This case study explores how scholars have collaborated within the Harriot Papers, specifically in processing Thomas Harriot’s early modern treatise De infinitis (On Infinity). Using Harriot’s handwritten notes, the study addresses two main objectives for making a digital edition: (1) documenting primary sources through collaborative editing, and (2) employing project management strategies to support work in the humanities.
This study explores a collaborative edition publishing mathematical notes of Thomas Harriot, an English polymath (1560–1621). Harriot’s work encompassed topics ranging from algebraic equations to linguistic and ethnological issues. Despite his extensive writings, Harriot chose not to publish his scientific works, leaving behind approximately 8,000 folio pages of working notes (Goulding; Schemmel). Given that he conducted research and engaged in study independently, without publishing any scientific findings, his mathematical research exists primarily in the form of unpublished notes. Among those notes, a treatise titled De infinitis (“On Infinity”) has been the object of analysis of the Harriot Papers, in which the author has been involved as Co-PI at the University of Notre Dame (2022–2024). The project is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Arts and Humanities Research Council at Notre Dame, the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, and the Cambridge University Library. To discuss the project logistics, a description of the digital workspace, scholarly community, workflows, and project management practices follows. As Lynne Siemens points out, there is an increasing awareness of project management in academic projects, though it is a skill utilized mostly in industry. The increasing demand for public responsibility from funding agencies and other stakeholders helps to explain, at least in part, detailed documentation and realistic planning, which project management facilitates in the humanities (Siemens, “Introduction”). Despite the criticism addressed to the field of digital humanities as managerial humanities, the popularity of grant-funded initiatives remains unquestioned to advance scholarship in the humanities and digital humanities alike.
The variety and nature of the primary sources pose a unique challenge at the intersection of historical studies and digital humanities (DH). Editorial workflows have been tailored and applied to making the digital edition of Thomas Harriot’s unpublished treatise, De infinitis (On Infinity), a text that required both content expertise in the early modern history of science and skills in project management. This paper’s focus on project management and collaborative editions intervenes in the conversation around digital scholarly editions, looking at individual contributions and top-down editorial decisions drawing from the editorial statement complying with diplomatic, rather than normalized, editorial criteria.
Harriot’s studies on infinity, titled De infinitis in Latin, the language of scholarship at the time, have never been edited or published previously. Primary sources documenting Harriot’s notes were never systematically collected and available for research, but most existing manuscripts to this date are scattered in archives around the United Kingdom and in Delaware, according to the current survey of Harriot’s manuscripts (Goulding and Schemmel). The digital edition represents the first publication of the text, which has remained unpublished and inaccessible for over four hundred years. The main objective of the project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), is to make a digital edition of the treatise. The editorial workflows for Harriot’s De infinitis involved transcribing, interpreting, and encoding complex mathematical texts, which included intricate notations and hand-drawn diagrams. When the author joined the Harriot Papers, team members had access to a list of goals and timelines from the NEH application materials. This list functioned as a project charter, providing a concise guide for planning and outlining the key objectives and benefits of the editorial project. Harriot’s texts in De infinitis did not have numbered or sequential pages, and all tasks were completed in iterative cycles, following a Waterfall model that had a list of tasks, to be repeated in a sequence (reading, transcription, alternative readings, and comments; comment resolution and expansion; peer reviewing; interpretation and resolution of unclear readings).
There were two phases in the editorial processing of content; the first one involved assembling a collaborative edition, as described above in the Waterfall sequence of tasks, and the second one required the team to store and preserve each manuscript page, while also establishing the order of the leaves based on the topics discussed. The platform used at the Harriot Papers is a workspace called Notion. One of the most used features was the page-by-page manuscript view, showcasing a single leaf, its transcription, annotation, and translation of non-English parts of the text. The editorial team has captured different facets of Notion, and is working on long-term preservation, accessibility, and addressability to align digital curation and digital humanities perspectives (“Digital curation and digital humanities share concerns, practices, and objectives” Poole 1772). Two aspects are discussed hereafter as essential to designing and building a digital edition of Thomas Harriot’s notes on the infinite: editorial workflows to transcribe texts from ancient manuscripts and interoperability for individual and collaborative work.
