Opening the book: data models and distractions in digital scholarly editing


RESEARCH ARTICLE Open Access

Opening the book: data models and distractions
in digital scholarly editing

James Cummings1

# The Author(s) 2019

Abstract
This article argues that editors of scholarly digital editions should not be distracted by
underlying technological concerns except when these concerns affect the editorial tasks at
hand. It surveys issues in the creation of scholarly digital editions and the open licensing
of resources and addresses concerns about underlying data models and vocabularies, such
as the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative. It calls for solutions which promote the
collaborative creation, annotation, and publication of scholarly digital editions. The article
draws a line between issues with which editors of scholarly digital editions should concern
themselves and issues which may only prove to be distractions.

Keywords Scholarly digital editions . Digital infrastructure . Textual editing . TEI XML .

Markup and data models

1 Scholarly digital editions

The creation of scholarly digital editions is a complex endeavour which exposes and is
dependent on our understanding of the theories of text, works, and documents that
underlie our relationships with texts. My approach in textual editing projects tends
towards the pragmatic, but there is a clear distinction between an objects to which we
often refer as a ‘work’, i.e. an abstraction as understood by readers (including authors
and editors), and a ‘document’, which is a particular instance of a physical manifesta-
tion of this text. Not all documents are faithful copies of the work, nor do they represent
all possible ways of understanding the text in question.

If we hold that each document is the work because without the document we
would not have the work, we would have to see each different document as a
different work. If one does not want to say that every copy of a work is a different

International Journal of Digital Humanities
https://doi.org/10.1007/s42803-019-00016-6

* James Cummings
James.Cummings@newcastle.ac.uk

1 Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s42803-019-00016-6&domain=pdf
mailto:James.Cummings@newcastle.ac.uk


work, then one must not say that the document and the work form an inseparable
unity. If, on the other hand, one says a single work is represented differently by
the variant texts in different documents, it seems necessary to also hold that one
cannot apprehend the work as a whole without somehow holding its variant
iterations in mind. Textual complexities resist simplification. How one conceives
of the relationship between documents and works influences one’s practice when
editing; it is important to have a sense of the complexity of that relationship
(Shillingsburg 2017, p. 188).

In editing a text then, the editor must attempt to communicate the understanding he
or she has of both the document (and any additional related documents considered
in scope) and the work as a whole. It is in ‘holding its variant iterations in mind’ that
I would argue the true editorial objects are formed, and the representation of this in
editions is inherently a lossy translation from the mental construct, whether or not
the editions are print or digital, scholarly or otherwise. There is a long history of
representing these mental constructs, i.e. what I consider a set of conceptual edited
objects, in print editions, and the systems of encoding editorial understanding have
a rich and complex history. As a side note, it should be recognised that in many
discussions of editing, the assumption that it is solely concerning the relationship
between multiple documents and their related works is often problematic for editors
of works for which there is only a single witness. Single witness editions are no less
editions. However, in the discussion of scholarly digital editions, we tend to focus
on scholarly editing within the Lachmannian paradigm, on texts for which multiple
witnesses exist, or at least complex textual apparatuses of one form or another,
precisely because we seek edge cases on the basis of which to test, problematize,
and construct our view of the nature of editorial activity. My view as a digital
editorial pragmatist is that these edge cases are interesting, but while they must be
dealt with, they need not distract us in the course of projects which focus on the
creation of scholarly digital editions which function within the limits of existing
solutions. I would argue that at times the academic investigation of scholarly digital
editing focuses on the problems rather than the solutions, and as much as possible
editors of scholarly digital editions should not be distracted from editorial tasks by
technological concerns if these technological concerns do not affect their edition.
There are cases, perhaps exacerbated by academic funding models, in which ‘the
perfect is the enemy of the good enough’.

In the creation of scholarly digital editions, the primary responsibility is the produc-
tion of a scholarly edition that is no less rigorous than its print equivalent, but there is
also the secondary responsibility to be truly digital in nature. That is not to say that a
digitised edition (an edition which represents nothing significantly more or less than the
possibilities of a print edition) is not a useful object. One could easily argue that the
world would be a better place if we had digitised the full texts of existing print editions
as a starting point. But in itself, a digitised edition barely exploits the fundamental shift
in medium. Print editing, or the equivalent in digital form (such as static PDF editions),
is restricted in the methods with which it presents the edited text, most commonly to a
single perspective on the work with accompanying editorial information encoding
additional witnesses or documentary information using standard formats, which the
reader decodes.

