8 Conclusions
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The process of creating an electronic edition of a historical document is foremost an act of transcription of the document onto the digital medium. If the electronic edition is to have any scholarly authority the users of the edition must have a certain level of trust that the original transcription was accurate and that the authenticity of the transcription in the edition has not been compromised since it was created. The current methods for creating electronic editions, while allowing the editor to ensure the accuracy of the original transcription, lack the means for authenticating the edition after publication. A Just In Time Markup system depends on the unchanging nature of the transcription files for its operation and, therefore has a built-in authentication mechanism, which continually verifies that the files to be marked up are exact copies of the original transcription. The JITM paradigm abstracts the meta-data of the edition away from the transcription into sets of tagging instructions. These tagRecords are used to create a perspective of the work specific to a user’s requirement. Since the meta-data is not permanently added to the transcription as in the current paradigm, the overheads involved in preparing and proofreading the edition are reduced. The ease of manipulation of digital documents makes the idea of a continually evolving electronic edition an attractive possibility. In fact there is a school of editors who see this as a feature of the medium that should be exploited, so that the full richness of the digital medium can be investigated. This idea is laudable, but carries with it the danger that scholars of the future may be presented with a bewildering number of different states of the electronic edition in a situation analogous to the current day situation when dealing with ancient texts. The states in question would be versions of a composite work made up of the original work plus the added meta-data. The JITM paradigm allows for the incremental development of meta-data tag sets that can be applied to the transcription files. Because the meta-data is abstracted away from the transcription and relies on the static nature of the transcription, it cannot create any new states of the transcription. The JITM paradigm fares well when compared to requirements for electronic editions as listed in the recently released Guidelines for Electronic Scholarly Editions [MLA, 1997]. However despite its advantages it would appear that the main problems for a JITM system would be one of acceptance. The JITM system is very different to the current paradigm, which is based more on the precepts of the printing of physical editions. A JITM-based edition is not likely to be a money making venture and so its maintenance and distribution would necessarily become the full responsibility of the editor up until the point where the JITM paradigm is accepted by the scholarly community. Fortunately the digital nature of the edition makes this easy using World Wide Web technology. The best way for the JITM paradigm to be accepted by the scholarly community is to make it freely available so that scholars can see its benefits through experimentation with its features. The establishment of a WWW-based electronic edition that used the JITM system and promoted research collaboration would hopefully allow the JITM paradigm to thrive through a process of natural selection as potential creators of electronic editions see the benefits of the JITM paradigm. |