A Review Journal for Scholarly Digital Editions and Resources
Hochgelobt und Abserviert. Das Crowdsourcing Projekt „What’s on the menu“ der New York Public Library
What’s on the Menu?, New York Public Library (ed.), 2011–2024. https://menus.nypl.org/ (Last Accessed: 14.03.2025). Reviewed by Janosch Förster (SLUB Dresden), Janosch.Foerster@slub-dresden.de. || Abstract: In 2011, the New York Public Library began indexing a portion of its menu card collection from … Hochgelobt und Abserviert. Das Crowdsourcing Projekt „What’s on the menu“ der New York Public Library Read More »
What’s on the Menu?, New York Public Library (ed.), 2011–2024. https://menus.nypl.org/ (Last Accessed: 14.03.2025). Reviewed by Janosch Förster (SLUB Dresden), Janosch.Foerster@slub-dresden.de. || Abstract: In 2011, the New York Public Library began indexing a portion of its menu card collection from the Buttolph Collection through a crowdsourcing project. The goal of the project, What’s on the Menu, was to record the dishes and prices on the digitized items in addition to the metadata provided by the library. The participation process was designed to be as low-threshold and simple as possible. The review scrutinizes the aims, approaches and deficiencies of the project, which unfortunately was discontinued in 2016. Abb. 1: Homepage des Projekts What’s on the menu. 1Wer wissen wollte, wann in New York das erste Mal Sushi serviert wurde (1932), was eine Tasse Kaffee im Jahr 1901 kostete (5 cents) oder welches Getränk zum Beginn der Prohibitionszeit am häufigsten serviert wurde (Lindenblütentee; gemeint war illegal gebrannter Alkohol), der konnte dies seit 2011 auf der Website What’s on the menu?1 herausfinden. Rund 17.500 Menükarten aus der insgesamt rund 45.000 Objekte umfassenden Kollektion der Sammlerin Miss Frank E. Buttolph2 wurden dort digitalisiert und online zur Verfügung gestellt. Das Projekt, angesiedelt an der New York Public Library (NYPL), setzte bei der Erschließung dieser Sammlung massiv auf Crowdsourcing und war für einige Jahre eines der Vorzeige-Projekte in diesem Bereich. 2016 wurde das Projekt aufgrund fehlender Finanzierung eingestellt. Die Website (siehe Abb. 1) ist inzwischen (2025) vom Netz genommen, allein die Digitalisate der auf ihr bisher erschlossenen Menü- und Speisekarten sind noch verfügbar3, die Rohdaten des Crowdsourcing-Projekts stehen als csv-Dateien unter der ursprünglichen URL zum Download frei zur Verfügung. Obwohl also das eigentliche Projekt aufgrund von „outdated software and hardware“ (so die Begründung auf der Website) nicht mehr existiert, kann auf Basis des zu Beginn der Arbeit an diesem Review noch möglichen Zugriffs und anhand einiger Fach- und Zeitungsartikel das ursprünglich geplante Projekt rekonstruiert und vor allem die realisierte Beteiligung der Laien-Nutzerinnen und Nutzer evaluiert werden (Lascarides und Vershbow 2014). Speise- und Menükarten und ihr wissenschaftliches Potenzial 2Zunächst sei zum besseren Verständnis des Projekts kurz erläutert, um welche Objekte es genau ging und warum es sinnvoll ist, in eine Tiefenerschließung via Crowdsourcing zu investieren. Der englische Begriff menu umfasst sowohl Speise- als auch Menükarten und ist damit weniger trennscharf als die begriffliche Differenzierung im Deutschen.4 Hierzulande bezeichnet eine Menükarte eine kulinarische Gebrauchsschrift, die eine festgelegte Abfolge von Speisen für ein singuläres kulinarisches Ereignis enthält. Eine Speisekarte dokumentiert das gesamte Angebot eines Restaurants, in der Regel mit Preisen versehen, aus dem eine oder mehrere Speisen ausgewählt werden können. Eine Speisekarte ist über einen längeren Zeitraum gültig (es sei denn, es handelt sich um eine Tageskarte). Im Projekt What’s on the menu wurden beide Idealtypen und auch sämtliche Mischformen als eine Gattung von Ephemera behandelt. Streng genommen müsste man beide Objektarten, Speisekarten und Menükarten, aufgrund ihrer erheblichen strukturellen Unterschiede auch verschiedenartig behandeln und ggf. die Metadatenerfassung und Erschließungslogik differenziert angehen. Da es aber bisher gar keine etablierten Metadatenstandards für Menü- und Speisekarten gibt, hat die NYPL ihre eigene Standards definiert, so wie es andere Menükartensammlungen weltweit ebenfalls tun.5 3Speisekarten informieren über das taxierte Speise- und Getränkeangebot eines Lokals zu einer bestimmten (aber retrospektiv nicht immer eindeutig zu bestimmenden) Zeit. Dabei lassen sich oftmals nicht nur Aussagen über die benannten Gerichte (z. B. „Pfirsich Melba“, „Ratatouille“), ihre Zubereitung (gegrillt, flambiert, gekocht), sondern auch die dafür verwandten Naturprodukte (z. B. Hummer, Trüffel oder schlicht Äpfel) oder spezifische Marken, Hersteller und Produktbezeichnungen („Coca Cola“, „Piesporter Michelsberg, J & H Selbach, 1999 (Mosel)“) treffen. Im Projekt wurden alle kulinarischen Einträge auf der Speisekarte global als „Dishes“ erfasst, eine weitere Differenzierung fand nicht statt, worauf noch zurückzukommen ist. Auch Menükarten benennen verschiedene Gerichte oder Produkte, hierbei jedoch in einer für das Objekt der Menükarte wesentlichen, genau festgelegten Reihenfolge und oftmals mit korrespondierender Weinbegleitung. Mitunter werden nicht nur Ort und Zeit, sondern auch beteiligte Akteure, etwa wichtige Gäste, der oder die Köche (sehr selten auch Köchinnen), begleitendes Musik- oder Kulturprogramm usw. vermerkt. Diese Begleitinformationen wurden im Projekt nicht strukturiert erfasst. 4Für die Wissenschaft sind Informationen auf Menü- und Speisekarten von großem Interesse, denn sie erlauben eine breite statistische oder quantitative Analyse ebenso wie eine tiefgehende qualitative Beschäftigung mit vergangener Esskultur. Um die Daten aber disparat zu halten und Vergleiche auch über Epochen- und Sprachgrenzen hinweg zu gewährleisten, wäre es nötig, die erfassten Daten, also die Gerichte, Produkte, Orte usw. zu normalisieren, sie also mit Normdatenbanken abzugleichen oder zumindest ein kontrolliertes Vokabular im Hintergrund zu installieren, in dem eindeutige Entitäten definiert wurden, denen die erfassten Zeichenketten dann zugeordnet werden können. Um den Erfassungsprozess der Daten durch Nutzerinnen und Nutzer aber so einfach wie möglich zu halten, wurde im Projekt What’s on the menu darauf verzichtet. Demensprechend entstanden beispielsweise 14 Einträge für dasselbe Produkt, den Digestif „Aalborg Akvavit“, darunter mindestens zwei Einträge, die schlicht auf Rechtschreibfehlern basieren („Akavit“). Auch für Geflügelsalat („chicken salad“) finden sich über 20 verschiedene Schreibweisen, deutsche oder französische Übersetzungen noch nicht mitgerechnet. Sie verweisen alle auf das mehr- oder weniger selbe Produkt oder Gericht, bilden aber Dutzende Datenobjekte und somit lässt sich eben nicht reliabel nachweisen, wann Geflügelsalat erstmals oder wo er wie oft serviert wurde. Die Angabe von rund 1,3 Millionen im Projekt erfassten „dishes“ ist ebenfalls irreführend, zumal auf der Unterseite Dishes nur noch 430.000 „unique dishes“ erwähnt werden, ohne das klar wird, wie es zu der Reduktion kommt. Abb. 2: Verschiedene Schreibweisen für dasselbe Datenobjekt. 5Um eine gewisse Standardisierung bei der Datenaufnahme zu gewährleisten, wurde ein „Help“-Bereich auf der Website eingerichtet, der im Fließtext einige Transkriptionsregeln festhielt. Die Grundaussage jedoch lautete hier: „Just type what you see“. Dementsprechend sollten abweichende Großschreibung, Rechtschreibfehler, Abkürzungen und Zeichensetzung wie im Original übernommen werden (siehe Abb. 2). Geplant war, die Daten im Nachhinein zu bereinigen, wobei nicht definiert wurde, ob es sich hier um eine retrospektive Anpassung der Rechtschreibung oder um eine Verknüpfung mit Normdaten handeln sollte. Mehrfach wird in diesem Hilfebereich auf entsprechende zukünftige Entwicklungen verwiesen, die aber nie realisiert werden konnten. Bei zukünftigen ähnlichen Projekten wäre also zu erwägen, die Normalisierung der Daten direkt bei der Eingabe vorzunehmen. Praxis der Datenerfassung durch die Crowd 6Während in der Logik der Tiefenerschließung einige Defizite erkennbar sind, war die propagierte Methodik des Projekts der NYPL, nämlich die niedrigschwellige Einbindung von Bürgerwissenschaftlerinnen und –wissenschaftlern, ohne Frage effektiv. Nach einiger Vorbereitung wurde die Beta-Version der Website am 18. April 2011 über den Twitter-Account der Bibliothek bekannt gemacht.6 Bereits zehn Tage später waren 100.000 Gerichte erfasst worden (Lascarides und Vershow 2014, 123). Die Medien, unter anderem die New York Times, berichteten unmittelbar danach (New York Times, 2011) und auch einige Köche wie Mario Batali oder Doug Crowell begrüßten das Projekt namentlich oder kochten Speisen von den erfassten Menükarten nach. 7Wie war eine solch fulminanter Start des Projekts möglich? Vermutlich lag dies vor allem an der maximal niedrigschwelligen Beteiligungsmöglichkeit. Während des aktiven Betriebs der Website war es für alle Nutzenden weltweit möglich, ohne jegliche Anmeldung, Autorisierung oder Qualifikation, ein neues Menü- oder Speisekartendigitalisat vorgelegt zu bekommen und mit der Erfassung der Gerichte auf dem Dokument zu beginnen. Die technische Umsetzung hierzu war denkbar einfach: Per Mausklick wurden die ungefähren Koordinaten des Beginns jedes Textbausteins erfasst. Diesem Datenpunkt (dish marker) konnte nun in drei Stufen ein unterschiedlich langer Abschnitt auf dem digitalen Abbild der Menükarte zugewiesen werden, um zumindest grob eine Schätzung der Dimension des zu erfassenden Schriftzugs festzuhalten. Der eingegebene Text konnte mit der Angabe „This is my best guess (text is not 100% readable)“ als fraglich markiert werden. Nach der so erfolgten freien Transkription einer Menükarte erhielt diese den Status „Review“. Richtlinien oder Konventionen zur Transkription wurden, bis auf die im oben erwähnten Help-Bereich angegebenen, nicht festgelegt. Andere Nutzerinnen und Nutzer konnten nun die bereits einmal erfassten Annotationsdaten verifizieren, ändern oder löschen. Während der Bearbeitung erhielt die Menükarte einen Indikator, der erkennen ließ, dass dieses Digitalisat gerade bearbeitet wurde, um Datenkorruption oder unbeabsichtigte Löschung zu vermeiden. Anschließend erhielt die Menükarte den Status „Done“ und die erhobenen Daten wurden in der Datenbank freigeschaltet, indexiert und in den Abfragebereich der Suchmaschine des Portals übernommen. Zunächst sollte durch die Nutzenden auch der Preis des Gerichts, die Währung und die Position des Gerichts innerhalb der Struktur der Menü- oder Speisekarte (z. B. Vorspeise, Dessert oder Getränkekarte) erfasst werden. Dies erwies sich aber als extrem repetitiv und damit ermüdend. Daher wurde die Währung durch Bibliothekspersonal manuell vorerfasst und der Versuch der Verarbeitung der Objektstruktur aufgegeben. Lediglich der Herkunftsort der Objekte ließ sich in einer späteren Version der Website per Geotagger-Tool lokalisieren und zusätzlich erfassen. Leider ist diese Funktion inzwischen vom Netz genommen, so dass sich über die Durchführung dieses Teilprojekts kaum noch etwas sagen lässt. 8Trotz des erheblichen Anteils an öffentlicher Beteiligung blieb für die Mitarbeiterinnen und Mitarbeiter der Bibliothek ein beträchtlicher Arbeitsaufwand. Denn bevor die Menükarten in den Crowdsourcing-Prozess eingespeist werden konnten, mussten die grundlegenden Metadaten für die Karte erfasst werden. Ausgewählt wurden die Eigenschaften Veranstaltungsort (Location), Anzahl der Gerichte, Datum (Date), Veranstalter (Sponsor), Ort (Place), Beschreibung (Physical description), eine Identifikatiosnummer (Call number) und Bemerkungen (Notes). All diese Metadaten wurden, soweit sich das rekonstruieren lässt, als Zeichenkette erfasst. Eine Ausnahme bildete möglicherweise die Zahl der Gerichte. Veranstaltungsdaten wurden in amerikanischer Schreibweise erfasst (MMM TT, JJJJ), falls ein genauer Tag nicht ermittelbar war, enthielt die Zeile nur ein Jahr oder eine andere Angabe. Die Metadaten wurden genauso wie die Annotationsdaten weder normalisiert noch verknüpft. Ob zumindest gezielt in den Volltexten der Metadaten gesucht werden konnte, lässt sich nicht mehr rekonstruieren. In jedem Fall wäre eine Suche schwierig und inkonsistent gewesen, denn die fehlende Normalisierung hätte, wie bei den Gerichten, zu zahlreichen falsch-positiven und falsch-negativen Treffern geführt. Selbst für die physische Beschreibung scheint es keine Konvention gegeben zu haben. Hier finden sich Angaben in Zentimetern, in Zoll, mit Komma, ohne Komma, mit zusätzlicher Beschreibung („Folder, Illustrations“) oder nicht mehr zuzuordnenden Abkürzungen. Vollkommen frei scheint das Feld Bemerkungen/Notes gewesen zu sein. Hier finden sich teilweise Zitate aus dem Objekt (zum Beispiel werbende Claims), andernfalls Kommentare („handwritten, many flags“) oder Provenienzinformationen, oftmals aber auch dann kein Eintrag, auch wenn ein solcher vielleicht nützlich gewesen wäre. Wer diese Metadaten wann erfasst hat, lässt sich mit den im Frontend zur Verfügung gestellten Daten nicht mehr rekonstruieren. Fest steht, dass diese Daten nicht von der Community erfasst wurden und auch nicht erfasst werden sollten. Neben der Normalisierung bedarf es bei ähnlichen Projekten also auch einer deutlich präziseren Anleitung sowohl für das professionelle Bibliothekspersonal als auch für die Bürgerwissenschaftlerinnen und –wissenschaftler. 9Die Niedrigschwelligkeit des Crowdsourcing-Prozesses erwies sich bei „What’s on the menu“ als Segen und als Fluch. Zwar konnten bis Ende 2014 laut den offiziellen Angaben 17.545 Menükarten mit angeblich 1,3 Mio. Gerichten erschlossen werden. Nicht erfasst wurden aber die Kontaktdaten der mitunter sehr fleißigen Helferinnen und Helfer, die diese beeindruckende Leistung in kürzester Zeit erbracht hatten. Die Projektverantwortlichen konnten mit ihrer Community ausschließlich diffus und indirekt über die sozialen Netzwerke (konkret Facebook und Twitter) kommunizieren. Die zweite Möglichkeit bestand darin, die Beteiligten per E-Mail-Newsletter und nur dann zu informieren, wenn diese zuvor per Kontaktformular freiwillig und proaktiv ihre E-Mail-Adresse hinterlassen hatten, was wohl nur die wenigsten tatsächlich getan haben dürften. Die Frage, ob den Freiwilligen Rechte an der von ihnen erbrachten Leistung zukämen, wurde durch die fehlende Verbindung ebenfalls recht brachial ‚geklärt‘: Wer anonym an einem Crowdsourcing-Projekt teilnehme, wer also schon direkt nach der Dateneingabe nicht mehr fassbar ist, dem könne auch keine Teilhabe an den geschaffenen Werten eingeräumt werden, so die Verantwortlichen (Lascarides und Vershow 2014, 122). Genauso wenig war es möglich, besonders verdiente Teilnehmende im Crowdsourcing-Projekt zu identifizieren und zu belohnen oder wenigstens ihre Mitwirkung öffentlich wertzuschätzen. Der euphorische Impuls der ersten Wochen und Monate konnte so wohl keine ausreichend langfristige Wirkung entfalten. Die für 2015 geplante Einführung eines Login-Bereichs wurde nicht mehr realisiert. Die Autoren des zitierten Zwischenberichts gaben sich dementsprechend lernfähig. In einem Absatz mit dem Untertitel „Lessons learned“ gaben sie einige wertvolle Tipps für zukünftige Projekte. Neben der niedrigschwelligen Beteiligung, der einfachen Bedienung und der emotionalen Ansprache in der das Projekt „What’s on the menu“ ohne Frage reüssierte, stellten sie auch fest, es sei unumgänglich für Crowdsourcing-Projekte, Belohnungen zu verteilen („give rewards“) und eine Community aufzubauen („build a community“, Lascarides und Vershow 2014, 134-135). 10Es ließ sich leider nicht klären, warum die Unterstützung für das Projekt 2016 offenbar völlig überraschend zurückgezogen wurde. Mit dem plötzlichen Ende wurde auch der Zugriff auf die Daten weitgehend eingestellt. Inzwischen sind die Digitalisate wie erwähnt nur noch über die digitalen Sammlungen der New York Public Library erreichbar.7 Die angekündigte öffentliche API ist nicht mehr ansprechbar, das GitHub Repository wird seit 2014 nicht mehr gepflegt, lässt aber immerhin noch Rückschlüsse auf die API Response zu.8 Fazit 11Zusammenfassend fällt das Urteil über das Projekt What’s on the menu gemischt aus. Während das Crowdsourcing an sich auf der einfach, intuitiv und sinnlich ansprechend gestalteten Website in kurzer Zeit zu beeindruckenden Ergebnissen führte, eine große Aufmerksamkeit für das Medium Menükarte generiert wurde und einige Ansätze bei der Datenerfassung durchaus Vorbild sein können, müssen auf der konzeptionell-inhaltlichen Ebene erhebliche Defizite konstatiert werden. Die Daten aus What’s on the menu sind nicht nur deswegen nicht mehr nutzbar, weil das Projekt offenbar ohne ausreichende Finanzierung geplant war und nun nicht mehr erreichbar ist, sondern auch, weil an den Bedarfen der Wissenschaft, die zwingend auf die Normalisierung der Daten und damit eine strukturierte und verlässliche Suche angewiesen ist, vorbei und recht hemdsärmelig vorgegangen wurde. Es bleibt zu hoffen, dass die erhobenen Daten (darunter die Digitalisate der Menükarten selbst, die heute nicht mehr abrufbar sind) so gespeichert wurden, dass sie in einem zukünftigen Projekt, vielleicht mithilfe maschinellen Lernens, noch einmal umfangreich aufgearbeitet werden können und damit der Beitrag der vielen Bürgerwissenschaftlerinnen und -wissenschaftler, die an diesem Projekt beteiligt waren, nicht umsonst war. 12Ein zukünftiges Projekt sollte die oben festgestellten Defizite vermeiden. Erfasste Daten sollten mithilfe von Normdaten oder einem kontrollierten Vokabular erschlossen werden. Dies könnte auch den Prozess der Erfassung vereinfachen, auch wenn die Orthografie des Originals beibehalten werden sollte. Zudem sollte die Mitarbeit nur nach Angabe eines Kontakts, wenigstens einer E-Mail-Adresse möglich sein, um die Helferinnen und Helfer identifizieren, direkt ansprechen und auch ihre Arbeit angemessen würdigen zu können. Darüber hinaus ist nach über zehn Jahren zu vermuten, dass moderne Verfahren maschinellen Lernens bei der Erfassung und Verarbeitung der Daten die manuelle Arbeit deutlich reduzieren bzw. erleichtern würden. Ganz ohne die Hilfe menschlicher Intelligenz werden aber so komplexe und diverse Objekte wie Menükarten, nicht zu erschließen sein. In jedem Fall braucht es deshalb sowohl für die Daten als auch für die beteiligte Crowd einer aktiven, langfristigen Pflege, damit die Ergebnisse des Projekts nicht auf der Strecke bleiben. Anmerkungen [1] Website: https://menus.nypl.org/. [2] Geboren als Frances Editha Buttles, 1844–1924. [3] https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/the-buttolph-collection-of-menus. [4] Vgl. den Eintrag im Oxford English Dictionary, das unter dem Lemma ‚menu‘ folgende Aufzählung angibt: „A list of the dishes to be served at a meal, or which are available in a restaurant, etc.; a card on which such a list is written or printed, a bill of fare. Also: the food available or to be served at a meal or in a restaurant.“ (https://www.oed.com/dictionary/menu_n?tab=meaning_and_use#37279961). [5] Verwiesen sei an dieser Stelle exemplarisch auf die Sammlungen des Culinary Institute of America (http://ciadigitalcollections.culinary.edu/digital/collection/p16940coll1), der University Library Las Vegas (https://special.library.unlv.edu/collections/menus), der Stadtbibliothek Dijon (http://patrimoine.bm-dijon.fr/pleade/subset.html?name=sub-menus) oder die Menükartensammlung der Bibliotheque Publique et Universitaire de Neuchatel in der Schweiz (http://bpun.unine.ch/menus) sowie der Staatsbibliothek Berlin (https://staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/die-staatsbibliothek/abteilungen/handschriften-und-historische-drucke/sammlungen/graphische-sammlungen/menuekarten). Große, aber bisher nicht vollständig erschlossene Menükartensammlungen besitzen zudem der Verein Deutsche Tafelkultur e. V. in Frankfurt (https://www.tafelkultur.com/verein-stiftung/sammlungen) sowie das Deutsche Archiv der Kulinarik an der Sächsischen Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden (https://www.slub-dresden.de/entdecken/deutsches-archiv-der-kulinarik). [6] https://x.com/nypl_menus/status/60091735388340224 [aktuell nicht archivierbar]. [7] https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/the-buttolph-collection-of-menus. [8] https://github.com/NYPL/menus-api. Bibliographie Cardiel, Mateo Sancho. 2023. „New York Public Library houses a captivating und undiscovered archive of over 45,000 food menus.“ El Pais, 22. Juli 2023. Lascarides, Michael, Ben Vershbow. 2014. “What’s on the menu?: Crowdsourcing at the New York Public Library.“ In Crowdsourcing our Cultural Heritage, edited by Mia Ridge, 113–138. Farnham: Ashgate. New York Times. 2011. “The Library Hands Out Menus to Thousands of Volunteers”, New York Times, 26. April. https://archive.nytimes.com/dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/26/the-library-hands-out-menus-to-thousands-of-volunteers/. Abbildungen Abb. 1: Homepage des Projekts What’s on the menu. Abb. 2: Verschiedene Schreibweisen für dasselbe Datenobjekt.