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The edited text does not get closer to the documents, there is still no visual
evidence, no making explicit of textual structures or semantic information,
limited potential for multiple views on the text. This is why a digitised edition
is not a digital edition (Sahle 2016, p.33).

It is precisely the potential of a digital edition to be near-infinitely refactorable and
dynamically to provide different views depending on external interactions that is one of
its greatest strengths. However, far too much discussion of digital editions focuses on
the presentation views of the edition. The real digital edition, that which best represents
the set of conceptual editorial objects (whether textual, musical, image, or other forms
of editorial object), is not represented by any one view of the edition.

Therefore in digital editions the encoded texts themselves are the most important
long-term outcome of the project, while their initial presentation within a partic-
ular application should be considered only a single perspective on the data. Any
given view will be far from unique or canonical, as different usage scenarios call
for different presentations—ranging from Breading text^ to Binteractive version^
with popup content, to chart, graph, or map representations and beyond. Further-
more, all initial presentations are also ephemeral, bound to be either modified
over time as technologies and forms of digital publishing change, or languish in
obsolescence on a forgotten server (Turska et al. 2016, para 4).

One way of looking at the encoded edition, for example an edition created in TEI
XML, is to consider it the true edition rather than any particular output. However,
and perhaps surprisingly given my long history helping maintain the TEI Guide-
lines, I do not view the encoded edition in TEI XML as the best form. Rather, it is,
in my assessment, the best serialization format for the underlying conceptual data
of scholarly digital editions.

The edition is in the encoding; this implies that encoded data is, in a certain sense,
already a scholarly-mediated presentation of other data that exist in the original
manuscript (Barabucci et al. 2017, p. 44).

While the encoded data is a good representation of the scholarly edition and one I care
about deeply, a truly conceptual editorial object is malleable and recombinable, and an
encoded edition, by itself, is not. The encoded edition is sufficient, for those literate in
the method of encoding, to present an edition by itself, but this would substantially limit
the audience of the edition. Editors should be able to understand the granularity and
categorisation of an encoded edition, and they should recognise where they have
abrogated any philological responsibility, but they should not necessarily be distracted
by the underlying data format. However, by forcing us to formalise some of our
assumptions, the structures and vocabularies of an encoded edition do help us fore-
ground the theories of text we use when creating scholarly digital editions, and thus it is
important that editors be at least familiar with the format of the encoded edition and any
limitations placed by it on their activity (Cummings 2008).

If part of the point of editing a work is to make it more accessible, in all senses of
that word, then usually some presentation view of the edition is required. With TEI

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XML-based digital editions this usually involves transforming the data to a web-based
serialization format (such as HTML or JSON being fed to an HTML container).

This distinction [between TEI data and HTML presentation] leads to an
important question: what constitutes the core of an edition? Its data or its
presentation? It is possible to think of a critical edition as a collection of
pieces of pure data? Or is a representation layer fundamental to the concept of
‘edition’? (Barabucci et al. 2017, p. 37)

In order to maintain the malleability of a conceptual editorial object, it is not the
presentation layer that is a requirement, as the presentation layer is merely one or more
additional views on the data. Rather, it is the ability to reshape, query, transform, and
reconceive of the data in the same way as (and in the case of a digital edition in more
ways than) a reader might do when translating a printed critical apparatus into a mental
construct representing the various document instances and their relationship to the
work. People developing complex IT systems for the publication of (usually specific)
scholarly digital editions might believe that their systems provide the necessary infra-
structure. However, these systems tend to focus on the rendering of one or more
presentational views on their datasets rather than providing a more direct interface to
the set of conceptual editorial objects encoded in the underlying data. Given current
technologies, I would argue that the true form of a scholarly digital edition would be
better expressed as a well-documented API for the manipulation and description of
editorial objects following an open international standard for the representation of
digital text. This would not necessarily provide the presentational view on the data
that most readers would require, but views of scholarly digital editions could be
constructed on top of it. This would enable all forms of examination, querying,
subsetting, and recombination of all editorial objects of all types. This infrastructure
would, in no way, stop a scholarly digital edition from being a publication of knowl-
edge and commentary on an individual work, but it requires that its underlying
framework meet at least basic criteria to enable the edition’s involvement in inter-
edition commentary and research in the future. There is a clear difference between the
knowledge in a scholarly digital edition and the knowledge which can be created across
a collection of interoperable editions, but the creation of one should not preclude the
eventual development of the other. Clearly this is unlikely to be created fully formed as
a complete solution, but efforts for API-based access to serialized editorial objects (for
instance with open annotations or URI-referenced encoding as first order objects) are a
step in the correct direction which should be encouraged and amalgamated through a
coherent infrastructure. Ideally, open data repositories for digital editions would build
such APIs into their serving of the underlying data of digital editions. (The TAPAS
archive seems to be moving in this direction, but even it has long way to go.)

