Organizing the work of transcription for a critical edition « Digital Humanities Questions & Answers

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Organizing the work of transcription for a critical edition

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Asked 5 years ago by Carin Ruff
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Carin Ruff
Member
I'm (seemingly perpetually) in the early stages of a critical edition of a Latin text and am looking for advice on the best tools to organize the work of transcription. There's only one of me, so I don't need something specifically geared towards crowd-sourcing.

Some particulars:

– I have about 20 full or partial manuscripts of a text of approximately 17,000 words.
– I don't especially want to fully automate the collation process once I've transcribed all the mss, but I WOULD like to be able to quickly pull the transcriptions of a particular passage for two or more mss, or query my transcriptions for particular lemmata to look for agreement or disagreement. I'd love something that makes "manual" collation very accessible visually - that is, something that will produce literally a synopsis of readings.
– If there's a tool that would easily accommodate making discursive notes to myself as I transcribe, that would be fab.
– I expect this project to have at least two distinct end-products, one a traditional (i.e, paper) critical edition, and one an electronic, single-manuscript edition from the earliest witness. My main concern at the transcription phase is not to do anything that would close off the possibility of either kind of output.

So I guess I really have two questions:
1) Is there software that will help with logistical and visual organization, and...
2) To what extent should I be thinking about coding at the transcription stage? That is, presumably I'd need to add some very basic coding to make the text query-able in the way I'm envisioning, but there are lots of features of the text that won't be meaningfully encodable until I've established the text...and here I get lost in a hermeneutic circle.

Any suggestions for tools and/or help thinking through this would be gratefully received.

Carin
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Posted 5 years ago Permalink
Shane Landrum
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I'm not a classicist, but my sense is that the tools developed by Greg Crane and his associates at the Perseus Project might be one option. If nothing else, investigating how they've solved some of these problems might give you ideas for your own work.

As for question number two, one option is to store your transcriptions in a text-based format that can easily be put into a version control system. Julie Meloni's A Gentle Introduction to Version Control may be helpful for understanding this. The advantage of version control, other than making it easier for you to undo changes, is that every time you save an edited version of a particular text, you can comment about what precisely you changed ( or, for example, what tags you used in this round of encoding.)

Posted 5 years ago Permalink
Carin Ruff
Member

Replying to @Shane Landrum's post:

Thanks, Shane. I definitely need to wrap my mind around version control, and I'd missed Julie's article. I also just found this, which looks like it might be helpful in comparing options: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/09/18/the-top-7-open-source-version-control-systems/

Carin

Posted 5 years ago Permalink
rlee13
Member

Replying to @Carin Ruff's post:

Juxta comes to mind as a possibility: http://www.juxtasoftware.org/

I've only played around with it a little bit, but it might be the kind of tool you're looking for, in terms of visualizing collations. The necessary XML markup looks pretty minimal as well.

Speaking of XML, if you're not already familiar with TEI's documentation about encoding MSS, that might be a good starting point: http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/MS.html

I'm a project assistant with the William Blake Archive (http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/). I recently published an article about encoding Blake's manuscript in XML -- including some discussion of how we developed the tag set (which is based on TEI, but not strictly TEI-compliant). It might be useful as you consider the encoding standards for your MSS? Here it is: http://romantic.arhu.umd.edu/praxis/editing_blake/lee_mcghee/lee_mcghee.html

Hope any of this is useful!

Rachel

Posted 5 years ago Permalink
Carin Ruff
Member

Replying to @rlee13's post:

Thanks, Rachel. I'd looked at Juxta before, but not for a couple of years. It looks like it's evolved a lot, so I'll definitely check it out.

Carin

Posted 5 years ago Permalink
elotroalex
Member
Best Answer

I'm not pretty sure I understand exactly what you are looking for in the original question, but let me try to share some thoughts:

a) Juxta is indeed a good tool to have. As you've noticed it has evolved and can now read TEI. I don't know what are your mark-up practices, but the ability to only compare the tags that you choose might be what you are looking for when you talk about comparing specific lemmata. Juxta is also still in continuous development, so stay tuned. I foresee Juxta giving back the editor even more control over what to collate and what not collate.

b) I don't recommend tagging from the beginning, since once the transcription is done, with some of the software we have out there it is easy to "wrap" blocks of text with the tags you need. You do want to leave markers for yourself as you go along, though. For example, if I'm transcribing prose, I leave myself a simple paragraph break marker, /p, as I go along. Notice that actual characters of your markers don't need to be proper XML or HTML or what have you. They just need to be easy to type, unique things that you can Find and Replace when it comes time to marking-up. In this case, after I am done I do a find and replace that looks something like this: Find: /p ; Replace with: </p><p>

c) Have you heard of Scripto? Perhaps this would move things faster for you.

Posted 5 years ago Permalink
Carin Ruff
Member

Replying to @elotroalex's post:

Alex, thanks for this, especially the suggestion of using place-holding markers. That helps a lot!

Carin

Posted 5 years ago Permalink

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