The Papyrological Editor (PE, SoSOL), Ryan Baumann et al. (ed.), 2010. https://papyri.info/editor/ (Last Accessed: 14.08.2024). Reviewed by Lavinia Ferretti (Universität Basel), lavinia.ferretti@unibas.ch and Elisa Nury (Université de Genève), elisa.nury@unige.ch. || Abstract: The Papyrological Editor is the editing environment of Papyri.info. … The Papyrological Editor Read More »
The Papyrological Editor (PE, SoSOL), Ryan Baumann et al. (ed.), 2010. https://papyri.info/editor/ (Last Accessed: 14.08.2024). Reviewed by Lavinia Ferretti (Universität Basel), lavinia.ferretti@unibas.ch and Elisa Nury (Université de Genève), elisa.nury@unige.ch. || Abstract: The Papyrological Editor is the editing environment of Papyri.info. It allows users to collectively curate data while keeping high scientific standards through a peer-review system and a Git-based version history. A custom syntax called Leiden+ makes the edition of XML data more easily accessible to users. However, the complexity of the multiple interlinked databases and the technical expertise needed to work with papyri may be a barrier for new users. The review focuses particularly on the user perspective, analyzing what makes the Papyrological Editor successful and how it could be improved. Introduction 1The Papyrological Editor (PE) is one of the two core components of Papyri.info, the platform for accessing a large collection of ancient Greek documentary and literary texts on papyri and ostraca (potsherds). The PE describes itself as an editing environment, enabling scholarly curation of the material from Papyri.info with version control and peer review mechanisms; it is accessible to everyone through registration. Its counterpart, the Papyrological Navigator (PN), is the openly accessible interface that allows for searching and viewing of the texts and their associated metadata. Lucia Vannini (2018) previously reviewed the PN component of Papyri.info for RIDE and received an award for best review. This review’s purpose is not to duplicate Lucia Vannini’s work but to complement it with a review of the second component of Papyri.info, the Papyrological Editor; we will thus focus on the crowd editing aspect enabled by the PE. 2We begin with introductory remarks on the Papyrological Editor’s history, authors, audience and aims. Afterwards, the body of the review is divided into two parts. The technical infrastructure is first described with a particular focus on two aspects that are tightly related: the Leiden+ syntax and the transcription interface. Leiden+ is a user-friendly, low-code syntax specifically developed for the PE and plays a central role in editing the transcriptions of papyri. The second part covers the various steps of the crowd-editing and peer-review processes from a user perspective. While we mention minor bugs, we have not tried the platform across different browsers and OS,1 and so do not aim at universality on this point. We rely on our experience of the platform combined with discussions with our colleagues.2 We finally discuss the questions of rights and attribution of scholarly contributions to Papyri.info. Users interested in the process of integrating textual corrections to the database can also consult the review of this aspect of the PE by Despina Borcea (2022). History 3The history of Papyri.info is described in a variety of publications (Sosin 2010; Babeu 2011; Baumann et al. 2011; Baumann 2013; Reggiani 2017; Cayless 2019). This platform is the result of three Mellon Foundation-funded projects titled Integrating Digital Papyrology (IDP) which ran from 2008 to 2012. In 2010, both components of Papyri.info (PN and PE) were formally launched during the 26th Congress of the International Association of Papyrologists (Sosin 2010).3 4The IDP projects aimed to gather multiple databases with overlapping papyrological content and make them accessible and editable through one common online platform. The first databases integrated into Papyri.info were the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri (DDbDP), a textual collection of edited documentary papyri encoded in TEI; the Heidelberger Gesamtverzeichnis (HGV), an XML collection of metadata pertaining to documentary papyri combined with a further database of XML translations into modern languages; the Advanced Papyrological Information System (APIS), a metadata repository for papyri collections primarily located in America. These were completed by the addition of the Digital Corpus of Literary Papyri (DCLP), collecting TEI-encoded text and metadata concerning literary and paraliterary papyri, and a bibliographical database building on a copy of the Bibliographie Papyrologique (BP).4 In addition, Papyri.info also displays data from Trismegistos, another database collecting metadata on texts from the ancient world, although the latter cannot be edited through the PE.5 The Trismegistos numbers attributed to papyri (Depauw and Gheldof 2014) serve as stable identifiers to crosslink the databases. 5The model behind the conception of the PE is Suda On-Line (SOL), a project to crowd-source the translation to English of a 10th-century Byzantine encyclopedia called the Suda, pioneering in combining data openness with editorial vetting. The editing environment was therefore named Son of Suda On-Line (SoSOL). The PE is an instance of SoSOL (Baumann 2013, 104), and SoSOL is the ‘bundle of services’ conceived as a reusable environment. The reusability of SoSOL was demonstrated in the Digital Corpus of Literary Papyri, a project that terminated in the late 2010s and is now integrated into the Papyri.info environment.6 Author(s) 7Although the conceptual inspiration of SoSOL is clear, correct authorship attribution of the PE is not as straightforward. We have chosen to highlight Ryan Baumann, the main contributor of the SoSOL code in the GitHub repository and author of the peer-reviewed article describing SoSOL and its functionalities (Baumann 2013). He was not working alone, but it is less obvious who to credit as co-creators of SoSOL among the various collaborators of the IDP. The proposal for the IDP2 project mentions the University of Kentucky’s Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments (VisCenter) as the group responsible for SoSOL. The About page of the DDbDP gives the names of Charles Carpenter and John Fox as members of the VisCenter. The Digital Classicist Wiki entry for the PE lists Hugh Cayless as a co-author to Ryan Baumann. However, it is likely safe to assume that most scholars involved in IDP2 may have contributed more or less to the creation of SoSOL, whether from a technical or conceptual perspective. Editorial Tasks 8The creation of the PE was motivated by the need to maintain and keep up to date the databases gathered in Papyri.info, particularly the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri, which lacked financial resources (Sosin 2010; Cayless 2019). Moreover, it aimed to democratize the management of a dataset that ultimately belongs to the community. The crowd is therefore involved in helping to maintain the material on Papyri.info and keeping it up-to-date with the scientific consensus. 9The editorial tasks carried out vary in scope: correcting existing transcriptions and metadata, adding new material retrieved from academic publications, or directly publishing new scholarship. In the first case, the corrections may be relatively small, such as adding missing words to the transcription or updating the link to an online facsimile. Adding new material from academic publications includes incorporating a new conjecture from an article or creating new XML transcription files for newly edited papyri published in a volume or article. New scholarship in Papyri.info mainly takes the form of corrections to existing transcriptions, except that these corrections have not been published elsewhere.7 In the past, some experiences with native digital editions have also been made (Berkes 2018), but this practice is rare and will not be the subject of this review.8 All three forms of editorial tasks undergo peer review from a board of editors before being integrated. Users of the PE 10Although anyone can register to the PE, knowledge of Greek papyrology and either the EpiDoc standard in XML or the Leiden+ syntax (see below) are necessary to contribute to Papyri.info. The full list of PE users is available.9 There are 5,259 registered users as of June 21, 2024. However, this list contains roughly 1,200 suspected spam users whose names are composed of random letters, and many duplicates. Through the Git repository, we gain a better view. There have been a thousand active users since the inception of Papyri.info, and the 100 most active are responsible for over 97 % of the modifications. Again, there are duplicates in this list since scholars may have contributed from different accounts created at different times.10 In fact, the number of active users is rather small compared to the amount of work required to keep it truly up-to-date. New volumes of edited papyri are published each year.11 Moreover, additional corrections and editions regularly appear in journal articles. There can also be errors in the data due to the conversion to EpiDoc XML from the original DDbDP and HGV databases, and their correction also relies on the community of PE users. SoSOL Infrastructure 11Before addressing the PE user experience, we wish to explain and comment on the technical aspects of the platform. The infrastructure of SoSOL is found open source on GitHub, with a GPL-3.0 License. SoSOL is a custom platform developed for the Integrating Digital Papyrology projects. It uses JRuby with the Rails web framework. Contrary to other online editing environments, such as MediaWiki, it does not rely on a SQL database but on Git, a tool meant for source code management and tracking versions of files. 12The argument for Git was its decentralized workflow possibilities, especially branching and merging. Git facilitates the editorial process where users and board members may work in parallel on the same publication and preserves the version history. There are two repositories for the data: the PE has its own GitHub repository, which is regularly updated via the user interface, and the idp.data is the public-facing repository. Both are “synchronized bidirectionnally on an hourly basis”.12 The idp.data repository hosts the data of all the databases integrated into Papyri.info. The HGV data is synchronized back to HGV, the only database still maintained separately. Advanced users may change the data directly in the idp.data repository, but using the PE is recommended as it incorporates the peer-review process. Leiden+ and EpiDoc Syntax 13Using Git is not the only innovation of the PE. The transcription interface for XML editing, based on the Leiden+ syntax developed expressly for the SoSOL, impacts users even more directly. 14The Leiden+ is inspired by the Leiden conventions for editing ancient texts. Its developers aimed to offer a user-friendly alternative to XML editing for PE users, encourage participation in the crowdsourcing effort with an easier-to-learn system, and, therefore, bridge the gap between traditional and digital papyrology. Fig. 1: The edition of P.Gen. IV 165 according to the Leiden (left) and Leiden+ (right) conventions. 15 The original Leiden conventions provided guidelines for indicating special features of ancient texts in editions: for instance, lacunas, missing letters, additions, and abbreviation expansions; they are widely used in editions of papyri and are common knowledge for papyrologists who use print editions in their daily research.13 However, when these same texts are encoded in XML, they follow the standard EpiDoc, a subset of the TEI used for ancient documents. The Leiden+ syntax bridges the gap as it imitates the traditional Leiden while enabling an automated generation of the XML version of the data through XSugar.14 As the Leiden Conventions also encompasses other publications such as epigraphic editions, the Leiden+ syntax is reusable in other projects, and indeed, a subset of the Leiden+ has been reused for the online version of the Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum. A comparison between a Leiden and a Leiden+ edition of a text makes the relationship between the two systems immediately visible (Fig. 1). 16Nicola Reggiani (2017, 232–40) presents a more in-depth discussion of the main differences between Leiden+ and its XML equivalent: the Leiden Conventions and Leiden+ system consist of a descriptive syntax, while the XML markup is semantic. For example, a lacuna is always indicated with square brackets in Leiden systems, whereas in EpiDoc, it may be rendered with either <gap> or <supplied> element, depending on whether the editor attempted to render the text of the lacuna or not. Consequently, semantic errors are not detected in Leiden+. This difference means that users may produce valid Leiden+ syntax, for instance, for a lacuna, which the papyrological editor may not transform into the semantically correct XML. 17The Leiden+/EpiDoc conversion is subject to minor bugs. For instance, correct XML indicating ancient diacritics over dotted letters (e.g., <hi rend="diaeresis"><unclear>ἀ</unclear></hi>) is not converted into correct Leiden+ indicating the same feature (e.g., “ἀ̣ (¨)”). This conversion problem results in broken documents that users can no longer edit in the PE Leiden+ interface. Editions with such combinations can only be properly edited in the XML version of the data.15 Leiden+ and EpiDoc Transcription Fig. 2: The Transcription Editor and the “insert a reading” popup window. 18 The need for user-friendly interfaces for XML transcription is not limited to papyrology. Various solutions have been developed over the years, from the “author mode” of the oXygen XML Editor to the more recent editors LEAF-Writer16 or FairCopy17. In New Testament research, the Transcription Editor18 plays a similar role to the Papyrological Editor, as a tool meant to facilitate the collaborative effort of transcribing a relatively homogenous corpus by a community of researchers. The Transcription Editor offers buttons to include XML elements in the text and pop-up windows to fill the metadata needed for the XML elements and attributes (Fig. 2). Fig. 3: The PE menu bar for adding elements via a popup window. 19 The interface of the PE also offers buttons to include XML elements within the transcription (see Fig. 3); nevertheless, the main difference and innovation between the PE and other editors remains the use of the Leiden+ syntax in synchronization with EpiDoc XML. Once mastered, using Leiden+ facilitates the transcription process, making constant button clicks to include tags and attributes unnecessary. In that regard, the PE takes advantage of the existing formalized syntax well-known in the research community, the Leiden Conventions, to help create the XML transcriptions. Without this valued feature (Borcea 2022), it is unlikely that participation in the collaborative editing effort would be as high as it is (Sosin 2010). Crowd Editing in the PE 20If SoSOL is the environment developed during the Integrating Digital Papyrology projects, the Papyrological Editor (PE) is the specific instance of this environment which runs alongside the Papyrological Navigator (PN) at Papyri.info. While the PN is openly accessible to browse and view the contents of Papyri.info, the PE is only accessible to registered users, although no restriction is placed on who can register. There follows a review of PE through the crowd-editing process. For a review of the PN, we redirect our readers to the RIDE review by Lucia Vannini (2018). Access and Home Page 21The sign-in process requires the user to log in or register with a Papyri.info account or through a Google account. There is no assignment of rights or user agreement. Newly logged users may start contributing immediately. Fig. 4: The home dashboard of the Papyrological Editor. 22 Once the user has logged in, they will land on their home page or dashboard, which gives an overview of the user’s work (Fig. 4). Contributions to the database, called publications, are divided into four main categories: New, Editing, Submitted, Committed, corresponding to the various phases of the editing and reviewing process. Work in progress appears under “New” if it concerns an entry not yet existing in the PN and under “Editing” if it concerns an existing entry. In both cases, the entry will appear under “Submitted” after submission to the editorial board. The editorial board then takes the relay; if it approves a publication, it will integrate it into the system – the publication is now under “Committed”. If the board refuses the publication, it will send it back to the user, who will find it again under “Editing”. If the list of committed entries becomes too long, it is possible to archive them through the “archive all” button.19 23For each publication, the dashboard presents a row of links allowing access to the various parts of the related data. The first, “Publication”, leads to the overview page (Fig. 6), where it is possible to look at the comments that inform the editorial history of the entry, to delete, submit or withdraw from the editorial review the specific publication, and to download a copy of the XML data composing it. The other links lead to the respective database entry for the same papyrus — DDbDP Text, HGV Meta, DCLP Meta, DCLP Text, Translation, Biblio, and APIS. This specific data structure comes from the original aim to merge data originating from various projects. It informs not only the user dashboard but the entire structure of the Papyri.info website. Each of these corpora can be edited, but most users will focus on Text and Meta entries, so these will be at the core of this review. 24Through the user page, accessible from the top right corner of the home page, one can edit user information and access the usage stats. Users with a Google account can create a password to switch to a username-password account.20 The activity statistics of all users is accessible through the “usage stats by user” link. For each user, it is possible to know whether they are a member of one or more editorial boards and which publications they have submitted, voted upon, or finalized. However, there is no list of the members of the various editorial boards who are allowed to vote upon individual submissions — such information would further increase the transparency of the peer review process. Creating a Publication Fig. 5: The “advanced create” and the “create new publication”. 25 Each papyrus in the PN has an “open in editor” button that creates a publication, i.e., a copy of the data retrievable through the user dashboard that can be modified and submitted to the editorial board for review. If the entry does not exist yet (for instance, if the user wants to add to the database the text of a papyrus recently published in a journal article), then the dashboard page includes an “Advanced create” button (Fig. 5) that leads to a “Start a Publication” page. This page offers the possibility to create a new publication from scratch (Fig. 5). Knowing the structure of the database facilitates the process: it is possible to create a DDB publication (an entry for a documentary text, which can include HGV metadata, DDbDP text, and translation), a DCLP publication (composed of DCLP Meta, Text, and possible translation), an APIS entry or a Biblio entry. Fig. 6: Overview of a publication. 26 The newly created publication leads to the overview page (Fig. 6), which is the same overview page accessible from the dashboard (see above). The structure of the publication can be found at the top left of the page; a simple entry will only contain the tabs Overview – Text – Meta. APIS and Translation appear when relevant, and papyri that have been re-edited will include one Text + Meta combination for each of their re-editions. 27The overview page also allows users to expand the existing entries to other IDP databases. For instance, it is possible to create a DDbDP textual entry for an existing HGV one or a translation for an existing DCLP or DDbDP. This is possible through the “create new” links at the bottom of the overview page (which is slightly ambiguous as they do not create a new entry, as with the Advanced create button, but an entry crosslinked to the one the user is working on; Fig. 6). At the bottom of the overview page, the user can download a copy or delete the publication; a deletion will only delete the user’s copy of that publication, and not the database entry of existing papyri. Editing a Publication 28Most of the work will be done in the “Edit” tab of the “Text” and “Meta” tab. The preview option gives the user an approximate idea of the final result and helps check the data before submission. For textual entries, the “Commentary” tab also allows for adding editorial comments to specific lines of text. Fig. 7: A wrongly encoded square bracket at the end of line 6 of the document prevents from saving the publication; the “*POSSIBLE ERROR*” indication at the end of l. 3 of the text shows where to look for the mistake. 29 Every time the user saves their modifications, the save button parses the Leiden+ and converts it into an EpiDoc XML. If the text was correctly encoded, the PE will display a green bar, save the data and allow the user to submit the publication to the editorial board. If there are mistakes in the code, the PE will display a red bar and indicate to the user where in the text it could not correctly process the Leiden+ by marking it as “*POSSIBLE ERROR*” (Fig. 7). Until the problems have been solved, the user cannot submit the publication. Although intimidating, this function is essential in ensuring that only correctly encoded data enters the system. It also helps users by giving them feedback. Submission and Review of a Publication 30From the overview page, the user is able to submit the completed publication for review to the editorial board, with a comment explaining the proposed modifications and the reasons behind them. This comment will not only be available to the editorial board during the voting phase but also be integrated into the XML entry of the data and retrievable for every future user. It is always possible to delete a publication as long as no editor has voted on it. Afterwards, the user can only wait for the voting and committing process. 31Each submission undergoes editorial scrutiny; the practice of the editorial board requires only one vote to send to finalization or reject proposals related to the maintenance of the database and at least two votes from two different editors for new scholarship. Each editor’s vote is associated with a comment that, in addition to guaranteeing the transparency of the editorial process, functions as a space for discussion among editors and as a source of feedback for users. Learning Curve Fig. 8: The entry form for HGV data. 32 The system is conceived to make machine-readable data entry as human-friendly as possible. For metadata, the users interact with a very standard form; an example may be the entry form for HGV data (Fig. 8). 33For the text, however, users have to learn either the Leiden+ language or EpiDoc XML to fully engage with the PE. Papyri.info integrates a help page, accessible all the time on the top right of the website, and provides a menu bar to help users correctly code in the language (Fig. 3). 34For textual entries, the Leiden+ help file furnishes reliable information on how to encode the data, and the POSSIBLE ERROR feature of the automated Leiden+ verification indicates where mistakes must be corrected. More generally, the editorial comments give feedback on the quality of the entry. For instance, when users do not know how to enter some data correctly, they can always mention it in their commentary field to leave the editorial board correctly encode the data; conversely, editor comments indicate corrections to be done to the entry that users can read to learn how to improve their future entries.21 35According to some feedback by colleagues, the comments field and Leiden+ help page are insufficient to build confidence in the user. The complex structure of the data and the website, with multiple interrelated databases each accessible through multiple paths, can be overwhelming for newcomers. The overview page, for instance, changes according to the status of the publication (New/Editing/Submitted/Commited). The help page concerns only one part of the system, and the comments arrive late in the process. Moreover, the EpiDoc encoding and the internal practice in the PE may evolve faster than the examples on the help page. This fact increases the difficulty of learning by example. 36Therefore, the creation of online tutorials for beginners on how to approach the website would be much appreciated, and existing tutorials, such as the SunoikisisDC class (Bodard, Vannini, and Vierros 2022), could be better highlighted. FAQ or forum pages, where one could ask specific questions, may be helpful too, although they are resource-consuming. Moreover, some initial training from more knowledgeable users is often necessary. Trainers can introduce users to the syntax of Leiden+ and give hints on how to properly encode text. They can also share some insider knowledge on how to fill the entry forms. A typical learning curve, therefore, is composed of a first introduction to the system through formal training, followed by a phase of trial and error through which familiarity with it develops. It may take some time to fully grasp the system, and some users abandon the PE during the learning phase. 37A special mention should be made of the form used to create a bibliographical entry. It is incredibly complex, to the point that without guidance, the average user cannot learn how to enter the information correctly. Even with training, it is easy to forget where each piece of information should go. Some fields tend to bug, such as the Publisher – Name and Publisher – Place entries, that systematically duplicate the information in the XML. Both reviewers have ended up directly editing the information in the XML file, as this is easier to understand. However, this is a minor criticism, as the addition of bibliographical data does not belong to the usual tasks of PE users and is mostly done by experienced users directly in the GitHub repository. Rights and Attribution 38The texts of the DDbDP and metadata of HGV are licensed with a CC-BY 3.0 License (Baumann 2013), while APIS records are under a CC-BY-NC 3.0 license. All licenses are clearly visible on each papyrus record and encoded in the DDbDP XML files. The DDbDP/HGV license is also highlighted in the project’s Git, but not the APIS license. However, the licenses appear to be absent from the XML files of the HGV metadata and APIS records. For long-term reuse purposes, it may be useful to include the licenses directly into the XML. 39The editing and voting process is entirely transparent, as every user contribution and every vote from the editorial board must be associated with a comment (Sosin 2010). If the publication is approved and committed, these comments will also be retrievable for every future user. If the publication is refused, the user can see the comments. Still, these are only integrated into the XML files if they resubmit the publication (see Code 1) and will disappear if it is deleted. 40 <change when="2021-01-12T07:38:39-05:00" who="http://papyri.info/users/james.cowey"> Vote - HGVReject - I am sending this back because the link is nowhere to be see. I think that you entered the link and then clicked on save. Please enter the link, click on the "add" button to the right of the box into which you entered the link and then click save. <change> Code Example 1: Example of a comment from the <revisionDesc> of HGV 3399 = UPZ I 8, accessible at https://papyri.info/hgv/3399/source (Accessed January 29, 2024). 41All the comments related to modifications of a file are included in the XML revision description, which thus ensures credit for the work done in the PE. It is accessible by looking at the XML itself, on the PN or the associated GitHub page, or by creating a publication to modify the file and looking at the comment section of the overview page. Comments pertaining to DDbDP and DCLP entries are also accessible at the bottom of the related PN page by clicking “Editorial History” – this option is not available for comments in the HGV metadata. 42In addition, logged users can access the statistics of any other user to see what they have submitted and the changes accepted by the boards. However, such contributions are not traditional research outputs, such as books or articles, and it may still be difficult to cite them in a CV and secure proper recognition when applying for academic positions – a problem that is not specific to the PE but more general to digital scholarship. 