Publication of my digital edition – Online launch of the TEI Publisher application

A year ago, almost to the day, I wrote my first post about TEI Publisher, as I began working with it, to execute the ‘publication’ phase of the pipeline I mentioned many times in my posts. I had created the application and it didn’t look like much. Six months later, I wrote another post about TEI Publisher, this time with my intern, hired to help me with the application. The goal was to create something functioning and easy to use, that would display editions of ego documents from TEI XML files. Now, six months after that, the application changed a little from what we showed with our images: I furthered the user experience and made the collections presentation clearer. More importantly, the time has finally come. After a year of working with TEI publisher, gathering editions of egodocuments and introducing the pipeline and the web application in different conferences, we have reached the next and (almost) last step. Our baby, “Digital Scholarly Edition” or “DiScholEd” (as it was nicely named) has been launched online.

Homepage of the application

Currently, DiScholEd contains six editions: 

• A WWI correspondence from Paul d’Estournelles de Constant (that I presented in this post) (It is not complete as I am still working on the transcription and the encoding of the corpus)
• Papers from Berlin intellectuals of the 19th century (which is an updated and still updating version of the content of this website)
• Catalogue of manuscripts and papers by August Boeckh
• Testimonies from Holocaust victims gathered by the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure
• a diary from the Napoleonic Wars, edited by Torsten Roeder
• a WWI war diary from Charles Bruneau, edited by Matthieu Quignard

Each collection contains corpus data as well as one or several indexes, filed under nominative folders. The application also provides extensive documentation explaining how to encode ego documents and how the application is working.

The application may be online but this is not a complete and definitive version. The editions have not all reached the same stage. Some of them have only half of their documents ready for publication. Others are missing minor elements to their edition, which prevents them from being published. Finally, some of them are all good and can be put entirely on the website. Moreover, it is not a closed website. It is possible for projects, with a corpus of ego documents and an interest in publishing it, to request a spot in DiScholEd, in order to publish their text(s) on our platform, if they like it.

The online availability of the application is also a good way to improve it. For a year now, I have been one of the only persons (if not the only one) working with the application. It existed solely on my computer and apart from some demonstrations during videoconferences, the other members of the project or the owners of the editions displayed did not have access to it. Consequently, they didn’t have the possibility to help improve it, by giving some feedback. Now, with the public accessibility of the website, they can. As more people will be able to browse the website and search every corner of it, I can be notified if they find something wrong or if something is not right in terms of user experience. This collaboration will help me upgrade the application so that it becomes its best version.

Hence, if you have a corpus of ego documents in need of a display platform or if you simply want to help improve the application, you can go see DiScholEd (https://discholed.huma-num.fr/exist/apps/discholed/index.html) and tell us what you think, through the comment section of this post.