthew James Driscoll and Elena Pierazzo, 19–40. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers. DOI: https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0095