Back to Analog. Printing Digital Editions for Data Quality.

Abstract

This article discusses the challenges of printing TEI XML data sets, and highlights a useful diagnostic value of PDF export for data quality. PDF output, indeed, renders only a part of the encoded information, but it can expose problems pertaining to the semantic accuracy and consistency, syntactic compliance, and completeness of the data. The uncovered problems are presented as possessing three dimensions: internal (the compliance of XML code with data models and schemata), external (the consistency of the print output in rendering the original), and contextual (arising from the interaction of XML with the transformation scenarios). These dimensions help to provide the definition of an error in the context of scholarly digital editions—both retro-digitized and originally digital. The article examines the extended skill set required of quality assurance specialists in social sciences and humanities (SSH) as compared to their industrial counterparts. It also places PDF production within the Agile testing framework, which aims to capture and eliminate defects in the early stages of product development.