One of the limitations of publications of scholarly digital editions is that only so
many views on the underlying encoded edition data can be realised. Even when access
is given to an API foregrounding manipulation of all the editorial objects, the nature of
the access will be limited to the methods of interrogation conceived of at the time of its
construction. One approach is to define an API that Bsees digital documents as stacks of
abstraction levels, each storing content according to a certain model.^ (Barabucci and
Fischer 2017, p. 51) However, these digital documents will suffer the same restrictions

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based on the limitations of how and when they are created. Even when more sophis-
ticated layers of abstraction are provided, there must also be methods for as many low
level operations on the encoded editorial data as possible. The editor of a scholarly
digital edition, I would argue, should understand the separation of these levels of
abstraction and the nature of the models they store on a conceptual level, but does
not need to be distracted by the actual implementation of this system.

2 Opening the edition

In order for scholarly digital editions to reach their full potential as contributions to a
wider academic environment of digital resources, it is not enough that they merely be
accessible but (as thankfully is becoming a requirement of many funding bodies) they
also need to be openly accessible. This may seem a minor difference, and it is often
confused with them being ‘freely’ accessible, that is free at the point of use by
researchers. In a world in which digital resources must become sustainable, there are
cogent arguments against making them freely available to all, and while this is a
regretfully retrograde step which mirrors the publication of print editions, online
hosting of scholarly digital editions must still be resourced. However, ideally editions
would be freely available to anyone who wants to use them, and institutions which
resource such sustainability should be lauded for their attempts to do so. Nonetheless,
‘openly’ available here is meant to convey legal availability rather than financial
accessibility, i.e. that a digital edition is openly pre-licensed for reuse with terms as
open as possible, e.g. licensing with a Creative Commons Attribution license where
feasible, rather than one that includes Non-commercial or Non-derivative conditions,
since these conditions significantly limit the potential reuse of the edition. Assuming
that data is openly licensed and the licenses follow open international standards and the
open repositories of digital edition data will exist for an extended period of time, then
the most interesting repurposing of any digital edition will likely not be done by the
original creators. In other words, assuming the survival of a well-documented edition’s
data into the distant future, the edition (or the data) is much more likely to be
repurposed as technology develops and exploited in ways which we could not have
predicted. And yet, current reuse of digital edition data by others is very rare, and even
with large text collections such as EEBO-TCP, the reuse often consists of making
improvements to them in order to ensure they reach the minimum criteria for a
scholarly digital edition. Editors of scholarly digital editions do not need to be
distracted by the detailed legal implications of openly licensing resources, but they
should understand the general categories of restrictions and how openly licensing their
own project outputs benefits future research. True reuse of scholarly digital edition data
is a laudable aim, and open licensing of data following well-documented open inter-
national standards is the necessary foundation of this (potentially overly-optimistic)
open data utopia of the future.

While the following characterization may represent an idealistic view, one of the
benefits of a scholarly digital edition is its infinite potential to be revisited, reformed,
and updated in what is a perpetual beta state which subverts the publishing hegemony
under which scholarly editing produces editions and a significant revision of an edition
(perhaps in adding newly uncovered witnesses) would form a new ‘second edition’.

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However, this infinitely changing edition creates a new barrier to use through its very
nature as an unstable object, unlike print editions, which are more stable but less
flexible. While the inherent anxiety about the possibility of ever-changing digital
objects is addressed by technological solutions (such as pointing at any particular stage
in its version history), these solutions do not fully solve the problem. And yet, the
nature of scholarly digital editions is such that we now talk about ‘versions’ or, in
reference to the source data itself, ‘revisions’ of the editions. The editorial structures in
the data which underlies any scholarly digital edition become the actual resource itself,
only temporarily translated into a variety of presentational structures.

