Proto4DigEd: Prototypical Workflows for Digital Editions

The main goal of the Open Research Data (ORD) project Proto4DigEd funded by swissuniversities for a duration of 18 months (07.2023−12.2024) is to test and further develop prototypical workflows in the conception phase of digital edition projects. Although fitted into the Swiss research landscape, its outputs are tailored to international requirements in the spirit of DARIAH-EU, offering solutions to its communities: Proto4DigEd answers to a growing need for standardisation concerning digital edition projects. For this aim, the project uses a small subset of the planned binational digital letter edition PARES (Gaston Paris: des archives aux reseaux, Switzerland and France).

Standardised Design

Proto4DigEd is concerned with all stages of the data life cycle from the conception phase until the publishing and archiving of the data in a repository. The project is not intended to develop new technical solutions, but focuses on a combination of easily available, long-time proofed and thus sustainable tools and on seamless transitions between them. For the automated transcription of manuscripts (HTR) the tool Transkribus offers general text recognition models as well as the training of specific models. TEI Publisher is a publishing toolbox developed in Switzerland and Germany that is supported by a growing community and allows standardised markup of texts in TEI-XML and their online publication. The DaSCH Service Platform (DSP) allows long-term archiving and long-term visualisation of edition data.

International Scope: Multilingual Editions

Multilingualism is an important concern in our workflow since Switzerland is a country with more than one official language and strong connections to French, German and Italian communities. The multilingual international correspondence of Gaston Paris is therefore a testcase for not only Swiss, but any pan-European project. Proto4DigEd develops versatile workflows for the use and training of multilingual HTR-Models and for the linking of metadata to different national and international authority databases with different language sets.

Community Driven Output

The completely open-source output consists of a model edition linked to a handbook of our workflows. The latter is based on MkDocs and continuously enriched and will be made available on the GitLab instance of the University of Zurich, available from spring 2024 (an URN will be available by the time of the conference). The Center Digital Editions & Edition Analytics, ZDE UZH, helps in sharing the workflow and offers discussion and training to any interested project; for this we envision to put the workflow – beside other modes of communication – on the SSH Open Marketplace. We thus focus on the needs of national and international communities, as the project aims for their needs in reproducible, long-time available and sustainable workflows.