Editing Glosses as Networks: Exploring the Explorative Edition

TY - UNPB

T1 - Editing Glosses as Networks: Exploring the Explorative Edition

AU - Steinova, Evina

AU - Boot, P.

PY - 2023/9/29

Y1 - 2023/9/29

N2 - Creators of digital editions have historically been among the early adopters of computational tools in the humanities. It is surprising, therefore, that digital editions have been very slow in accepting the distant reading paradigm, which has been widely embraced as a fruitful approach for studying textual collections. In this article we make the case that digital scholarly editions should become explorative editions: while maintaining philological accuracy, they can and should include interactive tools that help the reader study and work through the edition's riches. We use the example of the early medieval glosses to the first book of Isidore's Etymologiae and argue that a network representation is better suited than the traditional stemma to represent the relations among manuscripts that carry these glosses. Then we proceed to show that an edition of these glosses can use interactive network graphs to provide high-level overviews of the information that the edition contains. The graphs provide access points into the edition as well as ways to explore the relations among the manuscripts, Isidore's text and the glosses. We also discuss several examples where interactive network graphs could help in the study of other types of texts.

AB - Creators of digital editions have historically been among the early adopters of computational tools in the humanities. It is surprising, therefore, that digital editions have been very slow in accepting the distant reading paradigm, which has been widely embraced as a fruitful approach for studying textual collections. In this article we make the case that digital scholarly editions should become explorative editions: while maintaining philological accuracy, they can and should include interactive tools that help the reader study and work through the edition's riches. We use the example of the early medieval glosses to the first book of Isidore's Etymologiae and argue that a network representation is better suited than the traditional stemma to represent the relations among manuscripts that carry these glosses. Then we proceed to show that an edition of these glosses can use interactive network graphs to provide high-level overviews of the information that the edition contains. The graphs provide access points into the edition as well as ways to explore the relations among the manuscripts, Isidore's text and the glosses. We also discuss several examples where interactive network graphs could help in the study of other types of texts.

KW - codicology

KW - digital humanities

KW - digital scholarly editions

KW - distant reading

KW - early middle ages

KW - explorative edition

KW - TEI-XML

KW - Isidore of Seville

KW - diffusion of innovations

KW - historical network research

KW - Latin paleography

KW - manuscript studies

KW - medieval studies

KW - medieval Latin

KW - network analysis

KW - Network visualisation

U2 - 10.31219/osf.io/7auxz

DO - 10.31219/osf.io/7auxz

M3 - Preprint

BT - Editing Glosses as Networks: Exploring the Explorative Edition

ER -