TEI Panorama. A platform for digital scholarly editions of Polish literary texts 

Author: Agnieszka Szulińska

Reviewers: Arnaud Gingold, Sy Holsinger

TEI Panorama might seem like another platform in a digital scholar editor’s toolbox. However, its creators focus on assisting editors who wish to enter the digital domain without advanced technological skills. This makes the TEI Panorama team offer a unique workflow to meet the needs of two groups of humanists: traditional editors who worked previously on printed editions and digital experts behind the tool, equipped with skills in annotation, the FAIR-data approach, web design, and more.

Manufacture of editions

Called ‘manufacture of editions’ (a term borrowed from Elena Pierazzo’s article on digital scholarly editions, check the bibliography section), TEI Panorama (https://tei.nplp.pl/) is not a single-edition website, which seems to be a dominant way for many digital editions cases. Instead, it aims to gather as many modern, Polish-language editions as possible to prevent the dispersion of data. This approach has a fundamental impact on the whole platform’s design and many editorial decisions. For instance, avoiding design features that would only be used in one edition, as such exceptions could confuse users and cause difficulties in interacting with editions when the usage of each of them will vary from one to another significantly. Of course, a complete unification of all editions on such a platform is not possible due to the fact that it is based on literary genres, the project’s aims, or additional data-enhancing source text available – like scans of a manuscript. 

At the moment, TEI Panorama has around 17 editions published (and more incoming) including correspondences, dramas, novels, poems, articles from newspapers and texts with ambiguous nature and fuzzy genre boundaries like Samuel Zborowski written by Juliusz Słowacki. The Panorama team have worked mostly with editors from their home institution, IBL PAN (Institute of Literary Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences), while collaborations with representatives from Silesian University and the University of Warsaw are also in progress. 

[screen1: The main website of TEI Panorama with a zoom on editions list]

TEI Panorama is built mostly with PHP (on a Laravel framework), which ensures flexibility in software development regardless of the size of the update. Apart from PHP, the platform consists of typical web design programming languages like HTML, Blade, CSS and Javascript. Due to institutional policies, the software is not open to everyone yet, but processes are underway to change that in the future. 

Workflow for creating editions with non-technical editors

As was teased in the beginning, TEI Panorama is not only a platform for a specific digital research output, it is also a team of digital humanists behind this tool, called the Panorama team, which actively enhances it and provides its sustainability by establishing cooperation and helping to obtain funds for the realization of digital editions. This team, led by Barłomiej Szleszyński, a professor of the Institute of the Literary Research of PAN, consists of literary researchers-annotators, quality assurance testers and graphic designers who facilitate the publication process with traditional editors on one hand and with developers on the other hand. Hence, this approach might be described as bridge-like, where the Panorama team tries to convey the traditional editor’s need into a digital edition on a specific platform – TEI Panorama. Firstly, there is a set of meetings at the beginning of the project, where the Panorama team tries to identify non-technical, traditional editors’ needs and provide the content for the future edition. Secondly, there is a phase of preparing a technical specification for updating TEI Panorama for the new project, if necessary, and working with developers via mostly GitHub Issues and manually testing implemented functionalities – all on the side of the Panorama team. Thirdly, the content of a digital edition is added to TEI Panorama by the digital team, including semantic annotations, encoding text changes typical for critical apparatus like deletions of up to three different witnesses of a source text, or metadata enrichment. 

Finally, traditional editors may comment or test it themselves on the digital edition and send feedback on improvements. It should also be noted that any updates along with the Panorama team activities need to be funded additionally, so usually there is a pre-phase, where both sides prepare a grant application to obtain funds. 

This whole workflow was an answer to the need expressed by various traditional Polish editors who recognise opportunities in open digital humanities projects such as editions on TEI Panorama, yet they cannot learn the whole digital process for various reasons. What differentiates the Panorama team from being solely technical collaborators like developers is the deep knowledge of the literary data challenges as literary researchers themselves.They transfer ideas from non-technical data providers to the platform by implementing best practices of open science such as continuous FAIRification of editions. The Panorama team’s activities are considered scholarly, they actively discuss with traditional editors what might be best for the edition on various aspects, not only strictly technical. 

As a case study, in the digital scholarly editions of the first novels written by Eliza Orzeszkowa, a prominent 19th-century Polish writer, the Panorama team’s digital-editorial tasks were to:

• Decide, which types of entities will be used most and decide to what extent to incorporate fictional ones into the digital index
• Propose ways to present witnesses of the text between various book editions 
• Determine the limits of semantic enrichment – how often repetitive name entities (in this edition – courtesy phrases) should be manually annotated  

Panorama of possibilities 

TEI Panorama covers a wide range of functionalities for digital scholarly editions. 

