Proto4DigEd

The aim of the Open Research Data (ORD) project funded by swissuniversities is to test and further develop prototype workflows in the conception phase of digital edition projects. The conception phase is particularly crucial from an ORD perspective: this is where the foundations are laid for ensuring that the research data remains accessible and can be reused later on. Proto4DigEd tests and documents the use of proven tools (Transkribus, TEI Publisher) as part of the PARES project. The inclusion of various stakeholders and the involvement of the national and international ORD community is of great importance.

PARES (Gaston Paris: des archives aux réseaux) is a binational, Swiss-French project that aims to make the entire archive of Gaston Paris, one of the leading French philologists of the second half of the 19th century, which has been widely dispersed to date, accessible and usable on a digital platform. The core of the project is the extensive correspondence of the scholar, who was in contact with around 1,800 correspondence partners from all over the world, which corresponds to a total corpus of around 27,000 pages. These include a large number of documents with different scripts, different languages (mainly French and German, but also English, Dutch, etc.) and a range of formats (letters, postcards, both with numerous marginal notes), which in their diversity and complexity place exemplary demands on digital indexing.

• Transkribus
• TEI Publisher

The results of the research project will be documented in a handbook, which is expected to be publicly available in the fall of 2024. The first workshop, focusing on transcription workflows, took place in the spring of 2024. On September 11, 2024, a workshop on long-term archiving of TEI-XML editions was held. Here is the program for the workshop: Proto4DigEd Workshop II_11.09.24 (PDF, 232 KB)

In the summer of 2024, initial results of the project were presented at the DARIAH Annual Event in Lisbon: Proto4DigEd: Prototypical Workflows for Digital Editions (zenodo.org).

Project management: 

Prof. Dr. Ursula Bähler, Romanisches Seminar (RoSe), UZH

Project team:

Dr. Elias Zimmermann (RoSe),  Reto Baumgartner (Science IT), Dr. des. Yann Stricker (ZDE),  Marcus Zerbst (ZB), PD Dr. Rita Gautschy (DaSCH)