Transcription - An ongoing process

 

We have been working on encoding Leibniz's manuscripts in TEI-XML language. To do so, we have begun a collaboration with a CNRS fellow engineer, Richard Walter, and his team.
Since 2014, Richard Walter has extensively contributed to the world of digital publishing for scientific research in the humanities through his platform EMAN. EMAN, namely Édition de Manuscrits et d'Archives Numériques (Publishing of digital manuscripts and archives), is an Omeka Classic-based platform, that hosts today more than 60 projects.
Our project PHILIUMM has its website on the EMAN platform, which is still under construction. We will now provide a few examples of how digital editions can be made simple by using EMAN plugins.
Please note that this is an ongoing process and, due to the specifics of Leibniz's corpus, we are still in the experimental phase.

An example of transcription with the Transcript plugin

The Transcript plugin has been developed for EMAN by Vincent Buard and was first conceived for hosting XML-TEI diplomatic transcriptions of texts. Later, the plugin was adapted to create critical editions of texts and to incorporate mathematical formulas through a combination of MathJax and LaTeX languages.

As you can see in the following example, a diplomatic transcription combining XML, MathJax and LaTeX languages is already quite satisfying to the eye.

Nevertheless, we are also working on using Transcript to indicate the different strata of Leibniz's written reasoning. To do so, we are using XML-TEI to add pop-ups and underlined sections of text. These aesthetic devices allow us to suggest and signify the genetic history of the manuscripts we are working with.

Although our focus is encoding Leibniz's manuscripts, we must mention that the EMAN platform will also allow us to provide a graphical representation of the relations between the manuscripts of our corpus.
As the image below shows, the EMAN plugin Graph permits us to gain a global vision of the manuscripts and the relationships they hold with each other. Presently, we use Graph to manifest the sections in which the manuscripts are organized on the PHILIUMM website.
In the future, we are willing to adapt the Graph representation to show the genetic history of Leibniz's writings.

Our modus operandi

Finally, let's consider the process we follow to incorporate the transcriptions on the EMAN website.
First, we transcribe the texts in an ODT file as simple text. Mathematical formulas are then encoded using LaTeX, whilst mathematical signs are encoded using the formula tag.
Afterwards, we convert the ODT file into XML format using the Odette converter [https://obvil.huma-num.fr/odette]. Later, we import the XML code in Transcript, and correct and enrich the XML file using TEI tags that appear in the Transcript editor.

What's next?

We are working on a new TEI Publisher encoding model. We are therefore collaborating with the EMAN technical team. We would love to obtain a clear visualization of variants and layers in Leibniz's texts, but there is a long way to go.