The main functionalities of the platform are:

• a common digital index of entities, which means that you can gather data about a certain person, place, writing, journal, organisation, lexical phrase or event across all editions at once (if this appears in more than one). It also allows to compare notes from different editors – for example, Maria Kuncewiczowa (a Polish 20th-century writer) has two descriptions from two published editions of correspondences – a Skamander’s Literary Group Letters and Anna Dąbrowska-Maria Dąbrowska’s Correspondence on TEI Panorama:

• Collating up to three witnesses (chosen by the traditional editor) of the text based on manual encoding of differences to ensure highlighting is selected. It might also serve as a contextual window for the primary source of the edition. As a case study, it might serve the edition of, Spowiedź w drewnie (literally: Confession in wood), a Polish contemporary drama written by Jan Wilkowski. This play tells a story about an artist carving in wood the figurines of saints and later has dialogues with them along with a puppet performance as well. On the left window, there is the text of the drama Spowiedź w drewnie and the adaptation Żywoty Świętych (literally: Lives of Saints) by Jędrzej Wowro, which was an inspiration for the aforementioned drama. On the right, there are stage production notes, which supplement the original source. This is not a pure collation situation, but rather a source text and connected textual data that will enrich the base text of the play.

All entities can be linked by the Panorama team to another entity or to Wikidata and European Literary Bibliography (if they are also created there), basic features for image adjustments are possible, and there are dedicated subpages for editorial notes. This kind of activity also has the objective to increase further reuse of the editorial data, especially in digital-aware scholarly circles. It is worth highlighting that the Panorama team wants to build interoperable workflows with other digital tools like Pundit or actively contribute to the Digital Humanities arena, share observations and experiences with other digital editors at conferences and seek other ways of collaborating to strengthen common standards, best practices, etc. 

If you are a non-technical scholar who would like to publish a digital edition with the support of an experienced team of literary scholars and digital humanists, with an easy to use interface for its technical environment, the Panorama team would be eager to meet with you. We are also open to common initiatives and events for advanced digital edition creators and enthusiasts. 

The team of TEI Panorama actively contributes to the field of digital scholarly editing (DSE), i.e. by coordinating and editing the issue of “Sztuka Edycji” (The Art of Editing) on practices in the DSE area, including minimal computing approaches or how to implement user experience methods into digital editions projects. A conference on micro-communities in digital scholarly editing was also organised, and most presentations are available to watch on the team’s YouTube Channel. In the near future, the creators of TEI Panorama would like to investigate more about the needs of editors in Polish academic circles specifically and seek interoperability in connections with external tools like Pundit for user annotations. 

Anybody interested in TEI Panorama and collaborating with the team, is welcome to contact us at: https://tei.nplp.pl/kontakt 

Disclaimer: Some parts of this blog post will be included in the author’s PHD dissertation on Polish digital editions made with TEI Panorama. 

Further readings (in Polish and English):

1. Bartłomiej Szleszyński and James O’Sullivan’s interview. Interviews about the future of scholarly digital editions [Data files]. 2023 Interview by Michael Pidd, James O’Sullivan, Michael Kurzmeier, Órla Murphy, and Bridgette Wessels. https://www.dhi.ac.uk/data/c21editions.
2. Niciński, Konrad. 2023. ‘O strukturalizmie w działaniu, czyli TEI i naukowa edycja cyfrowa z perspektywy praktyki edytorskiej’. Sztuka Edycji. Studia Tekstologiczne i Edytorskie 23 (1): 103–11. https://doi.org/10.12775/SE.2023.0010.
3. Pierazzo, Elena. 2019. ‘What Future for Digital Scholarly Editions? From Haute Couture to Prêt-à-Porter’. International Journal of Digital Humanities 1 (2): 209–20. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42803-019-00019-3.
4. Szleszyński, Bartłomiej. 2023. ‘Krajobraz naukowego edytorstwa cyfrowego – możliwości i wyzwania’. Sztuka Edycji. Studia Tekstologiczne i Edytorskie 23 (1): 85–101. https://doi.org/10.12775/SE.2023.0009.
5. Szulińska, Agnieszka. 2023. ‘Pomiędzy światami. Anotacja semantyczna w naukowej edycji cyfrowej’. Sztuka Edycji. Studia Tekstologiczne i Edytorskie 23 (1): 121–31. https://doi.org/10.12775/SE.2023.0012.
6. Szulińska, Agnieszka. 2023. ‘Using Github Issues to Facilitate the Project Communication between Developers and Humanists. Case Study’. July 14. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8146368.

About the author

Agnieszka Szulińska (ORCID: 0000-0001-5778-6006) (née Kochańska, b. 1989) graduated from Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw with an MA degree in Polish Philology (specialization in scholarly editing). She prepares a Ph.D. thesis about digital scholarly editing of literary texts in Poland, based on digital projects such as Poetry Group Skamander’s Correspondence or Early Novels of Eliza Orzeszkowa. A member of New Panorama of the Polish Literature team and The Digital Humanities Centre at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Apart from scholarly editing, her research areas include testing tools and platforms used in SSH scholarly communication, and video games. All important links here: https://linktr.ee/agnieszkaszulinska