Diachronic Markup and Presentation Practices for Text Editions in Digital Research Environments

FAIN: HG-50047-13

University of Nebraska, Lincoln (Lincoln, NE 68503-2427)
Malte Rehbein (Project Director: October 2012 to May 2013)
Brett Barney (Project Director: May 2013 to April 2016)

Using three case studies -- the Walt Whitman Archive; an edition of James Joyce's Ulysses; and an edition of J.W. Goethe's Faust -- the proposed project will experiment with methods of advanced TEI markup, create methods for detailed scholarly queries currently unavailable, and develop user interfaces to best display the variants exposed through diachronic markup. The German partner, the University of Frankfurt, is requesting 139,634€ from DFG.

The project is situated in the Digital Humanities area of literary criticism and textual scholarship, in particular the analysis of literary works in diachronic depth, that is: under perspectives of the genesis of their texts. Here, only the digital medium allows substantial future research and education in literary studies. In this context, the project addresses three major desiderata: 1. testing, improving, and making usable diachronic markup, that is the digital representation of document sources (based on TEI), 2. tools to operate on this data under the light of research requirements, and 3. means to publish and visualize the results of these operations. The project promises to develop and publish such tools and to provide best practices for a wide range of use cases. It does so by bringing together three leading projects in digital literary studies, covering different eras of German, US, and British literature: J.W. Goethe, Walt Whitman, and James Joyce.