TEI-Based Interactive Critical Editions

A critical edition is the reconstitution of a text based on a survey of the available witnesses (manuscripts and quotations), resulting in a text and all its attested variants. It is usually created with high effort by scholars in the humanities, possibly separated by chronological or geographical boundaries, over several years. During the editing process, scholars in the humanities prefer to work with any tools and documents in any format they are familiar with. Independently of any boundary or tool in use, one primary goal usually is to produce a traditional print edition. However, working towards such a print edition is very time-consuming, and we argue that there is potential for reducing the time required without the need to forgo preferred tools and methods. Our contribution consists of providing different interactive views of the data as an additional offer to perform analyses. We enable scholars in the humanities to easily transform documents into the well-known TEI format and to store them in a database to create services on demand. The database management system Heurist, a tool for the humanities, allows for searching, automatic linking parts of the documents, interaction with the documents, and exporting the documents into a printable version of the edition. Our approach is validated by direct collaboration with scholars who are currently working on a critical edition. Our solution allows these scholars to efficiently work on a critical edition, independent of chronological or geographical borders, while they still use their preferred tools and document formats.