Improving the AAC-FACKEL, a Scholarly Digital Edition of the Satirical Journal "Die Fackel"

Improving the AAC-FACKEL, a Scholarly Digital Edition of the Satirical Journal "Die Fackel"
Biber, Hanno, Institute for Corpus Linguistics and Text Technology, Austrian Academy of Sciences,Vienna, Austria, hanno.biber@oeaw.ac.at
In the following a presentation of the latest developments to improve an existing scholarly digital edition will be given. The scholarly edition in question is the AAC-FACKEL, the digital edition of the historical literary journal "Die Fackel". The presentation will be devided into three parts representing three consistent steps in the development. First, the general principles and the specific edition and design considerations concerning the online publication of the AAC-FACKEL will be presented. Second, the particular questions of editing and exploring this important and interesting source of literary history of the German language by means of a sophisticated research tool will be addressed. Third, a plan and the considerations for improvement of this successful and widely used online edition, which is based upon the principles of corpus research and text technology, will be presented. The digital edition of the historical literary journal "Die Fackel" ("The Torch") has been developed in a collaboration of researchers, programmers and designers within the framework of the AAC-Austrian Academy Corpus which is operated by the Institute for Corpus Linguistics and Text Technology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. "Die Fackel" was originally published and almost entirely written by the satirist and language critic Karl Kraus in Vienna from 1899 until 1936. The AAC-FACKEL is online since January 2007 and offers free online access to its 37 volumes, 415 issues, 922 numbers, comprising more than 22.500 pages and 6 million tokens. The digital edition contains a fully searchable database of the journal with various indexes, search tools and navigation aids in an innovative and functional graphic design interface, where all pages of the original are available as digital texts and as facsimile images, which is one important principle of the AAC’s resources and publication initiatives. The work of Karl Kraus can be regarded as one of the most important contributions to world literature. It is a source for the history of the time, for its language and its moral transgressions. Karl Kraus covers in his typical and idiosyncratic style in thousands of texts the themes of journalism and war, of politics and corruption, of literature and lying. The interface provides the scholar with a complex research environment to read, study and access the texts from various entry points. The journal comprises a great variety of essays, notes, commentaries, aphorisms, poems and other forms. The scholarly digital edition allows new ways of philological research and analysis. The presentation of this resource, where the question of how a valuable historical text source is made visible and alive in a digital media environment is addressed, gives insights into the features of the edition, where the potential of lexicographic word searches within the various texts of the edition as well as basic and more advanced elements of the corpus research approach followed by the AAC is demonstrated. The research tool offers access to this resource by means of a multifunctional interface. The interface has five individual frames synchronized within one single window. The frames can be opened and closed as required. The 'Paratext' section situated within the first frame provides additional information about the background of the edition and scholarly essays about the journal. The 'Search|Index' section gives access to a variety of indexes, databases and full-text search mechanisms. The results of these queries and lists are displayed in the adjacent 'Results' section. A sophisticated 'Contents' section has been developed in order to show the reader the whole range of the journal ready to be explored and give access to the whole run of issues and all of the contents of the journal in chronological order. The 'text' section has a complex and powerful navigational bar at the top so that the reader can easily navigate and read within the journal either in text-mode or in image-mode from page to page, from text to text (soon to be implemented), from issue to issue, and with the help of hyperlinks. The text can be searched in the following four modes: in full text search mode, by means of a list of word forms and of an inverted list of word forms. The functionality of the indexes and the technical specifications of the edition are described in the 'Paratext' section on the technical details. The following indexes are in preparation: an index of titles including all texts of the entire journal; an index of errors that were corrected by Karl Kraus in "Die Fackel"; an index of errors that were not corrected by Karl Kraus but found and provided with suggested readings by the editors; an index of variants of Fackel issues, including the later editions, all confiscated issues and censored passages as well as the various regional editions of "Die Fackel"; an index of inserts including all regular inserts that are considered as part of the text of "Die Fackel" together with other inserts, which were added on occasion, as well as additions; an index of illustrations; an index of special issues; and an index of extra editions, including separately reprinted articles from "Die Fackel"; finally, an extensive and complete index of names mentioned in "Die Fackel", together with philologically sampled additional data, is in preparation and will consist of personal names, based upon the material collected by Franz Ögg, but corrected and largely extended, as well as indexes of fictitious names, institutions, periodicals, and works of literature, works of art and so on. The contents list of this edition is based on the original text titles given by Karl Kraus in "Die Fackel" and in the separate contents pages of the quarterly volumes of the journal, which were collected by the editors of the AAC-FACKEL. The corpus based research possibilities offered by this digital edition and its underlying principles will be dealt with in this presentation. The corpus research unit at the Institute for Corpus Linguistics and Text Technology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences is concerned with establishing and exploring large electronic text corpora and with conducting scholarly research in the field of corpora and digital editions. Among the sources collected by the AAC, which systematically covers various domains, genres and types, are more than 500 million running words of newspapers, literary journals, novels, dramas, poems, advertisements, essays on various subjects, travel literature, cookbooks, pamphlets, political speeches as well as a variety of scientific, legal, and religious texts, to name just a few forms. The specific principles of the digital editions are determined by the conviction that the methods of corpus research lead to valuable resources for scholars. The AAC has developed model editions to meet these aims, which provide well structured and well designed access to the sources, and will continue to do so by improving existing editions, thereby contributing to the development of digital resources for research into language and literature.