Funding for the Methods Network ended March 31st 2008. The website will be preserved in its current state.

Open Source Critical Editions Programme

9.30 Coffee
9.50 Introduction
10.00 Session 1: Critical editions
Research Agenda/Critical Apparatus
Argument: The agenda and research goals of philologists need to be kept in mind— even if modified and enhanced—when using digital technologies to create, edit, and study texts. Presenter: Charlotte Roueché.Responder: Stephen Oakley
Markup
Argument: XML (and within it especially TEI) offers both a solid standard for text markup as well as limitations which have to be managed in a collaborative framework. Depth of markup may be a hindrance as well as an advantage of this technology. Presenter: Gabriel Bodard. Responder: Notis Toufexis.
11.00 Coffee
11.30 Session 2: Technologies
eScience/VRE/Grid
Argument: the eScience methodologies offer a powerful technological framework for digital research. These technologies need to be exploited for digitial authoring, collaborative text editing, wide dissemination, and effective processing of available texts. Presenter: Stuart Dunn. Responder: Nathan Lea.
Depth vs. scale
Argument: The computational analysis of digital editions needs both a large enough corpus and a degree of deep encoding—any given textual project needs to find its own balance between these two. The field as a whole and any repository need to be able to accept and handle texts with a minimal layer of markup as well as more richly encoded versions. Presenter: Gregory Crane. Responder: Melissa Terras.
Collaboration
Argument: Large-scale digital projects make it possible, and even essential, that scholars work together to achieve multi-disciplinary work that is entirely within no one person's expertise. There are managerial and technological issues to be addressed with any collaborative project. Presenter: Ross Scaife. Responder: Brian Fuchs.
13.00 Lunch
14.00 Session 3: Protocols
Licensing/Open Source
Argument: Scholarship has always depended on transparency and availability of source texts and arguments, and these features need to be carried over into legal licensing of digital editions.Presenter: Sayeed Choudhury. Responder: tbc.
Registries/referencing
Argument: The proliferation of different kinds of critical digital texts need to be identified according to a standard registry—even if the hosting is distributed—if protocols of referencing are to be usefully consistent. Presenter: Neel Smith. Responder: Juan Garcés.
Authority/peer review
Argument: Scholarship has always depended on transparency and availability of source texts and arguments, and these features need to be carried over into legal licensing of digital editions.