Tools for Digital Scholarly Editing

For CLARIAH-VL, the Flemish contribution to the European research infrastructures DARIAH and CLARIN, the University of Antwerp's research group Centre for Manuscript Genetics (CMG) develops eXtant Toolkit for Digital Scholarly Editing. This toolkit offers a range of tools to assist with digital scholarly editing tasks, but not only for analogue material. Since literary heritage is increasingly born-digital, the toolkit also includes tools that can help, and also encourage, working with born-digital material, such as keystroke logging data.

  • Axolotl: Collaborative XML editor
    • Axolotl Collaborative XML Editor provides a specialised platform for collaborative editing, enabling scholars to refine and enrich transcriptions of handwritten sources within the TEI-XML framework. As a web application, Axolotl is designed to address the challenges associated with HTR post-processing, while offering real-time collaborative editing capabilities and overcoming limitations of generic and/or non-collaborative tools. Its key features in addition to real-time collaborative editing include XML validation, autocomplete suggestions, real-time cursor view, and annotation support. Axolotl is fully open-source, fostering academic collaboration and accessibility.
  • Bibundina: Writer’s Library App
    • Bibundina is a writer's library application that provides an environment for creating and publishing an edition of a collection of books and the reading traces in them. This edition can contain not only the bibliographic details of the books, but also focus on the marginalia left by writers and include information about the provenance of the books and when they were read.
  • Keystroke loxensis: Visualisation App for keystroke logged writing processes
    • The Keystroke Loxensis visualisation application aims to simplify a text genetic analysis of keystroke-logged writing processes. When a keystroke-logged writing process is encoded in TEI-XML, according to the TEI-XML Encoding Manual for Keystroke-Logged Writing Processes, the resultant XML files can easily be uploaded and visualised. The tool allows for multiple visualisation options, such as replaying the writing session (writing action per writing action), seeing all the writing actions in one glance, and to filter the actions (typos, deletions, addition).
  • Diff Annotator: Annotating Diffs
    • Diff Annotator is a lightweight environment for annotating text-comparisons of two plain text files. It makes use of Node.js, Python, and git diff. After running the text files through a pipeline of git diff (using a token-based comparison) and a Python processing script, the Diff Annotator creates a HTML rendering that is ready to be read, corrected, and annotated, all in the front end.

More information about these tools can be found on the eXtant Documentation page.

Besides these apps, the toolkit offers several tools with regard to handwritten text recognition:

  • HTR pre-processing scripts
  • HTR models
  • HTR Keyword Spotting 
  • HTR post processing

eXtant includes contributions from Nooshin Shahidzadeh Asadi, Loren Verreyen, Josip Batinić, Vincent Neyt, Dirk Van Hulle & Lamyk Bekius.