Humanist Texts in a Digital Age

Kecskeméti, Gábor (2023) Humanist Texts in a Digital Age. CAMOENAE HUNGARICAE, 8. pp. 5-20. ISSN 1786-5484 (print); 3004-1104 (online)

Preview

Text kg2023e.pdf Download (940kB) | Preview

Abstract

Studying the national classics of Hungarian literary history, including the Latin-language oeuvre of early modern humanists of Hungarian ancestry or relevance, has been the mission of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences since its establishment in 1825. The Textological Committee of the Academy was founded in 1960. The Committee provides quality assurance for the text editions of Hungarian national classics. Most of the critical editions are produced by the Institute for Literary Studies (Budapest). The efforts of the Committee and the Institute have resulted in several hundred volumes of critical text editions in the past decades. Two of the most important challenges the Committee and the Institute is facing today include (1) managing the retrospective publication of the digitized versions of existing paper editions and (2) making sure that the possibilities offered by digital technology are considered when new critical editions are prepared. The Institute for Literary Studies launched a website in 2019 to share the critical editions that have already been published in print, accomplishing the first step in the electronic processing of critical editions in the form of searchable facsimiles. The Institute has also started to publish truly digital, semantic web-based critical editions. It has built a separate platform to house these, the philological portal called DigiPhil. The editions for the latter undergo semantic processing by markup elements created according to the syntax of the Text Encoding Initiative. In addition to these projects of online publication, the technology necessary to produce digital text editions is present from the start in the text management practice of the specialists who work on the research, meeting the word processing needs of professional philological-textological work.

Actions (login required)

Edit Item