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We finally came to the idea that, without renouncing the novelty of the system we were designing at the database level, the interface should support as much as possible the habits and expectations of the scholars. The solution was to separate navigation from contextualisation. The interface of a suitable scholarly information management system should thus be divided into two communicating parts: a part A to browse and navigate easily in the documents and a part B to contextualise and compare them. In the part A, the electronic medium should try to recreate the traditional formats of scholarly communication: improving them, if possible, but without altering their form and usability. When browsing documents, the interface should be designed using common templates which make the navigation intuitive for those who have a normal practice on the Web. Functions are reduced to a minimum and contextualization is absent. This part is divided into different subparts corresponding to the traditional formats of scholarly communication. The most common of these are:

  1. The Facsimile Edition , which usually contains a catalogue, a material description and a digital reproduction of all the primary sources, be they documents, artifacts, movies, etc.
  2. The Critical Edition , which publishes a textual version of the primary sources including a critical apparatus, commentary and often a critical introduction.
  3. The Genetic Edition , which reconstructs and represents the genesis of the work.
  4. Translations will render the meaning of primary sources or of an edition in other languages.
  5. If the primary sources contain the personal library of an author, the catalogue of the library along with digital reproduction of the books, transcription of the annotations, commentaries and a general introduction can from a separate format.
  6. A Journal will publish essays, reviews and commentaries.
  7. Bibliographies will contain lists of secondary sources compiled according different subjects.

From each page of part A, a link allows the user to switch to the corresponding page of part B (and vice-versa). In part B, all the documents which in part A appeared organized in different formats are completely atomized. It is now possible to use a set of tools to retrieve them according to different criteria and above all to contextualize and compare them. As an interface for scholarly navigation, this time we will use a synoptic mask divided into several columns. The synoptic representation is widespread in erudite tradition at least since the time of synoptic gospels, and scholars should therefore not be lost. With this mask they will be able to compare not only different versions of a text, but any kind of contributions. If in the first column of the synoptic mask we select, for example, a passage of an article published in the journal (format 6 of part A) containing the reference to a Nietzsche aphorism, the second column will automatically display the related aphorism extracting it from the critical edition (from format 2), while the third column will reproduce the genetic path (extracting from the genetic edition, format 3) containing all the preparatory jottings Nietzsche used to write it. If it happens that the first step in the genesis of the aphorism was the page from an other author’s work contained in Nietzsche’s personal library, a column could display the facsimile of such a page containing, if present, the annotation Nietzsche wrote on it (from format 5). On the side of secondary sources, the user can choose to display in a column the text of other articles criticizing, praising or complementing that precise passage of the selected article (from format 6) and, finally, an additional column could list a bibliography of other articles written by the same author of by different authors of the same subject.

From a technical point of view, each format of part A can be a subpart of a unique website or an autonomous website hosted by a different server and created and managed by a different scholar or research team. And the synoptic view of the part B can collect contextual information coming from different websites for comparisons, e.g., different transcriptions of the same manuscript published by different critical editions produced by different teams. To be able to communicate, part A and B should simply use a compatible scholarly ontology and a common communication protocol which can be a reduced and customized version of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting.

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Source:  OpenStax, Online humanities scholarship: the shape of things to come. OpenStax CNX. May 08, 2010 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11199/1.1
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