Domain-Specific Digital Scholarly Editing as an integration of traditional and digital methods: the case study of GreekSchools
Creators: name: Del Grosso, Angelo Mario
name: Boschetti, Federico
name: Zenzaro, Simone
name: Ranocchia, Graziano
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2024
Subjects: DSL
Digital Philology
Digital Humanities
Digital Papyrology
Collaborative Editing

description: The goal of scholarly editing is to reconstruct and publish texts by exploring philological phenomena and documenting them in critical apparatuses or editorial notes. Textual scholarship involves complex, multi-stage processes, and the digital landscape requires even additional effort from textual scholars, as it necessitates formal protocols and standard representations of workflows and resources. This formalization step is often perceived as burdensome by traditional scholars and may be error-prone and time-consuming. An intermediary approach for DSE is based on DSLs. It is aimed to bridge the gap between traditional methodologies applied to printed editions and the recommended digital techniques endorsed by DHers. The latter refers to the established practice of producing editions by XML-encoding in compliance with TEI guidelines. The proposed DSL-Based DSE aims to preserve scholars' longstanding ecdotic knowledge while leveraging computational capabilities compliant to the open science digital agenda, based on the FAIR principles. Our approach follows two principles: 1) enabling scholars to work in a familiar text-focused environment, and 2) ensuring machine actionability and interoperability. The GreekSchools ERC-885222 project offers the perfect setting for developing the aforementioned workflow. Specifically, the aim of the project is to publish scholarly editions of a portion of the Herculaneum papyri - a collection of carbonized scrolls with unedited Greek texts. The potential of computational advancements to enhance the workflow of papyrologists has been demonstrated by recent AI initiatives, such as the Ithaca project and the Vesuvio Challenge, and by platforms like the papyri.info. Moreover, the GreekSchools aligns with the goals of the H2IOSC consortium targeting the following RIs: CLARIN for the computational linguistic technologies; DARIAH for the digital humanities technologies; E-RIHS for the advanced imaging techniques; and OPERAS for the open scholarly communication technologies. In this framework, we propose CoPhiEditor, a web-based digital scholarly environment designed to enhance the GreekSchools workflow. Compared to similar initiatives such as Proteus, Textual Communities, and LEAF-writer, CoPhiEditor implements the DSL-based DSE approach. The primary goal is to facilitate a collaborative and cooperative workflow, allowing scholars to work on the same text simultaneously or on different parts of the text asynchronously. Building on this workflow and principles, CoPhiEditor leverages formal DSLs, language technologies, and IIIF framework to provide automated support, enhancing the quality of the editing process and the editorial work. CoPhiEditor reduces the need for manual checks to ensure adherence to editorial conventions, such as encoding lacunae, unclear characters, and apographs’ readings. It also verifies cross-textual constraints, such as the consistency between diplomatic and literary transcriptions, and the correctness of the apparatus entries. Moreover, it maximizes time spent on textual phenomena, such as evaluating hypotheses for reconstructing the text with readings and conjectures. In addition, CoPhiEditor maintains the adherence to standard formats like EpiDoc. This guarantees interoperability of the edition across various software, enabling processing, such as search capabilities, information extraction, and the creation of training-sets for machine learning. CoPhiEditor is an open-source component, adaptable to different philological projects. Indeed, the tool extends to initiatives like the DiScEPT project, demonstrating its potential to meet new requirements.