This is my Master Thesis Research Topic. The idea came to me after I asked myself West's question: "Is your edition really necessary?". My initial purpose was to elaborate a critical edition of Xenophon's Symposium, but after approaching West's question, I realized that a new traditional edition was not necessary, since the last one published is still quite recent (it was published by John Cirignano in 1993). So I had to recalculate my purpose, and surfing the Oxford Scholarly Editions Online - Classics, I noticed the absence of Xenophon in this digitized critical edition database. My idea, then, started to take shape. I decided, then, to elaborate a Digital Scholarly Edition of Xenophon Symposium, to start granting wuch work and its author a scholarly reliable online presence. How? In such task I decided to follow a functional model called Why-What-How?, which subdivides the workflow in three-four steps.
According to Why-What-How? method, it is a good practice to start with asking Why? In other words, this first preliminary phase is a query of the scholarly needs and purposes of the research activity. In particular, I chose the philological theoretical framework, adopting the point of view of textual criticism. The final purpose is then to produce a reliable Digital Scholarly Edition which aims to be Critical (and not, for example, diplomatic).
After chosing the scholarly point of view, it is necessary to point out What to represent, what are the features of the text that the editor wants to represent, what's the vision on the text, if the approach will be focused on the documentary aspects or on the abstract, textual ones. In this phase I pointed out that my purpose is to represent the textual variation of a given work, through a digital representation of what is traditionally called apparatus criticus, the place of a critical edition where information about variants, emendations, conjectures etc. is stored. Among the advangtages of a digital medium, we can mention the potentially unlimited space. While in a printed critical edition the apparatus criticus is shaped and writtend according to a print-paradigm (which along the ages has found its own technical vocabulary, full of abbreviations which sometimes may result obscure), within a digital edition there are no space-limits anymore. So, for example, it is not necessary anymore to use the criptic, specialistic and synthetic vocabulary of philology, full of abbreviations and following a rigid structure, but it is now possible to provide the user/reader with information stored in plain text. In this way, also non-philologists can hae access to a reliable source.
The third step is led by the answer How?, and it is about the concrete, technical choices that make the digital edition take shape. In particular, from a technical point of view the workflow is subdivided in two steps: a. encoding the text, using XML-TEI; b. parsing the encoded text and display it, through an open-access software called EVT (Edition Visualization Technology), which frees the editor of the burdain to elaborate a specific software able to parse the information stored in the encoded file of the digital edition. EVT is indeed a ready-to-use software which parses the information stored in the XML-TEI encoded text through JSon language and Javascript, and display automatically such information in the final result of our edition, in a ready-made digital environment. A couple of constraints of using the aforementioned technologies is that a minimum familiarity with programming languages is required, and the fact that among the huge amount of vocabulary provided by TEI, a selection of them is necessary, according to EVT needs. Unfortunately, nowadays, a detailed handbook about how to use EVT is not available, and the information provided by the creators of the software sometimes lack of precision and details. Personally, I could understand how does EVT work only thanks to a set of slides provided by the creator of the software, prof. Roberto Rosselli Del Turco, by a group of students taking part to an academic laboratory about encoding digital editions. Outside this channel of communication, information about EVT's use are scarse.
The last and final step of my research is led by a fourth question: What if? It is about giving a glance to the future and survey the possible future improvements, implementations, and updates. In particular, in my case I realized that the next steps in my edition's evolution will be implementing it with Semantic information provided by Ontologies such as CAO (Critical Apparatus Ontology) by Francesca Giovannetti, using RDF triples to express such semantics. A further step would be re-encode the edition entirely, but with the guidelines provided by another software, called LIFT (Linked Data From TEI, again by Francesca Giovannetti), which is a ready-to-use digital environment which grants the scholar to compose a semantic markup without knowing coding or programming languages: LIFT is a ready-to-use digital environment, where the philologist only has to store philological data within a pre-programmed digital environment. Unfortunately, by the time I am writing, such software has not been fully implemented yet, but the general direction undertaken by philologists who want to open up to digital tools goes in the direction of what Elena Pierazzo calls the "bricks approach", according to which the scientific community has to build not general and universal tools, since cover all possible scholarly needs is not possible, but rather small tools that are task-specific, so the scholars only have to choose the most appropriate tools for their needs, according to their research purpose.
By the time I am writing, my edition is not a finished and definitive product. It is a choice which gets along with the digital nature of my research, for many reasons. Fisrt of all, as a master student I have nor time nor knowledge to compose an outstanding Digital Scholarly Edition which aims to be exhaustive, complete and definitive. Secondly, the digital nature of my edition implies that there is always the possibility to edit it, update it and change it. XML-TEI offers a feature which is very important for this aspect, which is the element, which allows the editor(s) to take account of all editorial interventions made on the edition, providing the possibility to express the responsible of the interventions, and the date. It is a good practice to use this functionality, to insert the edition itself in the story of tradition of the text, at the same time it is being composed. This means that, by nature, my Digital Scholarly Edition is an ongoing process, and by editorial choice it does not want to be a finished edition, but rather a workflow towards a Digital Scholarly Edition. This means that I choose only a small sample to begin with, which is chapter 1 of Xenophon's Symposium. As soon as I will be satisfied with the encoding tested on this sample, I will finally have the chance to extend the model to a full representation of the work.
Date: 04/11/2024