Papers by Raffaele Masotti
The TEI schemas and guidelines have made it possible for many scholars and researchers to encode ... more The TEI schemas and guidelines have made it possible for many scholars and researchers to encode texts of all kinds for (almost) all kinds of purposes: from simple publishing of documents in PDF form to sophisticated language analysis by means of computational linguistics tools. It is almost paradoxical, however, that this excellent standard is matched by an astounding diversity of publishing tools, which is particularly true when it comes to digital editions, in particular editions including images of manuscripts. This is in part due to the fact that, while there’s still an ongoing discussion about what exactly constitutes a digital edition, available publications have significantly raised users’ expectations: even a simple digital facsimile of a manuscript is usually accompanied by tools such as a magnifying lens or a zoom in/out tool, and if there is a diplomatic transcription (and/or a critical edition) we expect to have some form of image-text linking, hot-spots, a powerful search engine, and so on. The problem is that all of this comes at a cost, and the different needs of scholars, coupled with the constant search for an effective price/result ratio and the locally available technical skills, have a led to a remarkable fragmentation: publishing solutions range from simple HTML pages produced using the TEI style sheets (or the TEI Boilerplate software) to very complex frameworks based on CMS and SQL search engines.
The optimal solution to the long standing visualization problem would be a simple, drop-in tool that would allow to create a digital edition by running one or more style sheets on the TEI document(s). The TEI Boilerplate software takes this approach exactly: you apply an XSLT style sheet to your already marked-up file(s), and you’re presented with a web-ready document. Unfortunately, this project doesn’t cover the case of an image-based digital edition I presented above, which is why I had to look elsewhere for my own research: the Digital Vercelli Book project aims at producing an online edition of this important manuscript, and has been examining several software tools for this purpose. In the end, we decided to build a software, named EVT (for Edition Visualization Technology), that would serve the project needs and possibly more: what started as an experiment has grown well beyond that, to the point of being almost usable as a general TEI publishing tool. EVT is based on the ideal work flow hinted above: you encode your edition, you drop the marked up files in the software directory, and voilà: after applying an XSLT style sheet, your edition is ready to be browsed.
At the present moment EVT can be used to create image-based editions with two possible levels: diplomatic and diplomatic-interpretative; this means that a transcription encoded using elements of the TEI transcr module (see chapter 11 Representation of Primary Sources in the Guidelines) should be compatible with EVT, or made compatible with minor changes; on the image side, several features such as a magnifying lens, a general zoom, image-text linking and more are already available. For the future we aim at taking the Critical Apparatus module into consideration, which would imply creating a separate XSLT style sheet to complement the two existing ones, and make it easier to configure the whole system, possibly by means of a GUI tool.
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Papers by Raffaele Masotti
The optimal solution to the long standing visualization problem would be a simple, drop-in tool that would allow to create a digital edition by running one or more style sheets on the TEI document(s). The TEI Boilerplate software takes this approach exactly: you apply an XSLT style sheet to your already marked-up file(s), and you’re presented with a web-ready document. Unfortunately, this project doesn’t cover the case of an image-based digital edition I presented above, which is why I had to look elsewhere for my own research: the Digital Vercelli Book project aims at producing an online edition of this important manuscript, and has been examining several software tools for this purpose. In the end, we decided to build a software, named EVT (for Edition Visualization Technology), that would serve the project needs and possibly more: what started as an experiment has grown well beyond that, to the point of being almost usable as a general TEI publishing tool. EVT is based on the ideal work flow hinted above: you encode your edition, you drop the marked up files in the software directory, and voilà: after applying an XSLT style sheet, your edition is ready to be browsed.
At the present moment EVT can be used to create image-based editions with two possible levels: diplomatic and diplomatic-interpretative; this means that a transcription encoded using elements of the TEI transcr module (see chapter 11 Representation of Primary Sources in the Guidelines) should be compatible with EVT, or made compatible with minor changes; on the image side, several features such as a magnifying lens, a general zoom, image-text linking and more are already available. For the future we aim at taking the Critical Apparatus module into consideration, which would imply creating a separate XSLT style sheet to complement the two existing ones, and make it easier to configure the whole system, possibly by means of a GUI tool.
The optimal solution to the long standing visualization problem would be a simple, drop-in tool that would allow to create a digital edition by running one or more style sheets on the TEI document(s). The TEI Boilerplate software takes this approach exactly: you apply an XSLT style sheet to your already marked-up file(s), and you’re presented with a web-ready document. Unfortunately, this project doesn’t cover the case of an image-based digital edition I presented above, which is why I had to look elsewhere for my own research: the Digital Vercelli Book project aims at producing an online edition of this important manuscript, and has been examining several software tools for this purpose. In the end, we decided to build a software, named EVT (for Edition Visualization Technology), that would serve the project needs and possibly more: what started as an experiment has grown well beyond that, to the point of being almost usable as a general TEI publishing tool. EVT is based on the ideal work flow hinted above: you encode your edition, you drop the marked up files in the software directory, and voilà: after applying an XSLT style sheet, your edition is ready to be browsed.
At the present moment EVT can be used to create image-based editions with two possible levels: diplomatic and diplomatic-interpretative; this means that a transcription encoded using elements of the TEI transcr module (see chapter 11 Representation of Primary Sources in the Guidelines) should be compatible with EVT, or made compatible with minor changes; on the image side, several features such as a magnifying lens, a general zoom, image-text linking and more are already available. For the future we aim at taking the Critical Apparatus module into consideration, which would imply creating a separate XSLT style sheet to complement the two existing ones, and make it easier to configure the whole system, possibly by means of a GUI tool.