Tag Archives: Research Data Management

Ethica Complementoria Digital Scholarly Edition – Redux. Pt. 9: Slowing Down

Day 9 of my summer research leave

After yesterday’s proofreading marathon, I felt pretty depleted today. On top of that, I got a migraine which stopped things for a while. So I decided to do a slow day instead of working through the remaining unchecked and unsorted files in my temporary transcriptions folder. I meandered from here to there, leafing through the materials in my binders and physical folders, tidying the Zotero project library, updating information about the project online, etc.

I was thinking about in which way I can best create a post-factum data management plan for the Ethica project, including the digital scholarly edition and all the other related research. Something where I could give myself a guiding line for the future and make informed decisions about what data I keep where, which files are active and how to version control them, which platforms I use for which materials, and where data might be out of sight, like the XML file in the DTAQ environment, which I cannot change immediately, but have to use their ticket system and email. And what to do with the things that are not digital.

I suddenly felt the urge to take a picture of the spread-out documents on the table in my office: Because they are data, too! Some of them are printouts which I created for easier readability, so they could safely be thrown away without any loss, but many have handwritten notes on them, contain sketches of textual relations, corrections of all sorts and kinds or do not have a digital counterpart: they only exist physically.

An example of paper-bound data: printed and hand-annotated lists of errors and their corrections and Latin phrases from the Ethica Complementoria print from 1643.

I’m not a fan of keeping a lot of paper around, but in this case, I had to admit that I was not ready to throw them all out. Sensibly re-digitising them will be a bit of work and might not be worthwhile unless I work on something concretely for which I will need the paper-bound data. So back they go into their binders and onto the shelves. But into the data management plan, too!

A fool points a wooden spoon at a couple that is making out on a chair.

Ethica Complementoria Digital Scholarly Edition – Redux. Pt. 6: Transcriptions

Day 6 of my summer research leave

Today, I’m mid-way on my research leave: I have until Friday mid-day to finish this project overview and data management sprint and see that the transcription and HTR-training mini-project starts well.

Admittedly, I felt a bit hesitant to start the day: it’s still mainly going through old files, checking their contents, comparing them to the files on the GitHub repositories and deciding whether or not to keep them and, if so: where to move them and what to do with them next. Most of the morning was spent bringing order to the chaos of miscellaneous files in a documents folder. I moved most of them either into the private admin repository or the Ethica and the Greflingeriana repos. I even found some old teaching materials from the master seminar I taught at my alma mater, Freie Universität Berlin, in the summer of 2011; I archived them on Zenodo for whatever it is good for.

Another thing I did was click through the overview of posts on this blog. There were several drafts, some as old as 2015. Two had no content yet, only a title, and I decided to delete them: farewell! I published the other two (one about crowd-funding and sourcing the edition, the other about the Nordischer Mercurius, Greflinger’s newspaper project), adding a short note at the beginning about when they were created and what their status is. This is mainly for myself to have a reference: have I already written something about a particular aspect or sub-project? Now I can refer to it more officially; perhaps they even find an audience!

Lastly, I investigated the dreaded transcriptions folders. The one on the Ethica repository only contained XML files of transcriptions but without any documentation. On the other hand, the folders on my GoogleDrive only contained DOCX or other proprietary text files. If I remember correctly, when I decided to move some contents of the Ethica project into a GitHub repository, I didn’t want my MS Words files and other stuff there that could not be version controlled by Git. But it creates an undesirable situation where I don’t know what is where and finding the actual ‘latest version’ of a transcription will be a costly search, time-wise. And: if I ever want to share a file with a collaborator, it will be much easier to do so via the repository than having some files on a private GoogleDrive. However, the sheer amount of transcriptions and versions of files felt paralysing. So I started with the Löfflerey-Kunst instead of the Ethica.

