Workflow, Responsibility and Quality Control for Digital Editions: A Case Study

Abstract

The modern digital edition of a literary work is most often a collaborative product, with many contributors participating in the process of production, from the planning and image capture phases through to the electronic presentation of the edition. Managing the production process, and marshalling all these forces into an efficient workflow presents a major challenge, which is often well understood for large scale projects, but is perhaps less well defined for individual Edition projects. In this paper I will present some suggestions for tools to ease this workflow, and some analysis of their effectiveness in use, notably within the AHRC‐funded project, “Citation and Allusion in the Ars Nova French Chanson and Motet”, towards the production of “Je chante ung chant”, an archive of late‐medieval lyrical poetry. Now in a pre‐production phase, this project has leant heavily on a number of tools to ensure consistency in a highly complex markup schema. Many of the tools examined are standard, open‐source products, and are commonly used in other areas of digital production, such as software development; I will address both their applicability to the domain of literary text production, and their suitability to a less technical audience such literary editors and reviewers and look at notable features to assist developers, designers, editors and project managers.