/ride-static/ Latest reviews en Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 /ride-static/issues/21/ride.21.5/ tag:ride.i-d-e.de,2014:ride.21.5 Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Christian Erlinger 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in 2022 by the Wien Museum and the Wienbibliothek im Rathaus to involve the public in transcribing and indexing historical documents.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. /ride-static/issues/21/ride.21.1/ tag:ride.i-d-e.de,2014:ride.21.1 Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Daniel Burckhardt #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. /ride-static/issues/21/ride.21.4/ tag:ride.i-d-e.de,2014:ride.21.4 Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Sarah Lang 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. /ride-static/issues/21/ride.21.2/ tag:ride.i-d-e.de,2014:ride.21.2 Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Lavinia Ferretti Elisa Nury 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. /ride-static/issues/19/ride.19.4/ tag:ride.i-d-e.de,2014:ride.19.4 Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Martina Scholger Roman Bleier Large language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT have rapidly become prominent tools in academic contexts, including digital scholarly editing. Although not originally designed for editorial practice, they are increasingly integrated into experimental editorial workflows. This review assesses its potential to support key editorial tasks and surveys recent literature on their use in digital scholarly editing. Drawing on published case studies and our own experiments, we analyze the benefits and limitations of employing ChatGPT at different stages of creating and analyzing digital scholarly editions, including transcription, TEI encoding, and named-entity recognition. At the same time, the review addresses significant concerns. As a commercial and largely closed system, ChatGPT operates as a ‘black box’ that allows only indirect control through prompting, raising challenges for transparency and reproducibility in academic contexts. Issues of model bias and data governance must be carefully considered when integrating such tools into research workflows. ChatGPT should therefore be adopted cautiously and critically. Nevertheless, its capacity to lower technical barriers and to consolidate tasks that previously required multiple tools and advanced programming skills makes it, or similar artificial intelligence tools, a potentially valuable assistant in digital editing workflows. /ride-static/issues/21/ride.21.3/ tag:ride.i-d-e.de,2014:ride.21.3 Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Janosch Förster 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. /ride-static/issues/22/ride.22.1/ tag:ride.i-d-e.de,2014:ride.22.1 Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Martina Chiara The Hannah Arendt Kritische Gesamtausgabe is a critical edition aiming to provide a comprehensive and accurate collection of the works of Hannah Arendt. As an ongoing project, it seeks to give scholars access to both published and unpublished writings, with new materials being made available over time. The project is conceived as a hybrid edition, combining both print and digital publications. It is a fundamental resource for the Arendtiani studies, enriching the corpus with unpublished materials from international archives. The review assesses the project against Scholarly Digital Editions (SDE) criteria, highlighting its academic importance and limitations. The edition represents a significant contribution to the dissemination and understanding of Arendt’s thinking, promoting a dialogue between tradition and innovation. /ride-static/issues/20/ride.20.4/ tag:ride.i-d-e.de,2014:ride.20.4 Sun, 01 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Marcus Feldbrügge After his return from deportation, Otto Frank, father of Anne Frank, decreed that the annex in which the family hid during WWII should no longer be furnished. For this reason, Anne Frank’s world-famous writing place is vacant today. With the project The Secret Annex (3D), which was launched in 2010, and the VR application The Anne Frank House VR, which has existed since 2018, the Anne Frank Foundation is finally venturing to restore the annex virtually to its former state. In this way, the Anne Frank House wants to create an immersive environment that gives users an impression of the living conditions in the annex at the time of WWII. Although it is obvious from the outset that the resource under review is not a digital edition in the classical sense, it is nevertheless reviewed on the assumption that it is one according to the RIDE-‘Criteria for Reviewing Digital Editions and Resources’. It aims to emphasise the added value ‘Virtual Reality’ (VR) could have for digital edition practice. /ride-static/issues/20/ride.20.5/ tag:ride.i-d-e.de,2014:ride.20.5 Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Lucrezia Pograri