43This problem is especially acute for maintenance work; newly published scholarship, be it in the form of editorial corrections of new editions, is at least clearly indicated on the main web page of each entry (e.g., in the form of an apparatus note to the textual edition) and recorded in a specific publication that makes it easier to cite it in CVs, the BOEP.22 This situation directly impacts the system’s sustainability: although many papyrologists are aware of mistakes in the PN data, only a few actively correct them – the lack of recognition for a time-consuming task being a possible reason. Conclusion 44The Papyrological Editor has undoubtedly reached its primary goal of maintaining and keeping up to date the databases it relies on: over the last ten years, papyri newly published in print books have been thoroughly added to the system, and mistakes in the legacy data could be at least partially curated by the free work of its users. The vetting process guarantees the quality of the entered information and a relative consistency of practices. Although the online data is still not entirely up to date with print scholarship, especially concerning textual corrections and publications in articles, the backlog is no longer increasing and is even reducing. Hence, the data in the papyrological navigator remains an essential starting point for papyrological research. 45The main barrier to updating the online data is the low number of PE users compared to the amount of work required to keep the content up-to-date. Indeed, although virtually all papyrologists rely on the Papyrological Navigator for their work, and they are often aware of errors in the data, only some of them contribute to the Editor; likewise, only a handful of editors actively contribute to voting and finalizing publications, so that some user contributions wait a long time before being integrated to the data. Improving the engagement of PN users in the PE would help the upkeep of the data. Among the improvements that could go in this direction are the integration of better guidelines for the whole editorial process and not simply the Leiden+ syntax, the increase in visibility and crediting for the user and the editorial work, and solving the few bugs that remain in the system. Better visibility of the editor on the website and more precise documentation may help increase the users involvement with the PE. 46The PE in Papyri.info relies on the papyrological community’s knowledge to maintain various databases that benefit the same community. By centralizing access to these various resources and allowing collective editing, it simplifies access to the gathered data and ensures its continuous relevance. Notes [1] We work on a firefox browser accessed through a Windows 10 Enterprise OS. [2] Lavinia Ferretti is a papyrologist and a frequent user of the platform. Her knowledge comes from a training workshop with Prof. Mike Sampson, many discussions around specific publications with Prof. Sampson and Dr. James Cowey, two members of the editorial board, and frequent submission of publications. She contributes the user perspective. Elisa Nury is a DH specialist and a specialist of digital editions. She has worked extensively with the DDbDP and HGV XML data for the grammateus project. She contributes with technical knowledge and experience as a user of the PE. The reviewers are funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation while writing this review (grammateus, SNSF grant n° 212424, PI Paul Schubert, and EGRAPSA, SNSF n° 211682, PI Isabelle Marthot-Santaniello). The authors wish to thank all reviewers for their valuable input to this article. The text of this contribution was finalised in August 2024 and approved in January 2025. On October 2025, Lavinia Ferretti has been promoted editor in the DDbDP and HGV boards. [3] Currently, Papyri.info has no sustainable funding, as a call for support makes clear. [4] On the relationship between the latter and Papyri.info, cf. Vannini 2018, §15. [5] To see how the contents of various databases are combined, see for instance papyrus ZPE 203 (2017) S. 217, which displays HGV, Trismegistos, and APIS metadata, a DDbDP transcription, and HGV translations. [6] For comments on the differences between Papyri.info and DCLP, see Vannini (2018, §19). [7] The accepted changes are recorded in the Bulletin of Online Emendations to Papyri (BOEP), available as a downloadable PDF from 2012 to 2021 and integrated with the journal Pylon from 2022 (Ast et al. 2022). [8] There are only five born-digital editions of papyri and a few reeditions of already published texts. [9] https://web.archive.org/web/20240709083723/https://papyri.info/editor/all_users_links. [10] Among the 20 most active users, one finds three times James Cowey and twice Mike Sampson, who together have authored over 55 percent of all the commits. These statistics are obtained with the commands “git shortlog –all –summary” (for all users). The command was run in Git bash with a local copy of the idp.data repository (Accessed June 21, 2024). [11] See the checklist (accessed August 14, 2024) for the list of volumes published each year. The addition of volumes into the PE is shared among papyrologists (Sosin 2010). [12] https://web.archive.org/web/20240422020248/https://github.com/papyri/idp.data. [13] On the Leiden system in general, cf. Dow 1969. On its creation, cf. ‘Essai d’unification des méthodes’ 1932; Wilcken 1932; Collart 1933; ‘XVIIIe Congrès international des Orientalistes’ 1932. On later efforts to improve the system, cf. for instance Krummrey and Panciera 1980; Panciera 1991 for epigraphical texts, and Fournet 2022; Association Internationale de Papyrologues (AIP) 2022 for papyrological texts. The Leiden+ syntax and its relationship with both the Leiden Conventions and EpiDoc encoding is discussed in particular by Ryan Baumann (2013) and Nicola Reggiani (2017). [14] XSugar is a tool to manage back and forth conversion between an XML syntax and another syntax. The code of the XSugar conversion between Leiden+ and EpiDoc is also available on GitHub. [15] P.vat.aphrod 5 is such an example with several dotted accented letters, such as ὑ̣ on line 12 of fragment C. [16] https://leaf-writer.leaf-vre.org/ (Accessed January 25, 2024). [17] https://www.faircopyeditor.com/ (Accessed January 25, 2024). [18] The Transcription Editor is available as a standalone web editor or from within the New Testament Virtual Manuscript Room (NTVMR). [19] The archiving process works well from the dashboard page, where the “archive all committed” button allows users to archive all their committed publications, and the “archived” button to access them. On the contrary, the “Archive” button in the overview page of each committed publication is broken in Firefox as well as Chrome and Edge. [20] In the case of one of the writers, the process is bugged and it is now impossible to retrieve or modify the password, or to edit the user. Nevertheless, this problem does not impact the day to day usage of the system. [21] The revisionDesc for the HGV entry 3399 = UPZ I 8 (see Code 1) is a good example of such a learning from feedback process. [22] See Rodney Ast’s message to the papy-list (Accessed January 30, 2024) for the explanations on how to cite a BOEP publication. References Association Internationale de Papyrologues (AIP). 2022. “Guidelines for Editing Papyri.” https://web.archive.org/web/20230304172629/https://aip.ulb.be/PDF/Guidelines_for_editing_papyri.pdf. Ast, Rodney, Lajos Berkes, James M.S. Cowey, Holger Essler, and Julia Lougovaya. 2022. “Bulletin of Online Emendations to Papyri (BOEP) 10 (November 2, 2022).” Pylon: Editions and Studies of Ancient Texts 2. https://doi.org/10.48631/PYLON.2022.2.92976. Babeu, Alison. 2011. “‘Rome Wasn’t Digitized in a Day’: Building a Cyberinfrastructure for Digital Classics.” Washington D.C. http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/reports/pub150. Baumann, Ryan. 2013. “The Son of SUDA Online.” In The Digital Classicist 2013, edited by Stuart Dunn and Simon Mahony, 91–106. London: The Institute of Classical Studies. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44216325. Baumann, Ryan, Gabriel Bodard, Hugh Cayless, Joshua Sosin, and Raffaele Viglianti. 2011. “Integrated Digital Papyrology.” Presented at the DH2011, Stanford. https://web.archive.org/web/20170710154928/http://dh2011abstracts.stanford.edu/xtf/view?docId=tei/ab-193.xml;brand=default. Berkes, Lajos. 2018. “Perspectives and Challenges in Editing Documentary Papyri Online: A Report on Born-Digital Editions through Papyri.Info.” In Digital Papyrology II, edited by Nicola Reggiani, 75–86. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110547450-004. Bodard, Gabriel, Lucia Vannini, and Marja Vierros. 2022. “Contributing Apparatus Corrections to Papyri.Info.” Presented at the Sunoikisis Digital Classics, November 10. https://web.archive.org/web/20221110151510/https://github.com/SunoikisisDC/SunoikisisDC-2022-2023/wiki/Contributing-Apparatus-corrections-to-Papyri-info. Borcea, Despina. 2022. “Review of the Papyrological Editor.” The Stoa: A Review for Digital Classics (blog). 5 December 2022. https://web.archive.org/web/20231003011521/https://blog.stoa.org/archives/4163. Cayless, Hugh. 2019. “Sustaining Linked Ancient World Data.” In Digital Classical Philology, edited by Monica Berti, 35–50. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110599572-004. Collart, Paul. 1933. “Bulletin papyrologique, XII (1932).” Revue des Études Grecques 46 (218): 443–67. https://doi.org/10.3406/reg.1933.7142. Depauw, Mark, and Tom Gheldof. 2014. “Trismegistos: An Interdisciplinary Platform for Ancient World Texts and Related Information.” In Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries – TPDL 2013 Selected Workshops, edited by Łukasz Bolikowski, Vittore Casarosa, Paula Goodale, Nikos Houssos, Paolo Manghi, and Jochen Schirrwagen, 40–52. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08425-1_5. Dow, Sterling. 1969. Conventions in Editing: A Suggested Reformulation of the Leiden System. [Durham]: Duke University. “Essai d’unification des méthodes employées dans les éditions de papyrus.” 1932. Chronique d’Egypte 7: 285–87. https://doi.org/10.1484/J.CDE.2.307092. Fournet, Jean-Luc. 2022. “Some Thoughts on the Papyrological Edition.” In Proceedings of the 29th International Congress of Papyrology. Lecce, 28 July – 3 August 2019, edited by Mario Capasso, Paola Davoli, and Natascia Pellé, 460–70. Lecce: Centro di Studi Papirologici dell’Università del Salento. https://doi.org/10.1285/i99788883051760p460. Krummrey, Hans, and Silvio Panciera. 1980. “Criteri di edizione e segni diacritici.” In Miscellanea, 205–15. Tituli 2. Roma: Ed. di storia e letteratura. Panciera, Silvio. 1991. “Struttura dei supplementi e segni diacritici: dieci anni dopo.” In Supplementa italica 8, 9–21. Roma: Quasar. Reggiani, Nicola. 2017. Digital Papyrology I: Methods, Tools and Trends. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110547474. Sosin, Joshua. 2010. “Digital Papyrology.” The Stoa Consortium (blog). 26 October 2010. https://web.archive.org/web/20170408110552/http://www.stoa.org/archives/1263. Vannini, Lucia. 2018. “Review of Papyri.Info.” RIDE – A Review Journal for Digital Editions and Resources 9. https://doi.org/10.18716/RIDE.A.9.4. Wilcken, Ulrich. 1932. “II. Miszellen. Das Leydener Klammersystem.” Archiv für Papyrusforschung und Verwandte Gebiete 10: 211–12. https://doi.org/10.1515/apf.1932.10.3-4.211. “XVIIIe Congrès international des Orientalistes, Programme des communications.” 1932. Chronique d’Egypte 7: 127–30. https://doi.org/10.1484/J.CDE.2.307071. Figures Fig. 1: The edition of P.Gen. IV 165 according to the Leiden (left) and Leiden+ (right) conventions. Fig. 2: The Transcription Editor and the “insert a reading” popup window. Fig. 3: The PE menu bar for adding elements via a popup window. Fig. 4: The home dashboard of the Papyrological Editor. Fig. 5: The “advanced create” and the “create new publication”. Fig. 6: Overview of a publication. Fig. 7: A wrongly encoded square bracket at the end of line 6 of the document prevents from saving the publication; the “*POSSIBLE ERROR*” indication at the end of l. 3 of the text shows where to look for the mistake. Fig. 8: The entry form for HGV data.
#everynamecounts, Arolsen Archives (ed.), 2020-. https://everynamecounts.arolsen-archives.org/ (Last Accessed: 11.02.2025). Reviewed by Daniel Burckhardt (Moses Mendelssohn Zentrum für europäisch-jüdische Studien), daniel.burckhardt@uni-potsdam.de. || Abstract: #everynamecounts is the largest crowdsourcing initiative of the Arolsen Archives – International Center on Nazi Persecution. Since 2020, … #everynamecounts Read More »
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><paste> #everynamecounts, Arolsen Archives (ed.), 2020-. https://everynamecounts.arolsen-archives.org/ (Last Accessed: 11.02.2025). Reviewed by Daniel Burckhardt (Moses Mendelssohn Zentrum für europäisch-jüdische Studien), daniel.burckhardt@uni-potsdam.de. || Abstract: #everynamecounts is the largest crowdsourcing initiative of the Arolsen Archives – International Center on Nazi Persecution. Since 2020, more than 170,000 volunteers have been recording more than 7 million digitized index cards and lists in a structured way. The platform provides an outstanding digital process that is well thought out and optimized down to the smallest detail. As compelling as the crowdsourcing aspect is, it is difficult to evaluate #everynamecounts as a text or data edition: So far, the project website does not provide access to the research data generated by the volunteers. The reviewer is also not aware of any research project based on the results of #everynamecounts. It is to be hoped that this impressive ‘digital memorial’ will not only remain an educational and outreach project that provides the general public with direct access to historical sources in order to gain a first-hand understanding of the murderous system of the National Socialists rule, but will also form a comprehensive basis for innovative, data-driven research. Das Online-Archiv der Arolsen Archives 1#everynamecounts ist die teilnehmerstärkste Crowdsourcing-Initiative der Arolsen Archives, dem internationalen Zentrum über NS-Verfolgung.1 Das Archiv bewahrt die weltweit umfassendste Dokumentensammlung über die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus und gehört heute zum UNESCO-Weltdokumentenerbe.2 Herzstück der Sammlung ist eine zentrale Namenkartei von circa 50 Millionen Karteikarten mit Hinweisen auf das Schicksal von über 17,5 Millionen Personen. Im Projekt wurden seit 2020 mehr als 7 Millionen digitalisierte Karteikarten und Listen von über 170.000 Freiwilligen aus aller Welt strukturiert erfasst.3 Ziel ist sowohl eine bessere Durchsuchbarkeit und Sichtbarkeit der Bestände, als auch – so die Projektverantwortlichen als Motivation zur Teilnahme – ein digitales Denkmal für die Verfolgten des Nationalsozialismus.4 2Die Ursprünge der Arolsen Archives, bis 2019 als International Tracing Service (ITS) bekannt, reichen ins Jahr 1943 zurück, als die anglo-amerikanischen Verbündeten in London eine Einrichtung mit dem Ziel, Informationen über vermisste und verschleppte Personen zu sammeln, gründeten.5 Nach Kriegsende wurde der Sitz Anfang 1946 ins nordhessische Arolsen verlegt. Von 1955 bis Ende 2012 leitete das Internationale Komitee vom Roten Kreuz (IKRK) den Suchdienst unter der Aufsicht eines internationalen Komitees aus elf Ländern. In dieser Zeit hat sich die Rolle der Einrichtung stark gewandelt: Standen anfangs Suchanfragen nach vermissten Kindern, Jugendlichen und Erwachsenen mit dem Ziel der Familienzusammenführung im Zentrum der Arbeit, wurde die Einrichtung in den Folgejahren zunehmend zur Anlaufstelle für Wiedergutmachungsbehörden, Anwält:innen, Gerichte und Angehörige, die Beurkundungen von Todesfällen beantragten oder Dokumente für Einbürgerungsfragen oder Rentenanträge benötigten. 3Der Ruf nach Öffnung der Opferakten auch für die Forschung, insbesondere aus den USA, wurde zu Beginn der Nuller-Jahre zunächst kontrovers diskutiert. So bezeichnete der Berliner Historiker Wolfgang Benz im März 2006 die Vorstellung, unter anderem von KZ-Bürokraten verfasste Dokumente „weltweit und 24 Stunden am Tag abfragbar“ im Internet bereitzustellen, als absurd (Kellerhoff 2006). Nur wenige Monate später wurde jedoch ein Änderungsprotokoll verfasst, das das Archiv für die Forschung öffnete.6 Darin wurde auch jedem Mitgliedstaat eine digitale Kopie des Datenbestandes zugesprochen, wobei damals in der Presseerklärung des Auswärtigen Amts noch explizit versichert wurde: „Es erfolgt keine Einstellung in das Internet. Die Mitgliedstaaten achten besonders auf den Schutz persönlicher Daten“ (N.N. 2006). 4Mit dieser Öffnung wandelte sich der ITS von einem Dienst zur Vermisstensuche und Schicksalsklärung hin zu einem einzigartigen „Denkmal aus Papier“7 in Form eines Archivs. Das 2016 in Kraft getretene Übereinkommen vom 9. Dezember 2011 über den internationalen Suchdienst fügte den Interessen der in den Akten genannten Personen und ihren Angehörigen gleichberechtigt die Förderung von Forschung und Wissen hinzu.8 Was 2006 noch ‚absurd‘ erschien – der weltweite Zugriff auf Opferakten rund um die Uhr – wurde mit dem seit 2015 sukzessiv erweiterten Online-Archiv zunehmend zur Realität9 und bildete so 14 Jahre später die inhaltliche Grundlage der Crowdsourcing-Initiative #everynamecounts. Die Crowdsourcing-Initiative #everynamecounts 5#everynamecounts wurde im Januar 2020 noch unter dem deutschen Hashtag #JederNamezählt auf der Zooniverse-Plattform gestartet.10 Anlässlich des Holocaust-Gedenktages wurden in 26 Schulen Transportlisten mit lokalem Bezug digitalisiert (Zwilling-Seidenstücker 2020). Mit Beginn der COVID-19-Pandemie und dem damit verbundenen Umzug ins Homeoffice wurde daraus das internationale und öffentlich zugängliche #everynamecounts.11 Durch einen Artikel in der New York Times am 3. Juni 2020 (Curry 2020) erhielt das Projekt große Resonanz und konnte im August desselben Jahres bereits 7.000 Freiwillige verzeichnen, die bis Oktober 2020 1,5 Millionen Dokumente transkribierten. Damit konnte #everynamecounts an den Erfolg entsprechender Kampagnen in Archiven insbesondere aus dem angelsächsischen Raum anknüpfen.12 6Inzwischen ist das Projekt von Zooniverse auf eine unter der eigenen Domain gehostete zweisprachige Plattform (deutsch/englisch) umgezogen.13 Hier kann ohne Registrierung14 mit der Erfassung von Dokumenten aus einem der aktuellen Themen begonnen werden. Derzeit (25.11.2024) stehen drei Bestände zur Auswahl: Die Nummern-Namen-Kartei (Männer) – Konzentrationslager Buchenwald (22.283 von 60.000 erfasst), die Auswandererkartei Bremen (40.752 von 90.000 erfasst) und der Central Location Index (CLI) (64.657 von 85.401 erfasst). 7Nach einer allgemeinen Einführung mit knappen Transkriptionsrichtlinien („Der wichtigste Hinweis: Schreib alles ganz genau so ab, wie es auf dem Dokument steht.“) wird der gewählte Bestand kurz erläutert.15 Anschließend werden Schritt für Schritt die als relevant erachteten Informationen auf dem Dokument strukturiert abgefragt. Bei der Nummern-Namen-Kartei sind dies zunächst Vorname und Nachname, im nächsten Schritt dann Angaben zur Inhaftierung durch Auswahl des Lagers und die Eingabe der entsprechenden Häftlings- und Kriegsgefangenennummern. Über die Hilfefunktion kann jedes Eingabefeld anhand von Beispieldokumenten konkretisiert werden. Wer sich registriert, kann in einem Forum Fragen zu einzelnen Dokumenten oder Themen stellen, sich mit anderen Helfer:innen austauschen und nachträglich auf die bearbeiteten Dokumente zugreifen. 8Die Crowdsourcing-Plattform überzeugt durch einen bis ins Detail durchdachten und optimal gestalteten digitalen Prozess: Es ist kein Klick zu viel und keine Information zu wenig. Auch die parallele Darstellung von Scan und Eingabeformular ist gleichermaßen intuitiv, optisch ansprechend und funktional an unterschiedliche Gerätetypen angepasst. So kann die Erfassung einer Karteikarte beim Warten an der Bushaltestelle auf dem mobilen Gerät genauso gut erfolgen wie am Desktop zu Hause oder am Arbeitsplatz. Damit wurde die zentrale Erkenntnis aus dem Einsatz der Zooniverse-Plattform – „Freiwillige ermüden in der Praxis schnell, wenn die Usability zu wünschen lässt“ (Bräu et al. 2021, 178) – bei der Neukonzeptionierung vorbildhaft umgesetzt. 9Die Qualitätssicherung basiert auf dem Sechs-Augen-Prinzip: Jedes Dokument wird von drei verschiedenen Personen erfasst und nur dann als gesicherter Eintrag in die Datenbank übernommen, wenn zwei von drei Eingaben übereinstimmen. Bei drei unterschiedlichen Übertragungen überprüft die interne Qualitätsanalyse den Datensatz. Dies ist jedoch nur bei rund 10% der Dokumente erforderlich: „die ‚Crowd‘ macht also eine hervorragende Arbeit“ (Brandt 2024). Daten-Weiternutzung 10Da keine Registrierungspflicht besteht, gibt es weder eine Nutzungsrechtabtretung noch eine Freiwilligen-Vereinbarung. Aufgrund der fehlenden Schöpfungshöhe der erfragten Transkriptionen scheint dies rechtlich unproblematisch. 11So überzeugend der Crowdsourcing-Aspekt, so schwierig ist die Beurteilung von #everynamecounts als Text- oder Datenedition. Die Verantwortlichen benennen recht allgemein die Ziele der Arolsen Archives als ‚Informations-Hub‘ bei der Digitalisierung und Online-Zugänglichmachung von Sammlungen: „Neben der digitalen Sicherung von Informationen und Dokumenten für die Zukunft stehen die archivische Indexierung, Erschließung und Kontextualisierung solcher Überlieferungen im Vordergrund, die wiederum Teil sowie notwendige Basis für Projekte im Bereich der Data Science, der Digital Humanities bzw. der Public Science und Citizen Science sind“ (Bräu et al. 2021, 178). 12Die in Partnerschaft mit der Gedenkstätte Yad Vashem entwickelte Suchumgebung bietet einen barrierearmen Zugang zu den umfassend digitalisierten Beständen. Sie ist ein Musterbeispiel für ein retrodigitalisiertes Archiv, sowohl was den Umfang, die Suchmöglichkeiten als auch die Benutzerfreundlichkeit betrifft.16 Gemäß den Projektverantwortlichen fehlen der Präsentationsumgebung jedoch Schnittstellen, um strukturierte Daten automatisiert in dieses Online-Archiv importieren zu können, und zwar unabhängig davon, ob diese von Archivar:innen, durch maschinelle Texterkennung oder im Rahmen der oben beschriebenen Crowdsourcing-Aktivitäten erstellt wurden. 13Die dadurch entstehenden Einschränkungen möchte ich beispielhaft an einem Dokument aus der Akte von NOWAK, ZYGMUNT, geboren am 03.06.191717 erläutern: Dieses Dokument ist Teil des Bestands ‚DE ITS 1.1.5.3 Individuelle Unterlagen Männer Buchenwald‘ mit insgesamt 1.846.212 Dokumenten. Es liefert über den im Titel der Akte vermerkten Familiennamen, Vornamen und das Geburtsdatum hinaus umfassende persönliche Angaben, den Haftgrund (Polit. Pole) und das Datum der ‚Überstellung‘ aus dem Konzentrationslager Auschwitz ins Konzentrationslager Buchenwald. 14Eine Suche nach ‚Rollensee‘, dem Geburtsort von Zygmunt Nowak, liefert 27 Personen, aber keinen übereinstimmenden Namen. Auch wenn diese Angabe auf der Karteikarte im Rahmen von #everynamecounts maschinenlesbar erfasst wurde, ist diese Information also bislang nicht in den Suchindex eingeflossen. Eine Suche nach ‚Zygmunt Nowak‘ liefert dagegen 390 Treffer, darunter auch mehrere Übereinstimmungen bezüglich Namen und Geburtsdatum, neben der erwähnten Akte aus Buchenwald etwa den Häftlingspersonalbogen aus Auschwitz mit der DocID: 130806919 (Zygmunt NOWAK).18 15Dabei ist jedoch nicht ersichtlich, ob eines, beide oder keines der Dokumente im Rahmen von #everynamecounts bearbeitet wurden. Beim ersten Dokument ließe zumindest der Titel der Akte (NOWAK, ZYGMUNT, geboren am 03.06.1917) vermuten, dass diese drei Informationen möglicherweise im Rahmen des Crowdsourcing gewonnen wurden. Im Titel des Dokuments aus Auschwitz taucht dagegen nur der Name, nicht aber das Geburtsdatum, auf. Wo und von wem Letzteres erfasst wurde, um es in der Ergebnisliste der Personensuche zeigen zu können, bleibt unklar. 16Außer bei der Trefferliste ist auch kein Datendownload bzw. Copy/Paste über den Titel des Dokuments oder der Akte hinaus möglich. Nutzer:innen des Online-Archivs müssen deshalb bei beiden Dokumenten den kompletten Crowdsourcing-Prozess wiederholen, ohne von einer möglicherweise bereits erfolgten Erfassungsleistung und der Qualitätssicherung profitieren zu können. Denkmalprojekt statt Datenedition 17Hier werden zwei gegensätzliche Erwartungshaltungen deutlich: Eine datengestützte bzw. data-driven NS-Forschung betrachtet die strukturierten Transkripte als vielversprechende Forschungsdaten. Die Projektverantwortlichen sehen in #everynamecounts jedoch in erster Linie ein Bildungs- und Outreachprojekt. Es ermöglicht einem breiten Publikum einen niederschwelligen Zugang zu historischen Quellen. „Die Dokumente sind nicht nur für Wissenschaftler:innen wichtig, sondern jeder sollte sich ein Bild von dem menschenverachtenden System der Nazis machen können“ (Brandt 2024) . Darüber hinaus bringt das Crowdsourcing-Projekt alle Abteilungen der Arolsen Archives in einen bereichsübergreifenden Dialog. Ginge es bloß um die maschinenlesbare Datenerfassung, gäbe es günstigere Möglichkeiten als die Einbeziehung von Freiwilligen. Diese arbeiten zwar kostenlos, doch die geeignete Quellenaufbereitung und -bereitstellung sowie der Community-Support erfordern erhebliche personelle und technische Ressourcen (Bräu et al. 2021, 183). Anmerkungen [1] Die beiden weiteren Mitmach-Initiativen #LastSeen und #StolenMemory rufen dazu auf, bisher unbekannte Personen, Orte und Kontexte in Fotografien und Filmen von NS-Deportationen zu identifizieren bzw. die Rückgabe persönlicher Besitzstücke ehemaliger KZ-Häftlinge zu ermöglichen, https://web.archive.org/web/20250401074939/https://arolsen-archives.org/lernen-mitwirken/initiativen-projekte/. [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20250331234023/https://arolsen-archives.org/ueber-uns/kurzportraet/. [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20250401075106/https://everynamecounts.arolsen-archives.org/. [4] https://web.archive.org/web/20250404231722/https://arolsen-archives.org/lernen-mitwirken/initiativen-projekte/everynamecounts/. [5] Die historischen Angaben in diesem Abschnitt basieren wesentlich auf Schulte (2007). [6] „in der Erwägung, dass die Regierungen es für nützlich erachten, den Zugang zu den vom Internationalen Suchdienst aufbewahrten Archiven und Unterlagen zu Forschungszwecken sowohl vor Ort als auch durch Kopien der Archive und Unterlagen zu gewährleisten;“, Gesetz zu den Protokollen vom 16. Mai 2006 über die Änderung des Abkommens vom 6. Juni 1955 über die Errichtung eines Internationalen Ausschusses für den Internationalen Suchdienst […], Bundesgesetzblatt Jahrgang 2007, Teil II Nr. 11, ausgegeben zu Bonn am 18. April 2007. http://www.bgbl.de/xaver/bgbl/start.xav?startbk=Bundesanzeiger_BGBl&jumpTo=bgbl207s0538.pdf. [7] So der Titel des 2019 veröffentlichten Begleitbands zur Dauerausstellung: https://web.archive.org/web/20250107170827/https://arolsen-archives.org/content/uploads/aa_ausstellungskatalog_de.pdf. [8] „Diese Richtlinien [zur Nutzung personenbezogener Daten] berücksichtigen gebührend die Interessen der in Betracht kommenden Person oder Personen und ihrer nahen Angehörigen, ebenso wie die Förderung von Forschung und Wissen in Bezug auf den Zeitraum und die Ereignisse, die von den vom Internationalen Suchdienst aufbewahrten Archiven und Unterlagen erfasst werden.“ Gesetz zu dem Übereinkommen vom 9. Dezember 2011 über den Internationalen Suchdienst vom 12. Oktober 2012, Bundesgesetzblatt Jahrgang 2012, Teil II Nr. 31, ausgegeben zu Bonn am 17. Oktober 2012. http://www.bgbl.de/xaver/bgbl/start.xav?startbk=Bundesanzeiger_BGBl&jumpTo=bgbl212s1090.pdf. [9] Die Online-Stellung der eigenen Bestände ist zwischenzeitlich fast komplett: „Fast alle der 30 Millionen Original-Dokumente in den Arolsen Archives sind bereits online verfügbar“, https://web.archive.org/web/20250404124415/https://arolsen-archives.org/suchen-erkunden/suche-online-archiv/. Nur besonders sensible Inhalte wie Krankenakten und Akten des Kindersuchdienstes sind laut Weber (2022, 40) von der Online-Stellung ausgeschlossen. [10] https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/arolsen-archives/every-name-counts. Siehe auch die interaktive Projekteinführung unter https://web.archive.org/web/20241017131057/https://arolsen-archives.org/enc-intro/de/. [11] Zur Projektgeschichte vgl. Dresel (2021) sowie den digitalen Jahresbericht 2020, https://web.archive.org/web/20241017121945/https://arolsen-archives.org/downloads/jahresbericht-2020/everynamecounts/. [12] So beziehen etwa die National Archives seit 2012 über ein Citizen Archivist Dashboard mit großem Erfolg Freiwillige in die Transkription und Verschlagwortung ihrer Bestände mit ein: https://web.archive.org/web/20250308202933/https://www.citizenscience.gov/citizen-archivist/. [13] https://web.archive.org/web/20250401075106/https://everynamecounts.arolsen-archives.org/. Diese Plattform wurde von einem externen Dienstleister gemäß Vorgaben der Arolsen Archives erstellt. [14] Vgl. dazu häufige Fragen zum Projekt #everynamcounts: „Nein, eine Registrierung ist nicht nötig, aber möglich. Die kostenlose Registrierung ermöglicht zum Beispiel, im Forum mit anderen Nutzer:innen ins Gespräch über die Dokumente zu kommen.