The 94th Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America

Using Textual Communities with Medieval Texts
Organizer: Peter Robinson, University of Saskatchewan

The Textual Communities system has been developed since 2010, with aid from the Computer Foundation for Innovation, Compute Canada, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, for the collaborative editing of large manuscript traditions. It is based on the earlier Collate and Anastasia systems, developed by the proposer and used for the making of many editions, including the Prue Shaw editions of Dante’s Monarchia and Commedia and the publications of the Canterbury Tales project. Accordingly, while suitable for use by editorial projects in many different contexts, it is specially focused on the needs of editors of large medieval vernacular traditions. In this workshop, participants will learn how to create a “textual community”: a set of resources relating to the editing of a text or group of texts, together with a group of people working on them. Participants will be shown how to draw together images of manuscripts ready for transcription, how to invite others to join the community, and how to assign and supervise transcription tasks within the community. By the end of the workshop, they will have several documents with images and transcripts of individual pages, they will have invited others to join and assigned tasks to them. A key feature of Textual Communities is the collation system. This allows the scholar to filter and adjust the collation, removing non-significant variation. Tools for analysis of the collation to create hypothetical trees of relationship will also be shown. Textual communities may be seen at http://www.textualcommunities.org. The version at www.textualcommunitiessandbox.org
permits experimentation with the system.