Do you know how to work with the digital editions of the books you read? For researchers, understanding the features of the editions they work with is crucial for making efficient use of their research tools. This instrumental know-how is fundamental for the researcher’s quest for new scientific insights. This claim might sound trivial. However, in a rapidly changing digital environment, it can be challenging for researchers to keep up with the latest developments in digital editions. Indeed, not all their functions are self-evident. Therefore, just as editors of print editions have to explain special features to their readers, editors of digital collections are also called upon to clarify the functions they provide for researchers. This is especially true as the process of digital editing enters a new phase. Digital editions are no longer merely appendices to print editions, but now set the standard and create a new paradigm in text editing and exploration. This shift from print to digital forms of text presentation offers the opportunity to develop a variety of tools and functions that provide new possibilities for engaging with content. These tools need explanation.
Turning to the User’s Perspective
The project team of the long-term project, “The School of Salamanca: A Digital Collection of Sources and a Dictionary of its Juridical-Political Language” recently reflected on this necessity for editors to explain the new functions of their digital editions. This reflection arises as the project itself enters a new phase. Having built a big part of the Digital Collection of texts by 16th and 17th century authors from the Iberian World, the project now focuses on exploring this Digital Collection and developing a source-based Dictionary of the Juridical-Political Language of the School of Salamanca. This latter part of the project now involving text exploration and dictionary creation is a collaborative effort involving dozens of contributing authors. Thus, the project team must ensure that these authors fully understand how to work with the new Digital Collection and the project’s website. Even the best-designed website is ineffective if its users are unaware of all its features.
In a recent blog post, Christiane Birr and Thomas Duve discuss digital bottlenecks and the process of overcoming such challenges. They show the importance of making the texts and contents of the School of Salamanca digitally available and reflect upon their work »on« a digital edition – much like the editors and publisher of a printed book. Thomas Duve together with Matthias Lutz-Bachmann have directed the project for many years now, while Christiane Birr coordinated it from its inception until Stefan Schweighöfer assumed the position in 2023. Together with the rest of the team, they naturally know everything about the project that there is to know. Everything, that is, except for the experience of encountering the established website and its functions for the first time – the user’s experience.
As a new member of the project, I bring a fresh perspective to working with the digital edition, much like many of our dictionary authors and new users of the platform. With my research position as an editor for the dictionary, I am entering a new phase of my career, too. Now, one of my first tasks is to write a dictionary article on an important concept of the School of Salamanca. This task involves working »with« the Digital Collection. How do I accomplish this? For the aforementioned project of overcoming digital bottlenecks, it is crucial for researchers like me to fully understand the capabilities of the digital edition, specifically the website’s functions. Therefore, Christiane Birr and I collaborated to create short video tutorials for our new users demonstrating how researchers can utilize the website. The following deliberations take you behind the scenes of the Salamanca project and contextualize the newly uploaded video tutorials for researchers and contributing authors.
Well-known Features of Early Digital Editions and their Peculiarities
Most researchers have experience working with digital editions, either occasionally or regularly. The Salamanca project is interdisciplinary, bringing together legal historians, philosophers, historians, and theologians, among others. Consequently, the researchers come from diverse backgrounds and have varying levels of experience with digital editions in their respective fields.
My background is in philosophy. As a student of ancient philosophy, I often consulted the Perseus Digital Library. Initially, I used it when I didn’t have a printed version of a translation or source text available. When for example reading the works of Aristotle, the website provides a standard edition of the Greek text and, as an addition, links every single word to a word tool and a variety of well-renowned Greek dictionaries. Similarly, when I began studying scholasticism, I frequently worked with the Corpus Thomisticum. There, I found a digital transcription of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae from the Editio Leonina—a print edition you can’t just carry around in your backpack— and for German readers, the Thomas Lexikon, which offers explanations and refers you to other passages of Aquinas’s work (which you have to navigate on your own, though).
More recently, the Corpus Corporum has provided me with a wealth of available texts, advanced search functions, and helpful dictionary features. This meta-project, a digital collection of digital collections currently carried out by the University of Zurich, in many ways resembles the project to which I am contributing. Moreover, I was introduced to digital collections used by legal historians to work with the Corpus Iuris Civilis or the Corpus Iuris Canonici, such as The Roman Law Library or relevant digital collections by the Bibliotheca Augustana, the Münchner Digitalisierungs-Zentrum, the UCLA or the Columbia University.