To provide background and context, a brief description of the project’s development and features follows. Scholars at the University of Notre Dame along with colleagues at the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge have engaged in cross-institutional endeavors, conducting hybrid synchronous transcription sessions involving subject matter experts and digital specialists (2022–2024). Given the importance of project-specific features, search functions, and integrated comparison views across multiple editions in the field of digital editions, scholars working on the Harriot Papers are motivated to pursue interoperable formats and establish an Interoperable Text Framework (ITF) as a digital standard. A scholarly need for consistent, replicable interfaces and methods aligns with the model of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF). IIIF, which the author co-chairs, sets a standard for accessing and sharing high-resolution digital images across different platforms and institutions, including features for annotation.
To start, the Harriot Papers team needed to transcribe Harriot’s handwritten notes in the treatise De infinitis. Utilizing various technologies (Zoom for meeting international colleagues, Notion for viewing and transcribing, and Google Jamboard for annotating), transcribing sessions have captured live scholarship-in-practice based on digital images of the manuscripts. The current project of transcribing De infinitis continues an earlier initiative, available on ECHO–Cultural Heritage Online (to be discontinued and archived shortly). The Harriot Papers project intends to publish selected sources based on one topic—the mathematical and philosophical concept of the infinite—and its relevance to the study of early modern mathematics. For the past decade, the Harriot sources on ECHO have been the established repository and consequently a primary source of Harriot’s historical and scientific research. Unlike the ECHO project, encompassing a variety of scientific texts authored by Harriot, the Harriot Papers concentrates on one text, De infinitis. The ECHO project partners (ECHO standing for Open Access Infrastructure for a Future Web of Culture and Science) included the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the University of Oxford, the University of Notre Dame, the British Library, and the Petworth House Archives which belonged to Henry Percy, Lord of Northumberland, who was Harriot’s patron (Clucas 270). The earlier project (2012–2014) was directed by the late Jacqueline Stedall, Matthias Schemmel, and Robert Goulding, publishing a wide selection of notes on algebra, geometry, and motion for a total of over 350 folio pages that are housed at the British Library.
One of the scalable goals for future developments of the Max Planck project was to have “navigational tools that shall make the manuscripts more accessible” (ECHO website; see Figure 1). The ECHO project’s objective was to systematically gather and consolidate information from diverse archives, ensuring its accessibility for search and analysis. Stedall, Schemmel, and Goulding’s goal was to publish Harriot’s surviving papers, in the format of high-resolution images as well as in XML encoding, and to organize them by topic. The ECHO digital project was a major inspiration for narrowing down the scope of investigation of Harriot’s work to one treatise that would be transcribed from existing digital images.
To view images and access them in a user-friendly fashion, the ECHO digital architecture displays papers both by primary subjects (historical context, navigation, alchemy, mathematics, optics, astronomy, and more) as well as by housing institution and their shelf marks. For topic navigation, each subject contained additional subdivisions that extended to smaller, interconnected groups of manuscript pages. As Harriot’s manuscripts lack order, topic browsing expands capabilities for readers interested in early modern mathematics, which in turn requires a panoramic visual representation of the structure of topics within the discipline of mathematics. In the ECHO diagram available for user navigation, users can view the virtual architecture of the primary sources. By selecting a series of clickable maps, they land to subtopics and, ultimately, to each manuscript page’s digitized image.
Figure 1: Figure 1: Access by diagram—Extended Version by Jacqueline Stedall, Matthias Schemmel, and Robert Goulding. Navigational tools are provided by the topic on ECHO.
