Discussing Interfaces in Digital Scholarly Editing

Abstract

Interfaces define how research material is presented. They shape the view recipients acquire from historical sources. Since the digital medium is more open to variations than the once traditional form of presenting Scholarly Editions in printed book form, discussions on how to deal with the new possibilities started at a very early stage after the emergence of digital scholarly editions. In the beginning these were strongly influenced by traditional presentation practices but have shifted to aspects more associated with the digital paradigm. Theoretical approaches towards interfaces, however, were only sporadically published and have been continuously demanded by the scholarly community. This introduction attempts to summarize the scholarly discussions on interfaces and provides an overview of the papers presented in these proceedings: they offer both theoretical approaches and discussions of practical implementations together with studies evaluating interfaces.