You will probably have concluded by now that it is of the greatest importance that computers run their operations by strictly defined yet broadly accepted standards. Obviously, that is not a picture of the Kaaba, but in a moment of digital poetry people thought that this square with a question mark is an excellent symbol of it. From people’s responses, it became clear that they did not have this emoji installed, and their computer could, therefore, not display it as a little depiction of the Kaaba:, but instead displayed the standard sign for a character that is not available, which is a black square with question mark like this. I once tweeted the emoji for the Kaaba, the black box-shaped building in Mecca toward which Muslims pray. If I use a messaging app, on a technical level, I am not directly communicating with someone else, but I am relaying keyboard inputs to my smartphone, which in turn talks to someone else’s smartphone, which then relays differently colored pixels to that other person. And here is the catch: most of the times in our work, we talk to each other by having two computers talk to each other. If a person controls the input to the system, there is a good chance the person will convert the temperature to Fahrenheit before putting it in, but if it is only another computer that hands over the temperature input (say, the server of a national meteorology institute), there will be no possibility at both ends of the communication to intelligently evaluate the message.
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A computer controlling a heating system, however, will take that input without complaint, turning the system at full blast to combat the supposed freezing conditions, if it is set to Fahrenheit.
If I say the temperature is 20 degrees and it is summer, an American will understand I am talking in Celsius, not Fahrenheit. People can easily spot if something is off, but a computer cannot.
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Living on the other side of the Atlantic will make it rapidly clear just how important standards are-for length, weight, temperature, shoe size, where to place a comma in a number, how to display afternoon time … the list goes on. Abiding by this agreement is important because if large amounts of people do things in the same way, they can benefit from each other. We finish with notes on how to preserve and continue to work on the materials we produce along the way, and finally revisit that delicate issue of digital editions.Ī standard is nothing more than a detailed agreement to do something in a particular way. Then we look at how images can be incorporated into the workflow. Then we discuss how to move from simply typing text to building a critically marked-up text, and finish that section by discussing several typical use cases. We start with a general introduction to standards in the world of computers. Rather, we shall look at our digital workflow in a more general way, paying attention to the standards we ought to use and how the photos of digitized manuscripts can fit in that workflow. All too often, discussions about digital critical editing are about its end result and the thorny question whether or not we should be making a ‘digital edition.’ Since that topic is worthy of a handbook in itself, we will not go into it in great detail.
In the digital age, bringing surrogates together in one digital environment is a godsend. Indeed, for most of the twentieth century, scholars already collected photographs or microfilms of their manuscript copies in order to lay them side by side and work on them without the pressure of opening hours or erratic viewing policies at libraries. When setting out to edit a text, you will invariably find that its manuscript copies are scattered over different libraries, and it is costly and impractical to visit them one after the other. Among the most attractive aspects of digitized manuscripts is their use for philological purposes.
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