Course 4: Digital Editing

Elena Chestnova · USI Lugano

Lecturer

Elena Chestnova is a researcher at the Institute for the History and Theory of Art and Architecture (ISA) at the Academy of Architecture, Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), Mendrisio. Since 2017 she has been centrally involved in the digital edition of Gottfried Semper’s manuscripts, a project developed by USI in collaboration with ETH Zurich and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, serving as project manager for digital humanities since 2020. Her research interests encompass digital scholarly editing, TEI-based semantic ontologies, and the application of computational methods to the study of material culture and art history. She co-leads teaching in digital heritage and contributes to the broader Swiss digital humanities community through collaborative infrastructure projects.

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Lecture Overview

Overview

Chestnova introduces digital editing as a branch of digital humanities concerned with representing texts, not merely reproducing them. She starts from the history of scholarly editions, explains why variants matter, and then moves toward TEI, XML, and newer graph-based approaches.

Main Points

An edition is a research tool that helps readers work with multiple textual witnesses, variants, and transmission histories.
Editing is always interpretive: editions represent texts and therefore create a theory about what matters in a corpus and how it should be read.
Different editorial aims produce different editions, including textual criticism, reconstruction of authorial intention, and study of transmission history.
Chestnova presents TEI as the de facto standard for digital scholarly editing and explains why XML remains central in the current landscape.
She also points to graph-based models as experimental alternatives when text structure exceeds what hierarchical markup handles comfortably.

Examples Mentioned

The Gospel of John in multiple manuscript witnesses
The Semper manuscript edition project
TEI, TEI Publisher, and LEAF Writer
Digital editions such as Bentham, Haller, Darwin, and Faust

Source transcript: transcripts/Course 4_Chestnova_DigitalEditing.txt

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