We create information resources that are guided by abstract models and abstract
descriptions of the objects at hand. The dogma of our current markup strategies is
the separation or rather translation from form to content. Thus, we do not just
transform our textual witnesses from one (material) media and form into another
(digital) media and form. Rather, we try to encode structures and meaning of
documents and texts beyond their mediality. And from this data we may or we
may not create, and from time to time recreate, arbitrary forms of presentation in
one media or another (Sahle 2016, p. 32).

That not all scholarly digital editing is intended to produce an ‘edition’ rendered in
a presentation view is an important reminder that such editions are not merely
publications, but are intended to be resources with which to venture answers to the
research questions which prompted their initial funding. While this often leads to
new and different ways of reading the edition, this is more a product of the context
of digital editions.

The digital edition allows readers to break away from mono-directional reading
(as has also been vigorously discussed in relation to hypertext) (Vine and Verweij
2012, p. 134).

However one reads the edition, the underlying data may in fact have been created
not for a scholarly digital edition as a publication, but as a resource to be interro-
gated, analysed, or queried, rather than published. The publication of a scholarly
digital edition can, and perhaps more often should, be a mere byproduct of the real
research undertaken. That such information resources, in this case datasets of
editorial objects, become corpora for research analysis also enables us to work with
reproducible methodologies where all aspects of the data, methodology, and results
are transparent. Striving for reproducible research also enables us to publish in more
transparent ways, where the data behind the graph which supports any research
claims and even the tools used to undertake the analysis are provided. This enables
others to check the conclusions in a way often perceived by society (falsely, I must
note) as more ‘scientific’.

When producing a scholarly edition, an article, or an introduction to an edition in
a reproducible way, we publish not only the text in its final format including the
prose with possible figures and tables, but also the data (in our case typically
annotated transcriptions) as well as the computer code use in the analytic work.

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This enables other users– including our future selves – to redo, build upon and
adjust the work without the need to start over (Speed Kjeldsen 2017, p. 135).

It is not just the reproducibility of the research that is important, but the underlying
approach. Such a transparent approach to scholarly editing is not a neo-liberal quanti-
fication of computational literary studies as only containing objective data to be
analysed (there is no such thing as neutral editorial encoding), but merely a
foregrounding of our assumptions, methodologies, data, and results, whether we use
Digital Humanities methodologies or ‘Experimental Humanities’.

[W]e present a different approach to the application of digital techniques to
humanities research, a branch of experimental humanities in which digital exper-
iments bring insight and engagement with historical scenarios and in turn influence
our understanding and our thinking today (De Roure and Willcox 2017, p. 194).

Editors of a scholarly digital edition should not find the exposing of their research
methods distracting; their editorial tasks produce a dataset upon which experiments
which are core to a humanities research approach can be based. Moreover, as the
humanities inevitably becomes an increasingly collaborative undertaking, any approach
that assists us in making all aspects of scholarly digital editing more transparent from
the outset can only be seen as useful.

3 Data models and the TEI

The de-facto standard for a data model to be used in creating scholarly digital editions
is the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI, http://www.tei-c.org/). This is a
community-developed open international standard which provides a set of recommen-
dations for the encoding of digital texts. Yet it is inaccurate to say that the TEI is a data
model itself. Used properly, it is more of a framework for constructing and
documenting data models for particular editorial projects. In many cases, the TEI
defines objects for encoding texts, but it does so in a way which has been called
ontologically agnostic. That is, it defines a particular markup object for encoding a
specific textual phenomenon, but it does not always prescribe how to determine the
nature of that phenomenon. For example, the TEI’s < title> element is defined as
‘[containing] a title for any kind of work’, but TEI does not specify how to determine
whether or not something is in fact a title of a work. This extends to all sorts of editorial
interventions and encoding, where the editor is still left to determine whether a string of
characters is indeed the textual phenomenon in question. In reality, this is a pragmatic
level of indirection which enables the standard to be used by vastly different editorial
communities. Moreover, TEI customisation can provide equivalences to existing on-
tologies if the project is intended to relate an understanding of TEI encoding to
particular real-world concepts. The individual encoding of textual phenomena repre-
sents the editor’s interpretation of the objects which exist in the real world, and while
these signs may be encoded according to different methods, the editor’s choice for how
to encode any particular instance of a textual phenomenon has at its root a materialistic
cause which we should not confuse with its conceptual categorisation.