Next, a bibliographic sequence follows, including the Collection of Thomas Harriot’s manuscripts from the British Library and Petworth House Archives and printed works by Thomas Harriot, both linking to partner institutions and contributors (Figure 2). The primary goal of that portion of the work was to give access to digitized manuscripts, provided by their housing institutions, but also the visual organization of primary sources drawing from diagrams initially proposed by Schemmel (2008). The resulting sequence of images redirectable through the originally disordered primary sources is the outcome of scholarly work which, in turn, enables readers to explore primary sources based on their interests.
Figure 2: The user interface in the earlier digital edition offers options for direct access to libraries and archives. Redirecting readers to the original items and collections allows them to browse manuscripts in a sequence, rather than for topic-based inquiries.
The ECHO website navigation tools are components and attributes intended to make it easier for users to navigate around, explore, and engage with the virtual environment.
Figure 3: Comprehensive perspective of the 180 manuscript pages discussed by Schemmel in his 2008 book, The English Galileo (40–41)
This section discusses the key steps in initiating collaborative editions through project initiation and planning. A collaborative edition involves the process of compiling, editing, and publishing primary sources, which happens for large-scale projects through collaborative efforts. Recent scholarship on building digital scholarly editions has shown a digital turn in humanities studies. Both the project outcomes and the transformative shift toward utilizing digital technologies and computational methods have drawn scholars to analyze, interpret, and disseminate cultural and historical artifacts, promoting new avenues of research and scholarship (Dillen and Van Hulle). On the other hand, scholarly interests have adapted traditional fields such as collecting books, manuscripts, and archival sources into textual approaches (Lachmann; Manukyan et al.; Goulding; Schemmel; Agostini) and visual analysis alike (Dutta et al.). Both scholarly directions have guided the De infinitis edition, as a text-based interpretation of manuscript images available digitally. In the field of digital editions, high-quality, high-resolution images allow for digital viewing and interpretation that “enables a fluid change through zooming from macro to micro, and vice versa, and mixing of different kinds of data into research results” (Tabak 6).
The Harriot Papers team benefits from a variety of project management approaches. The cultural and historical value of collaborative editions guided the project management decisions, leading to the implementation and oversight of appropriate technological solutions for these types of editions. In the absence of formal project management, we employed Agile project management, specifically the Scrum approach, to help us prioritize and achieve incremental goals. We emphasized valuing individuals and interactions over strictly following processes and tools, such as those used in Zoom meetings. Additionally, we utilized the Waterfall model for the requirements, analysis, and testing of the project platform’s features and capabilities. Project milestones included tasks such as transcribing, annotating, and revising the treatise, as well as conducting User Experience interviews to develop user stories related to the chosen digital repository and workspace, Notion. Notion is an all-in-one productivity and collaboration tool that combines note taking, project management, and task organization within a single platform. In the De infinitis project, images were stored in the Notre Dame Box cloud and on Google Drive folders and linked to the Notion webpage. Notion is known for its versatility, enabling users to design personalized workflows, collaborate with team members in real time, and seamlessly transition between individual and team-based tasks, making it a popular choice for both personal and professional use. It features a flexible and customizable workspace where users can create pages, databases, and boards, incorporating text, multimedia, and various integrations. Since Notion provides customized layouts designed for both individual and collaborative projects, it functioned as a repository for manuscript images, an organized catalogue of leaves and images, and an editorial workspace for the transcribing team based at Notre Dame, which included occasional contributors from North America, Continental Europe, the UK, and Japan. For the Harriot Papers, the online environment collects a list of workshop members, objectives and editorial standards, new tasks, and a manuscript master list for the main work studied, as well as others on conic sections (De parabola), transcripts by the late Jacqueline Stedall, but also experimental digital tools such as Testing Mermaid in Notion and corpus linguistics via Voyant Tools.