This review critically evaluates Gli anni della cupola 1417–1436, the digital edition aiming to offer unprecedented access to over 1.8 million archival records from the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore archive, documenting the construction of Brunelleschi’s famous dome of the Florence cathedral, and its civic context. Featuring high-quality reproductions and textual transcriptions of original documents, it facilitates in-depth investigations into topics like workforce management and financial administration, positioning itself as an invaluable tool for scholars and historians. This review assesses the project’s alignment with FAIR principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability) and its effectiveness as a scholarly resource. Recommendations focus on improving data model interoperability and adopting robust preservation strategies to ensure long-term accessibility. By addressing these areas, the review underscores the project’s significance in advancing Digital Humanities and historical research, while proposing enhancements to strengthen its role as a key resource for studying one of history’s most iconic architectural feats. /ride-static/issues/20/ride.20.3/ tag:ride.i-d-e.de,2014:ride.20.3 Sat, 01 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Manuele Veggi The following contribution is focused on Bayeux Tapestry Digital Edition (BTDE), a project addressed to a heterogeneous audience that aims to describe this famous embroidery from different perspectives. Indeed, not only does this scholarly edigital edition (SDE) provide a high-quality facsimile of this artwork, but it also tries to reconstruct its historical and cultural background. This review mainly aims at describing the contents of the edition and their presentation, considering also the available approaches and tools when BTDE was first published. Moreover, it suggests possible further implementations and highlights minor issues in the sustainability and in the rendering of the Latin inscriptions. The review will show how the project can be considered a pioneering example of a scholarly digital edition, which managed to reconstruct the complexity of the chosen document in a digital environment, proposing an interesting solution to combine multimedia assets. /ride-static/issues/20/ride.20.2/ tag:ride.i-d-e.de,2014:ride.20.2 Sat, 01 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Erik Renz This paper reviews the digital edition Jean Paul – Sämtliche Briefe digital, which presents the complete correspondence of the German poet Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763–1825). Commissioned by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the edition features three distinct projects: the letters written by Jean Paul, the letters addressed to him, and the letters from his closest family, friends, and colleagues. Each project has different origins—such as the historical-critical edition of Jean Paul’s works and letters, started by Eduard Berend in the mid-1920s—as well as varying editors, funding sources, methodologies, and goals. Currently, letters from the first and last projects have been transcribed, and the platform provides free full-text access to them. Additionally, data from all projects are linked to a comprehensive index for easy searching and connected to external tools that enhance text analysis and visualization. Future updates will complete the digital edition by including the letters addressed to Jean Paul, which are currently available only in printed form. The edition strives to unify this broad and diverse material within a single platform, not merely placing the individual projects side by side but integrating them into a cohesive whole—without compromising usability. While this has largely been successful, methodological differences between the projects pose challenges for the user experience. These difficulties are further compounded by the occasionally cumbersome presentation of secondary information, which can hinder both accessibility and ease of use. /ride-static/issues/20/ride.20.1/ tag:ride.i-d-e.de,2014:ride.20.1 Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Bianca La Manna Schopenhauer’s Library is a project, on-hold, that aims to publish all of Schopenhauer’s Spanish books that contain personal annotations or marginalia written by the philosopher himself. It currently provides the digital edition of the book Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia (1659). This review analyzes the choices made in this digital edition, offering some comparisons with other projects that aim to publish the author’s marginalia. The project will be introduced with some general remarks related to the challenge of representing marginalia in the digital environment. The aims and methods of this digital edition will be explained, with some reflections on the editorial choices made for the representation and presentation of the digital edition. The edition can be considered an interesting example of an attempt to build