Digital literary and scientific editions as an element of digital humanities

Abstract

In the modern scholarly community there are two predominant ways of understanding of what the digital humanities means: 1) research into cultural texts in a broad sense when exploiting the potential of digital media, 2) using digital tools for analysis and data mining, including texts which are digitally born or were secondarily digitized. In both ways, texts in a digital form, if supposed to be useful on the digital humanities field as a research material, have to fulfill qualitative and quantitative conditions. Accessible (preferably on-line) collections should be made of characters, not (only) of images and should be formed with help of uniform set of tags and of course should be correct from the philological point of view. In turn, maximizing of those collections will allow for not only diversity of scholarly inquiries, but also reliability of research, and statistically significant results.

Therefore, literary part of the digital material is prepared with two criteria in mind: traditional, philological textual criticism and semantic elaboration of strings of characters. Standardization of this semantic elaboration is still work-in-progress and is a challenge for humanists and computer scientists. Such digital editions are becoming a new paradigm regarding to model critical editions of literary works.