Collaborative transcription of manuscripts involves several scholars working together to convert handwritten texts into digital formats. This approach integrates the skills of various contributors to achieve accurate, thorough, and consistent transcriptions. The collaborative nature of this process transforms the transcription task for participants. Workshops were proposed to bring together as many Harriot scholars as possible to transcribe the texts and discuss content and formats. As part of the larger project on the Harriot Papers and the development of an Interoperable Text Framework, the team piloted hybrid, synchronous transcription sessions with a mixture of deep subject matter experts and digital specialists (Agostini, Meyers, et al.). There were in-person sessions to transcribe the text at the University of Notre Dame, with worldwide participants joining on Zoom. By taking advantage of participants’ availability, it proved possible to hold a dozen of these workshops over the two years of the funded project. The main technologies used to transcribe the text were Notion for texts and multi-versioning, Google Jamboard for annotations, and LaTeX scripting for Harriot’s unusual mathematical notations.
Transcription sessions of manuscripts by Harriot were both synchronous and asynchronous, in person and via videoconferencing. Participants then conducted additional editing and analysis on their own, and collaboratively. Editing sessions followed once all primary sources were transcribed after the project’s first year. The editorial process benefits from peer review, which is a dynamic concept in digital humanities work. Incorporating peer review criteria early in the project is mindful of academic criticism of peer review as a late, ineffective method for scholarly exchange (Boyd). The peer review conducted during transcription and revisions represents an essential form of scholarly exchange facilitated by the broader project management framework. An example of this is Jason Boyd’s critique, which argues that blind peer review is often treated as the primary and initial mode of scholarly interaction. Boyd highlights how this approach leads to fragmented scholarly discourse, with meaningful author responses and dialogues often delayed until after publication, primarily through citations and subsequent reviews. In the Harriot Papers, instead, responsive web design enhances the functionality of Notion. User interviews were conducted, both in person and online, and the results were used to update participatory design and strategic planning (Senabre Hidalgo and Fuster Morell). The author, then, followed up with user interviews, and written user stories capturing general explanations on working with Notion, Google Jamboard, and Zoom from the perspectives of the end users. Collaboration and contributions are deeply intertwined, as digital projects have been interpreted as “intensely interpersonal” (Dombrowski). These objectives are aligned with what Kathleen Fitzpatrick discussed in terms of preservation when producing outcomes “From Text to… Something More” (Fitzpatrick 121–154; 83–89). User feedback gathered in October 2022—shortly after the initial hybrid workshop—enabled the author to compile user stories, communicate with the team, and refine Notion’s features accordingly. Furthermore, a team of scholars based at Notre Dame have run user experience observations during synchronous transcription sessions (Agostini, Meyers, et al.).
In the digital environment, scholars can view, annotate, and transcribe the manuscript images of De infinitis. Consequently, the texts of the digital edition are in the original language, English, with Latin passages supplemented with modern translations made by members of the Harriot Papers team (Agostini and Goulding). Manuscript pages contain Harriot’s personal notes, calculations, and unlabeled diagrams, where text is usually in English, with rare passages in Latin, the learned language of the time for scientific communication. Version control is a classic problem in editorial work. Once an edition is published, digital or printed, a typographical error can be noticed. While the process, historically at Harriot’s time and beyond, was handled in a section of Addenda or Errata Corrige, and other editorial solutions in later editions, the digital format allows for updates and version control via Notion analytics.
Figure 4: An overview of a manuscript leaf image, transcription, and annotation on the Notion workspace. British Library, Add. MS 6782, folio 362 recto.
Textual readings are documented in an editorial statement as the direct result of interpretive work in text criticism. In the editorial statement, the editors of the De infinitis edition explain editorial practices and interventions, as well as the overall philosophy guiding the critical edition. Documenting work in the digital humanities means concentrating on perspectives such as “the journey rather than the destination” (Dombrowski) and “process-based rather than product-based” (Tabak 6). Therefore, the collaborative team of editors followed the same practices prefaced in a traditional, print-critical edition. In it scholars outline the principles, methods, and criteria guiding the editorial process of preparing and presenting a scholarly text edition. Conversely, for readers, that document serves to inform them about the editorial decisions made during the process, with details about the editors’ approach to establishing the text as an accurate, authoritative version, in addition to explanations for how to handle variant readings, address textual issues, and add annotations.
