About

The Taylor Editions website showcases the work of members of the Medieval and Modern Languages Faculty and the wider digital scholarship community at the University of Oxford. The texts are the result of a practical training course in creating Digital Editions, which is led by library staff at the Taylor Institution Library, and is open to all members of the University. The images and texts in this resource have been created by the course participants themselves. Some images have been reused from other internal (such as Digital Bodleian) or external sources e.g. though the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF).

Students working with the Reformation Pamphlets in the Taylor Institution Library
Students working with the Reformation Pamphlets in the Taylor Institution Library

Blog Posts

Participants have written the following blog posts about their editions, which give an insight into what the course involves. Many of these appear on the History of the Book blog. This is the home for work relating to the Palaeography, History of the Book and Digital Humanities Method Option for Humanities Masters students. The workshops and seminars provide training in dealing with manuscripts and books across different historical periods and European languages. The aim is to combine philological training with project work which takes seriously the material turn in Modern Languages and the option enables students to do editorial work in the age of Digital Humanities. Many students of this method option have simultaneously taken the Digital Editions course.

Images

The images have been created in a variety of different ways, including mobile phone cameras, digital cameras and high quality scanners. All of the methods used are available to all readers of the library: this is a showcase of "DIY digitisation". The images are available to download for personal use under the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license, but should not be published or used for commercial purposes.

Texts

The texts are encoded with the Text Encoding Initiative P5 standard. The full TEI schema is available to course participants, to allow complete flexibility for them to pursue their own research interests in what is usually their first experience of encoding texts. However, encoding guidelines are made available to guide participants, and most texts do not deviate far from these guidelines. The texts are available for reuse, according to the terms of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.

Participants are encouraged to create their own transcription guidelines, and an editorial statement detailing the decisions made is available for each text.

Some texts have translations as well as transcriptions. For texts which do not have translations, we encourage students to submit new translations, which we will publish with appropriate attribution (see collaboration).

Preservation

All the texts and images contained in this website have been, or will shortly be, deposited in ORA-data, the research data archive of the University of Oxford, for long-term preservation. This is an important part of the course, as not only does it ensure the preservation of this data, it introduces students to the concepts of data sharing and preservation, and the roles of libraries in this, at an early stage of their academic career.

Collaboration

As a minimum, all texts contain images, a transcription, and basic bibliographic information. However, some also include a translation, further editorial material such as introductions, descriptions, notes, glossary of names etc. Anyone wishing to contribute additional information is very welcome to submit content for review. All texts are available to download and reuse.

Digital Editions Course

The course runs termly over eight weeks and is open to all members of the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at Oxford University. Participants benefit from learning a broad range of digital skills, from how to best take images for their own research, to TEI encoding, research data management, and even some basic paleography. Further details on the course, including a course programme, can be found on the Taylor Institution Library website.

The Digital Editions course is run by library staff at the Taylor Institution Library. Librarians are ideally placed to teach digitisation and Digital Humanities, as they combine subject knowledge, expert information management skills and a wide knowledge of other support services, such as (in Oxford) the Centre for Digital Scholarship, BDLSS, the e-research centre and faculty Digital Humanities Champions. In this course, librarians offer introductory training on text selection, imaging, transcription, encoding (two sessions), quality assurance, preservation and delivery. The aim is to give participants an overview of the main elements of a digitisation project, raising awareness of the issues to be considered (and budgetted for) in funded digitisation projects, and where to seek advice. It is hoped that this knowledge will ensure that course participants seek appropriate support at an early stage of any future project proposal, in the long term benefiting the libraries who usually have responsibility for preserving digital projects.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all contributors and supporters of this project.

Contact

Emma Huber
Subject Librarian for German
email: emma.huber@bodleian.ox.ac.uk
tel: 01865 (2)78153

Taylor Institution Library
St Giles
Oxford, OX1 3NA