The role of digital scholarly editors in the design of components for cooperative philology

This contribution is focused on the role of the digital scholarly editor in the continuous process of analysis, development and evaluation of libraries of components for cooperative philology. By following a general trend, in the domain of digital humanities developers are progressively shifting from the project-driven approach to the new community-driven paradigm. This shift is solicited by the increasing aggregation of scholars in communities of practice that are expressing common requirements and sharing best practices.In most cases, service providers are responding to these needs by offering web services quickly developed by taking into account the specific functionality that they expose or, worse, by wrapping legacy code. Although a pipeline of web services devoted to linguistic analysis and collaborative annotation provides many advantages in terms of flexibility, we are concerned by the impact of the main drawbacks, in order to study alternative or complementary solutions for our domain.Maintainability, performance and atomicity are the principal issues in which we are interested. In a chain of web services, the overall system depends by the status of the singles nodes and medium or small projects not always are able to grant the necessary level of redundancy or caching strategies. Performance is affected by the trade-off among challenging conditions (e.g. memory resources, computational overload, bandwidth). Atomicity influences the reusability and the extension of services (e.g. from many points of view, Latin metrical analysis is very similar to ancient Greek metrical analysis, but a web service that atomically provides the former could be totally unusable for the latter).At the Cooperative Philology Lab (Institute of Computational Linguistics "A. Zampolli", CNR, Pisa) we try to address these issues by designing and developing a library of components for the domain of scholarly editing. A library can be installed locally or remotely and it provides multiple choices for maintenance and performance tuning. But above all a library of components provides the building blocks to shape local or remote services at the adequate level of atomicity, in order to ensure reusability and extendibility.The role of the digital scholarly editors with which we have collaborated in pilot and funded projects at the CNR-ILC is crucial, because they are providing the necessary use cases that we are generalizing for the design of our library. During the workshop, we would like to stress the importance of a new generation of digital scholars that are not only creators of digital resources and consumers of computational tools or web infrastructures, but also actors in the analysis of requirements and in the evaluation of the libraries of components devoted to their activities.ReferencesBozzi, "Computer-assisted scholarly editing of manuscript sources," in New publication cultures in the humanities: exploring the paradigm shift, Davidhazi, Ed. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014, pp. 99-115. [Online]. Available: http://www.oapen.org/record/515678McGann, "From text to work: Digital tools and the emergence of the social text," Variants: The Journal of the European Society for Textual Scholarship, vol. 4, pp. 225-240, 2005.Robinson, "Towards a scholarly editing system for the next decades," in Sanskrit Computational Linguistics, ser. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, G. Huet, A. Kulkarni, and P. Scharf, Eds. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2009, vol. 5402, pp. 346-357. [Online]. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00155-0 18Robinson, "Towards a theory of digital editions," Variants, no. 10,105-131, 2013.Siemens, M. Timney, C. Leitch, C. Koolen, A. Garnett et al., "Toward modeling the social edition: An approach to understanding the electronic scholarly edition in the context of new and emerging social media," Literary and Linguistic Computing, vol. 27, no. 4, pp. 445-461, 2012.