“ https://web.archive.org/web/20250404231722/https://arolsen-archives.org/lernen-mitwirken/initiativen-projekte/everynamecounts/. [15] In den begleitenden e-Guides werden Hintergrundinformationen zu den Besonderheiten der verschiedenen Dokumentarten bereitgestellt: https://web.archive.org/web/20250120013242/https://eguide.arolsen-archives.org/archiv/anzeige/nummernkarte-fuer-maennliche-haeftlinge-des-kz-buchenwald/. [16] Zum Einsatz von OCR vgl. https://web.archive.org/web/20250403065937/https://arolsen-archives.org/ueber-uns/standpunkte/geschichte-geht-online-historische-dokumente-leichter-zugaenglich-mit-ocr/. Das Online-Archiv wurde 2020 mit der höchsten Auszeichnung im Bereich des kulturellen Erbes, dem European Heritage Award ausgezeichnet: https://web.archive.org/web/20250110000956/https://arolsen-archives.org/news/european-heritage-award-2020/. [17] Häftlings-Personal-Karte https://collections.arolsen-archives.org/de/document/6726802, enthalten in https://collections.arolsen-archives.org/de/archive/1-1-5-3_01010503-001-365-378. [18] https://collections.arolsen-archives.org/de/document/130806919. Bibliographie Arolsen Archives, ed. 2020. #everynamecounts. https://everynamecounts.arolsen-archives.org/. Arolsen Archives, ed. 2026. Arolsen Archives Online-Collection. https://web.archive.org/web/20260109203320/https://collections.arolsen-archives.org/. Brandt, Martin. „»Wir bauen ein digitales Denkmal«“. 2024. Sonja Pösel, Arolsen Archives, im Gespräch über die Crowdsourcing-Kampagne #everynamecounts.“ jungle.world, 25.1.2024. https://web.archive.org/web/20260113184748/https://jungle.world/artikel/2024/04/wir-bauen-ein-digitales-denkmal. Bräu, Ramona, Kerstin Hofmann, Sonja Nilson und Christa Zwilling-Seidenstücker. 2021. „#EveryNameCounts – Die Crowdsourcing-Initiative Der Arolsen Archives: Ein Erfahrungsbericht.“ Information – Wissenschaft & Praxis 72 (4): 177–184. https://doi.org/10.1515/iwp-2021-2157. Curry, Andrew. 2020. „How Crowdsourcing Aided a Push to Preserve the Histories of Nazi Victims.“ New York Times, 3.6.2020. https://web.archive.org/web/20251108112024/https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/world/europe/nazis-arolsen-archive.html. Dresel, Kim. 2021. „What counts and who does it? Crowdsourcing und Arolsen Archives 2.0.“ Medaon – Magazin für jüdisches Leben in Forschung und Bildung, 15 (29), 1–6. https://web.archive.org/web/20250617112210/http://www.medaon.de/pdf/medaon_29_dresel.pdf. Kellerhoff, Sven-Felix. 2006. „Diese Bewertung ist Stimmungsmache.“ Die Welt, 13.03.2006. https://web.archive.org/web/20240503144154/https://www.welt.de/print-welt/article203486/Diese-Bewertung-ist-Stimmungsmache.html. N.N. 2006. „Pressemitteilung vom 26.07.2006: Internationaler Suchdienst Bad Arolsen – Staatsminister Gloser hat Änderungsprotokoll unterzeichnet.“ Auswärtiges Amt.https://web.archive.org/web/20260113181244/https://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/de/newsroom/060726-badarolsenaenderungsprot/222048. Schulte, Jan Erik. 2007. „Nationalsozialismus und europäische Migrationsgeschichte. Das Archiv des Internationalen Suchdienstes.“ Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History, Online-Ausgabe, 4 (H. 1-2). https://doi.org/10.14765/zzf.dok-1909. Weber, Christiane Charlotte. 2022. „Out of the Storage Cabinet and into the World: The Use of State-of-the-Art Digital Technology to Provide Contextualized Online Access to Historical Nazi Documents, as Practiced by the Arolsen Archives.“ In Writing the Digital History of Nazi Germany, herausgegeben von Julia Timpe und Frederike Buda, 39–54. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110714692-003. Zwilling-Seidenstücker, Christa. 2020. „‘Jeder Name zählt‘ – ein digitales und partizipatives Erinnerungsprojekt.“ Lernen aus der Geschichte, 29.7.2020. https://web.archive.org/web/20250912124729/https://lernen-aus-der-geschichte.de/Lernen-und-Lehren/content/14855. </paste>
crowdsourcing.wien, Wien Museum; Wienbibliothek im Rathaus (ed.), 2022. https://crowdsourcing.wien (Last Accessed: 01.05.2025). Reviewed by Christian Erlinger (LibrErli – Christian Erlinger – Informatik für Bibliotheken, Archive und Museen), christian@librerli.eu. || Abstract: Crowdsourcing.wien is a digital platform launched in 2022 by the … crowdsourcing.wien Read More »
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><paste> crowdsourcing.wien, Wien Museum; Wienbibliothek im Rathaus (ed.), 2022. https://crowdsourcing.wien (Last Accessed: 01.05.2025). Reviewed by Christian Erlinger (LibrErli – Christian Erlinger – Informatik für Bibliotheken, Archive und Museen), christian@librerli.eu. || Abstract: Crowdsourcing.wien is a digital platform launched in 2022 by the Wien Museum and the Wienbibliothek im Rathaus to involve the public in transcribing and indexing historical documents. Originating from a pilot project on postcard transcription, the platform now hosts multiple initiatives, including letter transcription and metadata extraction from historical theater playbills. This review outlines the platform’s development, user interface, and collaborative mechanisms such as multi-step validation. While it effectively integrates user contributions into institutional collections, issues remain regarding data accessibility, licensing transparency, and restrictive privacy protocols that limit genealogical research. Overall, crowdsourcing.wien represents a valuable model for participatory cultural heritage preservation. Die Crowdsourcing-Plattform des Wien Museums und der Wienbibliothek im Rathaus 1Crowdsourcing.wien ist eine Transkriptionsplattform, die in Kooperation zwischen dem Wien Museum und der Wienbibliothek im Rathaus betrieben wird. Am 4. Juli 2022 erfolgte der offizielle Launch des Portals (Wien Bibliothek im Rathaus 2022). Dem vorangegangen war ein Pilotprojekt, bei dem aus der topografischen Sammlung des Wien Museums Ansichtskarten zur Transkription vorgelegt wurden. Diese Rezension bespricht die Crowdsourcing-Plattform zuerst aus einem ‚chronologischen‘ Aspekt, um danach anhand der vorhandenen Teilprojekte die einzelnen Funktionalitäten und die Einbindung der Crowd in das Projekt zu diskutieren. Pilotprojekt ‚Ansichtskartensammlung‘ 22000 Ansichtskarten wurden im Sommer 2021 von der ‚Crowd‘ innerhalb von zwei Wochen transkribiert (Egger 2023b). Über 400 Personen haben sich bei diesem ersten Projekt auf der eigens dafür erstellten Online-Plattform registriert und an der Transkription der Karten und der darauf befindlichen Grußworte, Adressinformationen und Nachrichten mitgewirkt (Scheller, Békési und Stuiber 2021). Die derart gewonnenen Daten wurden in die Sammlungsdatenbank des Museums zurückgespielt und sind über die Online-Sammlung des Wien Museums zugänglich.1 Die Transkription der Ansichtskarten umfasst hierbei nicht etwaige aufgedruckte Textbausteine wie ‚Gruss aus Wien‘2, sondern ausschließlich handschriftliche, individuelle Textelemente sowie Angaben zu den Stempelabdrücken. Nicht erkennbar ist in der Online-Sammlung allerdings, ob eine pixelgenaue Markierung des Textes auf dem Bild erfasst und gespeichert wurde. Personenbezogene Daten, insbesondere im Adressblock, sind im Digitalisat der Karte verpixelt und im Transkript mit Auslassungszeichen dargestellt. Bei Ansichtskarten mit Aufgabedatum rund um 1900 besteht höchst unwahrscheinlich noch Datenschutz, denn ob Personen, die damals am Postverkehr aktiv teilnahmen, 120 Jahre später noch am Leben sind, kann bezweifelt werden. Dieses Vorgehen ist zwar als Grundvorgabe datenschutz- und persönlichkeitsrechtlich vorbildhaft, für etwaige Forschungen im genealogischen Bereich aber als absolut abträglich zu beurteilen. Gerade die Bearbeitung mittels Crowd-Sourcing hätte die Möglichkeit erbracht, eine detaillierte Beurteilung der datenschutzrechtlichen Situation zu erhalten: Sind AdressatIn oder AbsenderIn nachweislich bereits verstorben, dann würde gemäß europäischer Datenschutzbestimmungen kein Datenschutz bestehen. Auch die üblichen archivarischen Sperrfristen hätten in diesem Zuge einer durch die Crowd erfolgten Beurteilung für eine spätere korrigierte Veröffentlichung ohne Verpixelung des Adressblocks herangezogen werden können. Urheberrechtlich ist das digitale Abbild der Ansichtskarte auf der Online-Sammlungsseite mit CC0 lizenziert; dies wird auch das Transkript umfassen, sofern bei einfachen Grußworten überhaupt eine Schöpfungshöhe erreicht ist. Die Online-Sammlungen des Wien Museums weisen im Impressum bzw. auf den Detailseiten der Postkarten darauf hin, dass die gemeinfreien Objekte unter CC0 lizensiert sind3; das ist aber streng genommen die falsche Lizenz; korrekterweise sollte für die Ansichtskarten, bei denen offensichtlich die urheberrechtlichen Schutzfristen abgelaufen sind, die Public Domain Mark vergeben werden. 3Auch hinsichtlich der systematischen Durchsuchbarkeit hat man sich für einen protektiven Ansatz entschieden: Die Postkarten können gegenwärtig nicht über eine Schnittstelle im größeren Stil recherchiert werden.4 Auch stehen im Web-UI abgesehen von der Suche über den Tag ‚Postkarten mit Transkription‘ keine vertiefenden Recherchen der Postkarten (bspw. nach Adress-Geographika) zur Verfügung. Portal ‚crowdsourcing.wien‘ 4Mit den aus diesem Projekt gewonnenen Erfahrungen und wohl gestärkt durch die scheinbar überwältigend-erfreuliche Rückmeldung sowie das Interesse der Online-Community an der Transkription von Materialien im weitesten Sinne zur Geschichte Wiens wurde als dauerhafte Plattform ‚crowdsourcing.wien‘ im Sommer 2002 lanciert. Ziel der Plattform ist es, gemäß der Eigendefinition auf der Startseite der Plattform, „die beiden [Bibliothek und Museum] Wiener Gedächtnisspeicher durch Ihre Mithilfe gemeinsam zu erschließen und handschriftliche Dokumente zu transkribieren“ (Wien Museum und Wienbibliothek im Rathaus 2025). Gegenwärtig sind drei aktive Projekte eingestellt, zwei zur Transkription von Briefen, eines zur strukturellen Erschließung der (gedruckten, nicht handschriftlichen!) Metadaten der Theaterzettel-Sammlung. Jedes Projekt verweist auf eine eigene Subseite des Portals und erlaubt demnach auch projektspezifische Erfassungsregeln und Hinweise zu verfassen. Die „hochwertige[n] Transkriptionen“ sollen nach Abschluss der Projekte in die jeweiligen Online-Sammlungen integriert werden (Egger 2023a). Erschließungsleistungen durch die Crowd 5Die Arbeiten, die die Crowd am Portal erledigen kann, sind individuell auf die bereitgestellten Bestände abgestimmt. Während es bei beiden Projekten zur Erschließung der Brief-Konvolute um die Volltexttranskription der Korrespondenzen geht, findet im Theaterzettel-Projekt eine strukturierte Erfassung der angegebenen Aufführungsinformationen statt. Dementsprechend unterschiedlich sind auch die Erfassungsmasken und Erschließungsrichtlinien auf der Plattform5. Transkription von Briefen Abb. 1: Screenshot der geöffneten Bearbeitungsmaske zur Volltexttranskription eines Briefes (https://web.archive.org/web/20240323195531/https://wienbibliothek.crowdsourcing.wien/briefe-1920-1934/object/4936713/). 6 Die Projekte zur Erschließung der Briefkonvolute erbitten von den Teilnehmenden die Transkription des auf den Manuskripten und Typoskripten befindlichen Textes nach dem ‚Acht-Augen-Prinzip‘. Das bedeutet, dass jeder als ‚vollständig‘ transkribiert gekennzeichnete Brief in einer zweiten Lesung von mindestens drei unterschiedlichen Beitragenden geprüft wird, und erst nach dreimaliger Bestätigung in der Prüfung als abgeschlossen gilt (Egger 2023b, 97). Diese Status sind gleichzeitig auch die wesentlichen Filtermöglichkeiten, um im jeweiligen Projekt Materialien zur Betrachtung bzw. Bearbeitung auswählen zu können. Je nachdem, ob man unbearbeitete Objekte erstmalig abtippen, bereits vorliegende Transkripte korrigieren oder einfach nur in Briefen lesend stöbern möchte, lässt sich das entsprechend einstellen. Die Bearbeitung der Volltexterschließung erfolgt in einem einfachen mehrzeiligen Textfeld, welches rechts vom Digitalisat des Briefes auf dem Bildschirm dargestellt ist (Abb. 1). Für das Digitalisat liegt eine eingebettete Zoom-Funktionalität vor. 7Direkt unterhalb des Bearbeitungsfeldes ist eine Kurzfassung der Editionsrichtlinien – der Transkriptionsregeln – sowie eine Hilfestellung für das Lesen von Kurrent verlinkt. Auch ist es möglich, eine benutzerspezifische Anmerkung zum Objekt zu hinterlassen, die für die weitere Bearbeitung durch andere Crowd-User hilfreich sein kann. Die Metadaten der Briefe stammen aus der digitalen Sammlung der Wienbibliothek. Etwaige Korrekturen an diesen können nur via E-Mail an die Bibliothek gemeldet werden. Erschließung der Theaterzettel 8Die Theaterzettel, zumeist einseitig gedruckte Ankündigungen von Theatervorstellungen, liegen digitalisiert im Bestand der Wienbibliothek nach Veranstaltungsorten, d.h. nach Theaterhäusern, zusammengefasst vor. Eine tiefere Erschließung fand bislang noch nicht statt, weshalb auch dieses Projekt an die Crowdsourcing-Plattform angeschlossen wurde. Die Theaterzettel können ähnlich den Briefen nach ihrem Bearbeitungsstand gefiltert werden: ‚Erfassen‘ für noch unbearbeitete Zettel, ‚Prüfen‘ für die Zweitlesung bereits erfasster Ankündigungen oder ‚Lesen‘ für bereits mindestens zweimal korrigierte Theaterzettel. Abb. 2: Screenshot der Erschließungsmaske eines Theaterzettels. 9 Die Erfassungs- und Prüfmaske der Theaterzettel zeigt, ähnlich wie bei den Brieftranskriptionen, links das Digitalisat des Druckes mit Zoom-Funktionalität, rechts aber eine strukturierte Erfassungsmaske. Die detaillierten Erschließungsregeln sind am Ende des Formulars verlinkt (vgl. Abb. 2). Nicht alle auf der Ankündigung auffindbaren Daten werden hierbei erschlossen. Welche Daten übernommen werden, ergibt sich aus dem Formular bzw. den Editionsrichtlinien. Wenn möglich, werden das aufgeführte Werk und die mit der Aufführung verbundenen Personen mit Einträgen in der Gemeinsamen Normdatei (GND) verlinkt. Für die Verlinkung werden die BenutzerInnen angeregt, die Suche in der Online-GND (OGND) des Bibliotheksservice-Zentrums Baden-Württemberg (BSZ) durchzuführen. Womöglich wäre eine Integration von lobid-gnd und insbesondere dem einfach zu implementierenden Autovervollständigungsmodus6 eine lohnende Erweiterung und Hilfestellung für die Bearbeitung. 10In welchem Datenformat die Werte aktuell erfasst werden, ist nicht bekannt und lässt sich auch im Quelltext oder in der Netzwerkkommunikation nicht eruieren. Nach Abschluss des Projektes sollen die Daten gleich dem Volltext der Korrespondenzen in den Online-Sammlungen integriert und recherchierbar sein. 11Allen Projekten gleich ist der Umstand, dass ein Objekt nicht durch eine Person allein vollständig transkribiert bzw. erschlossen werden muss; es können auch jederzeit Zwischenstände gespeichert werden. Es werden dann separate Versionen des Transkripts erzeugt, welche in einer ‚Historie‘ der Bearbeitung abgerufen, aber nicht vergleichend dargestellt werden können. Grundlagen der Mitwirkung und Benutzerführung 12Um am Projekt mitarbeiten zu können, ist eine einmalige Registrierung durch Angabe von E-Mail und frei gewähltem Benutzernamen nötig. Das Login ist für das gesamte Crowdsourcing-Portal gültig und erlaubt das Mitwirken an allen aktiven Projekten der Plattform. Als minimales Gamification-Element können die ‚Ranglisten‘ der ‚Beiträger*innen‘ gelten, welche auf den jeweiligen Einstiegsseiten der einzelnen Projekte verlinkt sind. Die Reihung erfolgt dabei entsprechend der Summe an Erst- und Zweitbearbeitungen. 13Ein Benachrichtigungsbereich erlaubt den Kulturinstitutionen Mitteilungen an die BenutzerInnen zu senden. Gleichzeitig werden Benachrichtigungen an die BearbeiterInnen übermittelt, wenn Änderungen oder Korrekturen an Objekten durchgeführt wurden, von denen man selbst zumindest eine Version erstellt hat. Diese drei Benachrichtigungskategorien sind optional wählbar. 14Begleitend zum virtuellen Arbeiten an den bereitgestellten Bibliotheksbeständen bietet die Wienbibliothek auch Präsenztreffen zum Austausch und zur Vernetzung zwischen Institution und Crowd und somit auch für die Crowd untereinander an. In sogenannten ‚Crowd-Cafés‘ besteht die Möglichkeit, die Bibliothek kennenzulernen und Feedback zum Projekt einzuholen. Auch wurden Kurrent-Leseworkshops angeboten; sicherlich ein wertvoller Beitrag, um Wissen und Fertigkeiten zur Transkription teilweise wohl sicherlich nicht einfacher Korrespondenzen zu teilen und aufzubauen (Egger 2023b, 97). Technologische Aspekte 15Technologisch scheint die Plattform eine für das Projekt von den beteiligten Gedächtnisinstitutionen in Auftrag gegebene und durch externe PartnerInnen eigens entwickelte Software zu sein. Weder im Impressum oder in anderen Credits, noch im Quellcode der Webseite lassen sich Verweise auf standardisierte oder offene (Editions-)Systeme erkennen. Im Gegenteil, in den verlinkten Javascripts wird bspw. das Copyright eines der beauftragten Webentwicklungsunternehmen angegeben. Demnach basiert crowdsourcing.wien auf einer proprietären Software.7 16Die Digitalisate in der Crowdsourcing-Plattform sind mit den Quellen in der Online-Sammlung der Wienbibliothek verlinkt. Transkripte aus dem ersten Briefprojekt ‚Briefe 1914–1919‘ sind bereits in der Online-Sammlung eingespielt und dort auch als Volltextelement in das Retrieval integriert. Die Volltexte sind maschinenlesbar und auch in den METS-Dateien der jeweiligen Objekte verlinkt.8 Interessanterweise ist auf der Landing Page des Objektes in der Online-Sammlung auch eine ALTO-XML-Datei verlinkt, die allerdings als Dimensionsangaben für alle Wörter nur ‚0‘ aufweist, da im Projekt kein koordinativer Zusammenhang zwischen Text und Bild ermittelt wird.9 Das Rückspielen der Ergebnisse des Crowdsourcing in die Digitale Sammlung ist allerdings sehr vorbildhaft und ehrt das Projekt und die BenutzerInnen für ihren Einsatz. Rechtliche Aspekte 17Für die durch Crowdsourcing entstandenen Daten wird eine umfassende Nutzungsrechteabtretung formuliert.10 Durch die projekthafte Struktur der Plattform können diese Rechte grundsätzlich je Projekt anders gestaltet werden. Gegenwärtig sind diese aber in den vorliegenden Projekten identisch. Sämtliche Werknutzungsrechte werden vollumfänglich an die Wienbibliothek abgetreten. Während hingegen angegeben wird, dass beim digitalisierten Textmaterial bereits Gemeinfreiheit besteht, wird den ‚gecrowdeten‘ Inhalten keine offene Lizenz zugeführt. Im Gegensatz dazu legt die strikte Nutzungsrechteabtretung eher die Vermutung nahe, dass seitens der PlattformbetreiberInnen diesen Inhalten Urheberrecht und Schöpfungshöhe zugemessen wird. Ob dies überhaupt der Fall ist oder sein kann, dass reine Abschriften von bereits gemeinfreien Textinhalten (bzw. bei Inhalten, die ohnedies womöglich nie Schöpfungshöhe erreicht haben – vgl. Theaterzettelprojekt) urheberrechtlichen Schutz erwirken, ist zweifelhaft: „Die Zurverfügungstellung einer reinen Transkription wird hingegen nur als Vervielfältigung eines bestehenden Werkes gelten können.“ (Scholger 2021) Hier wäre es sowohl unstrittig als auch für alle Beteiligten vorteilhafter, würden die Nutzungsrechtebedingungen vorsehen, dass alle durch die Crowd erstellten Inhalte im Zuge des Abspeicherns automatisch unter einer freien Lizenz, bspw. CC0, stehen. Gewissermaßen paradox wird die Situation dann noch durch die Einspielung in die Online-Sammlungen, denn dort werden die Objekte wie bspw. der zuvor schon beispielhaft verlinkte Brief11 korrekt mit der Public Domain ausgezeichnet, was demnach auch unzweifelhaft den Volltext mitumfasst. 18Für die Anmeldung auf der Plattform ist die Angabe einer E-Mail-Adresse, eines beliebigen Benutzernamens und eines Passwortes nötig. Demnach ist eine anonyme Teilnahme am Portal realisierbar. Der Benutzername ist auf der Plattform öffentlich sichtbar und wird mit den getätigten Erschließungsaktivitäten verknüpft. BenutzerInnen können ihren Account mit ausgewählten Social-Media-Plattformen verlinken, ohne dass eine nennenswerte Funktionalität damit verbunden wäre. Die angegebene E-Mail-Adresse wird über einen per E-Mail verschickten Verifizierungslink bestätigt. Eine weiterführende (persönliche) Akkreditierung der BenutzerInnen findet nicht statt. Conclusio 19Mit crowdsourcing.wien haben die beiden lose miteinander verbundenen Wiener Kulturinstitutionen ‚Wien Museum‘ und ‚Wienbibliothek im Rathaus‘ ein ansprechendes Portal lanciert, mit dem die spannenden und teils für die Wiener Stadtgeschichte wertvollen Bestände dem allgemeinen Publikum nicht nur zur Betrachtung, sondern zur ureigenen Mitwirkung und Bearbeitung vorgelegt werden. Die Resonanz durch die hohe Erschließungsgeschwindigkeit und -frequenz lässt die berechtigte Hoffnung zu, dass noch weitere Bestände aus den digitalen Sammlungen zur Bearbeitung durch die Crowd angeboten werden oder sich weitere Wiener Institutionen des Portals bedienen. Dass die gewonnenen Daten auch in das Retrieval auf den Quellsystemen einfließen, ist vorbildhaft und mit Sicherheit nicht nur für das Auffinden, sondern auch für jedwede weitere wissenschaftliche wie populäre Nutzung der Bestände zweckdienlich. Anmerkungen [1] Wien Museum 2025, hier: https://sammlung.wienmuseum.at/suche/?themes=144547, abgerufen am 22. März 2024. [2] Wien Museum 2025, hier: https://sammlung.wienmuseum.at/objekt/617835-elisabeth-bruecke-mit-karlskirche/, abgerufen am 22. März 2024. [3] Wien Museum 2025, hier: https://web.archive.org/web/20250211235426/https://sammlung.wienmuseum.at/ueber-uns/. [4] Wien Museum 2025, hier: https://web.archive.org/web/20240329200335/https://sammlung.wienmuseum.at/ueber-uns/. [5] Wien Museum und Wienbibliothek im Rathaus 2025, hier: https://web.archive.org/web/20240718140358/https://wienbibliothek.crowdsourcing.wien/theaterzettel/erfassungsregeln/. [6] https://web.archive.org/web/20240329200508/https://lobid.org/gnd/api#auto-complete. [7] Wien Museum und Wienbibliothek im Rathaus 2025, hier: https://web.archive.org/web/20240323192155/https://wienbibliothek.crowdsourcing.wien/briefe-1920-1934/_app/immutable/entry/start.cd53cb5e.js. [8] Wienbibliothek im Rathaus 2025, hier: https://web.archive.org/web/20240329200427/https://digital.wienbibliothek.at/wbrobv02/oai/?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=mets&mode=view&identifier=3863124. [9] Wienbibliothek im Rathaus 2025, hier: https://web.archive.org/web/20240329200730/https://digital.wienbibliothek.at/wbrobv02/download/ftpack/alto/3863124. [10] Wien Museum und Wienbibliothek im Rathaus 2025, hier: https://web.archive.org/web/20240329200517/https://wienbibliothek.crowdsourcing.wien/theaterzettel/nutzungsbedingungen/. [11] Wienbibliothek im Rathaus 2025, hier: https://web.archive.org/web/20240329200657/https://digital.wienbibliothek.at/wbrobv02/3863124. Bibliographie Egger, Alexandra. 2023a. „An der Geschichte mitschreiben – Crowdsourcing an der Wienbibliothek im Rathaus.“ Bibliothekskongress 2023, Universität Innsbruck. https://web.archive.org/web/20260118144527/https://www.uibk.ac.at/congress/bibliothek2023/programm/abstracts-donnerstag-vormittag/an-der-geschichte-mitschreiben–crowdsourcing-an-der-wienbibliothek-im-rathau.html. Egger, Alexandra. 2023b. „An der Geschichte mitschreiben – Crowdsourcing an der Wienbibliothek im Rathaus.“ Zeitschrift für Bibliothekswesen und Bibliographie 70 (2): 95–98. https://doi.org/10.3196/186429502070247. Scheller, Evi, Sándor Békési und Peter Stuiber. 2021. „Crowdsourcing bei Ansichtskarten. Transkribieren, übersetzen, kontrollieren.“ Interviewt von Petra Stuiber. Wien Museum Magazin. https://web.archive.org/web/20260118143919/https://magazin.wienmuseum.at/crowdsourcing-bei-ansichtskarten. Scholger, Walter. 2021. „Urheberrecht.“In: KONDE Weißbuch. Hrsg. v. Helmut W. Klug unter Mitarbeit von Selina Galka und Elisabeth Steiner im HRSM Projekt „Kompetenznetzwerk Digitale Edition.“ http://hdl.handle.net/11471/562.50.44. Wienbibliothek im Rathaus. 2022. „Neue Plattform crowdsourcing.wien und die »Briefe 1914–1919« | Wienbibliothek im Rathaus.“ https://web.archive.org/web/20240130132155/https://www.wienbibliothek.at/ueber-uns/presse/neue-plattform-crowdsourcingwien-briefe-1914-1919. Wienbibliothek im Rathaus. 2025. „Wienbibliothek Digital.“ https://web.archive.org/web/20250301103100/https://digital.wienbibliothek.at/. Wien Museum. 2025. „Online Sammlung.“ https://sammlung.wienmuseum.at. Wien Museum und Wienbibliothek im Rathaus. 2025. „crowdsourcing.wien.“ https://web.archive.org/web/20250317052654/https://crowdsourcing.wien/. Abbildungen Abb. 1: Screenshot der geöffneten Bearbeitungsmaske zur Volltexttranskription eines Briefes (https://web.archive.org/web/20240323195531/https://wienbibliothek.crowdsourcing.wien/briefe-1920-1934/object/4936713/). Abb. 2: Screenshot der Erschließungsmaske eines Theaterzettels. </paste>
Ways of making digital editions of historical recipes and experimental texts: The Making and Knowing Project
The Making and Knowing Project. Intersections of Craft Making and Scientific Knowing, Pamela H. Smith, Naomi Rosenkranz, Tianna Helena Uchacz, Tillmann Taape, Clément Godbarge, Sophie Pitman, Jenny Boulboullé, Joel Klein, Donna Bilak, Marc Smith, Terry Catapano (ed.), 2020. https://www.makingandknowing.org/bnf-ms-fr-640/ (Last … Ways of making digital editions of historical recipes and experimental texts: The Making and Knowing Project Read More »