Furthermore, narrative mathematical discussions and symbolic notation used by Harriot are rendered in natural language and LaTeX, respectively. Marginalia include handwritten notes, comments, or markings made in the margins of a manuscript, and can take the format of busy margins and annotations around some areas of the text or, conversely, wide blank space around diagrams and doodles. Marginalia are typically added by Harriot himself at the time of writing, when the ink looks identical, except for a few additional insertions later, based on the analysis of his script in more than three styles corresponding to different moments in his career, as proposed by Schemmel (2008). Another topic frequently discussed by the Harriot Papers team is the representation of Harriot’s diagrams, which combine algebra and geometry. These diagrams are often sketched but lack detailed descriptions or a strong connection to the rest of the content on the page. This issue updates Willard McCarty’s definition in the context of modeling according to which “what makes a graphic a diagram, properly so called, is how it is read, not its resemblance to anything” (McCarty 261). Alternative text captions have been used to address that problem, thus matching visual elements to their meaning, so that readers of the digital edition can access and understand visual and textual elements jointly. Currently, the project has completed milestones for the transcriptions and user stories.
During the project initiation and planning, emphasis was placed on the importance of establishing clear objectives and timelines to ensure the smooth progression of the project, but also developing a seminal participatory design and strategic planning, a practice encouraged by Enric Senabre Hidalgo and Mayo Fuster Morell. Project management and relationship management are equally important in projects involving computational approaches and technologies (Dombrowski 2021). Theoretical reflections spanned from authorial intentions to the accuracy of the extant texts. Harriot was reluctant to print his findings, the collaborative digital publication of his materials contrasts digital formats with his private notes, while also engaging more closely with Harriot’s own understanding of his work. In contrast, the ECHO project emphasized how Harriot could view his notes, instead, as fragmented reflections on mathematics. By publishing Harriot’s work digitally with an interoperable framework, scholars create opportunities to link his research with the network of individuals who influenced his thoughts and processes.
Early modern collaborative editions represent a dynamic intersection of the history of science, digital humanities, and project management (on representation, see McCarty 259–61). On Notion, all other technologies are linked or embedded, thus functioning as a collective repository and project management software. Furthermore, individual items, pages, and datasets can be exported in several formats, including markdown, which facilitates interoperability in the Harriot Papers diverse group. The team designed the interface to display menus and navigation bars located at the top or side of the landing webpage, providing categorical links to different sections or pages within the site. Additionally, dropdown menus organize subcategories. All manuscript pages are shown in a tabular view, where a Search Bar conveniently allows users to quickly find specific content by entering keywords (for example, secondary sources quoted by Harriot such as Euclid, Galilei, or a phrase such as the concept of infinity; on secondary sources quoted in early modern scientific texts, see William Newman 209–222), enhancing the efficiency of navigation. A significant portion of Harriot’s studies focused on natural philosophy and applied mathematics that also interested Galileo Galilei, including mechanics and optics. Hyperlinks to the text and image links (redirecting to Google Drive, Box, and cultural heritage institutions) are embedded in the content that connects to related pages, resources, or external sites. Once a specific manuscript leaf is open, pagination and scrolling options help users navigate through multiple pages of content.
Another goal of the project is the interoperability of textual projects, which has long been a dream of digital scholarly editing. Those motivations guided the development of the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines, a standard in the field of digital editions, but no single digital editorial system suits all needs (Agostini, Gooch, et al.). The Interoperable Text Framework (ITF) proposed in the grant is an attempt to facilitate cross-communication among projects using different technologies, and across different text and data types. Examining the editorial process as collaborative requires an analysis of the fundamental principles, opportunities, and challenges associated with overseeing projects centred on the collaborative creation of early modern texts. Marginalia can take various forms, including comments, underlining, drawings, or symbols penned in the Greek alphabet. These materials are excellent integrations to bring into the Interoperable Text Framework as they offer a glimpse into the writer’s and reader’s thoughts, reactions, and engagement with the material. In such context, the ITF has the potential to standardize references and facilitate the delivery of texts and annotations across diverse formats, which is carried out by Neil Jefferies at Oxford (“Digital Preservation and Scholarly Communications.”) The ITF represents an endeavor to foster cross-communication among projects using different technologies, a process documented on the Open Science Framework’s “Unlocking Digital Texts.” Thus, the Harriot Papers’ collaborative efforts promote a global scriptorium in the USA (in Indiana, California), the UK, Germany, France, and Japan, where contributing scholars work. Project stakeholders are scholars directly impacted by the project, including professors and specialists in the history of mathematics and digital humanities. Interoperability is, thus, a methodology that enhances the effectiveness of the editorial team and the content itself. It also creates opportunities for future collaboration among current team members and potential readers as contributors.
