“Tools for Critical Editing ”
Wilhelm
Ott
Universität Tübingen
ott@zdv.uni-tuebingen.de
To guarantee the reliability of critical editions, electronic tools are
indispensable, not only for publishing (in conventional or electronic form), but
above all for the preparation of text, apparatuses, indexes.
The tools to be presented start from automatic collation of different versions of
the same text as presented in the witnesses (manuscripts, typescripts, early
printings); they allow for the integration of the results of conventional
collation (after transcribing them electronically).
The demonstration includes a synoptic printout of the text and the different
versions as contained in the witnesses as a first overview over the tradition of
a text.
It also includes tools for semi-automatically separating the "minor" variants
(like pure orthograpical variation or differences in punctuation) from
"substantial" ones to be included in the critical apparatuses, and the sorting
and formatting procedures required for automatic generation of apparatus entries
(including reference to the copy text, lemma, variants, manuscript codes,
markup).
Though (except for very simple cases) fully automatical generation of critical
apparatuses is neither desired nor possible, these tools can take over much of
the burden of carefully and safely administrating the materials gained from the
witnesses and thus allow the user to concentrate on the editorial problems.
The editor has in every stage perfect control over the results of the automatic
steps during the preparation of the text and the different aparatuses. This
includes the possibility both to refine the rules for the automatic process and
to revise the results manually where the rules can not be adapted (e.g. to
ambiguous cases) without unreasonable effort.
The demonstration includes the tools to incorporate the apparatus entries into
the text and adding the markup as required for conventional or electronic
publication. Automatic page makeup (for paper edition) and automatic conversion
into a full text retrieval system will conclude the demonstration.
The procedures which will be demonstrated have been programmed using the
TUebingen System for TExt Processing TUSTEP, which is a flexible and very
powerful programming environment for handling textual data. It runs under
MS-DOS, VMS (DEC VAX machines), and different UNIX dialects (presently:
Interactive UNIX, LINUX, AIX, ConvexOS, Digital UNIX (OSF/1), HP-UX, IRIX,
SunOS/Solaris). The DOS version does not include the typesetting routines.
In addition to the preparation of critical editions (the list of editions
prepared and published with TUSTEP contains over 150 titles), TUSTEP is beeing
successfully used for lexicograpy, bibliographic work (well known examples are
the periodicals "Germanistik" and "Romanische Bibliographie"), concordances, and
literary and linguistic analysis.