The Making and Knowing Project. Intersections of Craft Making and Scientific Knowing, Pamela H. Smith, Naomi Rosenkranz, Tianna Helena Uchacz, Tillmann Taape, Clément Godbarge, Sophie Pitman, Jenny Boulboullé, Joel Klein, Donna Bilak, Marc Smith, Terry Catapano (ed.), 2020. https://www.makingandknowing.org/bnf-ms-fr-640/ (Last Accessed: 05.05.2025). Reviewed by Sarah Lang (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science), slang@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de. || Abstract: The Making and Knowing Project is an educational and research project that has employed citizen science to produce a digital critical edition of the 16th-century manuscript BnF Ms. Fr. 640, along with accompanying educational resources. Situated within a historiographical turn centered around materiality and practical making, the Making and Knowing Project, led by Pamela Smith, explores the tacit knowledge of early modern artisans and practitioners. A major component involves the recreation of historical recipes in educational laboratory settings, documented in the form of essays. The other central component is the digital critical edition of the anonymous French technical tract, BnF Ms. Fr. 640. The first version of the edition and website was completed during the initial funding phase by 2020. Further funding has supported continued development of the edition and related outputs, such as a teaching companion and the digital scholarly editing tool Edition Crafter. Making and Knowing is a flagship project in historical recipe research and in the application of experimental methods in the history of science and knowledge. Introduction 1The Making and Knowing Project (with the subtitle “Intersections of Craft Making and Scientific Knowing”) is situated at the intersection of the experimental history of science,1 recipe research and the Digital Humanities, leveraging the help of citizen scientists to create a digital scholarly edition.2 The recreation of historical recipes within educational laboratory contexts, documented in detailed essays, complements a digital critical edition of a 16th-century technical treatise, BnF Ms. Fr. 640. While the initial version of this digital scholarly edition was completed during the first funding run in 2020, the project later received additional funding to hone in on Digital Humanities aspects, which go beyond the first version of the digital edition. The Making and Knowing Project has received the Eugene S. Ferguson Prize (2019) and the Renaissance Society of America’s (RSA) Digital Innovation Award (2022). 2In seeking to understand historical practices of knowledge-making, historians of science have moved away from a narrowly defined concept of science as distinct from a broader history of knowledge. This shift reflects a growing recognition that knowledge production extends beyond the traditionally elite domains typically associated with the sciences. By focusing solely on a conventional history of science, scholarly attention has often been limited to specific practices and actors—frequently members of social or intellectual elites—while marginalising or overlooking the contributions of more everyday forms of knowledge. 3The Making and Knowing Project is situated within a historiographical tradition that centres the study of knowledge rather than science alone. It aligns with the material and practical turns that have reshaped epistemological and historical inquiry in recent decades (Rheinberger 2001). Closely related to these developments is the adoption of experimental methods, which have transformed the study of historical craft practices. Once viewed as peripheral or esoteric, such practices are now understood as central to the emergence of modern science and knowledge-making. In this framework, the historical practices of artisans, craftspeople, and alchemists are reframed not merely as precursors to scientific disciplines such as chemistry, but as integral components of their historical development (Smith 2006, 292). This perspective emphasises the complex interrelationship between textual sources and embodied, material practices.3 With the emergence of the experimental history of science, the so-called ‘RRR methods’—reconstruction, replication, and re-enactment—have become a pivotal tool for investigating the tacit and practical dimensions of historical scientific practices (Hendriksen 2020, 314).4 These methods help address the documentary gaps in historical recipes (Fors et al. 2016). Fig. 1: The main project website, which likely serves as the primary entry point for most users before navigating to the digital edition itself. Fig. 2: “About” page briefly describing the manuscript, linking to high-resolution images in Gallica, and displaying the book’s spine. 4 Under the leadership of Pamela Smith, the Making and Knowing Project has employed citizen science to craft a digital critical edition of BnF Ms. Fr. 640 (see the main website in Fig. 1). Li (2020, 586) describes the edition as “an exceptionally close reading of the sixteenth-century manuscript Ms. Fr. 640, an anonymous early modern source composed of handwritten entries that pertain to the history of science, art history, and material culture.” Over 500 collaborators helped create a full transcription and translation for 340 pages of manuscript. Over one hundred essays, many created by ‘grad scholars’ participating in laboratory seminars, represent an impressive output of the citizen science side of the project. Grounded in the historiographical turn centered on materiality and craftsmanship as sources for the history of knowledge beyond scholarly discourse, the project investigates the tacit knowledge (Polanyi 2009, Sibum 2020) of early modern artisans and practitioners. In its description (“About” section, see Fig. 2), the project frames itself as both a research and pedagogical initiative exploring intersections between crafts making and scientific knowing. It explores the earliest phases of a period p referred to as the “Scientific Revolution” where artisanal making and scientific knowledge production using experiments still overlapped.5 The Making and Knowing Project presents the results of its research at the intersection of laboratory and archival work using the digital medium. The digital edition was first launched in 2020 and updated to a more user-friendly version in 2021.6 The Project 5The Making and Knowing Project is situated at the Columbia University Center for Science and Society and led by Pamela Smith (Seth Low Professor of History, Director of the Center for Science and Society), Naomi Rosenkranz (Assistant Director) and Caroline Surman (Project and Communications Coordinator).7 Apart from the editors, a considerable number of individuals have contributed to the project, ranging from Digital Humanities professionals, palaeographers, postdoctoral and visiting scholars, makers, teaching assistants to student research associates and laboratory assistants.8 The project (and its web components) are twofold: A project website containing all activities revolving around Making and Knowing as well as the Digital Critical Edition of BNF Ms. Fr. 640 whose first version was released in February 2020. The Making and Knowing Project also maintains a number of social media outlets to keep the public and research community updated on the current state of the project. Apart from the Flickr photo repository, the project has X, Facebook, and YouTube accounts.9 The “Publications and Press” section provides an extensive overview of outputs generated in the Making and Knowing Project, covering a wide range of categories from a GitHub sandbox, public lectures, scholarly articles and books, press mentions to artistic responses.10 Fig. 3: The “Digital” section of the project site, which provides access to the digital critical edition, though its title “Digital” may be somewhat confusing. 6Under “Support”, the project declares itself as “a largely self-funded initiative” relying on federal or internal grants as well as donations, and its funding sources are listed.11 The “Collaborations” tab lists an impressive number of collaborating institutions.12 In “The Lab”, users of the website are redirected to a YouTube playlist containing the video outputs of the project.13 The “Project Components” tab provides further information on text workshops, lab seminars, and working groups previously held in the context of the project as well as digital project components. The somewhat cryptically named dropdown option “Digital” (Fig. 3) leads users of the website to information on the digital critical edition.14 This offers diplomatic and normalized French transcriptions as well as an English translation of BNF Ms. Fr. 640 alongside high-resolution facsimile images. A YouTube video of the Beta version is embedded as a demo. Below are two lists of “annotations” although the purpose of those lists remains unclear to the author of this review. After it follow links to earlier prototypes of the digital edition as well as the project sandbox, a GitHub.io site allowing users access to experiment with the data underlying Making and Knowing. Long-term sustainability of the digital edition is provided by the Columbia University Libraries where it is provided as Open Access. The page further documents three 2017/2018 Digital Humanities courses in collaboration with the project. Through the use of ‘expert crowd sourcing’, i.e., citizen science in the form of university class projects, the project has created a critical edition and English translation of its source.15 For example, the first transcription and markup were created during a series of three-week workshops with graduate students, beginning in 2014, teaching them practical skills in middle French palaeography while yielding base data for the digital edition.16 The replications of historical recipes were conducted as part of laboratory seminars involving modern expert practitioners, such as conservators, artists, and craftspeople. The Digital Critical Edition 7Between 2014 and 2020, the project’s main focus was creating a digital critical edition of an anonymous French technical manuscript dating from the 16th century, BnF Ms. Fr. 640. The manuscript, begun sometime after 1579 by an anonymous author, consists of 170 folios, or 340 pages, of closely written text with hand-drawn figures. It contains recipes, instructions, notes, and first-hand accounts of experiments with diverse materials, techniques, and observations from pigment application to imitation gem production, compiled over an unknown period, probably until around 1588. The resulting manuscript is now known as Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ms. Fr. 640. It is a unique record focusing on processes and the practice of making, and thus an invaluable source for the history of craft and material culture in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. 8This manuscript was transcribed and is given in its original French as well as an English translation. To satisfy the particular needs of editing the text of artisanal recipes, the critical apparatus offers not only annotations but also essay-length analyses and a glossary of technical terms. Apart from this multimedia apparatus to the text itself, the project held laboratory seminars, workshops, and working groups bringing together a wide array of interdisciplinary expertise whose results can also be accessed on the project website. The laboratory seminars would, for example, bring together university students (“grad student scholars”) and artisanal experts (from museums or craft-making contexts) to reconstruct the recipes contained in BnF Ms. Fr. 640, thereby understanding it better. The tacit and gestural knowledge as well as practical insights from these historical-critical experiments thus function as a new dimension of critical apparatus to further inform the reader, just like linguistic notes or notes on the transmission of a historical source.17 9The “BNF MS. FR. 640” tab provides a central point of entry to the digital edition, situating the source briefly as part of the “books of secrets” genre, recipe books or how-to manuals which had become especially popular in the last decades of the 16th century.18 It contains a citation suggestion and links to a sub-site dedicated specifically to citing the edition. Since the identity of the person responsible for writing or compiling BnF Ms. Fr. 640 is unknown, they are referred to as “the author-practitioner” throughout the Making and Knowing Project. This technical writing transmits the “maker’s knowledge”—the tacit or gestural knowledge of craftspeople who, previously illiterate, began recording their recipes during the print boom between 1490 and 1800. However, the editors describe BnF Ms. Fr. 640 as singular within this genre, as it is filled with self-reflexive commentary and process notes by the author-practitioner, offering a unique window to their ways of making and knowing. Fig. 4: Overview of the research essays, including an introduction to the manuscript and its physical construction, as well as examples of texts in both French and English, since some essays are available in both languages. Fig. 5: Another example of the essay overview page, here showing essays about the project itself—its encoding, translation, and methodologies—as well as reflections on the edition as a digital text and computational approach. Fig. 6: Example of a research essay presented in the project’s minimal edition format. Fig. 7: Example of an essay that includes an embedded video, illustrating how video documentation makes the experiments accessible to users of the edition in the digital format. 10Once the user of the website clicks “Explore” or any other link to the edition itself, one is directed to a dedicated landing page.19 From there, one can choose to watch a video, “Read the edition”, “Learn more” (leading to the “About” page) or access a list of resources and featured essays (Fig. 4, 5, 6, 7).20 The essays all have their own DOI and citation suggestions.21 Their topics range from essays explaining the edition itself (Fig. 5) (“An Introduction to Ms. Fr. 640 and Its Author-Practitioner”, “Ma<r>king and Knowing: Encoding BnF Ms. Fr. 640”, “The Manuscript Seen from Afar: A Computational Approach to Ms. Fr. 640”), information regarding the manuscript as a text-bearing object (“Making Ms. Fr. 640”, “The Language of Experience in Ms. Fr. 640”) to contextual information (“Artillery in 1590s France”, “Pigments in Sixteenth-Century Europe”) and experimental recreations of recipes in BnF Ms. Fr. 640 (“Counterfeit Coral”, “Uses of Sulfur for Casting”) (for examples of the essays, see also Fig. 6 and Fig. 7). Given the French origin of the manuscript, some of the essays are provided both in French and English versions. 11The digital scholarly edition (see Fig. 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 for screenshots of the user interface) provides detailed information on the manuscript, its author-practitioner, and the making of both the manuscript and the edition itself. It outlines principles of transcription, translation, and encoding, presented through website documentation and accompanying scholarly essays. The digitised facsimile pages derive from Gallica, BnF’s digital library. The edition was developed through workshops, courses, and conferences held within the Making and Knowing Project. Its markup, in a custom XML format inspired by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standard, is available via the project’s GitHub repository, where each folio appears as three XML files: a diplomatic transcription (verbatim in the original French), a lightly normalised version (with added punctuation and diacritics), and an English translation. 12The “Resources” section provides access to further material such as a glossary and an extensive bibliography for the edition.22 The principles of transcription and how exactly features from the TEI encoding are rendered in the web view are explained in a lot of detail. A “How to Use” section informs visitors of the site how to navigate, for example, the dual pane view of the digital edition or how to search the edition thematically using the tags in the “List of Entries”.23 The “Reconstruction Insights” page provides another point of entry for accessing the research essays.24 13Manuscript data can be accessed via a GitHub repository.25 The edition itself provides a parallel view of text (transcriptions or translation) and facsimile images.26 The “About the Edition” page contains explanations regarding questions such as ‘What is Ms. Fr. 640?’, ‘What is the digital critical edition?’ or how the digital development was envisioned and implemented.27 This page contains links to a number of further pages discussing the edition, transcription, translation, encoding guidelines, and so forth. Creating the digital edition has been the primary goal of the project since its foundation in 2014. It was developed through a series of workshops, conferences, and university courses. Contents were created in a specific form of citizen science that the project lead has termed “grad-sourcing” or “expert crowd sourcing”, meaning that the citizens contributing to the project were picked from the pool of Pamela Smith’s graduate students. Each essay published as part of the edition underwent multiple rounds of internal and sometimes external review to ensure high quality. 14The transcription and encoding were primarily undertaken during palaeography and text workshops (2014–2018), which trained graduate students in Middle French scripts and textual encoding. Senior project members and the digital lead later revised and finalised the XML files. The resulting texts conform to a custom schema developed iteratively during transcription and translation. This schema, influenced by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), derives much of its tag set from TEI conventions and is maintained in the project repositories, where the encoding principles and full tag descriptions are documented in detail. The edition’s tag set includes common structural and editorial elements such as <ab> (anonymous block), (division), (heading), <hand> (handwriting), <add> (addition), <corr> (correction), (deletion), <emph> (emphasis), <exp> (expansion), (figure), <gap> (gap), and <ill> (illegible). Semantic categories extend beyond standard TEI usage, incorporating tags such as <al> (animal), <bp> (body parts), <cn> (currency), <df> (definition), <m> (material), <md> (medical), and <ms> (measurement). These additions enable precise encoding of elements relevant to experimental reconstruction. The manuscript’s multilingual elements are also tagged. Although the schema is only inspired by TEI rather than fully compliant with it, this approach allows for highly specific encoding suited to the project’s aims. A stricter adherence to TEI might have facilitated broader interoperability, yet the documentation is so thorough that reuse remains entirely feasible. 15The website documentation is exceptionally comprehensive, including written explanations, videos, and photographic material from the workshops, offering valuable insight into how the edition was produced and how collaborative, crowdsourced scholarly projects can be organised. Beyond the brief overview on the “About” page, the sections on “Principles of Transcription”, “Translation, and Encoding” provide detailed explanations, while the “Credits” page lists all participants and workshops, allowing the tracing of individual contributions. Fig. 8: The landing page of the digital edition, where the header and all accompanying text are part of an image. This design is perhaps not ideal for users who wish to copy text or access it via a screen reader, as only part of the image’s text content is part of the logo’s alt text. Fig. 9: Dual-pane view showing, on the left, an overview of the manuscript pages and, on the right, the gecko animation used in place of a spinning cursor while pages are loading. Fig. 10: Edition view showing some laboratory notes. The left pane presents the facsimile, while the right pane displays the diplomatic French transcription. Fig. 11: Folio 124v in the edition view. Fig. 12: The same folio as the previous image, showing what happens when the small beaker icon is clicked. The icon links to a research essay on rouge clair, a material discussed in three manuscript entries that was replicated and tested. The link shows a preview of the essay’s findings and allows navigating to the essay itself. 16The digital aspects of the project were developed in a collaboration of Making and Knowing Project members with Performant Software Solutions and Columbia University Libraries.28 The project commits to making their data accessible openly and storing them sustainably by choosing sustainable, open formats for data creation and using Open Access and Open Source whenever possible. Furthermore, the adherence to minimal computing principles privileges durability over presentational aspects. Data storage is handled on third-party virtual servers (such as GitHub, AWS CloudFront, S3, and DigitalOcean). Facsimile images are provided by BnF’s digital library Gallica and integrated into the edition using their IIIF manifests. Each folio is represented as an individual XML file containing diplomatic French, normalized French as well as an English translation. The encoding uses a project-specific schema inspired by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines which can be found in the project repository. The XML base data is converted into HTML and JSON for creating the static site contents using a command line tool called Lizard, named after a sketch on the manuscript’s fol. 124v which became the project’s logo. 17To further highlight the innovative potential of the project, one might have opted to connect the edition and the related research essays beyond merely linking the essays in relevant passages. One could think of the results of replicative experiments as a form of apparatus to the text, just like philologists would add remarks on grammar or linguistic particularities. The replications are more than just results of engagement with the text, they are complementary sources of knowledge that readers can use to read and interpret the text. If the replication results were part of the TEI edition of the text, the data could later be used as training data for research questions such as deep learning recipe extraction. However, it is up for debate how such a direct integration of replication results into a digital edition would be implemented. Sandbox Fig. 13: The sandbox page on GitHub.io used for the less permanent, more experimental parts of the project and for engaging with the digital data. Fig. 14: The corresponding GitHub repository for the sandbox, including information about adding content and contributing to the sandbox. 18The Making and Knowing Project sandbox is a digital platform designed to support exploration and experimentation with the project’s data by students, scholars, and other interested users (Fig. 13). It provides access to a range of digital tools, while also encouraging the development and integration of user-created tools, case studies, and additional resources. The platform features a collection of projects that engage with the underlying data of Secrets of Craft and Nature. These projects represent experimental, provisional, and ongoing work, offering diverse approaches to analysing the content and themes central to Secrets of Craft and Nature and the broader objectives of the Making and Knowing Project. The sandbox provides access to the data underlying the Secrets of Craft and Nature digital edition and offers tools for its analysis, including textual analysis and visualisation methods.29 It also functions as an informal archive for early minimal edition prototypes that predate the current version of the digital edition. In addition, it links to a range of pedagogical materials developed and employed in the Making and Knowing laboratory courses. Technically, the sandbox is implemented as a GitHub repository (Fig. 14), made publicly accessible via a GitHub.io website. However, this front-facing site does not directly host the computational resources themselves but instead provides links to other sections of the project where these are maintained. As noted in Li’s review (Li 2020), the sandbox was conceived in part to separate experimental or in-progress components from the main edition, which is intended for long-term archiving. This separation also supports the project’s commitment to minimal computing principles and ensures reliance on technologies that are more conducive to long-term digital preservation. 19In terms of Digital Humanities, the most interesting part of the sandbox is probably the sub-site “Digital Projects”30 which contains entries such as: “Interacting with the Manuscript object in Python” (2020-11-02), “Understanding and Analyzing the Categories of the Entries in BnF Ms. Fr. 640” (2021-02-01), “Applying Machine Learning to the Manuscript: Semantic Trees, Word Clouds, and Sentence Embedding” (Dana Chaillard), “Visualizing the Semantic Tagging in Secrets of Craft and Nature” (Roni Kaufman), “ms-text-analysis: Files and tools for performing textual analysis of BnF Ms Fr 640” (2020-02-04) as well as “Visualizing Semantic Markup in BnF Ms. Fr. 640” by Making and Knowing postdoctoral scholar Clément Godbarge (2021-03-09). It also allows users to use Voyant Tools to explore the manuscript data (in v1.2.0 using “Normalized French” or “English Translation”). Related repositories to the sandbox are “cu-mkp/m-k-manuscript-data for XML transcriptions and translation of Fr. 640, as well as metadata and derivative files” as well as “cu-mkp/manuscript-object for data extraction, manipulation, transformation, and analysis”. The Manuscript Data Repository contains working files, data as well as XML transcription and translation for BnF Ms. Fr 640 along with complementary data such as metadata and bibliographies.31 The repository is documented extremely well using READMEs. However, the ms-xml subdirectory seems to include files with the naming ending in “preTEI.xml” which aren’t valid TEI files. This would indicate that the creation of TEI-conforming XML outputs was intended although this is in contradiction to the documentation stating that a project-specific schema was used. It is not clear whether TEI-conformant XML files can be found anywhere on the website or whether the creation thereof was implemented at all. The manuscript-object repository provides the Making and Knowing dataset based on the digital critical edition in the form of a custom python manuscript object the use of which is also well-documented in the README.md (including code examples).32 It is to be commended that releases of the contents of the GitHub repositories are archived in Zenodo as well. The edition was inspired by Minimal Computing principles to promote long-term sustainability. Usability 20A minor annoyance is that in many parts of the website, headings are rendered as images rather than digital text, making them inaccessible to screen readers and preventing users from copying them. This may limit navigation for screen reader users, who may miss out on key structural cues across sub-sites. Otherwise, the website is generally intuitive and easy to use, especially following the updated relaunch in 2021 (see Fig. 15, 16, and 17 for different sections of the website). However, the edition view can be slow to load. In such cases, the Making and Knowing logo—a gecko from the manuscript—appears spinning, though this sometimes leads to a timeout. Pre-loading lower-resolution images could improve front-end performance and provide a smoother user experience. Fig. 15: Visualization from the “Resources” tab showing the manuscript’s contents in percentages according to their tagging. The largest category is casting (33.87 %), followed by painting (14.25 %), and others such as practical optics, dyeing, alchemy, printing, household and daily life, and medicine. Fig. 16: “About” page with the start of the section describing the manuscript in detail, including an example of the handwriting. Fig. 17: Helper page explaining how to read and browse the digital edition of manuscript, noting that it consists of four versions (facsimile, diplomatic, normalized, and translation) and describing how the dual-pane view works. 21Furthermore, users may find themselves overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information offered by the Making and Knowing Project. It could be helpful to introduce thematic pathways or improve subject-based access through tagging and faceted search options. Nevertheless, the current site structure is more than adequate for users to navigate and locate relevant materials. If materials will continue to be added in the long term, it will be important to develop efficient ways of accessing the expanding collection of research essays associated with the broader Making and Knowing Project, particularly for users who may not yet know what specifically interests them. 22The project outputs are licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Ending a Long-Term Project 23The original version of this review was written in late 2022 and 2023. Since then, only minor changes have been made to the project, especially the digital scholarly edition at the core of this review.33 At the time, it appeared the project might still be ongoing, based on a Making and Knowing newsletter that mentioned additional funding for digital scholarly editing: In the Making and Knowing newsletter from 17 August 2022, the project announced receiving a new NSF grant to support the development and dissemination of the open-source, customisable tool Edition Crafter. This tool, based on the software developed for Secrets of Craft and Nature, is intended to enable others to publish their own digital critical editions as feature-rich yet sustainable websites. 24The 17 July 2024 newsletter announced the departure of Assistant Director Naomi Rosenkranz in 2024. That year, the project also hosted another Open Laboratory Day at Columbia, during which students participated in a workshop to develop a research and teaching companion intended to help educators use the platform and demonstrate how to incorporate hands-on experimentation in teaching. This research and teaching companion for Making and Knowing is now available through the web portal as well—an open-source, open-access online platform offering curated, searchable, and downloadable guides, lesson plans for hands-on activities, and case studies for research and teaching.34 The Making and Knowing Project has thus produced a wide range of material not only in Digital Humanities and the history of science but also in public outreach and citizen science.35 As part of a series of student projects, the Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Lab (CGUI) at Columbia University, under the direction of Professor Steven Feiner, developed an augmented reality (AR) toolset to complement the Secrets of Craft and Nature Project. These interactive tools are designed to convey the practice-based, experiential knowledge produced in the Making and Knowing Lab. Through visualisation technologies, such as Microsoft HoloLens and Google Tango devices, users are enabled to engage with historical techniques in an immersive manner, experiencing processes rather than solely reading about them. These activities remain connected to the broader intellectual framework of Making and Knowing, though not to the digital scholarly edition, which can now be considered complete. EditionCrafter 25The minimal edition tool, originally developed within the Making and Knowing Project, has since been expanded into a standalone resource: Now known as EditionCrafter, it was presented in a workshop at the 2025 ADHO Digital Humanities Conference in Lisbon.36 While it constitutes a significant and valuable outcome of the broader project, it is not the main focus of this review. Copyrighted in 2022, EditionCrafter appears largely complete, although recent updates to the GitHub repository and the 2025 workshop indicate ongoing development and support. 