From the Manuscript to the (Electronic) Edition: Strategies and Tools for Textual Scholarship

From the Manuscript to the (Electronic) Edition:
Strategies and Tools for Textual Scholarship

Wilhelm
Ott

Universitaet Tuebingen
Zentrum fuer Datenverarbeitung
ott@zdv.uni-tuebingen.de

1999

University of Virginia

Charlottesville, VA

editor

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

Modularity, professionality, portability, integration are key features of the
"Tuebingen University System of TExt processing Programs" TUSTEP. Its purpose is
to serve as a toolbox for those academic fields where texts (including those
written in non-Latin alphabets) are the object of research.
The demonstration shows how this toolbox can be used to prepare a critical
edition. It starts from automatic collation of different versions of a text,
which stores all the information necessary for further processing in a file.
There follow simple but powerful procedures which allow to automatically
distinquish between "substantial" variants (to be listed in the apparatus) and
"orthographic only" variants (probably to be discussed only in the editorial
preface). The remaining "substantial" variants are then arranged by program in
the order necessary for the critical apparatus and are "imported" with
appropriate, SGML-style markup into the text for both automatic typesetting and
for preparing a hypertext based electronic editon (based, for the demo, on HTML
for inspection by a web browser).
The demostration can -- of course -- show only the "automatic" part of the work,
but will also include the tools which help a scholar to gain control over the
"manual", intellectual part of his work.
TUSTEP is currently available for Windows 95/98/NT and UNIX platforms (including
Linux; see ).
Beyond critical editing (see ), typical
applications include the preparation and publication of encyclopedias (like the
15-volume "Neuer Pauly", 5 volumes of which have appeared by the end of 1998),
dictionaries, bibliographies, indexes and concordances (see ).