Re: [NTG-context] Critical Editions?

Thomas, You are deeply right ! But this is an issue in academic edition, not only because students read no more at length (specially in humanities), and by consequence, don't buy books, but among other reasons there is a general problem in publishing in academic fields, pointed by Jürgen Hanneder : even Universities libraries don't buy all items published by scholars in a specific field, but publishers themselves have leveled the academic criterium by commercial/economic considerations. Then, scholars have to gather financial funding with technical computing practice, which is another issue, and furthermore they have to find money in order to publish at expansive cost (see Brill prices, for example). You are right about some academic tools, like those developed by Tuft University (like ancient greek thesaurus : http://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu/ or The Liddell-Scott-Jones online dictionary : http://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu/lsj/#eid=1), but for providing such tools as online digital work, there is two ways : 1. Academic courses on TEI XML given to advanced students in order to help them to produce well achieved projects (and provide manuals to do that; an example here in French  : http://www.bvh.univ-tours.fr/XML-TEI/ManuelWeb/Manuel_TEI_BVH.html) 2. Or, there are not so numerous nests like NTG-Context discussion list ! How to help Jürgen (and scholars generally) who knock at the door looking for an analysis of their needs and questioning how ConTeXt may help them ? a) They have to learn TEI XML, then b) learn Context stylesheet ! Is it possible to gather a group of people interested by these topics ? Are we starting today ? Le 04/01/2022 à 13:38, Thomas A. Schmitz via ntg-context a écrit :

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On 3. Jan 2022, at 10:43, hanneder--- via ntg-context wrote:

While the system is ingenious and a great relief (for we do not have to work with xml directly), I am also critical about these new demands, because they force us to use a fairly complex system for sometimes quite simple tasks. I am a Sanskritist, we do not have huge budgets or a large staff, so efficiency is an issue. Just for what it’s worth: I don’t see any future in developing a ConTeXt input format for critical editions, for the following reasons:

1. Producing a print-only version (i.e. printed book) makes no sense in 2022. This is not sustainable because no-one will be able to take your edition and continue to work on it. You have to provide a digital edition as research data.

2. This digital edition has to be in a standard format that is sustainable at least for some time so it can be processed with various types of software. TEI xml has become the de facto standard.

3. ConTeXt is not stable enough to provide such a standard format: it is in development; what you code today may not be compilable in 2 (or 5 or 50) years.

4. However, ConTeXt is wonderful for processing xml.

Hence: keep the input source and the processing separate. Code in TEI xml (or a subset of it) and develop a ConTeXt stylesheet to process it.

Thomas ___________________________________________________________________________________ If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki!

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