Speaker
Description
After several years of development, the transition to the new version of the Manuscriptorium digital library was completed last autumn. The development, however, is still ongoing – the most significant and recent part of which is the TEI-compatible full-text module. As a result, Manuscriptorium offers its users an alternative core that shifts the central perspective from visual representation of digitised documents to textual content, with images serving as a complement to the texts they contain.
The overall objective is to build a solid and stable infrastructure, enabling the community of scholars as well as the general public to read, study, and research the historical texts within a wider Central European digital context. At present, the main focus lies on converting older editions of historical texts of Bohemian origin. The editions are then correlated not only with the documents forming their textual basis but also with other known witnesses, thereby reviving such editions in a broader and more dynamic context. In the extended process of establishing an exact method of data preparation, their subsequent processing, and visualisation workflows, we have come across several methodological problems, primarily in relation to directly connecting digitised fragmentary witnesses of varying extent and content with the full texts of the editions.
From the end-user perspective, the edition module consists of two components: an application for advanced viewing of the texts integrated with the digitised images, and a catalog enabling high-granularity searching across the edition database. The essential data persistence has already been secured by the overarching Manuscriptorium resolver infrastructure. By means of full IIIF compatibility, the texts are correlated with the digitised documents from Manuscriptorium's content core as well as from external image repositories. Parallel yet differentiated browsing of texts and images, along with the additional visualisation of modern translations has also been successfully implemented. The next developmental phase will be primarily dedicated to processing and visualising complex critical apparatuses. On the whole, compared with other historical-text databases, our principal purpose is to provide users with highly curated – and thus reliable – textual content and to make it as accessible as possible, not least through an engaging and easy-to-navigate user interface.
In addition, we are taking the first steps towards the inclusion of HTR-generated transcriptions in the database and, ultimately, in the wider Manuscriptorium environment. One goal is for these transcriptions to serve as a complementary dataset, allowing users, for instance, to visualise raw HTR data representing individual witnesses alongside the textual constructs resulting from critical editorial work. In the case of revised and moderately enriched HTR transcriptions, we also aim to incorporate them directly at the level of pragmatic editions, thereby further diversifying the edition module’s content.