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This paper presents the work undertaken by the Capitularia project to integrate a collaborative editorial workbench into the open-source content management system (CMS) WordPress. It introduces the reasons for selecting WordPress as the project’s CMS, the workflows established (including a sophisticated XSL-scripting pipeline), as well as three plug-ins created to integrate certain functionalities. The Cap-X2WP plug-in facilitates XSL transformations of XML files to HTML directly within the WordPress framework. The Cap-PaGer plug-in is used to generate WordPress pages automatically based on the XML files located in specific folders on the server. Their publication status can be administered via a special interface added to the general WordPress dashboard at a moment’s notice. Whereas the aforementioned plug-ins facilitate the daily work of the staff members in the general management and enhancement of the project’s website, the Cap-Coll plug-in eases the specific editorial task of collating texts by including the CollateX algorithms in a WordPress plug-in. The report concludes with a brief perspective on the possibilities for further developments.

This paper attempts to make two contributions to discussions related to TEI: (1) an analysis of how tools used for working with TEI documents encourage certain values and make certain assumptions about the work of textual editing and (2) a report on a methodological framework from outside the humanities that suggests a unique way to study such systems. Borrowing models of design research from the fields of design and human-computer interaction, I argue that prototypes can be used to create new conceptual knowledge, to investigate the values and assumptions of sociotechnical systems, and to communicate alternative visions of those systems. I first analyze an existing tool, the Versioning Machine, as a way of focusing the design of a prototype that reimagines several aspects of that original—specifically, I argue that the Versioning Machine creates an environment that to some extent assumes that TEI documents are created by one editor and intended for one instantiation. The prototype presented experiments with an alternative vision of textual editing as bringing encoded texts and interpretations together in multiple and flexible instantiations. Rather than a technical problem with an optimal solution, I approach this design process as an opportunity to ask how prototypes can give designers access to conceptual issues and allow users to enact alternative values and imagine alternative futures. This research was supported by the Modernist Versions Project, which is funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Partnership Development Grant.

This paper presents a newly developed framework for online publishing of scholarly text editions based on the TEI Guidelines. At the core of our publishing framework is support for delivery of TEI-encoded documents in Drupal, a popular, fairly powerful, and modular content management system (CMS). In this article we present the TEICHI suite of modules for Drupal that we developed, as well as a prototype implementation. TEICHI consists of a collection of modules for displaying TEI files online (via XSLT and CSS), interacting with them (via JavaScript), as well as uploading, searching, and downloading them. To showcase the particular strengths and possible use cases of our framework, we compare our tool to other currently available systems. Here, we focus on those tools which are suitable for textual scholars new to Digital Humanities and the TEI who would like to use the powerful encoding mechanisms provided by the TEI but have relatively little technical expertise. Therefore, we compare the TEICHI framework specifically to the Versioning Machine (VM) and the Scalable Architecture for Digital Editions (SADE). We look at these tools from four perspectives: that of the user interacting with the digital edition or archive, of the editor encoding and publishing texts, of the administrator setting up the publishing tool, and of the programmer possibly modifying or enhancing the tool. Our more general aim here is to investigate, from the perspective of tool development in the area of online delivery of TEI-encoded documents, what could be called the “tools paradox”: there is evidence for textual scholars’ need of such tools, and a number of them are available; however, the existing tools are not widely adopted by scholars. Our findings suggest that tool development has to address two aims which seem to be mutually exclusive, that of “keeping it simple” and that of “going generic”. In fact, we suggest that tool developers need to find ways of turning these conflicting aims into concurrent aims if they want to build successful tools and broaden their user base.