The Interoperable Text Framework is a long-term goal for the project so that scholars might achieve closer access to work across locally built applications. Transcribing manuscripts also confirmed that unordered page sequences pose questions in terms of personal archives and book contents. Additionally, large-scale collaborative work in digital research across disciplinary areas is another reason requiring project management skills. Project management work allows the Harriot Papers team to keep work and participants aligned in the various areas of their expertise in the humanities. With Notion, we have streamlined activities requiring input from people with different skills and knowledge—from paleography to early modern English, Latin passages, and Greek abbreviations, to mathematical notations, diagrams, and book history. Project management work allows us to keep this team aligned. Our project management software supports the ability to export Notion pages as markdown files, which facilitates interoperability in our diverse group. The first year of activities has been documented in a collective position paper, written in the format of a white paper, and published on Open Science Framework (Jefferies et al. 2023). To address the technical aspects of this collaborative effort, it is essential to analyze computational workflows, editorial conventions, and revisions. This examination shows how making the manuscripts available online in an interoperable and sustainable format supports digital humanities research on early modern texts. In this context, understanding editorial interactions and workflows involved in deciphering and interpreting the Harriot Papers benefits both the project and the broader community of the humanities and digital humanities. Building an editorial project benefits the broader scholarly community as the team plans to share editorial interactions, roadmap, and documentation. Deliverables include a wide range of assets ranging from a digital and print edition, both internally facing towards our team members and externally facing readers interested in the history of science. The integration of technology is increasingly vital in collaborative editions, facilitating the digitization, analysis, and dissemination of early modern texts.
For the first time, the digital edition made by scholars at the University of Notre Dame, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Oxford, transcribes and adapts early modern content for the needs of a modern readership interested in tracking original scripts and notations. This effort aimed to offer a substantial collection of source-based evidence for researchers interested in the history of the infinite and, more broadly, in understanding the note-taking practices of Thomas Harriot around the year 1600, in approximately seventy manuscript leaves that were not meant for formal publication. Moreover, intertextual and scholarly references are added redirecting readers to other passages by Harriot, as well as to traditional scholarship in mathematics that he was quoting or addressing in his treatise—for example, Euclid, Pythagoras, and François Viète. An edition of early modern texts aims to preserve and disseminate these works as a collaborative endeavor, by leveraging the expertise of participating scholars, editors, and project managers (Kudella and Jefferies; Poole). Since the scholarly process is known in digital editions as modeling, the outcome of the Harriot Papers is a model edition before export via interoperable formats, and the online version is, thus, “a representation of something for purposes of study, or a design for realizing something new” (McCarty 255). Additionally, the model edition can be contributed to and updated by all guest editors, confirming what McCarty calls the second quality of a model, that is, “manipulability” or, in equivalent terms, “the modeling system must be interactive” (256). As Lynne Siemens observes, for an experiential process that is also multidisciplinary and involving a large group of active researchers, the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE), “differences in disciplines can create conflicts over terminology, research methodology, appropriate research questions and authorship conventions” (Siemens 354). That point has been also raised by Harold Short, who writes that a project team “needs, of course, to agree on the practical aspects of project management, and to establish clear procedures and guidelines, but even with these things in place there are likely to be continuing intellectual challenges as the project is developed and as it proceeds” (Short). Edin Tabak argues that “DH is project-oriented scholarship” (Tabak 4). Boyd, instead, concentrates on the team members’ values as he argues that four basic aspects define scholarly exchange in digital humanities project management: “defining the bargain with team members; translating between team members; facilitating perpetual peer review; and researching scholarly exchange” (Boyd). As Boyd suggests, “scholarly exchange has always required managed collaboration”. With these goals in mind, adjustments are needed in deliverables, according to Fitzpatrick who observes that scholarly work changes shapes and formats when going “From Individual to Collaborative” (Fitzpatrick 72–76). In editorial projects, the main attention focus is to describe how to move along, “From Product to Process” (Fitzpatrick 66–72). In the Harriot Papers, all scholarship and outreach work are shared in the Open Science Framework, a web-based platform designed to support and facilitate the entire research life cycle openly and collaboratively (Agostini et al., “Unlocking Digital Texts”).
