Collaborative Construction of Updatable Digital Critical Editions: A Generic Approach
Vincent Barrellon · 2014
In the frame of Digital Humanities, many collaborative schol-arly publishing projects arise. Editors often give shape to those projects by designing a data structure that validates the annotated content of the edition. In practise, in the course of annotation, data structures have to be updated. Besides, they determine the expressivity of the critical appa-ratus. The challenge is to design a data structure that will: be updatable; guarantee the consistency of the collective ed-itorial project; reflect the different editors ’ needs in terms of expressivity. In this paper, we present the basis to build an edition tool dedicated to collaborative data structuring. To do so, we introduce a composite structure, constituted of a core structure (CS) and of ephemeral, peripheral ones (PS). PS will be created by individual editors to amend the core structure. They will then be discussed by the community, and eventually adopted or rejected. Means will be provided to translate the structured data instantiating one structure into a shape validated by the others. This way, if a PS is accepted, the CS will be updated and the instances of the previous CS will be transformed so as to match with the updated CS. Categories and Subject Descriptors [Human-centered computing]: Collaborative ans social computing