Philosophy and Electronic Publishing

The Monist, 1997

Digital studies, 2005

2009

Proceedings. Socioeconomic Dimensions of Electronic Publishing Workshop, 1998

The emerging culture of fully electronic publishing will considerably change the scientific communication process . At the moment, the emphasis is put mainly on the logistics and the storage of electronic documents as such. In this contribution we address the issue of changes in the representation of scientific communications due to the intrinsic possibilities of the electronic medium. With the societal needs of authors and readers as a starting point we present first results of a new, modular, model of scientific articles.

2004

The hypertext edition, the hypermedia edition, the multimedia edition, the computer edition, the digital edition, the electronic edition are all synonymous labels for a concept without a definition. The use of “edition” in these labels presuppose a conventional understanding of that word, and is based on the implicit assumption that there is a general agreement on what an edition is. But there is no such thing. In textual studies we certainly mean “scholarly” edition whereas in ‘strict’ bibliography “the term ‘edition’ refers quite properly to the identifiably separate type-setting of any book, whether it is an edition in the text-critical sense or not” (Greetham 348). Any kind of available text, therefore, qualifies as an “edition”, and any kind of electronically available text qualifies to be labelled an “electronic edition”, just as any printed text can be called a “paper” or a “print edition”. The words “digital” and “electronic” only describe the materiality (as opposed to “pri...

Some of the common ground between electronic publishing and computer science has already been touched on in the editorial section of this issue. Further connections between the two fields are highlighted in this brief paper and it is suggested that electronic publishing differs from other computer application areas because it benefits not only from the brute-force application of cheap computer power but also from the direct application of a host of computer science concepts. The history of computers and typesetters is examined leading up to the electronic publishing era, followed by an appraisal of those computer science topics which have already been applied to problems in typesetting and publishing, and those which seem poised for exploitation and application in the near future. The importance of abstract notions and high-level ideas in the development of computer science -and hence in electronic publishing -is pointed out.

2016

Both traditional and digital editing essentially consist of the inputting of text. When the source is a manuscript, this is still a very labour-intensive process, unlikely to be repeated. Scrupulous accuracy in the transference of information is therefore needed, continuing the tradition of diplomatic editions. The editing of texts within kleine Philologien differs from the classical mainstream, because of the different histories both of the traditions and of the texts themselves. For Slavonic, this reflects in particular the predominance of linguistics in early textual studies, and the national variants of the Slavonic language. Digital methods offer a new approach to these problems, principally through the more complete capture of information and greater flexibility in its presentation. Users of digital technology should ensure that their editions are enhanced rather than limited by it.

2021

Is hierarchical XML apt for the encoding of complex manuscript materials? Some scholars have argued that texts are non-hierarchical entities and that XML therefore is inadequate. This paper argues that the nature of text is such that it supports both hierarchical and non-hierarchical representations. The paper distinguishes (1) texts from documents and document carriers, (2) writing from "texting", (3) actions that can be performed by one agent only from actions that require at least two agents to come about (“shared actions”), (4) finite actions from potentially infinitely ongoing actions. Texts are described as potentially infinitely ongoing shared actions which are co-produced by author and reader agents. This makes texts into entities that are more akin to events than to objects or properties, and shows, moreover, that texts are dependent on human understanding and thus mind-dependent entities. One consequence from this is that text encoding needs to be recognized as a...

Learned Publishing, 2001

2013

any digital tools have been and are being developed aimed at transcribing, annotating and publishing editions of literary or historical texts making use of crowd sourcing for collaborative research. This panel discusses the question how well digital scholarly editions produced by such tools reflect the theoretical notions of digital scholarly editions, and how such may be assessed based on both empirical examination of current practices and text theory in the digital era. The practice of preparing and producing digital editions is increasingly supported by purpose made and specialized digital tools, many of them involving crowd sourcing. Although an exhaustive survey and typology of these tools is still missing, by and large we can see that most of these tools are highly similar in functionality, text model, and editorial process. As such they express a fairly straightforward transformation from the physical book to a digital metaphor of the book, roughly along a trajectory of trans...