Chantal Pivetta, Roberto Rosselli Del Turco, Renato Caenaro
Introduction of the workshop topic/idea and its importance:
Digital Scholarly Editions (DSEs) are essential for the preservation and accessibility of cultural heritage, providing global access to rare and historically significant texts. They support advanced research by offering searchable, annotated, and – in some cases – interlinked texts that clearly represent textual variations and editorial decisions. By integrating digital humanities tools, DSEs enable new methods of analysis and encourage interdisciplinary collaboration. Their interactive features and – when available – high-resolution images of original manuscripts make complex materials more engaging and useful for both research and teaching. As a result, DSEs ensure that historical and literary works remain accessible, transparent, and relevant in the digital era.
This workshop highlights the importance of encoding manuscripts and visualizing them using specialized digital tools. This process is crucial for preserving, analyzing, and making complex textual data more accessible. Encoding captures detailed information about a manuscript’s variations, structure, and materiality in a machine-readable format, improving searchability and enabling advanced analysis. Visualization tools then transform this encoded data into an interactive platform, allowing users to explore patterns, conduct comparative analyses, and understand editorial decisions. This approach enhances both scholarly research and public engagement, offering new ways to study and appreciate cultural and historical texts.
The workshop guides participants through the complete process of creating a Digital Scholarly Edition, focusing on two main phases with integrated software tools that simplify the workflow. In the first phase, participants will transcribe and encode manuscripts or printed texts using DPhD (Digital Philology for Dummies). The second phase involves visualizing the completed edition with Edition Visualization Technology (EVT). This hands-on approach allows participants to work directly with digital tools and materials, resulting in a practical project they can use as a foundation for their own research. By the end of the workshop, participants will have developed a digital edition that can be further refined and expanded according to their research needs.
The software that will be used:
Digital Philology for Dummies (DPhD) is a user-friendly software designed to facilitate the transcription and encoding of texts, regardless of their nature or language. It speeds up the process for experienced users while allowing beginners to focus on their humanistic research objectives without needing to worry—at least initially—about more technical or technological aspects.
Edition Visualization Technology (EVT) plays a crucial role in the visualization of Digital Scholarly Editions (DSEs), offering specialized tools for presenting and analyzing complex textual data. EVT enhances accessibility through a user-friendly interface, enabling users to navigate layered information and compare textual variants effectively. By integrating high-quality images with textual transcriptions, EVT allows for a richer understanding of manuscripts, preserving the original context and materiality of texts. It also promotes transparency in editorial practices, providing insights into the decision-making process behind transcriptions and annotations. The interactivity of EVT supports deeper engagement in both academic research and educational settings, while fostering collaboration and community participation.
Target audience:
The target audience includes anyone interested in digital scholarly editions or in the transcription of texts in XML/TEI format as well as their visualization and navigability. Beginners eager to learn are welcome, as are experts who can benefit from the more advanced and new features of the tools presented.
Expected outcomes:
Participants in this workshop will gain practical skills in transcribing, encoding, and visualizing digital texts using Digital Philology for Dummies (DPhD) and Edition Visualization Technology (EVT). They will complete a prototype digital edition that can serve as a foundation for future projects and acquire a holistic understanding of the Digital sScholarly Edition (DSE) workflow.
In detail:
-
Learn how to transcribe and encode texts, including manuscripts or printed materials, using Digital Philology for Dummies (DPhD). This skill is essential for creating accurate digital editions that retain the textual and structural nuances of original documents.
-
Familiarity with TEI Standards: Gain a foundational understanding of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standards, which are widely used in digital humanities for encoding textual features. This knowledge will be valuable for future digital editing projects.
-
Mastery of Edition Visualization Technology (EVT): Become proficient in using EVT to display and interact with encoded texts. Develop skills such as integrating transcriptions with high-quality images, visualizing textual variants, and navigating through different layers of the text.
-
Creating User-Friendly Digital Editions: By the end of the workshop, you will know how to produce digital editions that are both accurate and accessible, making them ideal for academic research and teaching.
-
A Practical Digital Edition: Work hands-on with provided materials and software throughout the workshop, resulting in a practical digital edition that you can take away as a prototype. This outcome can serve as a basis for creating more advanced editions or incorporating your own research materials.
-
Application to Future Projects: Reflect on how the methods and tools used in the workshop can be applied to your research projects, helping you plan and implement your own digital scholarly editions.
About the organizers
Renato Caenaro is the CEO of SilentWave SRL, a software company that partners with multinational corporations worldwide as a technology provider. The company’s core focus is the development of collaborative software, particularly for engineering applications. Renato has extensive expertise in IT consulting and collaborates with various universities, primarily in the fields of engineering and architecture. He has been working with Lund University for several years, contributing to the development of DPhD and other humanities-oriented projects.
Chantal Pivetta is a PhD candidate at Lund University, where she has designed the DPhD project alongside her doctoral research. Her dissertation project focuses on the critical edition of a 15th-century chivalric poem. She collaborates with the PRIN “CoenoBIuM” project at the Universities of Padua, Brescia, and Bologna, as well as the ALMA project at the Universität des Saarlandes. Additionally, she works with SilentWave SRLS as an independent researcher.
Bibliography
Apollon, Daniel, and Claire Belisle. 2014. Digital Critical Editions. University of Illinois Press.
Buzzoni, M., & Rosselli Del Turco, R. 2024. “Towards an Integrated Digital Edition of the Leges Langobardorum”. In Atti del XIII convegno AIUCD “Me.Te. Digitali: Mediterraneo in rete tra testi e contesti”. Retrieved from https://iris.unive.it/handle/10278/5078701.
Driscoll, Matthew James, and Elena Pierazzo, eds. 2016. Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories and Practices. Open Book Publishers. http://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/483.
Edition Visualization Technology. 2014-. Home page: https://evt.labcd.unipi.it. GitHub repository: https://github.com/evt-project/evt-viewer-angular/.
Rosselli Del Turco, Roberto. 2017. The Digital Vercelli Book. A Facsimile Edition of Vercelli, Biblioteca Capitolare, CXVII. Collane@unito.It. Università di Torino. https://www.collane.unito.it/oa/items/show/11.
Rosselli Del Turco, Roberto. 2019. “Designing an Advanced Software Tool for Digital Scholarly Editions