a user-friendly scholarly digital edition centered on marginalia, promoting a new approach to presenting digitized content as a facilitator for accessing knowledge and performing research. /ride-static/issues/19/ride.19.2/ tag:ride.i-d-e.de,2014:ride.19.2 Sun, 01 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Jennifer Bunselmeier Sina Krottmaier Consistency and coherence in annotated and enriched data are vital to the success of any digital edition project. Custom frameworks within the oXygen XML Editor provide a user-friendly approach for editors to interact directly with XML data, thus lowering entry barriers and ensuring consistency across datasets. Drawing on our experiences as customisers, this review explores the benefits and limitations of these custom frameworks, highlighting their potential for interdisciplinary teams with varying levels of XML expertise. We critically examine the technical requirements for creating and maintaining custom frameworks, as well as the current state of documentation. We also discuss challenges that users may face with oXygen’s complex interface. Once implemented, frameworks facilitate uniform data input, allow for the automation of repetitive annotation tasks, and integrate seamlessly with project workflows, thereby enabling users to focus on annotation tasks in an environment tailored to the specific needs of each project. In our opinion, despite being underutilised and insufficiently promoted within the oXygen platform, custom frameworks offer extensive functionalities that meet the needs of a wide variety of edition projects. /ride-static/issues/19/ride.19.1/ tag:ride.i-d-e.de,2014:ride.19.1 Sun, 01 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Nadine Sutor Andreas Mertgens The TEI Publisher is an open-source tool designed to simplify the publication of TEI encoded texts for researchers without extensive programming knowledge. It allows users to transform XML data into web-based digital editions using predefined templates and custom styles. Developed by eXist-Solutions, it integrates with the eXist-db XML database to store and organize data, offering flexibility for different use cases. Initially launched in 2015, the tool is under continuous development, with regular updates introducing new features and improvements. In this review, we examine how TEI Publisher balances ease of use with deep customization options. We demonstrate how scholars are empowered to produce digital editions rapidly and how researchers can experiment with various re-presentations of their data using a graphical interface and a set of predefined configurations. We also discuss how, while it lowers barriers for less technical users, it nevertheless requires a solid understanding of TEI and proficiency with XML technologies for more complex customization. Using a small practical example, we will demonstrate some of the core functions of the TEI Publisher and highlight both the advantages and drawbacks affecting its presentation and usability. TEI Publisher proves to be a mature and easy-to-use tool for projects with moderate technical demands, suited for researchers seeking rapid results. However, it falls short in accessibility, citability, and adaptability for highly customized use cases, revealing areas for future improvement in usability and inclusivity. /ride-static/issues/17/ride.17.4/ tag:ride.i-d-e.de,2014:ride.17.4 Wed, 01 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Ruth Sander The digital edition Digital Austin Papers (DAP) collects the correspondence of Stephen F. Austin and a selection of key associates from the 1820s and 1830s. It provides valuable insight into the changes occurring in the Texas borderlands during the early 19th century, both politically and socially. DAP offers full-text views of the collection of letters and two methods to download their TEI/XML files. Great emphasis is placed on browsing and search functionalities, striving to test new ways to discover patterns within the dataset. Its incorporation of sentiment analysis is one of DAP’s more unique characteristics. DAP has great potential but requires some additional data processing (e.g. assigning authority file IDs) to achieve it. /ride-static/issues/17/ride.17.3/ tag:ride.i-d-e.de,2014:ride.17.3 Wed, 01 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Tobias Hodel Peter Dängeli The project European Religious Peace Agreements - A Digital Edition (EuReD) is a long-term project in the Academies’ Program of the Union of German Academies, which focuses on the period after the European religious wars and is based on various already existing editions. It aims to lay the foundation for further research in religious studies, cultural studies, linguistics, and history. By reprocessing and re-using data and tools from previous projects, the long-term project represents a remarkable FAIR Data use case. Through solid editorial craftsmanship and the avoidance of visual or technical novelties, the project itself is geared toward long-term usability. By making