Computer-supported collation of modern manuscripts: CollateX and the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project

Abstract

Interoperability is the key term within the framework of the European-funded research project Interedition, 1 whose aim is 'to encourage the creators of tools for textual scholarship to make their functionality available to others, and to promote communication between scholars so that we can raise awareness of innovative working methods.' The tools developed by Interedition's 'Prototyping' working group needed to be tested by other research teams, which formulate strategic recommendations. To this purpose, the Centre for Manuscript Genetics (University of Antwerp), the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands (The Hague) and the University of Würzburg have been working together within the framework of Interedition.One of the concrete results of collaboration is the development and fine-tuning of the text collation tool CollateX. 2 In this paper we would like to investigate how the architecture of a digital archive containing modern manuscripts can be designed in such a way that users can autonomously collate textual units of their choice with the help of the collation tool CollateX and thus decide for themselves how this digital architecture functions -as an archive, as a genetic dossier, or as an edition. The first part introduces CollateX and its internal concepts and heuristics as a tool for digitally supported collation. How this tool can be integrated in the infrastructure of an electronic edition is discussed in part two. The third and final part examines the possibility of deploying CollateX for the collation of modern manuscripts by means of a test CollateX is an open source Java collation engine, developed, maintained, and supported by an international open source development community (OSDC) of developers active in the digital humanities community. Having originated and finding a number of applications in several projects of the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands, the final coordination of development currently rests with this institute. However the code is in the public domain: https://github.com/interedition/collatex case: the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (www.beckettarchive.org). Computer supported collation with CollateXFollowing John Unsworth's textual scholarship workflow typology of scholarly primitives (Unsworth, 2000), it is clear that text comparison is pivotal to any kind of textual scholarship. The role of text comparison becomes paramount in any scholarly editing project that involves critical enquiries about the edited text witnessed in multiple versions. Conducting such a comparison of a text's versions manually or -to use the proper terminology of the field -'collating them' classifies as tedious and error-prone work, 3 especially as the required attention to detail is highly demanding when measured against the repetitive and (sometimes) mechanical nature of the task. From that perspective, this type of work seems an ideal candidate for automation, not only because computers can support users in tedious, error-prone duties rather efficiently, but sp...

Para una crítica del texto digital: literatura, filología y redes

“…Representar y visualizar las variaciones. Hay tres enfoques principales: la comparación entre textos en paralelo, como en la edición a varias columnas del King Lear editada por Michael Warren; la vista de tabla, donde las variantes aparecen una encima de la otra, como en el software CollateX (Dekker et al, 2014); o el sistema local organizado en ventanas emergentes (Robinson, 2003).…”

Image Collation: Matching illustrations in manuscripts

“…The use of mechanical tools to compare different versions of a text can be dated back to Hinman's collator, an opto-mechanical device which Hinman designed at the end of the 1940s to visually compare early impressions of Shaekspeare's works [30]. More recently, computer tools such as CollateX [13] have been developed to automatically compare digitised versions of a text. The core idea is to explain variants using the minimum number of edits, or block move [5], to produce a variant graph [26].…”

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“…This institute started an open source project that resulted in an international community of developers who work continuously on a piece of software called CollateX. This is a collation engine that delegates the scholarly task of aligning variant texts to an algorithm based on a combination of computation and scholarly heuristics (Haentjens Dekker et al 2015). Graph models are then used for a precise and computational description of the differences between texts (see Fig.…”