1 Introduction
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In the field of the humanities, information technology has found an application in the creation of electronic transcriptions of historical documents. The original documents may be both rare and fragile and therefore not readily accessible to scholars who wish to study them. Authenticated, electronic editions not only give scholars cheap and easy access to the content of these documents, but also allow them to use computer-based tools for studying the material’s textual content. However one of the biggest disadvantages of the currently existing electronic editions is the lack of standardisation in this field. In September 1997, the Committee on Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association (MLA) of America released the second draft of its Guidelines for Electronic Scholarly Editions [MLA, 1997]. The MLA is recognised as the world’s leading authority for standards involved with the creation of scholarly editions. The recently released guidelines, which are currently in review, will affect the development of scholarly electronic editions in the future. Although the MLA guidelines do not specify a particular development system, a large number of editions are based on the Standard Generalised Markup Language (SGML) for the encoding of their documents. Based on the work by Charles F. Goldfarb, SGML became an International Standards Association standard (ISO 8879) in 1986. Briefly, SGML is a metalanguage for defining markup languages that can be used to describe the logical structure of documents. Markup languages can also be used to add meta-data pertaining to the work without interfering with the readability of the text through the use of hypertext links. Most applications of SGML are to be found in the areas of commercial and technical writing. However, since the recent MLA guidelines recommend the use of SGML [sect. I.B, MLA, 1997], it is likely that SGML-based editions will become the standard for future scholarly electronic editions. The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is an international cooperative project, that was set up in 1987, to develop a standard for the encoding of the logical structure and meta-data associations for electronic texts in the humanities. The TEI chose SGML to implement their standard encoding scheme and have developed the TEI Document Type Definition (DTD) for this purpose. In the preface of Charles Goldfarb’s book, The SGML Handbook [p. xii Goldfarb, 1990], he likens people’s understanding of SGML to that of blind men examining certain parts of an elephant and coming to a limited understanding of the nature of the beast. To stretch the metaphor further, the development of the TEI DTD has made the elephant manifest in all its glory so that even sighted men must be in awe, and daunted at the task of making the beast do some work – and pity the poor blind men. Simpler methodologies and tools are required to reduce the overheads involved in developing and maintaining electronic editions. This document details a proof of concept for a new paradigm for the creation of electronic editions of historical documents. The new paradigm not only protects the authenticity of the transcribed documents, but also extends the potential uses of the electronic editions created under this scheme beyond those enabled at time of publication, without risking the authenticity of the original transcription. This report is about the development of a prototype system designed to act as a proof of concept for the Just In Time Markup (JITM) paradigm. The idea of the JITM system was developed in response to the author’s perceptions of some of the problems involved with the current paradigm of electronic editions, in particular the use of SGML and the TEI DTD in the creation of such editions. The JITM system is an add-on to an SGML-based system and is designed to make the development, use, maintenance and updating of electronic editions easier for those literature scholars who are most likely to use them. This report details the concepts behind this new paradigm, compares aspects of the system to other systems found in the literature, discusses the data structures and processes necessary to achieve the just-in-time markup and then reports on the prototype JITM system. The analysis part of the report looks at whether the JITM system fulfils the user requirements of editors of electronic editions and checks to see if it conforms with the recently released MLA guidelines. |