TEI and Scholarly Digital Editions: how to make philological data easier to retrieve and visualise
Description
In the past few decades the number of TEI-encoded scholarly digital editions (SDEs) has risen significantly, which means that a big amount of philologically edited data is now available in a machine-readable form. One could try to apply computational approaches, in order to further study the linguistic data, the information about the textual transmission, etc. contained in multiple TEI-encoded digital editions. The problem is that retrieving philological data through different TEI-encoded SDEs is not that simple.
Every TEI-encoded edition has its own markup model, designed to respond to the philological requirements of that particular edition. The TEI guidelines, for example, show how the @type attribute can be used with the <rdg> element to distinguish between different types of variants. However, every edition may have its own set of possible values, beyond “orthographic” and “substantive”, to markup a wider range of phenomena of the textual transmission. For this reason, it is difficult to identify the same types of data through different digital editions unambiguously.
A possible way to simplify the retrieval of philological information from multiple digital editions is to link them to a same model that is able to represent SDEs on a more abstract level. This abstract model could be formalised as an ontology. Then inside different TEI-encoded editions it would be possible to add a further markup layer that binds each abstract component to the corresponding class of the ontology.
There are already some ontologies that were created for representing scholarly edited texts [1] and, more specifically, the critical apparatus [2]. My goal is to use these existing models, as well as the TEI guidelines, to analyse different scholarly editions (both digital and printed) and identify all the abstract components of a scholarly edition. The final goal of this preliminary research is to lay a theoretical foundation for an abstract model that can help make philological data more visible and easier to retrieve.
[1] http://e-editiones.ch/ontology/scholarly-editing.
[2] ‘The Critical Apparatus Ontology (CAO)’. n.d. Accessed 18 August 2022. https://fgiovannetti.github.io/cao/.
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Additional details
References
- Ciotti, Fabio, and Francesca Tomasi. 2016. 'Formal Ontologies, Linked Data, and TEI Semantics'. Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative, no. Issue 9 (September). https://doi.org/10.4000/jtei.1480.
- Daquino, Marilena, Francesca Giovannetti, and Francesca Tomasi. 2019. 'Linked Data per le edizioni scientifiche digitali. Il workflow di pubblicazione dell'edizione semantica del quaderno di appunti di Paolo Bufalini'. Umanistica Digitale, no. 7 (December). https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2532-8816/9091.
- Doerr, Martin. 2003. 'The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Module: An Ontological Approach to Semantic Interoperability of Metadata'. AI Magazine 24 (3): 75–75. https://doi.org/10.1609/aimag.v24i3.1720.
- Eide, Øyvind. 2014. 'Ontologies, Data Modeling, and TEI'. Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative, no. Issue 8 (December). https://doi.org/10.4000/jtei.1191.
- Martignano, Chiara. 2021. 'Un modello concettuale per favorire lo sviluppo e il riutilizzo di app per edizioni digitali'. Umanistica Digitale, no. 10 (September): 71–88. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2532-8816/12620.