[okfn-discuss] A question of history

Mon May 22 14:10:06 UTC 2006

Hello to the open-knowledge masters,

I was hoping for some advice about an open-knowledge problem that I
have often discussed with my father - and am now hoping to find some
way forward.

My father, Martin Brett, happens to be working on an
open-knowledge type project.  He's an historian, and works on
something like chuch history around 1100.  The main work in this area
is to produce editions of manuscripts from that time.  Manuscripts
almost invariably have many versions from different times, as the
original has usually been lost, and the document survives in many
copies, each of which has been edited, and often merged with other
documents, by the person transcribing the document.  The work of an
edition, as far as I understand it, is to take one particular version,
preferably the version closest to the original, in the opinion of the
historian, and annotate all important differences between this
version, and other versions, so that the edition provides a basis for
other historians to compare versions.

Usually editions are published by the historians as a book.  The
problem is that an individual historian may well not have access to
all the important manuscripts themselves, and editions take an
enormous amount of work.  This in turn means that the historian often
has a rather good but incomplete version of the edition on their hard
disk for many years before enough edits have been done to make it
acceptable for publication as a book.

For many years Martin has been trying to work on ways to make such
provisional editions available online, so that other historians can
benefit from the work already done, and even contribute to it
collaboratively.

Clearly this brings up many open-knowledge issues; licences,
version control, packaging (Martin Brett version 0.34 as of 12/4/06
for example), and allowing academic credit to be given to
contributors.

Another related issue is how to encode the information so that
it would be easy to change your view of which manuscript was primary,
and automatically readjust the annotations relative to this other
manuscript, instead of your first guess as to which was primary.

Could I ask for any thoughts as to how Martin might go about finding a
useful method to think about all this and implement it?

Thanks a lot,

Matthew