Agenda

The seminar will be held online. If you are interested in participating, please send an email to vedph@unive.it.

Presenting Cadmus: a general-purpose and modular content editing alternative for complex models

Relatore: Daniele Fusi (Venice Centre for Digital and Public Humanities)

In the traditional content creation process of Scholarly Digital Editions, a "text-centric" perspective is often responsible of the persistence of a "book paradigm" in its digital reincarnation. At least when producing content, we essentially deal with a text which flows from paper to a digital document with annotations (XML), to be then published to HTML via XSLT. Here, the tree structure laid on the text bears the whole data universe. This is consistent with the typical usages of TEI, essentially oriented to the "reconstruction of documents".

Yet, in some cases, especially with the outgrow of data provided by new types of analysis (e.g. morphological, syntactical or metrical tagging), and/or when handling very complex documents (e.g. inscriptions or complex literary traditions), this may not be the most efficient paradigm for creating content.
In such scenarios, a paradigm shift might be beneficial. Here, TEI might be the final outcome of a more articulated production flow, rather than its starting point. Thinking textual, meta-textual or non-textual content beyond the technological and mental markup constraints allows freeing scholars from a number of practical issues (e.g. apparatus and workarounds like stand-off), letting them focus on their logical rather than physical models. Also, when creating content we should emphasize the typical requirements of any modern content editing infrastructure (e.g. centralization, robustness, real-time validation and search, web-based concurrent editing, etc.), which are very difficult to be met when dealing with text files. For these scenarios, I'm proposing a simple, modular and open editing solution, codenamed Cadmus.