This website is a testbed for the Charles Harpur archive. Within it will be developed the components of a general web-publishing tool-set for cultural heritage texts. What it aims to show is that publishing historical texts, and providing a layered user interface designed for different classes of user, can be as easy as installing a tailored copy of Joomla! with the necessary components already built-in. The main objective is to automate as far as possible the very tedious tasks that have traditionally been associated with making digital editions. If we can lower the barriers in terms of cost and effort, then more of our textual cultural heritage can be preserved and made accessible.
An End to the 'Digital Incunable'
The modern digital edition has been described as a 'Digital Incunable', that is, a digital representation of a historical text that mimics the form of the print edition. Just as the early printed texts of the fifteenth century imitated the form of the manuscripts they superseded, and were eventually replaced by books that more fully exploited the possibilities of the print medium, so too the modern digital edition has to fully embrace the new medium of the web. This has already happened to some extent, but this slow evolution needs to be accelerated. This website is about exploring purely digital means of representing our textual cultural heritage, and reassessing everything we do to make a digital edition.