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http://www.tei-c.org/


Note that here I am not negating the whole pluralist view of textuality: I am only
denying the unlicensed (and undesirable, in my view) consequence that texts are
not really existent objects. The fact that we can describe reality at different levels
does not imply that the objects we describe do not exist in se: this fallacy is a
direct consequence of the confusion between ontology and epistemology, a
confusion that I want to get rid of (Ciotti 2017, p. 87).

At the heart of creating a TEI data model is the process of customisation that the TEI
framework uses to document, in a literate programming vocabulary, the relationship of
the vocabulary of the TEI to the application that is being undertaken in any particular
project. The TEI provides a processable form of customisation using the TEI ODD
format, which enables both the constraining of the overall scheme and its extension into
new areas.

At time of writing, the TEI P5 Guidelines version 3.5.0 have 573 elements, but no
particular scholarly digital edition would be expected to make use of all of them.1 Though,
to be clear, it is not just the inclusion/exclusion of elements that might form part of a
customisation. All aspects of the TEI framework (elements, attributes, classes, modules,
prose, examples, content models, intended processing, and much more) can be modified
for any particular project. Indeed, in proper use of the TEI, customization is not only
recommended, but almost required for:

These Guidelines provide an encoding scheme suitable for encoding a very wide
range of texts, and capable of supporting a wide variety of applications. For this
reason, the TEI scheme supports a variety of different approaches to solving
similar problems, and also defines a much richer set of elements than is likely to
be necessary in any given project. Furthermore, the TEI scheme may be extended
in well-defined and documented ways for texts that cannot be conveniently or
appropriately encoded using what is provided. For these reasons, it is almost
impossible to use the TEI scheme without customizing it in some way (TEI
Guidelines, Chapter 23: ‘Using the TEI’, Section 23.3 ‘Customization’
http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/USE.html#MD).

The nature of the TEI framework in providing methods for extensible meta-schemas
(from which TEI users generate schemas to validate their document) can result in vastly
different views of the TEI. These views may be so varied as to be almost mutually
incompatible, and yet having the common framework at their basis is always going to be
more beneficial than a multitude of different schemes. The documentation of the
fragmentation found in a TEI ODD customisation file actually enables easier interop-
erability and interchange between digital editions than if no such documentation existed.

Such documentation of variance of practice and encoding methods as a TEI ODD
meta-schema preserves then helps to enable real, though necessarily mediated,
interchange between complicated textual resources (Cummings 2014).

1 The number of elements the TEI Guidelines currently include is available on the element reference page
from version 3.2.0 onwards. http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/REF-ELEMENTS.html

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http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/USE.html#MD
http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/REF-ELEMENTS.html


The potential for different projects to define their own meta-schemas creates a frag-
mentation of overall consistency among projects. However, because they all define
their variance from the same source in a machine processable form, the divergences are
not as great as one might expect. (Though to say ‘same source’ ignores the rolling
releases of the TEI framework, i.e. the objects available to one customisation may have
been greatly modified by the time another customisation is created.) The TEI ODD
customisation methods provide a mechanism by which the meta-schema can document
the version of the TEI on which the customisation is based. And yet, even the phrase
‘version of the TEI’ is inaccurate. In most uses of the TEI this is a sufficient description,
but it is possible in a single TEI customisation to use multiple sources, which might be
different versions of the TEI framework or indeed other standards entirely.

The TEI customisation-literate programming mechanisms can also be used to
document entirely non-TEI schemas. To further complicate matters, in some sophisti-
cated uses a TEI ODD will ‘chain’ customisations in order to provide a variation on an
existing TEI customisation. For example, a project might decide that its needs are very
similar to the EpiDoc schema (a pure TEI P5 subset) but that it needs additional
elements or different attribute values or wants to customise the examples to its
materials. The project would indicate that the source is not the TEI directly, but the
compiled EpiDoc customisation, which itself points to the TEI. In processing these
chained customisations to generate schemas, each of the customisations is flattened in
turn against its source. Any form of TEI customisation is potentially quite complicated
because of the generalistic nature of the framework of which it is a part. And yet this
also provides quite rigorous methods of documenting the variance between schemas in
a way that can be processed on a more general level. An editor of a scholarly digital
edition should understand, at least on a conceptual level, the customisation of any
formal vocabulary they are using and the relationship of this vocabulary to the
categories of textual phenomena and the editorial activity they are undertaking. How-
ever, an editor whose well-resourced project team has included assistance in this area
need not be distracted by the methods by which this customisation is implemented.

