Auden in Austria Digital: Exploring the Potentials and Limitations of the TEI Guidelines in Editing Document Contents
Creators: name: Frühwirth, Timo
name: Mayer, Sandra
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2024
Subjects: digital humanities
SDE
DSE
digital editing
uncertainty
RDF
TEI
XML

description: The British-American poet W. H. Auden (1907-1973) counts among the most influential writers in the English language in the 20th century. From 1958 until his death, he spent up to six months of each year in Austria. A previously inaccessible private collection of material, in the estate of Stella Musulin, sheds new light on Auden’s Austrian period. These documents have been made openly available through the Auden Musulin Papers scholarly digital edition at the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (ACDH-CH) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. This has been the first stage in a larger-scale edition project, titled Auden in Austria Digital, which will bring together all Auden-related material held by Austrian archival institutions.

We approach this heterogeneous collection (including literary papers, correspondence, and legal documents) from the position of a dual interest in both textual features and historical-biographical information. Hence, our data model is being designed to observe both philological and historical data needs (as pointed out by Vogeler 2019, 2021). The TEI Guidelines provide rich opportunities for the markup of genre-specific textual and material document characteristics. In addition, it is our goal to formalize document contents for further computational processing (such as for network analysis). Furthermore, we aim to make editorial interpretation—with specific regard to aspects of uncertainty—transparent, reproducible, and FAIR. In this paper, we will outline the project-specific solutions for encoding content and interpretation information, which exploit, and push the limits of, the TEI reference model. Finally, we will point toward the potential of bridging TEI markup with alternative modeling systems.

Researching Auden’s networks of social interaction and professional collaboration, we have captured relevant information provided in the documents by means of the <event> element (with dates, places, and persons) of the type “internal”. This includes communicative acts such as correspondence, phone calls, meetings, as well as professional events and travel activities, for which the edition documents are the sole sources. The TEI Guidelines have also provided us with the means for encoding scholarly commentary on specific document contents, which is marked up by the <interp> element—to which the respective textual data or metadata are linked via the @ana attribute. The responsibility and confidence for each interpretation are stated in the <respons> and <certainty> nodes, respectively; the values of the @cert attribute are defined in the project-specific ODD.

Within the <interp> node, the <desc> elements contain human-readable comments intended for UI display. Additionally, we have endeavored to formalize that same interpretation in machine-readable TEI-conformant format. Such formalization has been successfully implemented in the cases of identification of entities and citation of bibliographic sources. In this context, we will propose allowing <correspAction> within <bibl> for citing correspondence (including e-mails) as sources. For the purpose of modeling more complex editorial interpretation, it would seem that the opportunities provided by the TEI Guidelines are insufficient. Here, we will suggest interlinking TEI/XML markup—by directing to external nanopublications through the @source attribute of <interp>—with the formalization of interpretative activity modeled in RDF using the CRMinf argumentative ontology.