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Scottish Universities Press

Close and distant reading in explorative editions: distributed cognition and interactive visualisations

Chapter of: Digital editing and publishing in the twenty-first century

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Metadata
TitleClose and distant reading in explorative editions
Subtitledistributed cognition and interactive visualisations
ContributorPeter Boot(author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.62637/sup.GHST9020.12
Landing pagehttps://books.sup.ac.uk/sup/catalog/book/sup-9781917341073/chapter/13
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
CopyrightPeter Boot
PublisherScottish Universities Press
Published on2025-04-29
Long abstractThe distant reading paradigm has taught us that transformations of textual material, be they in statistical or visual form, can be very informative about trends and patterns in text collections.  However, current digital editions often fall short of exploiting this computational potential for text representation, analysis, and interaction. This paper argues that digital scholarly editions can transcend the limitations of print and print-inspired digital formats and become what I call "explorative editions." I draw on the work of Eugene Lyman about the role of distributed cognition in the design of scholarly tools and that of Shane McGarry about interactive tools creating the possibility for immersion in the edition through properly contextualised goal-directed activity. The paper advocates the integration of interactive visualizations in digital editions. This can transform digital editions into cognitive artifacts that enhance the user's exploration and understanding of the edited material.  The paper proposes five criteria for these explorative editions, emphasizing the inclusion of visual representations, manipulable features, top-down and bottom-up navigational structures, co-extensiveness with the edited items, and minimization of user effort. Finally, I challenge the scholarly community to develop a scholarly edition that meets these criteria, offering a reward for the first project to accomplish this.
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Peter Boot

(author)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7399-3539

Peter Boot studied Mathematics and Dutch Language and Literature. He wrote his thesis about annotation in scholarly digital collections (Mesotext. Digitised Emblems, Modelled Annotations and Humanities Scholarship. Amsterdam 2009). Boot works at the Huygens Institute for the History and Culture of the Netherlands in Amsterdam. In most of his career, his position has been between that of an intermediary between scholars and developers. Among other projects, he worked on digital editions of emblem books, medieval miscellanies, the letters of Vincent van Gogh, the manuscripts of Anne Frank and papers of Piet Mondrian. With Evina Stein, he published an edition of glosses to Isidore’s Etymologies that incorporates live network visualisations (https://db.innovatingknowledge. nl/edition/). Boot is also active in the field of computational literary studies, where he has a special interest in the phenomenon of online book discussion, as exemplified on sites such as Goodreads and in reviews on booksellers’ sites.