These days, there is considerable interest in and activity around publishing digital scholarly editions online. However, far too many digital editions are created individually as unique “one-offs” or use technologies that will not be durable over the long-term. There is also a growing interest and momentum around annotation, thanks in part to the efforts and successes of hypothes.is. Readux addresses these interests and concerns in its new annotated edition export functionality. Readux provides digitized book repository content, pairing digitized facsimile images with searchable and selectable TEI-encoded text. Both text and page images are available for annotation with text, multimedia content, and tags. A volume in Readux can be exported with a user’s annotations to generate a customizable, open access annotated edition in the form of a Jekyll website. The use of Jekyll, which is a static site generator, provides a durable, future-proof website as well as built-in hosting through GitHub pages. This functionality makes previously digitized content available for engaged, public scholarship and teaching in a new way, and the combination of image and text is particularly valuable for visual content such as hymnbooks, yearbooks, and scrapbooks.
Ingesting born digital disk image content into a repository is still fairly uncommon, and has its challenges, which include the need to preserve provenance and handle large files. Born digital disk images are still a fairly new concern, but one that is likely to become more common. It is also a format likely to grow in average size, as archives accession materials from more recent computers with larger hard drives. For our content, we make use of bagit to calculate checksums prior to ingest and to ensure data integrity from the archivist’s workstation into the repository. An archivist creates a bag with a disk image master and supplemental files, which provide details about the disk image capture process. That bag, which is effectively the Submission Information Packet (SIP) for our curation system, is uploaded to a shared network drive. The curation application validates the bag and then converts it into a Fedora 3.x-compatible SIP, adds basic descriptive (MODS) and PREMIS object metadata (including two different checksums from the bag metadata), converts local paths into file URIs accessible to Fedora, and then passes in checksums from the bag metadata for Fedora to verify before ingest.
Researchers effectively trust the work of others anytime they use software tools or custom software. In this article I explore this notion of trusting others, using Digital Humanities as a focus, and drawing on my own experience. Software is inherently flawed and limited, so when its use in scholarship demands better practices and terminology, to review research software and describe development processes. It is also important to make research software engineers and their work more visible, both for the purposes of review and credit.
This presentation was part of a panel titled: "Panel: Innovative Digital Humanities Projects at Emory University." Presented at the NFAIS 2016 Humanities Roundtable that focused on Digital Humanities: Preserving the Past, Capturing the Present & Building the Future. The NFAIS 2016 Humanities Roundtable took place at the Pitts Theology Library / Candler School of Theology / Emory University in Atlanta.