Computer-supported collation of modern manuscripts: CollateX and the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project

R. Haentjens Dekker, D. Van Hulle, Gregor Middell, Vincent Neyt, J. van Zundert

Research output: Contribution to journal/periodicalArticleScientificpeer-review

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Abstract

Interoperability is the key term within the framework of the European-funded research project Interedition,1 whose aim is ‘to encourage the creators of tools for textual scholarship to make their functionality available to others, and to promote communication between scholars so that we can raise awareness of innovative working methods’. The tools developed by Interedition’s ‘Prototyping’ working group were tested by other research teams, which formulate strategic recommendations. To this purpose, the Centre for Manuscript Genetics (University of Antwerp), the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands (The Hague), and the University of Würzburg have been working together within the framework of Interedition. One of the concrete results of collaboration is the development and fine-tuning of the text collation tool CollateX.2 In this article, we would like to investigate how the architecture of a digital archive containing modern manuscripts can be designed in such a way that users can autonomously collate textual units of their choice with the help of the collation tool CollateX and thus decide for themselves how efficiently this digital architecture functions—as an archive, as a genetic dossier, or as an edition. The first part introduces CollateX and its internal concepts and heuristics as a tool for digitally supported collation. How this tool can be integrated in the infrastructure of an electronic edition is discussed in part two. The third and final part examines the possibility of deploying CollateX for the collation of modern manuscripts by means of a test case: the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (www.beckettarchive.org).
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)452
Number of pages470
JournalLLC: the journal of digital scholarship in the humanities
Volume30
Issue number3
Early online date19 Mar 2014
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 19 Mar 2014

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