The Löfflerey-Kunst (The Art of Spooning, i.e. making out) is an odd little book. It appears a short while after the first prints of the Ethica circulated, in 1648, right at the time of the negotiations of the Peace of Westphalia. I have reconstructed the genealogical relations between this text and the Ethica in my book and have pointed out that it is unlikely that the Löfflerey-Kunst in itself has anything to do with the alleged compiler-author Georg Greflinger but that the content lends itself to a combination with the Ethica and thematically related materials. The Löfflerey-Kunst can be best described as a satirical adaption of the Ethica: both in regards to the initiation of romantic relations between young men and women of status and in regards to the political and religious tensions of the times, where especially the Catholics were the targets of insults and jokes in protestant regions.

I have prepared an edition of the Löfflerey-Kunst, based on the printer syntheses B2 and C1, that is, where the Löfflerey-Kunst was printed together with the Ethica Complementoria and texts such as the Bettelstab der Liebe, Alamodische Damensprichwörter and a selection of poems from Seladons Weltliche Lieder. This edition will be published with the Deutsches Textarchiv, but I cannot say when it will happen. My investigation of the many files containing transcriptions revealed that I do have a complete transcription of C1 as a DOCX file – done from the digital copy of the Bavarian State Library in Munich and collated with the original print on-site in Munich in December 2016. But I do not know whether I have collated this file with the XML transcription. I also have a part of a transcription of B2, circle half of the text, from when I had my research stay at the Herzog-August library in Wolfenbüttel in 2013. Since it’s incomplete and I have no plans of travelling to Wolfenbüttel anywhen soon, I have ordered a digital reproduction of the book to run it through Transkribus and complete the transcription. More importantly, I would like to get a full transcription of what I have called L1, the most likely first edition of the Löfflerey. The Berlin State Library uniquely holds it and has a digital copy, so I don’t have to travel there for the transcription job!

A fool points a wooden spoon at a couple that is making out on a chair.

Detail of the title illustration of the 1648 Löfflerey-Kunst print. Berlin State Library, Yz 1551.

To round off my day: data organisation post-factum takes a lot of time and is mentally draining. And it becomes evident that good data management would have prevented much of the frustration and saved me time to finish parts of the edition. 

Ethica Complementoria Digital Scholarly Edition – Redux. Pt. 5: Sources

Day 5 of my summer research leave

On Day 5 of my summer research leave, I continued working on organising folders and files and getting a general overview of what I have on my local drive, what is already on the GitHub repository for the Ethica project and what should go into related repositories. I managed to move some files around and normalise filenames, but then I got stuck on a particular file: This, too, was very old. I last touched the file in late August 2013 – ten years ago. It’s a file I called “Quellen” (sources). It contains several phrases, sentences, poems, or concrete references from the Ethica to other texts and – where possible – their verification with contemporary sources or more modern scholarly editions of referenced texts. It’s an MS Word file; the formatting was horrific, and the document really hard to read. I converted the DOCX file into a plain text format like Markdown, using Pandoc. I hadn’t planned on working on the file’s content, only trying to tackle the layout and readability, but I got stuck on the references. Many contained links, and clicking on the first one already revealed a problem I had hoped not to have: link rot. So I spent the rest of the morning checking all links and references, which turned into checking many sources, adding them to the list, and ordering some older prints from the library to check references of not yet digitized material.

I really love this kind of detective work: trying to find the source of an odd-sounding phrase or a cryptic reference, verifying citations, and revealing the literary, theological, and philosophical foundation of this book on good manners and easy conversation. We can also see the frame of reference for a contemporary: what would they have known to use the book? Were they familiar with the works of Plato, the classic authors like Sallust, Horace and Cicero, early medieval philosophers like Boethius, the church fathers, and more contemporary writers like John Owen? Probably. Studying the intertextual references in the Ethica can help us re-create the target audience, perhaps even the model reader/user of the guidebook. 

The overview of sources and references is not complete by far. My work many years ago was discontinued after chapter 2, most likely because I decided to prioritise another part of the scholarly edition. The original edition plan did not include a commentary, so this is ‘side work’, which I thought would be nice but not mandatory. But now I’m intrigued again! I want to dig deeper into it and learn more about the intertextual references and what they might tell us about the Ethica and its appeal. I have uploaded the revised document to the GitHub repository, so I can add things on the way – and have a public reference in case I will not finish this side-work and someone else wants to pick it up instead.

