Digital Publications: The Technology Behind

Elisa Bastianello

Digital Publications forms one interface between the Publications Department and the DH Lab. It serves the needs of all the departments of the Institute, using the content provided by the Library and the Photographic Collection, in particular catalogs and digital images, but also the entire Knowledge Graph infrastructure (see {KG}²).
The path to the online publication of a scientific text is identical to that of traditional publications, but, contrary to hard-copy books, the infrastructure is constantly evolving, as are the devices used to consult them. Therefore, one of the tasks of the Digital Publications unit is to look for infrastructures that are compatible with the type of publication (articles, critical or source editions) and to optimize them according to the needs of the content. The use of standard open-source platforms, such as Open Journal System (OJS) for the publication of papers and articles, or TEI Publisher for critical and source editions, helps with long-term maintenance and updating, but still requires a collaborative effort in order to adapt them to specific needs. In some cases, however, tools need to be developed to improve the workflow and make it more sustainable, both in terms of workload and step control. It is not always possible to develop projects in-house, despite the collaboration and support of the entire DH Lab and in particular of the DH Scientist. For example, in the case of the platform for critical editions and the tools for transforming transcribed sources into TEI XML, the developer is attached to the HWGW project from the University of Zurich team. In the case of paper publications, on the other hand, we received funding from the DFG for a postdoctoral position on the PubLink project. In other cases, it has been necessary to enlist the support of external developers on a pilot project, such as the Referency tool (2022) or the Resolver prototype, aimed at bringing together digital content from the entire Institute. Here is a list of the major work developed to support digital publications between 2022 and 2024.

HWGW Platform for Critical Editions

The critical edition of the complete works of Heinrich Wölfflin (HWGW) is a shared project between the Department Weddigen and the University of Zurich that has been used to model a platform for critical editions based on the existing open-source project TeiPublisher. The platform is used for both the content annotation phase and the online publication. The development includes the ability to integrate the new critical edition with the texts of the editio princeps, entity annotation, common indexes for all works, and faceted searching. The layout has been optimized for browsing on desktops as well as tablets or smartphones, and the iconographic apparatus uses the IIIF servers of the Photographic Library and the Library for the digitized books and Illustrations. In addition to the platform, a workflow (trans2tei) has been developed to convert texts transcribed by a neural machine directly into the platform that has been already reused by several projects.

Coordination: Elisa Bastianello
Development: Reto Baumgartner (UZH)
Intern: Maria Francesca Bocchi (web design implementation)

PubLink

The experience of manual coding for the publication of the first volume of Hertziana Studies in Art History (HSAH), where much of the work was repetitive correction and integration of the article code, led to the conception of a workflow that could coordinate and organize both existing scripts in the open-source landscape and those specifically developed to improve work management and reduce errors associated with the constant repetition of copy and paste operations between platforms. The project was submitted to the LIS initiative of DFG and approved in 2022 for an initial period of 18 months. The development started once the developer was appointed in March 2023, and was renewed in September 2024 for 18 more months. The demo platform is accessible online and integrates access via the ORCID online identity service for scientists. (DFG, Grant Number: 501142032)

Coordination: Elisa Bastianello
Scientific Advisor: Alessandro Adamou
Development: Christopher Tomlinson (DFG postdoc)

Referency (Reference Harmonizer)

PubLink was not the first attempt to ease the burden on article encoding on the digital publication unit. An earlier project, called Referency, focused on the task of recognizing and linking references in footnotes and was released as open source in late 2022. The project was developed by an external provider under a work contract. Although the tool performed acceptably at the time of its release, changes in the way bibliographic catalogs share information would have required a complete overhaul within less than two years since its release, which was deemed unnecessary due to the start of PubLink and the improvements it brought to the work process.

Coordination: Elisa Bastianello
Scientific Advisory: Alessandro Adamou
Development: Advance Services (GR)