I’d like to propose a brainstorming session in which we re-imagine, rethink, and reconceptualize the digital edition. Some of the questions we could begin with include: What are current digital editions doing well? What are they lacking? How can we make them more useful for both professional readers and the general public? What do we imagine the digital edition/text to look like in 5 or 10 years? How will the nature of the digital edition change with advances in technology? I imagine beginning with broad theoretical questions, but I’d also like to suggest that we spend some time getting our hands dirty with prototypes and wireframes. Perhaps a DSE UI challenge?
THATCamp London 2010 website designed by Loaded Dice Design Ltd.
One of the questions that needs to be answered in doing so is what kind of visual vocabulary could become standardised for the representation of typical editorial interventions. Every edition represents these differently so there is no continuity in users understanding how these work from one edition to the next. The same is true with the representation of critical apparatus in critical edition projects. But in addition to a lack of agreement on how things should _look_ how they interact is also important. In looking at an edition of a poem I need to be able to see selected versions people have edited of that poem/line and notes and discussion on it, even though those might have been written by any number of different people whose method of collaboration is solely that they advertise in standard (RESTful web service) kind of manner that they have provided a version of this text/line or an annotation on it. I’m thinking here of the proposals made by Peter Robinson for fluid cooperative editions. Editions not as sole fixed things but as research sites that evolve as more material is provided. Built into this will need to be the new proposals for Genetic Editing emerging in the TEI community to allow views of documents through successive editions and revision stages. To me, what it _looks like_ with wireframes sketching out our ideas is less important than what it can do. I wonder if we can predict the developments in UI that will have become commonplace in 10 years? (I would not have predicted Apple’s pinch-to-zoom, but that will be ubiquitous soon enough!) Maybe it is just me.
By “Digital edition”, do you mean contemporary articles and books, or edition of historical materials?