After a much-needed iced coffee break in the sun with my colleagues from the Digital Scholarship Center at the University of Oslo Library, I returned to my office to find one of the youngest prints of the Ethica Complementoria waiting for me on my desk! This second edition of the Danish translation was printed in Copenhagen in 1708. The book, together with the first Danish edition from 1678, was a gift from the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen to the newly founded University of Oslo in 1811. Together with 45.000 books from the Royal Library’s collection, it made the rootstock of the Univesity Library – and the National Library of Norway – today. An incredible feeling for a researcher interested in the Ethica: to have two rare editions “in-house”. I was unaware of this when I moved to Norway 11 years ago, so I guess we found each other at the right time and place.

A detail photograph of the 1708 edition of the Ethica Complementoria. The book is half opened, and a printed double page is visible. On the right side, the second chapter begins and the page is framed with ornaments.
Detail from the 1708 print of the Ethica Complementoria, UBO UHS Sikring 97

Ethica Complementoria Digital Scholarly Edition – Redux. Pt. 4: Digressions & Contemplations

Day 4 of my summer research leave

Today has been a day of digressions and contemplations. The goal was to go through all the remaining files on my local drive and see which ones contain information that needs to be kept and isn’t stored on the GitHub repository for the Ethica Complementoria project yet. I reviewed almost all files, identified them, checked their content, modified the filename to be more descriptive and standardised, and added the date of creation/last modification, which sent me down memory lane. One file in particular, a synopsis I made of all Ethica prints, hit especially hard: it was last modified precisely on this day, eight years ago! Such a long time ago – I remember that I was working on the edition, recording variants between the different prints and sorting out their relationship. I was so sure I would be able to finish the manuscript of the edition and send it to a publisher in 2016. I did not. I haven’t done it yet, and I am less and less sure whether I will ever “finish” this project as I had initially intended. Don’t get me wrong: I have published a big chunk of my research on the Ethica already in a monograph in 2017. What was planned as an article for editio. Internationales Jahrbuch für Editionswissenschaft turned into a book. It gives a detailed overview of all surviving copies we know of, the relation between the different editions, their chronology, extensions, and revisions. It also discusses the authorship question and argues for a more conservative approach when attributing the Ethica to Georg Greflinger: he was likely not the author but could have acted as a later redactor. I also have three complete transcriptions of prints: the editio princeps from 1643, the edition 1645, and the youngest Ethica print from 1728. Transcription of the critical 1660 print is about 70% done. However, I have never had the time to do the final touches. Both prints from 1643 and 1645 are already uploaded to the German Text Archive but have not been “released” by me because there is some manual fixing of the encoding, which takes forever. I can still aim to do as much as possible next week and perhaps get the 1643 edition publishable. We’ll see.

Aside from all the feelings, I had a couple of productive digressions today. First was a search for who hides behind “Ex libris bibl. erot. Krenneri”. In some Greflinger prints, catalogues recorded provenience, i.e. who owned the book before it made it into the library’s collection. It can be interesting to find out how certain books ended up where they did, both geographically and collection-wise. But also who they might have been made for or who in the past found them worth buying, keeping and collecting. I straightforward Google search didn’t bring many concrete results, but I was led to the notorious bibliography of erotic literature by Hayn and Gotendorf from the early C20th. In the digitized tomes, the ExLibris popped up several times, with the remark “München” (Munich). Aha! An indicator. I modified my search to include the last name “Krenner” (the nominative form of the latinised “Krenneri”) and München and found a newspaper article from 2007. Christina Hoffmann writes about “forbidden books” in the Bavarian State Library in Munich, and the name “Franz Krenner”, date and his occupation is revealed: Turns out, the man was a fiscal officer in the late 18th, early 19th century in Munich and had an extraordinary collection of erotica which were bought by the library right after his death and kept locked away from public access. You can read about the kinky official on Wikipedia.

