Insights into the Work of Editors of Digital Scholarly Editions for Correspondences

Abstract

Digital scholarly editions are one way to preserve the great literary value of correspondences for future generations. They serve as a repository of data, enriched through annotations, textual-comments and contextual information, which is the result of a manifold and extensive groundwork and research effort. The workflow and tasks of editors provide insight into how such editions are created. This is of particular interest because with better tools and environments for creating digital scholarly editions, higher efficiency can be reached. Thus, in this paper, we provide an insight into work of editors, by analysing their workflow and related tasks, in context of a digital scholarly edition for correspondences project, and point out challenges, limitations and solutions. We confirm that there is a necessity for tools and advanced features for editors by showing examples from editorial work. Furthermore, the design process and its interconnections to software engineering and digital humanities are presented.