A recent change in the TEI further extends the TEI ODD customisation language
vocabulary with the ability to document intended processing models. This is a signif-
icant departure for the TEI, which has more usually held that the processing of the
encoded edition is a completely separate activity from that which it defines, the
encoding of the textual phenomena according to an agreed framework. The TEI
vocabulary for customisation now provides users a mechanism with which they can
indicate, in an entirely implementation-agnostic method, how they intend a particular
element (or other TEI object) to be processed for a variety of outputs. This mechanism
does not specify precisely how to handle elements, but it gives a general behaviour
recommendation and might indicate some details of formatting. For example, this
processing model documentation might indicate that for abbreviations and expansions
embedded inside a TEI <choice> element that something processing it should imple-
ment a behaviour of ‘alternate’ which would somehow provide both the abbreviation
and expansion to the user. Furthermore, the processing model documentation in the TEI
customisation can indicates which of the abbreviations or expansions should be used as
the ‘default’ content and which should provide the ‘alternate’. One can imagine using
this instruction in web output to provide a tooltip with expansion and the text showing
the abbreviation. In a print publication the same ‘alternate’ behaviour might generate a

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footnote to provide a similar effect. One of the reasons for doing this in a hands-off
implementation agnostic manner is to predetermine not the nature of the processing, but
instead the nature of the intended output. Another benefit is the shrinking of the code-
base necessary to maintain publication solutions. Instead of writing code to deal with
every occurrence of TEI elements, one could create a system which examines this
documentation and reacts to the models it contains. Indeed, early experiments show that
this can be beneficial in simplifying the maintenance of such code (Turska 2017, p.
364). One of the intentions behind the documentation of the processing model,
however, is to benefit not just software developers but also editors of scholarly digital
editions. The format is designed to be simple enough that an editor could easily change
whether the abbreviation or expansion is shown or whether it is highlighted in bold or
italics. While editors of digital scholarly editions need not be distracted by how the
processing is implemented, if this processing model documentation is being exploited
by their publication processing they will enjoy significant benefits if they understand
the base format well enough to have control over the presentation.

One popular area for discussion in explorations of scholarly digital editing is the handling
of critical apparatuses of multi-witness texts. These are works that are represented in the
edition by multiple documents (extant or theorised) in order to produce a coherent editorial
view of the text. This is one area where people sometimes argue against XML as a
serialization format. As this is the current format in which TEI is expressed, those making
this argument often find themselves arguing against this open, international, community-
developed set of recommendations. Instead, other formats are suggested by proponents of
one solution or another, mostly based on hiding the serialization format from the user. And
yet, once an interface is placed between the editor and the underlying code which represents
their decisions, then in many ways it is only the granularity of information and its
relationships which matter, not the serialization format. In such a system, though editors
are assisted in their work, ‘the tools themselves and their heuristics are not questioned, as
long as they do what they are Btold^’ (Pierazzo 2015, p. 109).

One of the facile arguments that is often made by those opposed to an XML-based
solution is that XML (and thus TEI) is unable to handle overlapping hierarchies. This
is, of course, a falsehood. People who perpetuate this myth, however, are usually doing
so innocently with a naive understanding of XML as a format assuming all XML
representations are created as embedded in-line markup. (Cummings 2018) The crea-
tion of markup structures that rely on an embedded hierarchical use of XML is an
increasingly dated notion of how XML is used in complex resources such as scholarly
digital editions. Increasingly, scholarly digital editions are based on distributed and
multi-faceted sets of resources. The idea that all the markup of an edition is embedded
within a single hierarchy of XML and encoded inline, while often the tempting when
one is creating early digital editions, is now a strawman used for to propose a conflict
between overlapping hierarchies. While much ink has been spilt on the merits and
shortcomings of the various solutions to the problem, this discussion is pursued
primarily by people seeking more elegant solutions for the markup languages of the
future. For many projects, the in-built solutions, such as the use of milestones (such as
<pb/> to mark page breaks) where one hierarchy (usually the intellectual) is preferred
over another (usually the physical), are sufficient. Swapping between hierarchies
displayed as milestones is no longer the complex processing activity that was once
imagined.

