An Open-Source Scholarly Text-Editing Platform for the Critical Editions in the Institute for American Thought

FAIN: HD-51362-11

Trustees of Indiana University, Indianapolis (Indianapolis, IN 46202-3288)
David E Pfeifer (Project Director: March 2011 to June 2014)

The creation of a platform based on the Drupal content management system that would support the development of scholarly editions. The core test case is the NEH-funded Charles Peirce edition, with input from editors of other critical editions housed at the Institute for American Thought.

The Scholarly Text-Editing Platform (STEP) will provide an exceptional online environment for scholarly editors that will greatly increase efficiency and collaboration in the production of both digital and print critical editions. Beginning with the complex writings of American philosopher Charles Peirce, and then extending to the critical editions of Santayana, Royce, Douglass, and Bradbury, STEP will give editors advanced tools and interfaces to produce their volumes from initial transcription to editing to layout and publication. STEP will be entirely open-source, using Drupal's content management system as its foundation. It will use standardized XML coding compliant with the Text Encoding Initiative guidelines for representation of texts in digital form. Changes and revisions will be kept in a MySQL database, allowing the entire evolution of the documents to be preserved. STEP will position the Institute for American Thought as a leader in streamlined digital critical editing.