The other digression(s) mainly were software related. I had some files in an odd format, and I could not check their contents without the proper software. Which, of course, was proprietary and for purchase, but I managed to get a test version to open the files with. From a distance of time, I could now see my search for a comfortable tool to help me visualize the print history, genealogy and stemma of the Ethica. By looking at the time stamps, the filenames and the file formats, I could see a journey of testing out, discarding, re-visiting, and moving around from one tool to another. I made the published visualization of the stemma in Scapple, so I guess at that point in time, I had found something that was good enough for the job and worked well for me. But times have changed, and I no longer want to use this type of software. I cannot export an interactive version of my stemma from Scapple, only static versions in .png or .pdf. But that’s not helpful for edits and further work. I turned to my social network on Mastodon and asked for input, and I got a nice tip from Till Grallert for a file format converter from the OPML format, which Scapple can export, to SVG, which is much more common and easier to import and export between drawing tools. I will try it out tomorrow and hopefully end the week with a nice stack of files in more durable, sustainable, and standard formats so I can still use them eight years from now!

Enjoy this visualisation of the Ethica and Tranchierbuch, and Löfflereikunst prints on a timeline, made with Zotero, tomorrow, also eight years ago 😅 !

Timeline of prints. Ethica-prints are colored yellow, while prints of the Tranchierbuch are red and prints of the Löfflereikunst are orange. Highest density of prints around 1650.

Timeline of prints. Ethica prints are coloured yellow, while prints of the Tranchierbuch are red, and prints of the Löfflereikunst are orange. Observe the density of prints around 1650.

The image shows a visualisation of a useful filename structure for a scan of the title page of a rare book. It has four parts, divided by underscores. The first part is the library information using its standard abbreviation, the second part is the shelfmark, the third page indicates the page number or part of the document, and the fourth part contains additional information in a short form.

Ethica Complementoria Digital Scholarly Edition – Redux. Pt. 3: Filenames and Co-workers

Day 3 of my summer research leave

Filenames

After a bit of a hiccup yesterday, I’m back on track. It’s day 3 of my research leave, and I still haven’t gotten any of the “big tasks” started. If there is anything to be learned from previous iterations of this and other projects, it’s that without proper data management, the big tasks will never be finished. All of the available time in a side project like this will eventually be eaten by trying to understand where I left off last time, what needs to be done and where the files are. So the first step – in a way, the first “big task” – is to get an overview of what I have, where I left off, and what needs to be done to tackle the milestones.

A refreshing insight this morning was that I had already weeded out many superfluous files and manuscript versions of the book on the print and transmission history of the Ethica Complementoria. The most crucial documents are neatly stored in a public GitHub repository: the final version of the manuscript as published on the epub-server at the Herzog-August Library in Wolfenbüttel. The transcriptions of several prints in XML. Preliminary collation results and the code I used to create them. An ok README file describing the status quo and plans. One of these plans was to find a secure place for the documents which cannot be stored publicly, like scans I purchased for the publication and other admin stuff. I will put them in a private repository so I have access remotely.

While preparing the files for transfer into their new home, I witnessed a common problem of practical data management: Creating meaningful yet short and machine-friendly filenames! I used to teach data organisation and documentation in my previous job, and since then, I made it a daily practice only to use informative, machine-friendly filenames. For scans and digital photos of archival materials, manuscripts, or old books, I find it helpful to embed information about the source in the filename, e.g. which library holds this book? What is its shelf mark or reference number? What part of the book is the scan of? Is there any additional information relevant to see at first glance? With this in mind, and adhering to a few principles of good data management, like shallow directory structures, short names for files and folders, and no use of any special characters apart from underscore _ and hyphen – and ASCII letters and numbers. I made a little infographic about filenames for scans of archival materials and shared it with the researchers at the Dept. of Archaeology, Conservation, and History and my colleagues at the library. I will adopt this method now for the Ethica project and similar ones and rename all files accordingly. And add this info to the README so I might have a chance of remembering what I did and why next time!