In early digitally transcribed editions, I regularly used the browser’s search function to find specific words on the page and I often copied text to paste into my personal excerpt documents. Somehow you find your way through the aforementioned websites. These digital collections provide digitized print versions of source texts and dictionaries. That means that the critical editions and dictionaries were originally prepared for print and have been digitized since the late 1980s. The Digital Collection of the School of Salamanca is very different. As I mentioned earlier, text editing has entered a new phase, and the Salamanca project was planned as a digital edition from the start. Over the last few years, you can observe the project’s progress through the publication of newly transcribed sources. Now, you can even contribute to the dictionary as an author and see your article published before the entire project is completed.
How to Work with the Digital Edition of the School of Salamanca
Some researchers might find the new media challenging. The younger generation is becoming increasingly educated in digital media and intuitively works with digital editions. However, with every new project there are new functions and not all functions of the digital edition are self-evident, at least not to everybody, and to be honest, I did not know all the functions from the beginning either. Therefore, the project team produced short video tutorials on how to work with the digital edition of the School of Salamanca.
So far, four tutorials have been launched on the website, allowing you to learn many helpful details in about five minutes per video. I won’t delve too deeply into details here, as abstractly describing everything in text can get complex (and boring) quickly. It’s easier to demonstrate the functions by actually using them. By now you have the opportunity to watch the video tutorials yourself. Therefore, I want to pose some questions you might ask yourself when working with the website—questions that are answered in the video tutorials. And I want to highlight some of the less obvious tools, that are no less powerful or helpful for your research.
New Features of the Reading View
Yes, it might be easy to click yourself through the website and enter the reading view of works like “De iustita et iure” by Domingo de Soto, where you can immediately read the fully transcribed text from its beginning. But after reading a few passages you might ask yourself: Why are some words in the text dark grey or dark red instead of black? We offer a constituted and a diplomatic view of the text and the user can comfortably switch between the two of them. Furthermore, there is the possibility of comparing the transcription of the reading view with the facsimile, but how does one do this? How do I find a passage when I have a specific chapter or even a page number of the original source at hand? Additionally, we offer a table of contents for quick access, but how does this work? You find answers to these questions in the video tutorial on the basic functions of the reading view.
Citing and Downloading the Digital Edition
In a very intuitive manner, you can copy and paste text directly from the reading view. However, there is a more efficient way to accomplish this. The project team has designed a toolbox with various functions, such as exporting text or citations, which can be applied to individual paragraphs, sections, the entire work, or even the full corpus of the Digital Collection. We offer the option to save the full text as a PDF, allowing you to work with it offline and independently of the website. Additionally, there are various other downloadable formats available for digital humanities analysis. How to do all this? Watch our video tutorial on the advanced functions of the reading view.
New Search Functions and their Advantages
If you are looking for the use of specific words in the text, you no longer need to use the browser’s internal function to search the text displayed on a single webpage. Instead, you can use our specially designed search engine for the full text corpus. How does this search engine work? What are the features of the lemmatized search? And what advanced functions does our search functions offer? These functions are crucial, as they surpass the search functions of many older digital collections. Looking for example searches? You can find them in our video tutorials, which cover both basic and advanced search functions.
Work in Progress and Outlook
The next major step of the project involves linking the dictionary lemmas that our authors contribute within the full text of the digital edition, allowing readers to consult the dictionary with a single click. As mentioned earlier, the project was planned from the beginning as a digital edition. This approach enables the project to present itself as a work in progress. This might seem unfamiliar since people are often accustomed to encountering finished projects in printed editions. However, the approach also highlights the collaborative nature of the project, involving many authors, which exemplifies scientific work at its best. With the School of Salamanca Project, the development of a dictionary can be followed in real-time until its completion in 2030.
Just as analog editions can exhibit significant differences, we view the diversity of digital editions as an opportunity to enhance digital work with the content. The accelerating digital access to content and its processing is pivotal. If you haven’t already watched our video tutorials, we recommend doing so now! Help us break the digital bottleneck and gain as well as transmit a better understanding of the School of Salamanca.
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