Europe’s beginnings through the looking glass: publishing historical
documents on the Web using EVT
EVT (Edition Visualization Technology) [1] is a software aimed at the creation of image-based web
editions of TEI P5 encoded texts. It is a light-weight, open source tool specifically designed to simplify
the production of digital editions, freeing the scholar from the burden of web programming andenabling the user to browse, explore and study digital editions by means of a user-friendly interface,providing a set of tools (zoom, magnifier and hot-spots for manuscript images, an internal searchengine for the edition texts) for research purposes.
Everything is created around the data and the encoded text itself: by applying a single style sheet to theTEI XML file that contains the whole transcription of a document, an XSLT 2.0 transformation chain
is started that results in a web based application – a mix of HTML 5, CSS3 and JavaScript – that can beeasily shared on the Web. Besides presenting the digital scans of the original manuscript (if available)
linked to the corresponding text of the edition, the software provides a bookreader visualization mode
if double side images are supplied.

The Digital Vercelli Book edition using EVT

EVT was born in the context of a specific use case (the Digital Vercelli Book project, whose firstversion has been available online for about a year [2]), but it is now being used to publish anotherdigital edition, that of the Codice Pelavicino manuscript [3]. The need to adapt it to different types ofdocuments has led to a revision and expansion of the underlying code to make it more flexible andsuitable for many different types of TEI-encoded texts. With this proposal we want to demonstrate theflexibility and re-use of EVT by applying it to an edition of diplomatic documents to be published on
the CVCE's Web site [4]. We will discuss both the technical implications of its application as well as
methodological consequences.

The digital edition of the Codice Pelavicino manuscript

The intended digital edition we plan to build using EVT is based on XML-TEI P5 bilingual (French,English) documents of the W.E.U. (Western European Union), concerning armament production,
standardisation and control in the period 1954-1982. The corpus was selected from the Luxembourg
National Archives, W.E.U. collection, and implied: OCR processing with ABBYY FineReader (oneimage file per typewritten page), Microsoft Word styling and OxGarage [5] conversion to XML-TEI
P5, as well as semi-automatic enrichment by XSLT 2.0, Named Entity Recognition with GATE [6] andmanual annotation.
Several types of documents compose the corpus: meeting minutes, notes from the Secretary-General,
memoranda and studies. The encoding includes metadata (title, author, document reference, copy
number, version, date of availability, confidentiality status); structural markup for headers/footers,sections/subsections, paragraphs, line breaks; content-related annotations (discourse ofinstitutional/country representatives, names of persons, organisations, etc.).
A digital edition will imply features for browsing and searching the collection, as well as side-by-side
visualisation of the transcribed pages and facsimile images. The presentation would address technicalissues (adjustment of the EVT framework to generate the Web edition from the XML-TEI corpus) andmore general questions (to what extent the XML-TEI encoding and associated technologies may
support enhanced “mirror-like” digital representations of the original documents).
Authors
Chiara Di Pietro (dipi.chiara@gmail.com) graduate student, University of Pisa
Raffaele Masotti (raffaele.masotti@gmail.com) graduate student, University of Pisa
Roberto Rosselli Del Turco (roberto.rossellidelturco@unito.it) Researcher/Assistant Professor,
University of Turin
Florentina Armaselu (florentina.armaselu@cvce.eu) Researcher, Digital Humanities Lab, CVCE
Lars Wieneke (lars.wieneke@cvce.eu) Head of Information & Technology, CVCE
References[1] EVT home page: https://sourceforge.net/projects/evt-project/[2] Digital Vercelli Book beta edition: http://vbd.humnet.unipi.it/beta/[3] Codice Pelavicino digital edition: http://labcd.humnet.unipi.it/[4] CVCE (Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance sur l'Europe): http://www.cvce.eu/[5] OxGarage: http://www.tei-c.org/oxgarage[6] GATE (General Architecture for Text Engineering): https://gate.ac.uk/