Implementing an Online Text-Editing Platform for Scholarly Editions

FAIN: HAA-261249-18

Trustees of Indiana University, Indianapolis (Indianapolis, IN 46202-3288)
Andre De Tienne (Project Director: January 2018 to August 2023)

The further development of the online Scholarly Text-Editing Platform for the production of print and digital critical and documentary editions.

Following a successful NEH start-up grant, we propose to implement a cloud-based Scholarly Text-Editing Platform (STEP). That platform is a complete workflow environment designed by scholarly editors, interface specialists, and web and application developers, for facilitating the production of print and online critical or documentary scholarly editions. STEP helps (1) facilitate rigorous TEI-XML transcriptions through timesaving encoding methods; (2) import digitized images of original documents; (3) compile textual apparatus lists; (4) enable the online scholarly editing, annotating, and formatting of texts in an interface that keeps track of and archives every iteration of a document through multiple stages of corrections and editorial interventions; (5) link edited texts and their components both to the digitized documents and to their critical editorial apparatus; and (6) streamline the conversion of edited texts to laid-out and hyperlinked texts for online or print publication.

Associated Products

TEI-XML Components (Computer Program)
Title: TEI-XML Components
Author: André De Tienne
Abstract: TEI-XML Components helps users learn, understand, and navigate among all the TEI components described in the TEI Guidelines swiftly and easily. It breaks the barrier that discourages many editors from embracing the TEI concept of encoding texts for the long-term benefit of humanities research. A particular challenge is to get a good grasp of the many mutual or hierarchical interdependencies within TEI’s XML structure. This software allows users, beginners or advanced, to understand the logic of those interdependencies through a navigational system that reveals connections between elements, attributes, values, attribute classes, datatypes, models, macros, and modules. It comes with two integrated but distinct sub-applications. "Explore TEI-XML Files" is one of them. It helps navigate XML files and extract encoded data from them. Users do not need to master programming languages such as XQuery to query the XML. After importing any XML file, users need only use pull-down menus to examine complete alphabetized lists of tag elements, attributes, and values found in that file. Users then select any of those XML components in any order to display their related contents or related encodings in the interface’s bottom field. Clicking any line in that bottom field selects and displays the related encoding in the XML file in the top field. The "XML:Lang Utility" is the other sub-application. It helps XML practitioners fill in correct values for the ubiquitous xml:lang attribute—the attribute in charge of identifying the language in which any portion of a text has been written or spoken. The app is based on the IANA “Language Subtags Registry”, a large database that provides a unique identifier for thousands of languages, dialects, idioms, scripts, and orthographies. The app not only provides the correct and well-structured code for any registered language, it also helps users discover languages and dialects while displaying more information than the Registry itself.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://peirce.iupui.edu/TEI.html
Primary URL Description: A webpage within the official website of the Peirce Edition Project inder a tab labeled "TEI-XML Software". The webpage explains and illustrates the three applications contained in TEI-XML Components and allows people to download five distinct versions of the software (MacOSX, Linux 32 bit, Linux 64 bit, Windows 32 bit, and Windows 64 bit).
Access Model: The software is provided free of charge under a BY-NC-ND Creative Commons License defined within a document that accompanies the software.
Programming Language/Platform: The programming language is LiveCode Script (also known as Transcript), which compiles into C. Platforms: MacOSX, Linux, and Windows.
Source Available?: Yes

Sentential Search (Computer Program)
Title: Sentential Search
Author: André De Tienne
Abstract: This software is meant to help users search texts of any size but especially large ones for any string of interest either within distinct sentences or distinct paragraphs. The utility displays all results in ways that clearly readable, all strings being shown within the context of their expression, sentence by sentence or paragraph by paragraph, all at once. This utility is useful for TEI-XML encoders and others to explore XML files in ways that are fully readable (unhampered by encoding). It is also most useful to any other humanities and social science researchers in need of searching texts SENTENTIALLY. The utility, which supports drag and drop, can display texts with the following file extensions: doc, docx, docm, odt, txt, htm, html, rtf, rtfd, rnc, xml, xsl, odd, rng, and dtd.
Year: 2022
Access Model: free and open access
Programming Language/Platform: LiveCode script / LiveCode Platform : Mac and Windows
Source Available?: No

Lexical Tools (Computer Program)
Title: Lexical Tools
Author: André De Tienne
Abstract: “Lexical Tools” is a set of several utilities focused on the search of English terms and concepts. At its core is the principal utility “Search English Words,” which lets users search at once the definitions and synonyms of all sorts of English words from a list of no fewer than 413,765 words across multiple dictionaries (about 40). That list comes in part from the web archive source infochimps.com (© 2013 Infochimp) and some other sources, including a good 200 words coming from Charles Peirce’s philosophical, logical, and semiotic lexicon. “Lexical Tools” includes besides five other utilities allowing (1) users to add words to the default list; (2) create, compare, and augment custom lists of words; and (3, 4, and 5) search with enhanced efficiency (within a combined sub-application named “Specialized Dictionaries”) a large portion of the classic Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology edited by James Mark Baldwin at the turn of the twentieth century, the Commens Dictionary: Peirce’s Terms in His Own Words, and Runes’s celebrated Dictionary of Philosophy of 1942. Peirce contributed significant definitions in logic to Baldwin’s dictionary, and several entries in Runes’s dictionary refer to him.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://peirce.iupui.edu/technology.html#lexicaltools
Primary URL Description: This is not a live URL yet, but is the most likely address that will be used to provide download access to the software, within the Technology tab of the Peirce Edition Project's website.
Access Model: It is intended for free distribution. Only the source code created by the author is available.
Programming Language/Platform: LiveCode Platform of creation: MacOS Platform for distribution: MacOS, Windows, Linux
Source Available?: Yes

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