Advanced Digital Editing: Modeling the Text and Making the Edition

FAIN: HT-267285-19

University of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, PA 15260-6133)
David J. Birnbaum (Project Director: March 2019 to present)

A two-week summer institute on the theory and development of digital scholarly editions for twenty-five participants to be hosted at the University of Pittsburgh.

The proposed NEH Institute, “Advanced digital editing: modeling the text and making the edition”, will train 25 participants who already know how to edit their texts in TEI XML to participate directly in the modeling, conceptualization, and implementation of their editions, empowering them to express innovative philological scholarship in a way that is informed by a deep understanding of what is possible technically, and of how to achieve it.

Associated Products

Main page for Institute (Web Resource)
Title: Main page for Institute
Author: David J. Birnbaum
Author: Gabi Keane
Abstract: Main page for Institute
Year: 2020
Primary URL: https://pittsburgh-neh-institute.github.io/Institute-Materials-2020/
Primary URL Description: Main page for Institute

Hoax: ghosts in 19th-c. British press (Database/Archive/Digital Edition)
Title: Hoax: ghosts in 19th-c. British press
Author: Gabi Keane
Author: David J. Birnbaum
Author: Emma Schwarz
Author: Mason Gobat
Author: Leif-Jöran Olsson
Abstract: This project aims to collect, annotate, and mediate newspaper- and periodical-reported ghost stories from 19th-c. Britain, with a location-focus on London. While researching and using available newspaper and periodical databases, I discovered a field largely dominated by large databases (archives), which contain either scans of broadsheets or collected books. A researcher can expect to use finding aids, record and note-taking tools, powerful search and filtering, plus visualization within an archive. But if the finding aids and search cannot index on data that drives the research questions, one can expect to rely only on proxies for their interests. In a perfect world, the research questions could guide the research tools, not the other way around. The project originated as a research station for an undergraduate thesis Locating Literature in the Ghost Hoax: an exploration of 19th-century print news media by Gabi Keane. Shortly after submission of the thesis, the project became a pedagogical tool for an National Endowment for the Humanities Institute for the Advancement of Digital Humanities grant application “Advanced digital editing”. The version of the application that you're currently using represents the laboratory edition created in support of the grant; it also represents an expression of the research questions the author stated in the original thesis. The idea of creating a dedicated project space for brief newspaper and periodical articles, collected by a common theme, is somewhat unusual among digital edition projects, as its subject matter tends to be based on manuscripts, like books, short stories, poems, or collected letters. These kinds of digital editions can privilege the [known] authors in a way that simply is not as useful in periodical studies, and thus many low-code publication tools did not account for some of the nuances of the corpus. With this project, we hope to model the way one may go about larger subject-focused periodical collections.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: http://hoax.obdurodon.org
Primary URL Description: The open-source code underlying the site is available at https://github.com/Pittsburgh-NEH-Institute/pr-app. An open-access running instance of the project is at http://hoax.obdurodon.org.
Secondary URL Description: Hoax: ghosts in 19th-c. British press
Access Model: MIT license (open access)

eXist-db app initializer shell script (Computer Program)
Title: eXist-db app initializer shell script
Author: Gabi Keane
Author: David J. Birnbaum
Author: Leif-Jöran Olsson
Abstract: The eXist-db App Initializer is a lightweight bash shell script that creates the housekeeping files needed to build and install an eXist-db package into an instance of the database.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://github.com/Pittsburgh-NEH-Institute/initializer
Primary URL Description: Source code and instructions for using the Initializer.
Access Model: Open-source (GPL3 license)
Programming Language/Platform: Bash shell script
Source Available?: Yes

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