Schedule

The workshop will be eminently practical. It is not offered as an occasion to debate theoretical issues concerning the use of the computer or of the Internet in the Humanities in general. What it wishes to achieve, instead, is to give very practical and detailed instruction in the deployment of the Hyper platform for publishing scholarly editorial work on the web. For this purpose, we invite the participants to come prepared and, where possible, to bring with them samples of their digitized documents – a few pages in digitized facsimile, together with their (plain) transcription, and perhaps notes towards genetic linkings, as well as commentaries, critical essays, or even translation samples – so as to be able to try out, on these materials of their own, the Hyper platform functions and tools.

The programme will daily alternate explanations of the Hyper functions and procedures with the participants’ own practical exercises, which will be publicly discussed at the end of each working day. During the exercise sessions, the instructors will be available to help the participants in making use of what they have been learning. The working language at the workshop will be English; but individual presentations may be given in English, French, German or Italian; the assistance during the practical exercises will be available in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Swedish.

Thursday, June 22nd 2006, 3 p.m.: Opening

To open the workshop, a general presentation will be given of the Hyper project, the functions already in place, and the sections scheduled for future release.
Paolo D’Iorio will explicate the overall conception of the Hyper project and outline the characteristics of this innovative web-based infrastructure for research and publication in comparison with the traditional infrastructure utilised in the Humanities.
Michele Barbera will present the information technology architecture which will allow an interchange of information between the Hyper platforms, within the HyperFederation, and with other information systems.
Hans Walter Gabler will refer to the nascent project platform HyperWoolf as a case in point to reflect on what is involved in generalising the pilot project (HyperNietzsche) for other project authors and/or materials.

Friday, June 23nd 2006, 9 a.m.: Classification of primary sources
and facsimile publication on the Web

The first requirement, before any body of documents can be accessed and researched, is to classify it. To this end, in the world of paper, archivists or librarians stick labels on volumes, number manuscript folios and compile catalogues, so as to enable researchers to identify unambiguously their objects of study, as well as unambiguously to refer to them in their editions and commentaries. The classification thus creates a system of indicators (signatures, page numbers) bi-univocally associated with the primary sources and their parts, thus rendering the body of documents citable and hence accessible and fully usable in scholarship.
Hyper transposes this intellectual operation into a digital environment and permits creating a system of unique identifiers (the “sigla”), which are attached in a bi-univocal manner to the primary sources (the “materials”), but which at the same time co-define stable web addresses, and thus plainly open a body of documents to exploration in an electronic research environment. Instead of writing the signatures and page numbers on the materials themselves, we will learn how to write them in our electronic research infrastructure, Hyper.
The digital classification is thus the first scholarly contribution which Hyper permits to publish on the Web. Matteo d’Alfonso and Barbara Keiko Saile will provide a theoretical outline and present a practical example of digital classification of manuscripts, printed works and collections of images.
With the classification established, it becomes possible to attach to each siglum other types of scholarly contributions, for example facsimiles of primary sources. Salvatore Viola and Barbara Keiko Saile will demonstrate how to publish different types of facsimile editions in Hyper.

Friday, June 23rd 2006, 3 p.m.: Classification of primary
sources, Part II: levels of finer granularity

In the afternoon, we will return to the question of digital classification to show how finer classifications than are normally realised in the world of paper may be achieved in Hyper. In effect, Hyper permits attributing sigla not only to each page, but also to areas within a page: one may thereby for example define notes on a manuscript page, paragraphs in a printed text, or distinguish details within images. Each zone on the page or the image, precisely identified by means of a set of cartesian coordinates, is given a siglum and a unique and stable web address, thus becoming citable in an electronic environment. A demonstration by Matteo d’Alfonso and Barbara Keiko Saile will be followed by practical exercises.
At the end of the second day of the workshop, the participants should have realised, and published on a Hyper demonstration platform of their own, digital classifications and facsimile editions of their several electronic materials. A session for presenting these results will end the working day.

Saturday, 24th June, 2006: Encoding and publication
of manuscripts and printed texts

Beyond facilitating digital editing in facsimile, Hyper is designed to publish diverse editions of manuscripts and works in text mode. The way in which Hyper works and its manner of structuring information is not based on text encoding in general, and even less on one particular encoding language. Instead, Hyper permits publishing different editions, established according to different editorial criteria and using diverse encoding formats (HTML, XML, TEI...).
Nonetheless, the HyperNietzsche project has also designed a new encoding language, based on XML and inspired by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), that is particularly adapted to representing genetic processes in manuscripts. This is the HyperNietzsche Markup Language (HNML). Though taking its departure from the manuscript characteristics of Nietzsche, it should with little modification prove adaptable also to other author materials. In the course of the third day of the workshop, Volker Zapf will be demonstrating HNML in some of its most interesting features, such as generating either a critical or a diplomatic edition from the same encodings, or rendering distinct the successive stages of the writing process on a given manuscript page.
Salvatore Viola will show how, from an HNML tagging, one may semi-automatically produce an XML encoding for importation into a DTP environment (such as Xpress or InDesign) and thus produce a print version of professional quality. Salvatore Viola will equally demonstrate other types of manuscript transcription conceived for the HyperNietzsche project: the ultradiplomatic and the interactive transcriptions.
Alois Pichler will end the day with a demonstration of how editions of manuscripts and texts prepared under the TEI encoding standards may be published in Hyper. He will also exemplify an adaptation of the TEI encoding conventions to the manuscripts of Wittgenstein.

Sunday 25th June, 2006: Publication of critical
essays and other scholarly contributions

The workshop’s last morning will be devoted to explain the procedures for the publication of four further types of scholarly contributions in Hyper: paths, commentaries, critical essays, and translations.
A path is a type of scholarly contribution that consists in collocating the primary sources (represented by their sigla) in a chronological, thematic, or genetic sequence, with possibly a pertinent commentary subjoined. Once the researcher has established and published a certain number of paths, Hyper is capable of generating automatically a rhizome to represent graphically all paths running through a given material unit, for example a manuscript page. Volker Zapf and Barbara Keiko Saile will give a demonstration of this function.
Hyper allows publishing essays in an image mode by simply digitizing articles or books already published on paper; or else, in a text mode, unpublished essays or essays already previously published in book or on the Internet. The reader may leaf through an essay, enlarge it and print it. Each essay is given a siglum composed of the first names of the author or their initials, followed by the author’s name, a dash and a serial number. This siglum, joined to the project address (e.g., in HyperNietzsche: <http://www.hypernietzsche.org/mmontinari-5>) permits identifying in a stable and unambiguous manner each essay published on an Hyperplatform, and to quote it. The commentaries are commonly short passages of discursive text closely linked to the materials commented on, and submitted in HTML format. Each document in Hyper – an essay, a commentary, a manuscript page, or also a path description – may be an object of translation into another language, and the translations published by a researcher are obviously linked automatically to the corresponding original documents. Matteo d’Alfonso will explain the procedures of publication and peer review evaluation for these different types of scholarly contribution.
After the habitual practical exercises, the workshop will end with a general discussion