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There are numerous other methods for overcoming the supposed limitations of XML
without departing from its specification, including out-of-line or standoff markup. It is
perfectly reasonable in XML to employ a simple technique of remotely pointing into basic
structures (with URI-based pointing or other standoff mechanisms) to provide encoding
and annotations which might be at risk of overlapping. This is not a non-XML solution, as
it is entirely possible for out-of-line markup to exist as pure XML. For example, the TEI
Guidelines provide recommendations for how an <app> element recording an editorial
apparatus entry may be stored completely separately from the base text to which it refers.
In addition, the apparatus readings may now surround larger structures (such as whole
divisions or paragraphs), and not merely phrase-level content. With regard to the use of
out-of-line markup, it does not matter if the objects being stored out-of-line are variant
readings, physical vs intellectual structures of the document, or something else. If the text
is encoded to a sufficient degree of granularity, then all of these supposedly conflicting
hierarchies can be expressed in separate out-of-line markup that points to the site of
overlap. My own stance as a pragmatic digital editor is to encode at an orthographic word
level of granularity (whose markup can be added by simple scripts). While this might
mean some redundancy when recording sub-word changes, this is balanced by the ease of
processing at this level. While out-of-line markup is a very simple and powerful mech-
anism that can be used to cut across an infinite number of hierarchies, it does so at the cost
of human-readability. The underlying problem, which explains why solutions such as this,
which employ out-of-line or standoff markup, are not popularly used by all digital
editions, is that of support from tools, not only in the creation of editorial objects and
annotations of data, but also in its processing. There are limitations in the creation of
markup for scholarly digital editions that may cross the boundaries of common embedded
markup structures, but these limitations are the result of a lack of tools with which to
create the markup in standoff or out-of-line forms, rather than any particular serialization
format. Other proposed formats, such as JSON (a very useful serialization for frontend
manipulation) or RDF (a useful graph technology for conceptual annotation), have as
many well-understood problems as formats like XML, and in the creation of scholarly
digital editions in TEI, they are more accurately understood as generated outputs from the
TEI source. Nonetheless, solutions to these problems are not beyond the scope of current
technology, but when projects create solutions, the solutions are usually for very specific
use-cases rather than generalised applications. When a scholarly digital edition project
creates a significantly detailed frontend to hide the encoding structure, it becomes
unnecessary to start proposing entirely new data formats and to eschew the vocabularies
of existing open international standards. Significant user-friendly technology in this area
would benefit the creation of scholarly digital editions no end, especially if these solutions
built on the improvements to the recommendations of the TEI, such as the processing
model documentation. The TEI framework is a mature, rich, and complex method of
documenting our relationships with text (in its many forms). While editors of scholarly
digital editions should not be overly distracted by the implementation of underlying
technology for the creation and publication of their editions, they should not be dissuaded
from using de facto standards, such as the TEI, merely because they do not wish to
understand any of the technological background to their editions. Developers who would
throw away frameworks like the TEI because they dislike the current serialization format
(XML), because of their own technology choices, or want to reinvent the wheel (and do
not realise that they can do so within the framework) are short-sighted.

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4 Publishing scholarly digital editions

Even where one is not worried about multiple hierarchies or complex out-of-line
markup and is creating an edition which is straightforward, the publishing of a
scholarly digital edition is still a needlessly complicated affair. Given the technology
that already exists and the solutions which have been reinvented time and time again, it
is unconscionable that public research funds are used to produce bespoke publication
engines unnecessarily again and again. Slowly generalised but customisable and
detailed publication infrastructures (such as TEI Publisher http://www.teipublisher.
com) are being developed, but they still have a long way to go. It is unusual for an
individual to have all the skills necessary to edit a work properly, create an encoded
edition, and develop a publication framework. Some of us who have some skills in
multiple aspects of these areas are usually less developed in other areas.

While there are scholars who have achieved such an impressive skillset, it also
seems evident that they are setting the threshold very high and that it is not likely
that this profile will become very common in the foreseeable future, if at all
(Pierazzo 2015, p. 115).

