Scholarly digital editions have been increasingly important over the past two decades. With them, a paradigmatic shift in editing historical sources has taken place. Digital editions, especially conducted in now established XML formats such as TEI (for text editions) and MEI (for music editions) can cover information levels at a level of granularity traditional critical editions could not. This, in turn, opens new ways of researching data within large corpora. We will explore the basics of XML and the concept of digital editions and highlight the details of the text and music editions of CMO. We especially focus on the challenges and peculiarities of the literal and music traditions of the Near East, how these have been modelled in the data structure and what future prospects in research may arise.
The workshop is open to all scholars of musicology, literature studies, and related areas of research. Knowledge in X-Technologies (e.g., XML, XSL, X-Path) is helpful, but not a prerequisite. For hands-on exercises in digital editing, attendees need to install the oXygen XML Suite which can be downloaded for free as a 30-day trial version.
A takeaway for participants of this workshop should be an insight into the basics, structures, and nature of digital editions. Small hand-on examples will detail the workflows of a digital edition and sharpen awareness of different data modelling strategies that depend on the scalability of a research project as well as the research questions. Discussing these questions with the participants, the goal is to have mutual benefits implementing digital models in music and literal studies in the Near East.