briefingpaper: Digital Tools and Electronic Texts

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.

http://methodsnetwork.ac.uk/redist/pdf/wkp05.pdf

This paper is one of nine working papers written for the AHRC ICT Methods Network. The Methods Network Working Papers form part of the range of information and support materials that have been assembled to assist arts and humanities researchers with the task of acquiring knowledge about ICT tools and methods. The papers focus on various different disciplines but also highlight where tools and methods can be of benefit to multiple subject areas.

It is anticipated that these documents may serve a number of non-exclusive functions:

• To provide a foundation document to provoke discussion and value-added commentary;
• As reference documents that foreground links and references to other material;
• As an introductory resource for researchers who are new to digital developments in a particular subject area;
• As a knowledge-gathering exercise to assist the Methods Network with event organisation and community-building activities.