The real answer, of course, is that the creation of scholarly editions, whether digital or
not, has never been an individual enterprise. Just as an author in the age of incunabula
had a sense of printing technology but did not fully understand the techniques printers
used, editors should not be distracted by the publication infrastructure for their editions.
Usually, the publishers and printers of print editions took on many of the activities that
are now cognate to the frontend developers and web hosting for digital editions.
However, as mentioned earlier, so far, no single generalised software for the publication
of scholarly digital editions has had mass uptake by the community. And as the research
for scholarly digital editions becomes more collaborative (though ignoring the potential
of crowdsourcing and citizen science for digital editions), a solution that lowers the bar
for the production and publication of digital editions would inherently need to be a
collaborative platform. Instead of creating solutions that are individual to any specific
project’s needs, we need collaboratively to build small modular improvements on top of
a generalised infrastructure for the creation, publication, and analysis of scholarly
digital editions.

All of these tools, however, act like small unconnected islands. They expect input
and output data to match their own data format and data model, both narrowly
tailored to their task and following their own idiosyncratic vocabulary (Barabucci
and Fischer, p.48).

What is needed is a generalised infrastructure to which a larger community of scholarly
editing projects contribute and which leverages existing technologies for handling
scholarly digital editions. This infrastructure should require little or no specialised
knowledge for its use by an editor of scholarly editions. Having the requisite skills
for work as an academic researcher in a modern digital age should be sufficient to
produce a digital edition. Even if the skills of encoding the edition in TEI XML are
required by the editor (and my experience in teaching TEI is that this is a basic skill that

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all modern editors are more than capable of learning if they honestly have the desire to
do so), the additional annotation, text-image interactions, collaboration with colleagues,
and publication and interrogation of this data should be done through a standard easy-
to-use interface based on the most common open international standards.

If digital editing should become the standard practice for preparing editions,
digital tools, which are easy to handle and do not require much technical or
even programming skills are needed. Moreover, we need useful standardiza-
tion processes, which lead to an unhindered and unrestricted usage of digital
tools (Speer 2017, p. 199)

That no single solution has been widely adopted by a majority of projects is an
indication of the disparate nature of the desires of those producing scholarly digital
editions, the strength of the ‘not invented here syndrome’, and the limitations of the
existing software. But even when the software is available, it often does not meet the
needs of those outside the specific project because it was created with very specific and
often fragile approaches to the editorial endeavour.

Let us state clearly that the described issues are not due to the fact that the
implementations of the tools are incomplete. The root cause lies, instead, in
the fragile theoretical foundations upon which these tools are built. (Barabucci
and Fischer, p. 50)

Editors of scholarly digital editions should not be distracted by the lack of single cohesive
solutions to the creation, annotation, and publication of digital editions. Instead, a de facto
community-based solution should be created to meet their needs. Scholarly digital
editions and the solutions that support them must learn from the history of the print
edition and fully exploit the digital medium through which they are expressed.

5 Conclusion

The use of open international standards for the creation of scholarly digital editions is
necessary if the resources spent on them are not to be squandered. The TEI does a good
job in being flexible and customisable to individual scholarly digital editing projects.
Where feasible, it is better to use this at least as a storage and preservation format than
to invent even more standards. The search for better serialization formats and the
reinvention of encoding formats, while an important endeavour for markup theorists,
is a distraction pragmatic digital editors should ignore. Similarly, the creation of openly
available resources is the future for any truly collaborative international research, and
editors should adopt common legal solutions, such as creative commons, so as not to be
distracted by unnecessary legal intricacies. The publishing of scholarly digital editions
and the distractions of concerns about a particular presentation view of the edition
should be discarded in favour of the adoption of consistent digital editorial publication
methods where feasible. However, more work needs to be undertaken on the produc-
tion of generalised software for editing tasks that truly supports the flexibility of out-of-
line and standoff markup technologies within existing standards like the TEI. However,

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this work should not be undertaken by scholarly editorial projects, who are the
customers in this enterprise. I would contend that large amounts of public funding
should not be set aside merely for the open publication of digital editions, as there is no
technological barrier to achieving this if a consortium of projects desires to do so. (I
would want to see that funding used to create the generalised infrastructure proposed
above that such projects would use.) Much as the TEI has become the de facto standard
for the data of scholarly digital editions, it is time for software infrastructures to be
adopted for a more consistent environment that benefits all. As editors of scholarly
digital editions, we need to have some understanding of the mechanisms of the
production of our editions without being distracted by the underlying technological
issues, unless we are interested this distraction.

Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and repro-
duction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a
link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

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	Opening the book: data models and distractions in digital scholarly editing
	Abstract
	Scholarly digital editions
	Opening the edition
	Data models and the TEI
	Publishing scholarly digital editions
	Conclusion
	References