Genetics and pdf

I have been reluctant to practice genetic editing so far. Not that I disregard the importance and/or meaning of such editions, but I did not think that we were fit for that. My main worry was that it would take too much time working with elaborate genetic tools like critical apparatus, that it would slow down our publication rhythm for a meager benefit. I had decided to solve the tension between content tagging and genetic tagging in favor of the first, which made it necessary to encode a pretty big text quantity to be able to make something out of it. Time-consuming genetic encoding was made superfluous by the necessity of delivering text masses.

When we started approaching canonical authors, it became clear that my solution was not necessarily the best one. At first, I thought it had to do with the difference between letters and texts: we cannot do as much content tagging on the literary works as we do on the letters, considering people, works, places don’t play such a great role there. So the tagging of the “Romantic Key Texts” mostly concentrates on rendering the materiality of the manuscript. I realized during the work on the Chamisso letters that the imperative of genetic encoding had to do with the necessity of an authorial enunciation (e.g. to provide for an ultimate text and not for any text) in the case of authors that cannot tolerate to be treated like we don’t care what the word it is that has just been stroked through.

In the end, we developed a complex tagging system that tries to deal with both identifying content entities and rendering manuscript materiality. It has taken a great deal of time to conceive said system, it still takes plenty of time to implement it (we haven’t encoding half of the third of the fourth of what I had hoped for this fall). What is more, I find it less and less satisfactory. One of the reasons why it is so is that it addresses the genetic issue not as a research question, but as a problem to get rid off.

The preparation of the grant application for the August Boeckh Encyklopädie achieved to make a shift in the conception necessary. This only became clear to me when I changed the title of the project  last week. From a “historisch-kritisch”, I switched to “genetic”, because this is what the project was describing.

Now that the grant application is out (or will be in one hour or two), I can finally show you what the pdf test page looks like! – Looking forward to hearing your commentaries on it, because I intend to improve the method for our other documents.

 



Cite this blog post
Anne Baillot (2012, September 28). Genetics and pdf. Digital Intellectuals. Retrieved March 19, 2024, from https://doi.org/10.58079/nmsd

Anne Baillot

I am a Professor of German Studies at Le Mans Université. My areas of research include German literature, Digital Humanities, textual scholarship and intellectual history.

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