Tara Andrews, University of Vienna, Austria, “Computational Models for Editing Medieval Texts: The Case of Matthew of Edessa"

What are the consequences for data modelling when we think of critical edition not as a document, but as a process? In this talk I will outline such a process-based approach, adopted in the upcoming digital edition “The Chronicle of Matthew of Edessa Online”, in which the logic of edition is modelled not merely in the data format, but also in the associated computer code, embedding logic that allows the editor to define custom answers to question such as the following:
- What constitutes a reading, in what context(s)? A lemma reading? A variant?
- How should variants be classified? What implicit hierarchy, if any, does the editor’s classification scheme have and what are the implications?
- How should the text be subdivided, and in what order(s) should these subdivisions be read?
- What kind of information is carried within the text, and how can that be expressed?
Most crucially, the process model allows the answers to these questions to be enforced consistently within the project, with the useful side effect of compelling the editor to reconsider assumptions that turn out not to be adequate. The result, as we hope to demonstrate, is a digital critical edition that inherently captures, not only the resulting text, but also the intellectual process by which it is produced.