Electronic Boethius and Edition Production and Presentation Technology

Edition Production & Presentation Technology (EPPT) is an integrated set of  XML tools designed to help humanities editors prepare image-based electronic editions. EPPT is a free standalone application that editors can install and use on their own individual computers. The idea of building an edition production toolkit was a response to the extremely complex process of creating an image-based edition in the Electronic Beowulf.  EPPT met one of the primary goals of the Electronic Boethius project by developing a comprehensive set of tools to help prepare the Electronic Boethius, but EPPT has evolved into a generic workbench for any image-based electronic edition. 

EPPT makes image-based encoding, the laborious process of linking descriptive markup to material evidence through XML, a relatively easy and error-proof task.  Using automatically generated templates based on the data of each individual project, humanities scholars and their students, who typically have little or no prior knowledge of XML/TEI markup or encoding, can set to work with EPPT with very little training.  Prevalidation techniques alert encoders whenever markup is wrong, missing, or otherwise invalid, so that their markup operates seamlessly even in the presence of multiple or conflicting hierarchies. Following emerging standards (XSLT, XPath, XQuery), EPPT is testing its broad application to external projects that preserve texts in Old English, Middle English, Old French, Old Slovene, ancient Assyrian, Greek and Latin, on parchment, vellum, paper, papyrus, clay and stone.

ImagText (with OverLay) and xTagger, the basic EPPT tools for integrating images and text, are already highly configurable and ready for action.  ImagText and xTagger can organize and display any document-centric object, making it possible to annotate searchable manuscripts, as well as searchable works of art, maps, and sculpture that have no explicit text.  In addition to encoding and linking through coordinates any feature of an image, from a letter or brush-stroke to an entire page or painting, OverLay can also combine and compare different aspects of material evidence in an XML file that overlays, for example, offsets, shine-through, conservator's notes, ultraviolet and fiber-optic enhancements, diagrams, tracings, and even conjectural restorations using the scribe's own letters, on top of the original image.  EPPT's Glossary tool, which is easily configurable to different languages, can when starting a project generate incipient glossaries with appropriate templates to guide the construction of glossaries linked to both texts and images.  Other tools under development foster paleographical analysis; compile and dynamically deploy statistics for conjectural reconstructions and restorations; perform collations and automatically encode the results; and deploy configurable search engines to find and display and otherwise harness everything that is tagged in XML by the EPPT tools.  EPPT is schema independent and therefore accommodates, for example, both of the different TEI DTDs, P4 and P5, for different Trial projects.

All that one needs to start an image-based electronic edition using EPPT is a set of relevant images and the corresponding plain text, preferably but not necessarily with a project-specific DTD.  Thus scholars using EPPT are able to create (with permission of the online repositories) new image-based electronic editions using images and related data available through completely independent online archives.  EPPT can also help scholars working on established projects to prepare, collate, and search variant manuscript versions of texts preserved in many manuscripts.  EPPT does not in any way, however, take ownership of independent projects nor use any proprietary format for encoding.  Editors of these projects simply use EPPT to help them accomplish on their own computers highly complex image-based encoding to make it possible to search or display whatever they encode.  The presentation functionality of EPPT will let editors in their work-in-progress dynamically search and display any image details linked by this transparent encoding.  After encoding with EPPT, each project can use its own preferred way of publishing the results.

EPPT's powerful generic workbench can serve a very wide range of projects.  EPPT is programmed to run on both Mac and PC platforms.  While anyone following our detailed installation guidelines may download, test, and use EPPT for their own image-based encoding, we currently provide free support only for the specified Trial projects on the EPPT website.  This website will as time permits add more guides and tutorials.  A preliminary explanation of its technology and editing methods is available on the Electronic Boethius project website.