the worked-upon documents accessible from the early funding phase, the project embraces openness and provides insight into the editorial process. Expectedly, there are gaps and ambiguities, which – at this early stage – are unavoidable and are mentioned by the reviewers in favor of the project's further development rather than to point out definite weaknesses. /ride-static/issues/17/ride.17.5/ tag:ride.i-d-e.de,2014:ride.17.5 Wed, 01 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Sandra König This review describes the Semper-Edition in its current version of March 2024, when work on the edition is at its midpoint of a projected 12-year processing time. Nevertheless, it seems suitable to review this resource at this point as it gives valuable insight into what constitutes good usability when going online at an early production stage. The edition encompasses Gottfried Sempers (1803–1879) opus magnum Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten, oder Praktische Aesthetik (1860/1863), including draft versions, fair copies, proof stages, and complementing these texts with additional manuscripts closely linked to Der Stil, namely Vergleichende Baulehre, Kunstformenlehre and student notes on Semper’s lectures. The edition does not create one ‘Leittext’ (scholarly curated text) but aims at making the comprehensive content within these texts accessible and usable for different courses of analysis, achieving this by using a labelled property graph data base. /ride-static/issues/18/ride.18.3/ tag:ride.i-d-e.de,2014:ride.18.3 Fri, 01 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Luisa Ammirati Paolo Bufalini’s Notebook (from here on PBN) is a critical edition of the personal notebook that the Italian politician and intellectual Paolo Bufalini held from 1981 to 1991. The edition offers the opportunity to plunge into the flow of thoughts of a man of the twentieth century who reflects on philosophy, poetry, and politics. The methodical goal of this edition, which is implemented with XML/TEI and RDF graphs, is to create an encoding system using Semantic Web technologies, able to emphasize the complex network of quotations and annotations that fills the pages. The digital edition aims to follow a data-centric paradigm. In this light, PBN is connected to authority files and external knowledge bases, such as DBpedia, VIAF, and WorldCat, to harness the power of the Linked Open Data universe. This review provides the reader with an overview of Paolo Bufalini’s work and the main features of the semantic critical edition. Finally, PBN can be evaluated as a decent edition, which responds to certain requirements of a digital edition, but not to all, and it still lends itself to improvements and new developments. /ride-static/issues/18/ride.18.5/ tag:ride.i-d-e.de,2014:ride.18.5 Fri, 01 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Martina Pensalfini Catullus Online, a collection of the author’s poems and a repository of the conjectures collected through the centuries, was published by Dániel Kiss with the support of the Abteilung für Griechische und Lateinische Philologie of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, in 2013. Kiss faced many difficulties in the creation of such a resource, both from a technical standpoint and from the inner complexity of the philological tradition behind Catullus and his poems. He still ended up creating a rather interesting Scholarly Digital Edition, which has made such work more accessible, even to those that don’t typically belong in the academic world, offering the possibility to access high-quality photos of the manuscripts, a curated apparatus and much other information about the texts and the author, with just a simple click. What is mostly missing in this project is a more sophisticated digital interface, a lost opportunity to further enhance the quality of such a Scholarly Digital Edition. /ride-static/issues/18/ride.18.4/ tag:ride.i-d-e.de,2014:ride.18.4 Fri, 01 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Sarah Lang Furnace and Fugue is a digital edition of Michael Maier’s (1568-1622) opus magnum, the emblem book Atalanta fugiens (1617/18) in which Latin and German texts are paired with images and musical fugues in an enigmatic way to engage users of the book in deep meditation on alchemical subjects. The digital edition of the text itself, including an English translation based on a 17th century manuscript, is accompanied by a number of scholarly essays. A main feature is the MEI player, which includes a piano roll visualisation that allows users to experience the musicological makeup of Atalanta fugiens even without a background in music theory. The edition is a beautifully designed “haute couture” edition, intended to provide an example for the future of digital scholarly publishing. The project has used digital editing effectively to enable the multimedia experience that Michael Maier had likely envisioned for Atalanta fugiens. but which was previously inaccessible to most users of the book.