The image shows a visualisation of a useful filename structure for a scan of the title page of a rare book. It has four parts, divided by underscores. The first part is the library information using its standard abbreviation, the second part is the shelfmark, the third page indicates the page number or part of the document, and the fourth part contains additional information in a short form.

Infographic depicting a filename structure for scans of archival materials.

Co-workers

The Ethica project is a single-person project for most of the time. I recently got funding for a research assistant to help me transcribe and prepare the bilingual digital scholarly edition of the Danish print of the Ethica from 1678. The assistant will mainly work on automatic text recognition, using Transkribus and building on the HTR model NorFraktur created by the National Library of Norway. NorFraktur is a multilingual model trained on printed Norwegian, Danish, and German texts from the early modern period. It performs quite well, and I hope to increase the performance slightly.

More interesting than the work, although, is collaborating with another researcher. Lots of the motivation behind proper data management and documentation stems from the need to work together on something, to share files and folders and workflows. The Ethica project is old, conceived in 2009, and has grown wildly since. So, for the following weeks to be a smooth and fruitful collaboration, I must create a usable data management plan (DMP) and set up a shared and version-controlled repository. And that’s why I had to go through all the “old stuff” – to know where things are, what is useful in this stage and which mistakes not to make again!

I will draft a DMP using DMPtool again – if I get lucky, I can do it today and publish it on this site, too. Update: the DMP is public and published here: https://dmphub.cdlib.org/dmps/doi:10.48321/D1RP93.

A screenshot of the project repository on GitHub showing Jupyter Notebook as the main type of code.

Ethica Complementoria Digital Scholarly Edition – Redux. Pt. 2: Setups and Fails

Day 2 of my summer research leave

The plan for today was to gather all documents which have something to do with the edition, then list an overview of the files and their contents and create a README and a data management plan to continue the Ethica project so I don’t have to redo all these steps again next time.

Due to unforeseen circumstances, I had to work from home today and take care of something else, so this didn’t happen. The little time I had to work on the project was used up by setting up my private laptop for the tasks. In 2019, I transitioned from working locally and occasionally using GoogleDrive or similar cloud-based storage systems to working with Git and GitHub for most of my projects. This helps keep files and stuff synchronised even when I have to work from home – or, in the worst case, have to access my files using the GitHub platform.

However, it turns out that I haven’t been using my private computer for a while, and so it needed the dreaded updates to run Git. This led to a cascade of updates, and when I finally had set up everything I needed, I went online and checked the contents of a project repository which I hadn’t cloned to my local environment yet.

A screenshot of the project repository on GitHub showing Jupyter Notebook as the main type of code.

On GitHub, every repository has an information block displaying the most used programming language. What surprised me was that this repo had “Jupyter Notebook” highlighted. What on earth did I use a Jupyter Notebook for when creating XML transcriptions of early modern books? A quick look revealed that the notebook was created during a workshop at the Huygens Institute in The Netherlands on February 12, 2019. The topic was collating textual witnesses using the CollateX package for Python. Right! I remembered that I had started doing some tests with the transcriptions of the prefaces of several editions of the Ethica. I read the code and installed CollateX on my private computer.

By now, you should have an idea of where this is going. I wasn’t able to. I followed the instructions and updated Java (of course, every time!), but I only ever got this error message: Error: Unable to access jarfile collatex-tools-1.7.1.jar. I spent an hour following suggestions on fixing the problem, but I could not get it to work.

Having CollateX running is not vital to the project at hand; it would probably have been a major distraction. But this stuff is so frustrating! When I teach the basics of coding, I also talk about how to help oneself when stuck and to build resilience and a higher frustration threshold. But we’re only humans; sometimes, even a relatively high threshold isn’t enough. I give up for today. Java issues are a problem for future me. I need some calming tasks to finish my short workday today, so I will spend the remaining 45 minutes tidying my Zotero project library instead.