The eDITem project

The Huygens Institute publishes important and prestigious digital editions of cultural and historical sources. Until now, we often developed a new digital environment for each edition. This means that, typically, Huygens editors start from scratch in modelling, encoding, and thinking of how to visualize their editions. Existing workflows or encoding models are rarely reused, not even when dealing with similar types of sources. This lack of standardization leads to significant diversity between resources, increasing the time and costs associated with their maintenance.

The eDITEM project addresses this problem by developing a publishing tool that assumes every edition consists of a combination of reusable building blocks which we call templates. We develop different templates for different types of source text, as well as for supporting components such as an introduction or a biography.

The template-based approach facilitates software reuse, diminishes development and maintenance costs, thus ensuring a longer lifespan for digital editions. As such, using the eDITem framework allows editors to create flexible, dureable digital editions without leaning heavily on IT support.

The project team consists of scholars from the Innovating Digital Editions and DHLab research groups and research software engineers from Team Text of the Digital Infrastructure department of the KNAW Humanities Cluster. This interdisciplinary group brings together knowledge of editions, research methods, and information technology.

We are initially developing this tool for the Huygens Institute’s edition projects, but the software is open source and can therefore also be used by other institutions.

For more information, see the project page and the project's GitLab repository.