The author applied contents and methods to pedagogy and, thus, designed two-week long content units in an advanced undergraduate and graduate class (The Knowledge of Data: Images, Texts, and Interpretations) and, additionally, in a doctoral seminar on digital textual scholarship (Digital Textual Scholarship). Both iterations involved collaborative transcription, as well as reflections on long-term preservation, accessibility, and addressability of digital editions. The value of matching learning goals to pedagogy, as reverse outlining the syllabus, has been recently noted by Quinn Dombrowski:
The repetition would have the added benefit of giving students exposure to the experience of an ad-hoc project, as a further motivating force for adopting better project management practices the second time around.
Iteration in pedagogy within the humanities holds significant value as it aligns with the principles of continuous improvement, critical thinking, and a deeper understanding of complex concepts in editorial practices of early modern texts. Another advantage of using a form of standardization as a DH project deliverable (Tabak 31) is that such method facilitates achieving the goals of preserving and making text reusable (Poole). The interrelatedness of textual and digital formats has been discussed by Stephen Gregg, who coined the term “bookishness” to be opposed to the digital version of it, for Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). Gregg argues that “(a)nother aspect of bookishness affected by filming and digitisation is the experience of reading an open book” (Gregg). As in experiential learning, it is only then that noticing blank space around certain sections of text serves as a notable dimension influenced by the processes of filming and digitization in the construction of a book, which scholars cannot capture through traditional text encoding techniques. As Gregg observes, “the platform produces a crucial tension between two ways of understanding and using old books: the bibliographical (or the ‘bookishness’ of books) and the textual.” Such dichotomy is inherent in the interpretation and utilization of old books. On one hand, there is the bibliographical perspective, encapsulating the essential material book history, or “bookishness” of books, and on the other, the textual approach, highlighting the content within the books. This tension underscores the evolving dynamics between traditional book aesthetics and the modern, digital means of accessing and engaging with literary works. Particularly, the platform introduces a significant tension between two distinct approaches to comprehending and utilizing old books: the bibliographical, which pertains to the bookish qualities of books, and the textual, which emphasizes the content within the pages. The interplay between these two perspectives highlights the transformative nature of technology in shaping our engagement with traditional forms of literature.
The essay highlights the cultural and historical value of collaborative editions and project management to implement and oversee technological solutions while enriching our understanding of the early modern history of science. Collaborative editions play a crucial role in ensuring the accessibility and accuracy of early modern texts. By navigating the complexities of collaboration, communication, and technology, scholars play a pivotal role in preserving and promoting historical primary sources of the early modern period. The adoption of project management significantly enhanced both the editorial team’s efficiency and the quality of the editorial content in Harriot’s De infinitis digital edition. By facilitating seamless integration and collaboration, it not only streamlined the workflow but also opened avenues for future cooperation among current and potential contributors. This approach has demonstrated its value in creating a dynamic and adaptable editorial process. Applying these methodologies to other projects in the humanities can similarly improve organizational effectiveness and foster collaborative opportunities, ultimately enriching the scholarly impact and reach of diverse research initiatives.
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