biblio: Digital Tools and Electronic Texts

A Methods Network working paper.

The principle areas that this paper will focus on are the digital tools and techniques that have been developed to acquire, process, analyze and present text in digital formats. For the purposes of this paper, the texts in question are originally from analogue sources and are likely to be works of literature, non-fiction historical documentation (e.g. newspapers, government records), manuscripts, religious writings, etc.

As with many activities related to scholarly research, the production of electronic editions and archives - and the associated focus on technologies to assist with that process - has been closely (though not exclusively) entwined with developments associated with the World Wide Web since the mid 1990’s. As the data available to users of the Web has exponentially grown, so has the expectation that material previously only to be found by browsing library stacks should automatically become freely available to all online. In some senses this has actually happened with initiatives such as Project Gutenberg, which provides reading copies of a significant number and range of publications, but it quickly becomes apparent that there is little by way of scholarly apparatus to describe the derivation or the potential inaccuracy of these resources. As such, they are problematic to wholeheartedly endorse as source material on which to base serious and sustained research.