26EditionCrafter is an open-source platform designed for publishing digital scholarly editions, enabling the creation of diplomatic renderings of texts alongside deep-zoom views of original folios. Editions may include multiple textual layers, such as transcriptions paired with translations, and support the display of editorial notes and glossaries. Inheriting its methodological approach from its parent edition, EditionCrafter employs minimal computing strategies to generate static websites. It operates without a server or backend infrastructure; all components are rendered from XML-TEI at the time of build. Projects may be initiated with as little as a set of image files and corresponding plain text transcriptions. The resulting edition is economical to host and can be maintained on nearly any standard internet hosting service. A notable feature is its permalinking capability, which allows stable references to individual pages within primary source materials. 27Building on the functionality of its predecessor, the development team behind EditionCrafter conducted a survey of typical requirements expressed by their Humanities collaborators. Two tasks often proved challenging for collaborators lacking technical support: the transformation of plain text transcriptions into digital scholarly editions encoded in XML-TEI, and the organisation of image sets for hosting via a IIIF server. In response, the EditionCrafter build process was adapted to better accommodate these use cases. A key requirement is that the XML-TEI file includes references to folio images within the <facsimile> element. A command-line utility, distributed as @cu-mkp/editioncrafter-cli, is provided to convert base documents into the necessary output formats for the final edition. EditionCrafter is designed to function within content management systems (CMS) that support HTML editing. It has been tested across several platforms, including Hugo CMS, Scalar CMS, and the Astro framework. The tool can be embedded directly into an HTML-based website or implemented as a React component within a React application. A ready-to-use example site built with Hugo is available for forking via the project’s GitHub repository. Conclusion 28The experimental history of science aims to replicate historical experiments and recipes in contemporary laboratories. This approach goes beyond revisiting historical texts, using practical making as a method to bridge gaps in the historical record. Recipe texts were once interpreted by craftspeople whose tacit knowledge allowed them to navigate implicit instructions. For modern readers, removed by centuries and lacking this experiential background, such texts often appear opaque. The project’s aim was to recreate aspects of this practical understanding by using making as an epistemic tool. Practical making was both studied in historical texts and used as a method to investigate and fill gaps in the sources that transmit chymical and craft recipes. 29The Making and Knowing Project has had a widespread impact on the history of science and knowledge, beyond the manuscript under review here. The project’s principal investigator, Pamela Smith, published the definitive study From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World (University of Chicago Press, 2022). This book provides a comprehensive account of practical and recipe literature, and of the broader phenomenon of encoding practical knowledge in writing, particularly in how-to books. It examines the relationship between tacit, practical knowledge and its written transmission, exploring what occurred when artisans began to record their recipes and compose tracts that presented their expertise as part of university learning. It considers artisan authors, the use of these texts, and the implications of collecting and reconstructing knowledge, including its global entanglements, situating makers’ writing within broader intellectual and social contexts. Emerging directly from almost a decade of the Making and Knowing Project and related activities, it reflects Smith’s 15–20 years of scholarship in this field and constitutes both a culmination of the project and a major contribution to the state of scholarship on the topic. 30The project has shaped and continues to shape the discipline. Its interactive digital edition of BnF Ms. Fr. 640, alongside documentation of replicated experiments, offers a rich array of resources for both scholars and the public. Li (2020) highlights its pedagogical potential, but one could argue that its most significant contribution lies in popularising experimental methods in the history of science. Moreover, it is a pioneering effort in developing digital editions informed by contributions from citizen scientists and in creating editions of this unique type of text, where experimental reconstructions function as an additional scholarly apparatus. 31A notable feature is the “project sandbox”, a digital platform designed for users to experiment with distant reading techniques. This platform provides access to the full dataset from the digital edition, facilitating data reuse in line with the FAIR principles by ensuring the data is accessible, reusable, and interoperable through the use of standard formats. Within the field of Digital Humanities, the Making and Knowing Project has been a pioneer in adopting and promoting minimal computing principles for digital scholarly editing. These principles have not only guided the technical implementation of the project itself but have also led to the development of a spin-off tool, EditionCrafter. This tool enables users to create sustainable digital scholarly editions with minimal technical expertise, drawing directly on the approach and implementation employed by Making and Knowing. Thus, the project has not only developed a sustainable implementation for its own purposes but has also benefited the wider scholarly community beyond the history of science and knowledge. 32While engagement with materiality, experimental replication, and artisanal tacit knowledge have increasingly become the norm history of science and knowledge, the Making and Knowing Project was at the forefront in integrating the latest and best practices in Digital Humanities trends. Its pioneering approach not only recovers the tacit knowledge of historical craftspeople but also opens new research paths, such as the analysis of historical recipe books through making or distant reading. The project is not merely a study of the past; it has shaped new methods in the historiography of knowledge. As the field continues to evolve, the project will remain a central reference point for researchers and enthusiasts alike. Notes [1] The reviewer’s academic background is in Classics (Neo-Latin), history of science (esp. alchemy) as well as the Digital Humanities. Having written a PhD thesis on a use case for digital methods on the work of an early modern alchemist, she has a background in relevant aspects of the project under review (digital editing, history of science, recipes) and is familiar with the research tradition. Furthermore she has been involved in a project which utilized citizen science in the creation of a learner-oriented, educational digital edition. She also holds a degree in French, the language of the manuscript which is the centerpiece of the digital edition under review. The first draft of this review article was submitted in summer 2023 when the reviewer was still with University of Graz and not yet affiliated with the „Metals, Minerals, and the Life Cycle“ project at Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, in which Pamela Smith is involved. On the experimental history of science see, for example, Principe 2000, Gelius 1997, Fors et al. 2016, Hagendijk 2018, Dupré et al. 2020, Hagendijk et al. 2020, Hendriksen 2020, Sibum 2020, Taape et al. 2020. On experiments in the Digital Humanities see Lang 2022. On replication in the Humanities see Peels and Bouter 2018, Peels 2019. [2] On citizen science see Vohland et al. 2021, on digital editions generated using citizen science meant to serve as educational resources Lang and Spielhofer 2020. [3] In the History of Science, a whole sub-field has emerged investigating artisanal knowledge-making amongst which the Making and Knowing Project is probably the most prominent among many others, see Smith 2006, 2017, 2020b, 2022; Smith et al. 2017, 2020b; Neven 2014, Valleriani 2017, Hagendijk 2018. [4] A whole range of experimental methods has become established in the experimental history of science under the label of ‘RRR methods’. Hendriksen (2020, 314) provides a definition: “Performative methods include, but are not limited to, reconstruction, replication, and re-enactment (RRR) of historical experiments, apparatus, processes, and techniques.” [5] On the so-called ‘Scientific Revolution’ see, for example, Moran 2009 and Principe 2011. Nowadays many scholars are critical of this periodization because it suggests a rapid teleological move towards to our modern notion of science, thereby creating an artificial, ahistorical caesura and discarding other forms of pre-modern knowledge production, such as certain aspects of alchemy which do not fit our modern idea of science. [6] https://web.archive.org/web/20250327111435/https://edition640.makingandknowing.org/#/content/about. Links were archived where possible, however, this is not always technically feasible. [7] https://web.archive.org/web/20250519033653/https://scienceandsociety.columbia.edu/content/research-cluster-making-and-knowing-project; The Making and Knowing Project: https://web.archive.org/web/20250519033648/https://www.makingandknowing.org/. [8] People sub-page: https://web.archive.org/web/20260313151958/https://www.makingandknowing.org/people/. [9] Photo repository for the documentation on the reconstruction experiments: https://web.archive.org/web/20250519033846/https://www.flickr.com/photos/128418753@N06; X: https://web.archive.org/web/20250325182455/https://x.com/makingknowing; Facebook: https://web.archive.org/web/20250519034038/https://www.facebook.com/login/?next=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2FMakingKnowing%2F; YouTube: https://web.archive.org/web/20250519033936/https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCViaSZhCLq9zmI6djVL044Q. [10] https://web.archive.org/web/20250519034127/https://www.makingandknowing.org/publications/; for scholarly publications see, for example: Klein 2020, Smith et al. 2017, Smith et al. 2020b, Taape et al. 2020, Uchacz 2020. [11] https://web.archive.org/web/20250519034324/https://www.makingandknowing.org/support/. [12] https://web.archive.org/web/20250519034156/https://www.makingandknowing.org/collaborators/. [13] https://web.archive.org/web/20250519034410/https://www.makingandknowing.org/the-lab/. [14] https://web.archive.org/web/20250519034311/https://www.makingandknowing.org/digital/. [15] The video lecture by project lead Pamela Smith titled “Learning through Reconstruction: The Making and Knowing Project” (Yale University Art Gallery; July 31, 2018) introduces the reasoning behind the pedagogy of Making and Knowing. https://web.archive.org/web/20250519034533/https://www.youtube.com/embed/zlOyAdg1Td4. [16] https://web.archive.org/web/20250519034500/https://cu-mkp.github.io/2017-workshop-edition/about_mk/. [17] Polanyi 2009; on gestural knowledge: “[…] practical engagement also builds up a working knowledge in the practitioner that Sibum has called ‘gestural knowledge.’ […]” The nature of this gestural knowledge is well-described in his difficult-to-translate German phrase “das in seinem Handlungsvollzug gebundene Wissen”. In: Fors et al. 2016, 92; see also Sibum 2020. On historical-critical experiments (Gelius 1997), replication in the context of historical experiments (Fors et al. 2016) or the so-called ‘RRR methods’ more generally see Hendriksen 2020. It is a matter of discussion in the experimental history of science which term is best suited to describe such research methods: While some favour ‘replication’ (Fors et al. 2016), Gelius suggests ‘historical-critical experiments’ (Gelius 1997). The Making and Knowing Project seems to have chosen ‘reconstruction’ to name its method of ‘trying and testing’ the instructions contained in BnF Ms. Fr. 640. [18] https://web.archive.org/web/20250519034812/https://www.makingandknowing.org/bnf-ms-fr-640/. On the genre of “books of secrets” see Eamon 1990, 1994, 2016; Zweifel 2022. [19] https://web.archive.org/web/20250519034702/https://edition640.makingandknowing.org/#/. [20] https://web.archive.org/web/20250519034649/https://edition640.makingandknowing.org/#/content/about. [21] A few relevant examples are: Godbarge 2020; Camps and Lyautey 2020; Smith 2020a, 2020b. The list can be accessed under: https://web.archive.org/web/20260313152943/https://edition640.makingandknowing.org/essays. [22] https://web.archive.org/web/20260313162434/https://edition640.makingandknowing.org/content/resources. [23] https://web.archive.org/web/20260312112539/https://edition640.makingandknowing.org/content/how-to-use. [24] https://web.archive.org/web/20260312112539/https://edition640.makingandknowing.org/content/resources/reconstruction-insights. [25] https://web.archive.org/web/20250519035228/https://github.com/cu-mkp/m-k-manuscript-data. [26] https://web.archive.org/web/20260430110945/http://web.archive.org/screenshot/https://edition640.makingandknowing.org/folios. [27] https://web.archive.org/web/20250519034649/https://edition640.makingandknowing.org/#/content/about. [28] https://web.archive.org/web/20250519034649/https://edition640.makingandknowing.org/#/content/about. [29] https://web.archive.org/web/20250519035629/https://cu-mkp.github.io/sandbox/ and https://web.archive.org/web/20250519035642/https://github.com/cu-mkp/sandbox; https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4914452. [30] https://web.archive.org/web/20250519035746/https://cu-mkp.github.io/sandbox/docs/index-digital-projects.html. [31] https://web.archive.org/web/20260430111435/https://github.com/cu-mkp/m-k-manuscript-data; https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4724101. [32] https://web.archive.org/web/20250519035912/https://github.com/cu-mkp/manuscript-object. [33] There has been little further development on the digital scholarly edition. Since the reviewer’s visits in October 2022 and August 2023, GitHub records indicate that little has changed in the Making and Knowing Project. Despite the 2022 newsletter’s implication of continued work, the website and repository suggest the project had already mostly concluded by that point. The few identifiable edits include the addition of essays and the correction of minor bugs and transcript errors. These were made or suggested by the Digital Humanities Lead, Terry Capitano, and the project’s PI, Pamela Smith, presumably the remaining permanent staff at Columbia associated with the project. Consequently, the project can now definitely be considered concluded. Still, the continued activity shows that the project and related efforts are continuously being maintained. [34] Research and Teaching Companion to Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France: https://web.archive.org/web/20250519040050/https://teaching640.makingandknowing.org/; https://web.archive.org/web/20250519040208/https://teaching640.makingandknowing.org/resources/digital/. 2024 entry from the Making and Knowing Project newsletter (dated 17 July 2024) reported that the project’s efforts culminated in the Ph.D. summer school Mindscapes – Socio-Natural Sites of Extraction and Knowledge, co-led by Pamela Smith and long-term collaborator Tina Asmussen. They are now working with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science as part of the Metals, Minerals, and Life Cycle project, led by Dagmar Schäfer, and further summer school excursions are planned for 2025 and 2026. [35] The bulk of the pedagogical initiatives and lab seminars seem to have ceased somewhere around 2023, despite a few related activities still ongoing. [36] Developed at the Center for Science and Society at Columbia University by the Making and Knowing Project in collaboration with Performant Software Solutions LLC, EditionCrafter was funded by Grant SES-2218218 from the National Science Foundation (2022). https://web.archive.org/web/20250519035821/https://editioncrafter.org/; https://web.archive.org/web/20250519040007/https://github.com/cu-mkp/editioncrafter. Workshop at DH Lisbon: Nick Laiacona & Christopher Ohge: Publishing Digital Editions with EditionCrafter. References Camps, Celine and Margot Lyautey. 2020. “Ma<r>king and Knowing: Encoding BnF Ms. Fr. 640.” In Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France. Edited by Making and Knowing Project et al., New York: Making and Knowing Project. https://www.doi.org/10.7916/cjhd-wh90. Dupré, Sven, Anna Harris, Julia Kursell, Patricia Lulof, and Maartje Stols-Witlox, eds. 2020. Reconstruction, Replication and Re-enactment in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Eamon, William. 1990. “From the secrets of nature to public knowledge.” In Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, edited by David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman, 333–365. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eamon, William. 1994. Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Eamon, William. 2016. “How to Read a Book of Secrets.” In Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, 1500–1800, edited by Elaine Leong and Alisha Rankin, 23–46. NY: Routledge. Fors, Hjalmar, Lawrence M. Principe, and H. Otto Sibum. 2016. “From the Library to the Laboratory and Back Again: Experiment as a Tool for Historians of Science.” Ambix 63 (2): 85–97. Gelius, Rolf. 1997. “Historische Experimente in Chemie und chemischer Technik.” Chemie in unserer Zeit 31 (4): 162–67. Godbarge, Clément. 2020. “The Manuscript Seen from Afar: A Computational Approach to Ms. Fr. 640.” In Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France. A Digital Critical Edition and English Translation of BnF Ms. Fr. 640, edited by Making and Knowing Project, Pamela H. Smith, Naomi Rosenkranz, Tianna Helena Uchacz, Tillmann Taape, Clément Godbarge, Sophie Pitman, Jenny Boulboullé, Joel Klein, Donna Bilak, Marc Smith, and Terry Catapano. New York: Making and Knowing Project. https://www.doi.org/10.7916/s7f5-5h76. Hagendijk, Thijs. 2018. “Learning a Craft from Books. Historical Re-Enactment of Functional Reading in Gold- and Silversmithing.” Nuncius 33, 198-235. Hagendijk, Thijs, Peter Heering, Lawrence M. Principe, and Sven Dupré. 2020. “Reworking Recipes and Experiments in the Classroom.” In Reconstruction, Replication and Re-enactment in the Humanities and Social Sciences, edited by Sven Dupré, Anna Harris, Julia Kursell, Patricia Lulof, and Maartje Stols-Witlox, 199–224. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Hendriksen, Marieke M. A. 2020. “Rethinking Performative Methods in the History of Science.” Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 43: 313–22. Klein, Joel. 2020. “Methodologies for Making and Knowing: Reconstructions for Historical Research.” In Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France. Edited by Making and Knowing Project et al., New York: Making and Knowing Project. https://www.doi.org/10.7916/s7f5-5h76. Lang, Sarah. 2022. “Experiments in the digital laboratory. What the Computational Humanities can learn about their definition and terminology from the History of Science.” In Fabrikation von Erkenntnis. Experimente in den Digital Humanities, edited by Manuel Burghardt et al., Esch-sur-Alzette (LU): Melusina Press. https://doi.org/10.26298/melusina.8f8w-y749-eitd. Lang, Sarah, and Lukas Spielhofer. 2020. “Digitale Lernplattformen und Open Educational Resources im Altsprachlichen Unterricht I. Technische Spielräume am Beispiel des ›Grazer Repositorium antiker Fabeln‹ (GRaF).” Zeitschrift für digitale Geisteswissenschaften. Wolfenbüttel. https://www.doi.org/10.17175/2020_004. Lan A. Li. 2020. “Crafting Digital Histories of Science: A Review and Tour of Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France.” Isis 112 (3): 586-589. Moran, Bruce T. 2009. Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Neven, Sylvie. 2014. “Transmission of Alchemical and Artistic Knowledge in German Mediaeval and Premodern Recipe Books.” In Laboratories of Art. Alchemy and Art Technology from Antiquity to the 18th Century, edited by Sven Dupré, 23–52. Cham: Springer. Peels, Rik. 2019. “Replicability and Replication in the Humanities.” Research Integrity and Peer Review 4. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41073-018-0060-4. Peels, Rik, and Lex Bouter. 2018. “The Possibility and Desirability of Replication in the Humanities.” Palgrave Communications 4. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-018-0149-x. Polanyi, Michael. 2009. The Tacit Dimension. With a New Foreword by Amartya Sen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Principe, Lawrence. 2000. “Apparatus and Reproducibility in Alchemy.” In Instruments and Experimentation in the History of Chemistry, edited by Frederic Lawrence Holmes and Trevor Harvey Levere, 55–74. Dibner Institute Studies. Cambridge, MA. Principe, Lawrence. 2011. The Scientific Revolution: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. 2001. “History of Science and the Practices of Experiment.” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 23 (1): 51–63. Sibum, H. Otto. 2020. “Science and the Knowing Body: Making Sense of Embodied Knowledge in Scientific Experiment.” In Reconstruction, Replication and Re-enactment in the Humanities and Social Sciences, edited by Sven Dupré, Anna Harris, Julia Kursell, Patricia Lulof, and Maartje Stols-Witlox, 275–94. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Smith, Pamela H. 2006. “Laboratories.” In The Cambridge History of Science 3 / Early Modern Science, edited by Katherine Park and Lorraine Daston, 290–305. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Pamela H. 2017. “The Codification of Vernacular Theories of Metallic Generation in Sixteenth-Century European Mining and Metalworking.” In The Structures of Practical Knowledge, edited by Matteo Valleriani, 371–92. Cham: Springer. Smith, Pamela H. 2022. From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Pamela H. 2020a. “Making the Edition of Ms. Fr. 640.” In Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France. A Digital Critical Edition and English Translation of BnF Ms. Fr. 640, edited by Making and Knowing Project, et al. New York: Making and Knowing Project. https://web.archive.org/web/20260312171930/https://edition640.makingandknowing.org/essays/ann_329_ie_19. Smith, Pamela H. 2020b. “An Introduction to Ms. Fr. 640 and its Author-Practitioner.” In Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France. A Digital Critical Edition and English Translation of BnF Ms. Fr. 640, edited by Making and Knowing Project, et al. https://www.doi.org/10.7916/ny3t-qg71. Smith, Pamela H., Amy R. W. Meyers, and Harold J. Cook. 2017. Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Pamela et al. 2020a. Making and Knowing. A minimal edition of BnF Ms Fr 640 (with diplomatic and normalized transcriptions as well as an English translation). https://web.archive.org/web/20260430111638/https://cu-mkp.github.io/2017-workshop-edition/. Smith, Pamela H., Tianna Helena Uchacz, Naomi Rosenkranz, and Claire Conklin Sabel. 2020b. “The Making of Empirical Knowledge: Recipes, Craft, and Scholarly Communication.” In Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access, edited by Martin Paul Eve and Jonathan Gray, 125–144. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11885.003.0014. Smith, Pamela, Naomi Rosenkranz, Terry Catapano, Caroline Surman, Gregory Schare, and Sophia Qureshi, eds. n.d. Secrets of Craft and Nature Sandbox. https://web.archive.org/web/20260430112009/https://cu-mkp.github.io/sandbox/. Taape, Tillmann, Pamela Smith, and Tianna Uchacz. 2020. “Schooling the Eye and Hand: Performative Methods of Research and Pedagogy in the Making and Knowing Project.” Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 43 (3). Uchacz, Tianna Helena. 2020. “Reconstructing Early Modern Artisanal Epistemologies and an ‘Undisciplined’ Mode of Inquiry.” Isis 111 (3): 606–613. Valleriani, Matteo. 2017. “The Epistemology of Practical Knowledge.” In The Structures of Practical Knowledge, edited by Matteo Valleriani, 1–21. Cham: Springer. Vohland, Katrin, Anne Land-Zandstra, Luigi Ceccaroni, Rob Lemmens, Josep Perelló, Marisa Ponti, Roeland Samson, and Katherin Wagenknecht, eds. 2021. The Science of Citizen Science. Cham: Springer. Zweifel, Simone. 2021. Aus Büchern Bücher machen: Zur Produktion und Multiplikation von Wissen in frühneuzeitlichen Kompilationen. Berlin: De Gruyter. Figures Fig. 1: The main project website, which likely serves as the primary entry point for most users before navigating to the digital edition itself. Fig. 2: “About” page briefly describing the manuscript, linking to high-resolution images in Gallica, and displaying the book’s spine. Fig. 3: The “Digital” section of the project site, which provides access to the digital critical edition, though its title “Digital” may be somewhat confusing. Fig. 4: Overview of the research essays, including an introduction to the manuscript and its physical construction, as well as examples of texts in both French and English, since some essays are available in both languages. Fig. 5: Another example of the essay overview page, here showing essays about the project itself—its encoding, translation, and methodologies—as well as reflections on the edition as a digital text and computational approach. Fig. 6: Example of a research essay presented in the project’s minimal edition format. Fig. 7: Example of an essay that includes an embedded video, illustrating how video documentation makes the experiments accessible to users of the edition in the digital format. Fig. 8: The landing page of the digital edition, where the header and all accompanying text are part of an image. This design is perhaps not ideal for users who wish to copy text or access it via a screen reader, as only part of the image’s text content is part of the logo’s alt text. Fig. 9: Dual-pane view showing, on the left, an overview of the manuscript pages and, on the right, the gecko animation used in place of a spinning cursor while pages are loading. Fig. 10: Edition view showing some laboratory notes. The left pane presents the facsimile, while the right pane displays the diplomatic French transcription. Fig. 11: Folio 124v in the edition view. Fig. 12: The same folio as the previous image, showing what happens when the small beaker icon is clicked. The icon links to a research essay on rouge clair, a material discussed in three manuscript entries that was replicated and tested. The link shows a preview of the essay’s findings and allows navigating to the essay itself. Fig. 13: The sandbox page on GitHub.io used for the less permanent, more experimental parts of the project and for engaging with the digital data. Fig. 14: The corresponding GitHub repository for the sandbox, including information about adding content and contributing to the sandbox. Fig. 15: Visualization from the “Resources” tab showing the manuscript’s contents in percentages according to their tagging. The largest category is casting (33.87 %), followed by painting (14.25 %), and others such as practical optics, dyeing, alchemy, printing, household and daily life, and medicine. Fig. 16: “About” page with the start of the section describing the manuscript in detail, including an example of the handwriting. Fig. 17: Helper page explaining how to read and browse the digital edition of manuscript, noting that it consists of four versions (facsimile, diplomatic, normalized, and translation) and describing how the dual-pane view works.
