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“multimedia scholarly editions.” Reside acknowledged that the market is currently crowded with CMS
options but noted that none of the current options quite meets the needs of scholarly editions.
The fourth and f<strong>in</strong>al layer of the TILE model <strong>in</strong>volves user-generated data layers, which Reside
considered possibly to be the most “volatile data <strong>in</strong> current digital humanities scholarship.” The open
nature of many sites makes it hard to dist<strong>in</strong>guish contributions from the <strong>in</strong>experienced versus expert
scholars. Thus, while their framework argued for the “development of repositories of user-generated
content,” s<strong>in</strong>ce all content contributed by users cannot be permanently stored, they suggested
“sandbox” databases where only the best user-generated content is selected for <strong>in</strong>clusion and
publication.
One partner <strong>in</strong> TILE, the DHO, has also conducted some <strong>in</strong>dependent research <strong>in</strong>to develop<strong>in</strong>g a
framework for scholarly editions (Schreibman 2009). Schreibman offered criticisms similar to those of
Rob<strong>in</strong>son and Reside, stat<strong>in</strong>g that not only were many early digital editions typically one-off
productions where the content was tightly <strong>in</strong>tegrated with the chosen software, but that:
We also don’t, as a scholarly edit<strong>in</strong>g community, have agreed upon formats, protocols, and
methodologies for digital scholarly edit<strong>in</strong>g and editions. Moreover, many of the more mature
first-generation digital projects creat<strong>in</strong>g onl<strong>in</strong>e editions from pr<strong>in</strong>t sources have more <strong>in</strong>
common with digital library projects—i.e., editions created with a light editorial hand,
m<strong>in</strong>imally encoded and with little more contextualization than their pr<strong>in</strong>t counterparts
(Schreibman 2009).
To address some of these issues, the DHO held a one-day symposium <strong>in</strong> 2009 on the issue of digital
editions that was followed by a weeklong scholarly edit<strong>in</strong>g school to determ<strong>in</strong>e “a set of protocols,
methodologies, rights management and technical procedures to create a shared <strong>in</strong>frastructure for digital
scholarly editions <strong>in</strong> Ireland.” They plan to follow relevant developments from TextGrid and
Interedition, so that the <strong>in</strong>frastructure and tools developed <strong>in</strong> Ireland can l<strong>in</strong>k up with these other
national and <strong>in</strong>ternational projects.
The Challenges of Text Alignment and Text Variants
As illustrated by the preced<strong>in</strong>g discussion, any <strong>in</strong>frastructure developed for digital classics and for the
creation of digital editions will need to consider the challenges of both text alignment and textual
variants. The research literature on this topic is extensive. This subsection briefly describes two recent
state-of-the-art approaches to deal with these issues. 138
While the <strong>in</strong>troduction to this review illustrated that there are a large number of digital corpora
available <strong>in</strong> both Greek and Lat<strong>in</strong>, Federico Boschetti (2007) has criticized the fact that although these
corpora are typically based on authoritative editions, they provide no access to the apparatus
criticus. 139 He rem<strong>in</strong>ded his readers that when us<strong>in</strong>g a literary corpus such as the TLG, they must
remember they are deal<strong>in</strong>g with the text of an author that has been created by editorial choices. This
makes it particularly difficult to study l<strong>in</strong>guistic or stylistic phenomenon because without access to the
apparatus criticus it is impossible to know what variants an editor may have suppressed. This can
render digital corpora useless for philologists:
138 For a thorough bibliography of over 50 papers <strong>in</strong> this area see the list of references <strong>in</strong> Schmidt and Colomb (2009).
139 This criticism has also been made by Ruhleder (1995) and Stewart, Crane, and Babeu (2007).