Documentation

Team

This project is a collaboration between the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (ACDH-CH, Vienna) and Greta Franzini.

Contributors

Many digital editions in the Catalogue have been added by external contributors, listed here in alphabetical order (those for which we have full names; for some we only have GitHub usernames): Holger Berg, José Calvo, Ulrike Czeitschner, Ricardo Gómez-López, Eglal Henein, Szilvia Maróthy, Arnold Michalowski, Paolo Monella, Martin Anton Müller, Thomas Nehrlich, Frederike Neuber, Clemens Radl, Matthias Reinert, Torsten Schrade, Christian Schwaderer, Werner Stangl, Evina Steinová, Marjam Trautmann, Francesca Tomasi, Gabor Mihaly Toth, Ron van den Branden and Aengus Ward. THANK YOU!

Duration

The Catalogue of Digital Editions began collecting digital editions in 2012. Development on the web application began in the summer of 2016 and kick-started the collaboration. The project will continue for as long as the team's means allow.

Funding

The initial project received no funding. Greta Franzini's contribution is entirely voluntary. As of 2025 the project is supported by the ACDH-CH in means that work time can be spent further developing the application as well as gathering more data.

Components and repositories

The Catalogue of Digital Editions Web Application is made-up of two interacting components, each stored in its own GitHub repository: 1) the data, and 2) the web application to display the data to the user. The two components are connected via a custom script that regularly fetches the latest updates from the data repository and delivers them to the web application.

Data component

The digital editions present in the Catalogue come from numerous sources and their selection follows basic criteria: the electronic texts can be ongoing or complete projects, born-digital editions as well as electronic reproductions of print volumes. They're gathered from aggregators (e.g. Projects using the TEI or conferences presentations, publications, social media posts, word of mouth, the web, as well as external contributors.

The data is collected across two .csv (Comma Separated Value) files: the digEds_cat.csv file contains the digital editions, while the institutions_places_enriched.csv file contains geographical information associated with the institutions contained in the master file, allowing us to place digital editions on a map.

The data's GitHub repository is: https://github.com/dig-Eds-cat/digEds_cat

Web application component

The application is implemented using a Python based custom static site generator. The facetted full text search is realized with a Typesense instance hosted by the ACDH-CH. The page is build and deployed using GitHub-Workflows and GitHub-Pages.

The web application's GitHub repository is: https://github.com/dig-Eds-cat/dig-ed-cat-static

Limitations

Users might have noticed from the Catalogue that projects from Asian and African countries are underrepresented if not completely absent. The only reason for this large gap in the data is the language barrier. A Japanese project and website can only be correctly catalogued by someone who can read Japanese. Browser plugins to automatically translate webpages exist but we hesitate to use them as any machine-translation errors would go unnoticed and possibly lead to incorrect cataloguing. This is where user contributions become necessary to help provide a global, rather than a Western-centric, picture of digital edition initiatives.

How to contribute to the Catalogue

If you wish to contribute a digital edition to the Catalogue or correct an existing entry, you can do so in one of two ways:

• If you're familiar with GitHub, you can fork the data repository, edit the .csv file and create a pull request.
• If you're not familiar with GitHub, you can create a GitHub issue with as much information about the edition as possible

How to cite and follow the Catalogue

There are two citations for this project. If you wish to cite the data only, please adapt the following according to your preferred referencing style:

Franzini, G. (2012-) Catalogue of Digital Editions.

Web analytics

We monitor visits to the Catalogue with the Matomo Open Analytics platform (formerly Piwik). This allows us to improve the resource and, to some extent, understand user behaviour on the site while complying to GDPR regulations.

Copyright

The data constituting this project are published under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike International 4.0 License (CC-BY-SA 4.0). This means that you are free to reuse all contents as long as you make your copies or adaptations available under the same or a similar license.

Relevant reading

• Franzini, G., Terras, M., Mahony, S. (2019) 'Digital Editions of Text: Surveying User Requirements in the Digital Humanities', Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH) - Special Issue on Evaluation of Digital Resources, 12(1), pp. 1-23. DOI: 10.1145/3230671
• Franzini, G., Mahony, S., and Terras, M. (2016), 'A Catalogue of Digital Editions', In: Pierazzo, E. and Driscoll, M. J. (eds) Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories and Practices. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers. DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0095.09 [describes an early version of the Catalogue of Digital Editions]
• Krippendorf, K. (2004) Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology. 2nd edn. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
• Warwick, C., Galina, I., Terras, M., Huntington, P., Pappa, N. (2008) 'The master builders: LAIRAH research on good practice in the construction of digital humanities projects', Literary and Linguistic Computing, 23(3), pp. 383-396. DOI: 10.1093/llc/fqn017

Relevant resources

• Other catalogues:
  • The first ever catalogue of digital editions was published and is still maintained by Patrick Sahle under the name Catalog of Scholarly Digital Editions. Sahle's catalogue collects digital editions with a strong critical ("scholarly") component and from which our Catalogue borrows key data definitions.
  • In December 2016, a catalogue of Spanish digital editions and texts also appeared on the web and can be accessed here.
• As the name suggests, the RIDE review journal for digital editions and resources publishes peer-reviewed reviews of digital editions in multiple languages.
• The Scholarly Editing journal.
• The multilingual Lexicon of Digital Scholarly Editing brings together field-specific definitions, concepts and terminology found in existing literature.
• The Austrian KONDE - Digital Edition Competence Network.
• correspSearch: Search Scholarly Editions of Letters.

Acknowledgments

We thank Professor Melissa Terras (University of Edinburgh) and Professor Simon Mahony (Beijing Normal University at Zhuhai) for their continuous support and encouragement since the very beginning of this project.