EDITORIAL: Crowd Editions. Participation, Expertise and Automation in Digital Scholarly Editing
Crowd Editions: Participation, Expertise and Automation in Digital Scholarly Editing 1The idea that scholarly knowledge is generated by the many rather than the few has gained renewed momentum in the early 2000s. As an alternative to small, selective expert editorial … EDITORIAL: Crowd Editions. Participation, Expertise and Automation in Digital Scholarly Editing Read More »
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><paste> Crowd Editions: Participation, Expertise and Automation in Digital Scholarly Editing 1The idea that scholarly knowledge is generated by the many rather than the few has gained renewed momentum in the early 2000s. As an alternative to small, selective expert editorial teams, projects such as Wikipedia and Wikisource have demonstrated that large, loosely organised digital communities can catalogue, structure and make extensive bodies of knowledge publicly accessible. Such forms of collective knowledge production have since been widely discussed under the term crowdsourcing and have given rise to new ways of working, particularly in the fields of cultural heritage research and the digital humanities (Terras 2015; Ridge 2017). In the field of digital editions, too, projects have emerged since the 2010s that open up tasks within the editorial process to a wider public. 2However, with the increasing digitisation of humanities work processes, it is not only the technical tools of editorial practice that have changed, but also the institutional and social context of scholarly practice. Keywords such as Open Science, Citizen Science, Public Humanities or Participation signal a shift towards viewing research as a social process and towards exploring new forms of collaboration between academic institutions and the public. In the field of digital editions in particular, collaborative working methods have developed in this context, discussed under terms such as crowdsourcing, social editing or crowd editing. 3Currently, the question also arises as to what extent crowdsourcing, as a method of digital knowledge aggregation, is falling behind due to competition with generative artificial intelligence processes (Christoforou, Demartini, and Otterbacher 2025) – or what advantages it continues to offer as an effective method of data extraction. Advances in automated processes in areas such as OCR, handwriting recognition or text-based analysis have triggered a new debate on the relationship between algorithmic and human forms of knowledge production. Crowd editions thus also illustrate the general transformation of editorial practice, in which questions of expertise, participation and automation are being renegotiated. 4This special issue of the review journal RIDE is dedicated to these developments under the heading of Crowd Editions. The aim is to review digital editorial projects that employ participatory working methods and make parts of the editorial process accessible to a wider public. The reviews collected in this volume examine such projects from various perspectives and explore the extent to which participatory methods are compatible with the scholarly requirements of digital editions. Concepts and Models of Participatory Editing 5The discussion of participatory forms of editing is closely linked to a range of terms whose usage in scholarly discourse is not always unambiguous. A distinction is often made between social editions and crowd(sourced) editions. Whilst social editions usually refer to collaborative projects in which a community makes editorial decisions and edits texts collectively (Crompton, Arbuckle, and Siemens 2013), crowdsourcing generally refers to a form of division of labour in which clearly defined tasks are delegated to a larger group of participants (Martin, Lessmann, and Voß 2008). 6In practice, these models often overlap. Many projects combine different forms of participation and cannot easily be assigned to a single category. The term citizen science is also increasingly used in the context of humanities research, although its applicability to the humanities is not without controversy (Smolarski, Carius, and Prell 2023). Historical Development 7The involvement of a wider public in academic projects is not a fundamentally new phenomenon. In the natural sciences, forms of voluntary data collection or observation have long existed, which are now summarised under the term citizen science. In the digital humanities, the concept of crowdsourcing in particular has played a central role. Melissa Terras describes crowdsourcing in the digital humanities as a method whereby tasks traditionally carried out by a small circle of experts are outsourced to a larger group of voluntary or semi-professional contributors (Terras 2015). 8The use of crowdsourcing in the digital humanities began to emerge in the early 2000s, in parallel with the development of collaborative platforms such as Wikipedia. An example is the Distributed Proofreaders project (Distributed Proofreaders Foundation 2026), founded in 2000 by Charles Franks, in which digitised texts are proofread by volunteers before being uploaded to Project Gutenberg (Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation 2026), originally founded by Michael S. Hart in 1971. The work is broken down into small units – usually individual pages – and processed in parallel by many contributors. A key motivation for participants is to be an active part of the crowd and the growing collaborative effort. 9The Transcribe Bentham project (Bentham Project 2026), launched in 2010, represented a decisive step towards scholarly editorial work. The project invited volunteers to transcribe manuscript pages from the extensive papers of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham and to carry out basic TEI encoding. This marked the first time that a demanding editorial task had been systematically opened up to a wider public. 10The success of this project has significantly influenced the discussion on participatory forms of editing. Tens of thousands of manuscript pages were transcribed and encoded, and the resulting data is being incorporated into the preparation of the printed complete works of Bentham. At the same time, the project has demonstrated that crowdsourcing can be not only a method for generating large volumes of data, but also a way of involving interested laypeople in scholarly processes (Busch and Roeder 2023). 11In this context, Ben Brumfield coined the term accidental editors to describe those voluntary contributors who, through their participation in transcription projects, acquire editorial skills and thus effectively become contributors to scholarly editorial projects (Brumfield 2017). This observation suggests that the boundary between professional and voluntary editorial work in participatory projects is becoming increasingly blurred. Crowdsourcing in the Digital Humanities and in Digital Editorial Projects 12In the field of digitised cultural heritage and scholarly digital editions, such approaches have been established since the 2000s. Mia Ridge has demonstrated in several studies that crowdsourcing projects in libraries, archives and museums often serve not only to generate data, but also play an important role in scholarly communication and social participation (Ridge 2017; Ridge, Blickhan, and Ferriter 2021). Examples in this volume include the Crowdsourcing Wien project (reviewed by Christian Erlinger) and What’s on the Menu (reviewed by Janosch Förster). Participatory projects can thus both generate research data and establish new forms of interaction between academic institutions and the public. This is evident not only in historical everyday documents such as postcards and menus, but particularly in material where collective, intangible knowledge is the central focus of scholarly investigation, as in Making and Knowing (reviewed by Sarah Lang). 13In the field of scholarly editing, this approach may initially seem unusual. Editions are traditionally regarded as highly specialised scholarly products, the creation of which requires extensive specialist knowledge. Accordingly, opening up this process to a wider public was initially viewed with scepticism. In some cases, however – particularly in smaller and geographically dispersed specialist communities – the ‘crowd’ is also understood as a potentially globally distributed collective of experts. An example of this in this volume is the Papyrological Editor (reviewed by Lavinia Ferretti and Elisa Nury), whilst #everynamecounts (reviewed by Daniel Burckhardt) demonstrates that initial expert platforms can indeed transform into citizen science portals. Opportunities and Challenges 14Integrating a crowd into editorial workflows promises several advantages. One of the most important aspects is the ability to process large volumes of source material that small research teams could scarcely manage on their own. Particularly in projects involving large manuscript collections or vast amounts of source material, the participation of many individuals can significantly accelerate data collection. However, ethical concerns are sometimes raised when crowdsourcing is viewed merely as a means of obtaining cheap labour and the public engagement aspect is disregarded (Busch, Roeder, and Prell 2025). 15Furthermore, participatory projects can play an important role in scholarly communication and social participation. The involvement of interested citizens can help to raise the profile of humanities research and establish new forms of interaction between research institutions and the public. However, this process is by no means one-sided: in addition to recognition for their contribution, citizen scientists also gain in-depth knowledge of the material, thereby creating forms of knowledge distribution that in some respects anticipate traditional forms of scientific public engagement. 16At the same time, crowdsourcing projects involve considerable organisational challenges. As several studies have shown, the successful use of participatory methods requires careful project management as well as continuous support for the participating community (Ridge 2017). Crowdsourcing is therefore not a simple tool for reducing workload; on the contrary, it often requires additional resources for community management, technical infrastructure and quality assurance. Worth mentioning in this volume is the review of What’s on the Menu, not least because the service has since been discontinued by its operators, and the review thus also serves a documentary function. 17Issues of academic quality also play a central role. Contributions from a large and heterogeneous group of participants must be reviewed and integrated consistently. In many projects, multi-stage control mechanisms are used to this end, such as editorial checks, peer validation within the crowd, or automated verification procedures. However, it is also the case that a crowd community evolves over time into an expert crowd, which in turn can contribute to increasing self-regulation and quality assurance within the community, provided that adequate opportunities for exchange exist. 18The discussion on crowdsourcing is also influenced today by advances in the field of artificial intelligence. Automatic handwriting recognition, OCR processes and large language models open up new possibilities for processing historical texts. In the Digital Humanities, such processes now take on tasks that were previously considered typical applications of crowdsourcing, such as the transcription and annotation of historical documents. At the same time, the question arises as to whether human crowd work, or parts thereof, could be replaced by automated processes in the long term. 19Within the Digital Humanities, however, this development is increasingly understood not as a simple substitution of human labour by machines, but as a transformation of the work processes themselves. Although automated methods enable the faster processing of large volumes of text, they remain dependent on training data, which often originates from previously manually generated or curated datasets. Crowdsourcing projects have contributed significantly to the creation of such ground truth corpora, which serve as training and evaluation data for handwriting recognition, OCR or other forms of automated text analysis. The crowd thus functions not only as a workforce in the editorial process, but also as a producer of key data infrastructures upon which many AI applications in the digital humanities are built. 20Current research, therefore, suggests that the relationship between human and machine work is more complex than a simple competitive perspective would suggest. Whilst automated methods now achieve remarkable results in many areas, well-trained citizen scientists can still achieve high levels of accuracy in certain tasks (Brumfield and Evans 2025). This applies in particular to material that exhibits a high degree of diversity (e.g. typescripts and manuscripts) and consists of small or abstract documents (e.g. index cards). Automated methods continue to reach their limits, particularly with highly variable layouts, damaged documents or idiosyncratic handwriting (Werner and Cugliana 2026), whereas human editors can contribute contextual knowledge and interpretative skills. 21Furthermore, crowdsourcing and AI methods differ not only in terms of their technical capabilities but also in terms of their scientific functions. In the current DH debate, it is repeatedly pointed out that algorithmic methods often operate as ‘black boxes’, whose decision-making processes are only partially comprehensible to users. Participatory projects, on the other hand, can make editorial decisions visible and enable scholarly work processes to be designed transparently. In this sense, crowd editions contribute not only to data generation but also to the epistemic traceability of editorial work. 22At the same time, crowdsourcing projects often fulfil additional roles within the research landscape. They serve, for instance, as instruments of scholarly communication, education or social participation, and make it possible to make historical source collections accessible to a wider public. This aspect can only be replaced to a limited extent by automated processes. 23This suggests that future working models may rely more heavily on hybrid approaches, combining automated processes with human collaboration. In such models, AI systems can, for example, handle initial transcription or recognition steps, whilst the crowd is deployed for corrections, contextualisation or more complex interpretative tasks. The role of the crowd thus potentially shifts from primary data collection towards tasks of validation, curation and interpretation of algorithmically generated results. Conclusion and Outlook 24The reviews collected in this volume examine crowd-sourced editions from various perspectives. Some projects place particular emphasis on the aspect of citizen science and use participatory methods as a tool for educational work and social engagement. Other projects focus more strongly on the indexing of previously neglected source materials, such as postcards, menus or other forms of everyday documents. Still others can be understood as platform-based research infrastructures that primarily serve specialised academic communities. 25The contributions in this volume demonstrate that crowd editions now constitute a diverse and dynamic field within digital scholarly editing. At the same time, it becomes clear that many projects have so far been inadequately documented or scientifically evaluated. Reviews can play an important role here by making projects visible and comparable, situating them within broader research contexts, and ensuring their long-term documentation. 26In the long term, the question arises as to what role participatory methods will play in future editorial practice. Crowd editions are not only a tool for managing large volumes of data, but also a testing ground for new forms of collaboration between academia and the public. In a research landscape increasingly characterised by openness, interdisciplinarity and digital infrastructure, they could contribute to a greater understanding of editorial work as a collective knowledge process. References Bentham Project. 2026. Transcribe Bentham. A Participatory Initiative. https://web.archive.org/web/20260508072837/https://transcribe-bentham.ucl.ac.uk/td/Transcribe_Bentham. Brumfield, Ben. 2017. “Accidental Editors.” In Advances in Digital Scholarly Editing: Papers Presented at the DiXiT Conferences in The Hague, Cologne, and Antwerp, edited by Peter Boot, Anna Cappellotto and Wout Dillen, 69–83. Leiden: Sidestone Press. https://web.archive.org/web/20260410231134/https://www.sidestone.com/books/advances-in-digital-scholarly-editing. Brumfield, Ben, and Connor Evans. 2025. What’s the Character Error Rate of a Volunteer? Analyzing accuracy in cultural heritage crowdsourcing projects. Digital Humanities Conference 2025, Lisbon, 18 July 2025. Program Agenda, DH2025 LOC. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16084200. Busch, Anna, and Torsten Roeder. 2023. „Crowdsourcing in digitalen Editionen – ein Themenband der Rezensionszeitschrift RIDE.“ In Partizipative Transkriptionsprojekte in Museen, Archiven und Bibliotheken, edited by Diana Stört and Anita Hermannstädter, 47–49. Berlin: Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (MfN) – Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science. https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bsz:14-qucosa2-926062. Busch, Anna, Torsten Roeder, and Martin Prell. 2025. „‘Die Hölle, das sind die anderen.‘ Crowdsourcing in digitalen Editionen.“ DHd 2025: Under Construction (DHd2025), Bielefeld, Germany. Zenodo, 2025. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14944585. Christoforou, Evgenia, Gianluca Demartini, and Jahna Otterbacher. 2025. “Crowdsourcing or AI-Sourcing? Considering the impact of generative artificial intelligence on data annotation tasks.” Communications of the ACM, 4 March 2025. https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/crowdsourcing-or-ai-sourcing/. Crompton, Constance, Alyssa Arbuckle, and Raymond Siemens. 2013. “Understanding the Social Edition Through Iterative Implementation: The Case of the Devonshire MS (BL Add MS 17492).” Scholarly and Research Communication. 4 (3). https://doi.org/10.22230/src.2013v4n3a118. Distributed Proofreaders Foundation. 2026. Distributed Proofreaders. Preserving History One Page at a Time. https://web.archive.org/web/20260507101008/https://www.pgdp.net/c/. Martin, Nicole, Stefan Lessmann, and Stefan Voß. 2008. „Crowdsourcing: Systematisierung praktischer Ausprägungen und verwandter Konzepte.“ Multikonferenz Wirtschaftsinformatik, MKWI 2008, Munich, 26 February 2008 – 28 February 2008, Proceedings. Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. 2026. Project Gutenberg. https://web.archive.org/web/20260502174313/https://gutenberg.org/. Ridge, Mia, ed. 2017. Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage. First issued in paperback. Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities. London New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. Ridge, Mia, Samantha Blickhan, and Meghan Ferriter, eds. 2021. The Collective Wisdom Handbook: Perspectives on Crowdsourcing in Cultural Heritage – community review version. PubPub. https://doi.org/10.21428/a5d7554f.1b80974b. Smolarski, René, Hendrikje Carius, and Martin Prell, eds. 2023. “Citizen Science in den Geschichtswissenschaften: methodische Perspektive oder perspektivlose Methode?” DH & CS – Schriften des Netzwerks für digitale Geisteswissenschaften und Citizen Science, Vol. 3. Göttingen: V&R unipress. Terras, Melissa. 2015. “Crowdsourcing in the Digital Humanities.” In A New Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens and John Unsworth, 420–38. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118680605.ch29. Werner, Nicolas, and Elisa Cugliana. 2026. “Transcribing the Untranscribable: Automating Recognition of Text and Image in Multimodal Medieval Manuscripts from Law to Divination.” DHd 2026: Not Just Text, Not Just Data (DHd2026), Vienna, Austria. Zenodo 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18696365. </paste>
Swiss Editions: Call for Reviews (English)
The Institute for Documentology and Scholarly Editing (IDE) invites reviews for an upcoming RIDE issue dedicated to Scholarly Digital Editions with a connection to Switzerland. This special issue will review digital scholarly editions that are produced in Switzerland, focus on … Swiss Editions: Call for Reviews (English) Read More »
The Institute for Documentology and Scholarly Editing (IDE) invites reviews for an upcoming RIDE issue dedicated to Scholarly Digital Editions with a connection to Switzerland. This special issue will review digital scholarly editions that are produced in Switzerland, focus on Swiss history, literature, or culture, or concern people who lived in Switzerland at any point in their lives. Despite limited funding, numerous innovative edition projects have emerged in Switzerland in recent years, and a vibrant community has grown – yet many questions about use, standards, sustainability, and interoperability remain open. By focusing on the Swiss context (multilingual source materials, regional heritage, and national infrastructure), this issue aims to highlight exemplary practices and encourage exchange between Swiss projects and the international digital editing community. We welcome reviews of digital scholarly editions across all disciplines that fall within the broad scope described. In particular, we encourage reviews of: Editions developed by Swiss institutions or research teams, regardless of the subject matter or language. Editions focusing on Swiss-related materials, such as historical documents, literary works, or data about Switzerland’s regions and cultural heritage. Editions centering on figures with ties to Switzerland, including authors, scholars, or historical persons who were born, lived, or worked in Switzerland. In addition to the general criteria for reviewing digital editions as outlined by the IDE’s guidelines, reviewers should consider aspects especially pertinent to these editions – for example, how the edition handles multilingual content or multiple scripts (if applicable), the integration with Swiss research infrastructures (such as national libraries, archives or data infrastructures), and any features that make the edition particularly valuable. Reviews should evaluate the depth and quality of the scholarly work (transcription, annotation, commentary, etc.), the technological implementation, and the resource’s user experience. Submission Details Expression of interest: Before you begin writing a review, please send a brief email to the editors at ride-ch@i-d-e.de with (1) the edition you propose to review, (2) your institutional affiliation, and (3) a short statement of your expertise and any connection to the project. This advance notice helps us prevent duplicate reviews and manage potential conflicts of interest. We also encourage you to consult the list of projects currently under review (available on the RIDE website) to ensure the edition is not already being reviewed. Language and length: Reviews may be written in English or any official language of Switzerland (French, Italian, German, Rumantsch), and should typically range from about 2,000 to 5,000 words (to ensure sufficient depth of discussion). Every submission will be subject to editorial and double-blind peer review, as RIDE aims to publish reviews at the level of scholarly articles. To reach the desired depth, please plan for a minimum length of roughly 2,000 words. Format: Please submit your review as an editable text file (DOCX format preferred to facilitate conversion to TEI). Include any figures or screenshots as separate image files (PNG format), and indicate in the text where each image should be placed (e.g., “(here image-1.png)”). Along with the review text, provide a short abstract in English (even if the review is in another language) to accompany the published article. Also, fill out a short questionnaire to collect specific (meta-)information. Guidelines and checklist: All authors should familiarize themselves with the RIDE writing guidelines and submission guidelines before submitting. These guidelines outline the expectations for content and citation format, and following them will streamline the editorial process. In particular, please ensure your review addresses the relevant points from the IDE’s Criteria for Reviewing Scholarly Digital Editions and that it situates the edition within broader scholarly and technical contexts. At the time of final submission, you will also need to complete a RIDE questionnaire (for digital editions, see the questionnaire for digital editions). This questionnaire collects standardized information about the resource and should be filled out to accompany your review. Timeline: Submission is open-ended. Originally, we anticipated a deadline of October 31, 2026, but the issue will operate on a rolling release model. This means reviews will be edited and published online in RIDE on an ongoing basis throughout 2027 as they pass peer review. The special issue will be overseen by Elena Spadini (University of Bern), Beat Immenhauser (Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences), and Tobias Hodel (University of Bern and Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences) as guest editors. Publishing process: RIDE was founded in 2014 to provide a forum for the critical evaluation of digital scholarly editions. The journal is open access – accepted reviews are published on the RIDE platform in HTML and PDF formats, and a TEI-XML version of each review is also made available for download. All reviews undergo a double-blind peer review process to ensure they meet scholarly standards. Publications are released under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license, and no fees are charged for submission, processing, or publication. By contributing to this issue, reviewers help advance best practices in digital scholarly editing and contribute to an ongoing discourse on digital edition methodologies within and beyond Switzerland. The three most impressive reviews will be awarded a RIDE Award. Suggested Editions for Review Below is a non-exhaustive, alphabetically sorted list of digital scholarly editions that could be reviewed for this special issue. These suggestions include editions produced in Switzerland or closely related to Swiss history and culture. (Strikethrough indicates projects that have already been assigned to a reviewer and thus cannot be selected.) Ajax Multi-Commentary (https://mromanello.github.io/ajax-multi-commentary/) – A multi-commentary platform about Sophocles’ Ajax Anton Webern Gesamtausgabe (https://edition.anton-webern.ch/home) – A critical historical edition of the works of the composer and conductor Anton Webern. Bernoulli-Euler Online (BEOL) (https://bernoulli-euler.dhlab.unibas.ch/) – Digital edition and database of the works and correspondence of the Bernoulli family and Leonhard Euler (University of Basel). Bullinger Digital (https://www.bullinger-digital.ch/) – Online edition of the correspondence of Heinrich Bullinger (1504–1575), a Swiss Reformation leader. BurckhardtSource (https://burckhardtsource.org/) – Semantic digital edition of the European correspondence to Swiss art historian Jacob Burckhardt. Correspondance de Jean-Alphonse Turrettini 1671-1737 (https://humanities.unige.ch/turrettini/) – Turrettini’s letters, a major source for early modern European Protestant history Denis de Rougemont, l’intégrale en ligne (https://www.unige.ch/rougemont/) – Retour, en textes et en images, sur les étapes d’une vie et d’un parcours intellectuel. Der späte Nietzsche (https://nietzsche.philhist.unibas.ch/) – A critical edition focusing on Nietzsche’s late writings. Desenrollando el cordel (https://desenrollandoelcordel.unige.ch/inicio.html) – The University of Geneva’s collection of Spanish chapbooks. Digital Statius: the Achilleid (<a href="https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fachilleid.unige.ch%2Fverse&data=05%7C02%7Celena.spadini%40unibe.ch%7C6bff664dd84c4a408c2d08de89c388e7%7Cd400387a212f43eaac7f77aa12d7977e%7C1%7C0%7C639099670091517803%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=1rJIw%2Fkd3WygtzqOiPb%2F7J2aJrgSgQY%2BU06XZr3L00o%3D&reserved=0">https://achilleid.unige.ch/verse) – A critical edition of the Achilleid. Digitale Gesamtausgabe Jeremias Gotthelf (https://gotthelf-digital.ch/) – Digital historical-critical edition of the works and letters of Jeremias Gotthelf (Albert Bitzius, 1797–1854). Diplomatic Documents of Switzerland (Dodis) (https://www.dodis.ch/de) – Online database and edition of key documents on Swiss foreign policy since 1848. Gottfried Semper – Der Stil (https://www.semper-edition.ch/) – Digital edition of Der Stil by Gottfried Semper (1803–1879), with scholarly commentary (ETH Zurich). Grammateus (https://grammateus.unige.ch/home) – A research environment on Greek documentary papyri from Egypt. Gustave Roud. Textes & Archives (https://roud.unil.ch) – A complement to the paper editions of the complete works of Gustave Roud. Hermann Burger: Lokalbericht (https://www.lokalbericht.unibe.ch/) – Digital edition of Lokalbericht, a literary work by Swiss author Hermann Burger (1942–1989). Johann Georg Sulzer – Johann Jakob Bodmer: Briefwechsel (https://www.sulzer-briefe.uni-halle.de/sb/) – Online edition of the correspondence between J. G. Sulzer and J. J. Bodmer (18th-century intellectuals, Bodmer based in Zurich). Kritische Robert Walser-Ausgabe (Electronic Edition) (https://kwae.kritische-walser-ausgabe.ch/kwae.html) – The digital component of the critical edition of Robert Walser’s works, including transcriptions of Walser’s “Mikrogramme” (microscripts). Nachlass Karl Barth (https://kbga.karl-barth.ch/) – The scholarly edition of the oeuvres of the theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968). Johann Caspar Lavater: Historisch-kritische Edition ausgewählter Briefwechsel (JCLB) (https://www.jclavater-briefwechsel.ch/) – Online edition of the correspondence of Lavater Rousseau Online (https://www.rousseauonline.ch/) – Full-text digital edition of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s collected works in their first Geneva edition (1780–1789). Schweizerische Rechtsquellen / Swiss Law Sources (https://editio.ssrq-online.ch/) – Historic Edition of Law Sources from the Middle Ages to 1798. To the reader (<a href="https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fearlymodernprefaces.unige.ch%2F&data=05%7C02%7Celena.spadini%40unibe.ch%7C6bff664dd84c4a408c2d08de89c388e7%7Cd400387a212f43eaac7f77aa12d7977e%7C1%7C0%7C639099670091549098%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=bKTktmQuCEgid8pbZAJ3xHIBC9rn%2Bk1GQR7MdlK8Ge8%3D&reserved=0">https://earlymodernprefaces.unige.ch) – The English prefaces to readers in books printed between 1475 and 1623 Apart from the above suggestions, reviews of other digital editions are welcome as long as they fit the thematic profile of the issue. Please note that projects already under review by RIDE cannot be considered for this issue. We look forward to your contributions and to shedding light on the rich array of scholarly digital editions from and about Switzerland. By reviewing these resources, you will help researchers and cultural heritage practitioners understand the strengths of each project and promote high standards for future digital editions. Please feel free to reach out to the editors at any time if you have questions about the suitability of a project or the review process. Contact: ride-ch@i-d-e.de (RIDE Swiss Editions Issue Editors) Last updated: April 2026 (rolling submissions in progress)
Resource reviewed Title crowdsourcing.wien Editors Wien Museum; Wienbibliothek im Rathaus URI https://crowdsourcing.wien Publication Date 2022 Date of last access 01.05.2025 Reviewer Name Erlinger, Christian Affiliation LibrErli – Christian Erlinger – Informatik für Bibliotheken, Archive und Museen Place Gars, Krems, Wien … Factsheet Read More »
Resource reviewed Title crowdsourcing.wien Editors Wien Museum; Wienbibliothek im Rathaus URI https://crowdsourcing.wien Publication Date 2022 Date of last access 01.05.2025 Reviewer Name Erlinger, Christian Affiliation LibrErli – Christian Erlinger – Informatik für Bibliotheken, Archive und Museen Place Gars, Krems, Wien Email christian@librerli.eu Documentation Bibliographic description Is it easily possible to describe the project bibliographically along the schema “responsible editors, publishing/hosting institution, year(s) of publishing”? (cf. Catalogue 1.2) Contributors Are the contributors (editors, institutions, associates) of the project fully documented? (cf. Catalogue 1.4) Contacts Does the project list contact persons? (cf. Catalogue 1.5) Selection Is the selection of materials of the project explicitly documented? (cf. Catalogue 2.1) Reasonability of the selection Is the selection by and large reasonable? (cf. Catalogue 2.1) Archiving of data Does the documentation include information about the long term sustainability of the basic data (archiving of the data)? (cf. Catalogue 4.16) Aims Are the aims and purposes of the project explicitly documented? (cf. Catalogue 3.1) Methods Are the methods employed in the project explicitly documented? (cf. Catalogue 3.1) Data model Does the project document which data model (e.g. TEI) has been used and for what reason? (cf. Catalogue 3.7) Help Does the project offer help texts concerning the use of the project? (cf. Catalogue 4.15) Citation Does the project supply citation guidelines (i.e. how to cite the project or a part of it)? (cf. Catalogue 4.8) Completion Does the editon regard itself as a completed project (i.e. not promise further modifications and additions)? (cf. Catalogue 4.16) Institutional curation Does the project provide information about institutional support for the curation and sustainability of the project? (cf. Catalogue 4.16) Contents Previous edition Has the material been previously edited (in print or digitally)? (cf. Catalogue 2.2) Materials used Does the edition make use of these previous editions? (cf. Catalogue 2.2) Introduction Does the project offer an introduction to the subject-matter (the author(s), the work, its history, the theme, etc.) of the project? (cf. Catalogue 4.15) Bibliography Does the project offer a bibliography? (cf. Catalogue 2.3) Commentary Does the project offer a scholarly commentary (e.g. notes on unclear passages, interpretation, etc.)? (cf. Catalogue 2.3) Contexts Does the project include or link to external resources with contextual material? (cf. Catalogue 2.3) Images Does the project offer images of digitised sources? (cf. Catalogue 2.3) Image quality Does the project offer images of an acceptable quality? (cf. Catalogue 4.6) Transcriptions Is the text fully transcribed? (cf. Catalogue 2.3) Text quality Does the project offer texts of an acceptable quality (typos, errors, etc.)? (cf. Catalogue 4.6) Indices Does the project feature compilations indices, registers or visualisations that offer alternative ways to access the material? (cf. Catalogue 4.5) Types of documents Which kinds of documents are at the basis of the project? (cf. Catalogue 1.3 and 2.1) Single work, Letters Document era What era(s) do the documents belong to? (cf. Catalogue 1.3 and 2.1) Modern Subject Which perspective(s) do the editors take towards the edited material? How can the edition be classified in general terms? (cf. Catalogue 1.3) History Spin-Offs Does the project offer any spin-offs? (cf. Catalogue 4.11) None Access modes Browse by By which categories does the project offer to browse the contents? (cf. Catalogue 4.3) Other: randomized Simple search Does the project offer a simple search? (cf. Catalogue 4.4) Advanced search Does the project offer an advanced search? (cf. Catalogue 4.4) Wildcard search Does the search support the use of wildcards? (cf. Catalogue 4.4) Index Does the search offer an index of the searched field? (cf. Catalogue 4.4) Suggest functionalities Does the search offer autocompletion or suggest functionalities? (cf. Catalogue 4.4) Help texts Does the project offer help texts for the search? (cf. Catalogue 4.4) Aims and methods Audience Who is the intended audience of the project? (cf. Catalogue 3.3) Interested public Typology Which type fits best for the reviewed project? (cf. Catalogue 3.3 and 5.1) Digital library Critical editing In how far is the text critically edited? (cf. Catalogue 3.6) None XML Is the data encoded in XML? (cf. Catalogue 3.7) Standardized data model Is the project employing a standardized data model (e.g. TEI)? (cf. Catalogue 3.7) Types of text Which kinds or forms of text are presented? (cf. Catalogue 3.5.) Edited text, Semantic data Technical accessability Persistent identification Are there persistent identifiers and an addressing system for the edition and/or parts/objects of it and which mechanism is used to that end? (cf. Catalogue 4.8) None Interfaces Are there technical interfaces like OAI-PMH, REST etc., which allow the reuse of the data of the project in other contexts? (cf. Catalogue 4.9) None Open Access Is the edition Open Access? Accessability of the basic data Is the basic data (e.g. the XML) of the project accessible for each part of the edition (e.g. for a page)? (cf. Catalogue 4.12) Download Can the entire raw data of the project be downloaded (as a whole)? (cf. Catalogue 4.9) Reuse Can you use the data with other tools useful for this kind of content? (cf. Catalogue 4.9) Declaration of rights Are the rights to (re)use the content declared? (cf. Catalogue 4.13) License Under what license are the contents released? (cf. Catalogue 4.13) Multiple licenses
Resource reviewed Title The Making and Knowing Project. Intersections of Craft Making and Scientific Knowing Editors Pamela H. Smith, Naomi Rosenkranz, Tianna Helena Uchacz, Tillmann Taape, Clément Godbarge, Sophie Pitman, Jenny Boulboullé, Joel Klein, Donna Bilak, Marc Smith, Terry Catapano … Factsheet Read More »
Resource reviewed Title The Making and Knowing Project. Intersections of Craft Making and Scientific Knowing Editors Pamela H. Smith, Naomi Rosenkranz, Tianna Helena Uchacz, Tillmann Taape, Clément Godbarge, Sophie Pitman, Jenny Boulboullé, Joel Klein, Donna Bilak, Marc Smith, Terry Catapano URI https://www.makingandknowing.org/bnf-ms-fr-640/ Publication Date 2020 Date of last access 05.05.2025 Reviewer Name Lang, Sarah Affiliation Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Place Berlin Email slang@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de Documentation Bibliographic description Is it easily possible to describe the project bibliographically along the schema “responsible editors, publishing/hosting institution, year(s) of publishing”? (cf. Catalogue 1.2) Contributors Are the contributors (editors, institutions, associates) of the project fully documented? (cf. Catalogue 1.4) Contacts Does the project list contact persons? (cf. Catalogue 1.5) Selection Is the selection of materials of the project explicitly documented? (cf. Catalogue 2.1) Reasonability of the selection Is the selection by and large reasonable? (cf. Catalogue 2.1) Archiving of data Does the documentation include information about the long term sustainability of the basic data (archiving of the data)? (cf. Catalogue 4.16) Aims Are the aims and purposes of the project explicitly documented? (cf. Catalogue 3.1) Methods Are the methods employed in the project explicitly documented? (cf. Catalogue 3.1) Data model Does the project document which data model (e.g. TEI) has been used and for what reason? (cf. Catalogue 3.7) Help Does the project offer help texts concerning the use of the project? (cf. Catalogue 4.15) Citation Does the project supply citation guidelines (i.e. how to cite the project or a part of it)? (cf. Catalogue 4.8) Completion Does the editon regard itself as a completed project (i.e. not promise further modifications and additions)? (cf. Catalogue 4.16) Institutional curation Does the project provide information about institutional support for the curation and sustainability of the project? (cf. Catalogue 4.16) Contents Previous edition Has the material been previously edited (in print or digitally)? (cf. Catalogue 2.2) Materials used Does the edition make use of these previous editions? (cf. Catalogue 2.2) Introduction Does the project offer an introduction to the subject-matter (the author(s), the work, its history, the theme, etc.) of the project? (cf. Catalogue 4.15) Bibliography Does the project offer a bibliography? (cf. Catalogue 2.3) Commentary Does the project offer a scholarly commentary (e.g. notes on unclear passages, interpretation, etc.)? (cf. Catalogue 2.3) Contexts Does the project include or link to external resources with contextual material? (cf. Catalogue 2.3) Images Does the project offer images of digitised sources? (cf. Catalogue 2.3) Image quality Does the project offer images of an acceptable quality? (cf. Catalogue 4.6) Transcriptions Is the text fully transcribed? (cf. Catalogue 2.3) Text quality Does the project offer texts of an acceptable quality (typos, errors, etc.)? (cf. Catalogue 4.6) Indices Does the project feature compilations indices, registers or visualisations that offer alternative ways to access the material? (cf. Catalogue 4.5) Types of documents Which kinds of documents are at the basis of the project? (cf. Catalogue 1.3 and 2.1) Single manuscript Document era What era(s) do the documents belong to? (cf. Catalogue 1.3 and 2.1) Early modern Subject Which perspective(s) do the editors take towards the edited material? How can the edition be classified in general terms? (cf. Catalogue 1.3) History, History of Science Spin-Offs Does the project offer any spin-offs? (cf. Catalogue 4.11) None Access modes Browse by By which categories does the project offer to browse the contents? (cf. Catalogue 4.3) Pages, Images Simple search Does the project offer a simple search? (cf. Catalogue 4.4) Advanced search Does the project offer an advanced search? (cf. Catalogue 4.4) Wildcard search Does the search support the use of wildcards? (cf. Catalogue 4.4) Index Does the search offer an index of the searched field? (cf. Catalogue 4.4) Suggest functionalities Does the search offer autocompletion or suggest functionalities? (cf. Catalogue 4.4) Help texts Does the project offer help texts for the search? (cf. Catalogue 4.4) Aims and methods Audience Who is the intended audience of the project? (cf. Catalogue 3.3) Scholars, Interested public Typology Which type fits best for the reviewed project? (cf. Catalogue 3.3 and 5.1) Enriched edition Critical editing In how far is the text critically edited? (cf. Catalogue 3.6) Transmission examined, Palaeographic annotations, Normalization, Variants, Commentary notes XML Is the data encoded in XML? (cf. Catalogue 3.7) Standardized data model Is the project employing a standardized data model (e.g. TEI)? (cf. Catalogue 3.7) Types of text Which kinds or forms of text are presented? (cf. Catalogue 3.5.) Facsimiles, Diplomatic transcription, Edited text, Translations, Commentaries Technical accessability Persistent identification Are there persistent identifiers and an addressing system for the edition and/or parts/objects of it and which mechanism is used to that end? (cf. Catalogue 4.8) DOI Interfaces Are there technical interfaces like OAI-PMH, REST etc., which allow the reuse of the data of the project in other contexts? (cf. Catalogue 4.9) None Open Access Is the edition Open Access? Accessability of the basic data Is the basic data (e.g. the XML) of the project accessible for each part of the edition (e.g. for a page)? (cf. Catalogue 4.12) Download Can the entire raw data of the project be downloaded (as a whole)? (cf. Catalogue 4.9) Reuse Can you use the data with other tools useful for this kind of content? (cf. Catalogue 4.9) Declaration of rights Are the rights to (re)use the content declared? (cf. Catalogue 4.13) License Under what license are the contents released? (cf. Catalogue 4.13) Other: Couldn’t find rights declaration but it seems implied that reuse is permitted Personnel Editors Bilak, Donna Boulboullé, Jenny Catapano, Terry Godbarge, Clément Klein, Joel Pitman, Sophie Rosenkranz, Naomi Smith, Marc Smith, Pamela Taape, Tillmann Uchacz, Tianna Helena Programmers Catapano, Terry Advisors Gil, Alex Contributors Abruzzi, Ray Ahmed, Atif Anantharaman, Divya Atkinson, Jo Kirby Beentjes, Tonny Bol, Marjolijn Buscarino, Bella Chaillard, Dana Cherian, Philip Debuiche, Colin Elmer, Hannah Glenhaber, Linus Hermens, Erma Hu, Bingyan Hu, Christine Kaufman, Roni Kumar, Matthew Kumar, Mehul Lacey, Andrew Lyautey, Margot Macahilig, Christian Maragi, Varsha Mehrish, Divya Munoz, Sarah Nahley, Charlotte Palframan, Jeffrey Patel, Nilam Pensack, Miriam Rechberg, Carolin Sabel, Claire Schare, Gregory Shende, Tanisha Shulman, Camilla Sonnenberg, Scott Stijnman, Ad Suryanarayanan, Sharan Tetik, Emre Touze-Peiffer, Ludovic Troth, Kelsey Vandermel, Jacklyn Vandermel, Katie Vandermel, Katie Vikram, Karuna Wayno, Jeffrey
Resource reviewed Title What’s on the Menu? Editors New York Public Library URI https://menus.nypl.org/ Publication Date 2011–2024 Date of last access 14.03.2025 Reviewer Name Förster, Janosch Affiliation SLUB Dresden Place Dresden Email Janosch.Foerster@slub-dresden.de Documentation Bibliographic description Is it easily possible … Factsheet Read More »
Resource reviewed Title What’s on the Menu? Editors New York Public Library URI https://menus.nypl.org/ Publication Date 2011–2024 Date of last access 14.03.2025 Reviewer Name Förster, Janosch Affiliation SLUB Dresden Place Dresden Email Janosch.Foerster@slub-dresden.de Documentation Bibliographic description Is it easily possible to describe the project bibliographically along the schema “responsible editors, publishing/hosting institution, year(s) of publishing”? (cf. Catalogue 1.2) Contributors Are the contributors (editors, institutions, associates) of the project fully documented? (cf. Catalogue 1.4) Contacts Does the project list contact persons? (cf. Catalogue 1.5) Selection Is the selection of materials of the project explicitly documented? (cf. Catalogue 2.1) Reasonability of the selection Is the selection by and large reasonable? (cf. Catalogue 2.1) Archiving of data Does the documentation include information about the long term sustainability of the basic data (archiving of the data)? (cf. Catalogue 4.16) Aims Are the aims and purposes of the project explicitly documented? (cf. Catalogue 3.1) Methods Are the methods employed in the project explicitly documented? (cf. Catalogue 3.1) Data model Does the project document which data model (e.g. TEI) has been used and for what reason? (cf. Catalogue 3.7) Help Does the project offer help texts concerning the use of the project? (cf. Catalogue 4.15) Citation Does the project supply citation guidelines (i.e. how to cite the project or a part of it)? (cf. Catalogue 4.8) Completion Does the editon regard itself as a completed project (i.e. not promise further modifications and additions)? (cf. Catalogue 4.16) Institutional curation Does the project provide information about institutional support for the curation and sustainability of the project? (cf. Catalogue 4.16) Contents Previous edition Has the material been previously edited (in print or digitally)? (cf. Catalogue 2.2) Materials used Does the edition make use of these previous editions? (cf. Catalogue 2.2) Introduction Does the project offer an introduction to the subject-matter (the author(s), the work, its history, the theme, etc.) of the project? (cf. Catalogue 4.15) Bibliography Does the project offer a bibliography? (cf. Catalogue 2.3) Commentary Does the project offer a scholarly commentary (e.g. notes on unclear passages, interpretation, etc.)? (cf. Catalogue 2.3) Contexts Does the project include or link to external resources with contextual material? (cf. Catalogue 2.3) Images Does the project offer images of digitised sources? (cf. Catalogue 2.3) Image quality Does the project offer images of an acceptable quality? (cf. Catalogue 4.6) Transcriptions Is the text fully transcribed? (cf. Catalogue 2.3) Text quality Does the project offer texts of an acceptable quality (typos, errors, etc.)? (cf. Catalogue 4.6) Indices Does the project feature compilations indices, registers or visualisations that offer alternative ways to access the material? (cf. Catalogue 4.5) Types of documents Which kinds of documents are at the basis of the project? (cf. Catalogue 1.3 and 2.1) Archival holding Document era What era(s) do the documents belong to? (cf. Catalogue 1.3 and 2.1) Modern Subject Which perspective(s) do the editors take towards the edited material? How can the edition be classified in general terms? (cf. Catalogue 1.3) Other: Food History Spin-Offs Does the project offer any spin-offs? (cf. Catalogue 4.11) None Access modes Browse by By which categories does the project offer to browse the contents? (cf. Catalogue 4.3) Dates, Other: Restaurants, Menus, Dishes, Ingredients Simple search Does the project offer a simple search? (cf. Catalogue 4.4) Advanced search Does the project offer an advanced search? (cf. Catalogue 4.4) Wildcard search Does the search support the use of wildcards? (cf. Catalogue 4.4) Index Does the search offer an index of the searched field? (cf. Catalogue 4.4) Suggest functionalities Does the search offer autocompletion or suggest functionalities? (cf. Catalogue 4.4) Help texts Does the project offer help texts for the search? (cf. Catalogue 4.4) Aims and methods Audience Who is the intended audience of the project? (cf. Catalogue 3.3) Scholars, Interested public Typology Which type fits best for the reviewed project? (cf. Catalogue 3.3 and 5.1) Collection of texts Critical editing In how far is the text critically edited? (cf. Catalogue 3.6) None XML Is the data encoded in XML? (cf. Catalogue 3.7) Standardized data model Is the project employing a standardized data model (e.g. TEI)? (cf. Catalogue 3.7) Types of text Which kinds or forms of text are presented? (cf. Catalogue 3.5.) Facsimiles, Diplomatic transcription, Semantic data Technical accessability Persistent identification Are there persistent identifiers and an addressing system for the edition and/or parts/objects of it and which mechanism is used to that end? (cf. Catalogue 4.8) None Interfaces Are there technical interfaces like OAI-PMH, REST etc., which allow the reuse of the data of the project in other contexts? (cf. Catalogue 4.9) Other: Link to Database Dump Open Access Is the edition Open Access? Accessability of the basic data Is the basic data (e.g. the XML) of the project accessible for each part of the edition (e.g. for a page)? (cf. Catalogue 4.12) Download Can the entire raw data of the project be downloaded (as a whole)? (cf. Catalogue 4.9) Reuse Can you use the data with other tools useful for this kind of content? (cf. Catalogue 4.9) Declaration of rights Are the rights to (re)use the content declared? (cf. Catalogue 4.13) License Under what license are the contents released? (cf. Catalogue 4.13) No license Personnel Editors Federman, Rebecca Inman, Michael Vershbow, Ben Programmers Giraldo, Mauricio Kelly, Kristopher Advisors Lascarides, Michael Contributors The Crowd