The Authenticated Electronic Editions Project: A Progress Report

Abstract

The paper will report on developments in the Authenticated Electronic Editions (AEE) Project and consider some of the implications for textual scholarship. The AEE project will produce robust, flexible, long-lasting and readily accessible electronic editions of textual works. A particularly innovative part is the development and use of Just In Time Markup (JITM). This is designed to solve a major problem associated with electronic texts: the maintenance of the integrity of the core text while it is being proliferated, translated across platforms, manipulated, supplemented and analysed. JITM ensures ongoing textual integrity by using a stand-off markup technique. Descriptive markup tags are kept in an overlay file, rather than embedded in the text, and are applied to the target document prior to processing. This system allows for conflicting structural markup and simultaneous development by different people, whose efforts can be kept separate or consolidated as desired. The project testbed is the creation of an electronic edition of Marcus Clark's His Natural Life, a work whose textual complexity makes it ideal for the medium. The paper will outline work carried out in the first stage of the project: the architecture of the edition, the JITM system, the implementation of SGML-based tagging, the preparation of digitised page images of significant versions of the novel.