In the course of duerer.online, selected texts from Albrecht Dürer's written estate or afterlife are prepared for all interested parties. A list of the texts, including older digitally available editions, can be found here. In order to make the source texts optimally accessible and comprehensible in terms of content, the editorial procedure is as follows:
Text structure
The project staff use TEI tools to label both visual breaks in the source (pages, columns, lines) and chapters and sections that are recognisable as such, enabling navigation through the text corpus either according to the physical structure of the respective text carrier or according to editorially identified semantic units.
Text layout
The TEI-coded texts can be displayed either in their original form (largely without editorial adaptations) or in a text display prepared editorially for reading. The editorial adaptations listed below apply to the editorially prepared text display.
The continuous text is visualised without line breaks.
Normalisations
The connection and hyphenation are modernised according to the rules of current orthography.
Upper and lower case letters basically follow the original, whereby
a) Sentence and verse beginnings, proper nouns, adjectives of place and name will always be capitalised.
b) Capital letters inside the word are given in lower case.
Obvious spelling and printing errors will be corrected.
The punctuation is based on current usage.
In addition, in order to ensure comfortable readability,
- different allographs of letters, numbers and diacritical marks are unified (e.g. 1, s)
- ii, j, u, v, w are resolved according to modern phonetic values (e.g. Fraw to Frau)
- conventional characters adopted (e.g. &)
- on the other hand, ligatures, abbreviations, nasal and geminate strokes are dissolved.
As a special case, ÿ or the combination of i and i longa is
a) uniformly transcribed as ii in Latin passages
b) in German passages adapted according to modern phonetic values with a tendency towards current orthography
c) in the case of names, according to the standardised version (e.g. in the case of Dürer's father-in-law Hans Frey, according to the main spelling in the GND).
Further normalisations according to modern phonetic values are
- uu and vu to w
- in Latin passages w to vu (e.g. wlt to vult).
Handling visual findings and textual revisions in the source
Visual markings, e.g. underlining, different text colour, superscript, etc. are hidden.
Text changes by erasure, strikethrough, overwriting etc. are hidden.
If later corrections or additions are attached to a source text, these can be hidden by the users.
Editorial interventions
FErrors, e.g. due to a lack of knowledge of Latin on the part of the writer, will be corrected if necessary by editors with the appropriate knowledge of Latin.
Additions
Years that are only indicated with the lower number are added, e.g. 26 concluded from context to 1526.
Gaps concerning a few letters or single words are completed.
In the case of an ambiguous resolution, the most probable variant according to the text at hand is to be added.
Major damage to the text is marked as a gap, but reconstruction is to be refrained from.
Editorial apparatus
Abbreviations of academic titles that are considered parts of names, e.g. D, Dr. Lic. IUD, IUL., conventional (e.g. St., Hr.) and fixed abbreviations such as measurements, weights and currencies are retained, indexed and resolved there.
GND tagging of places, persons, works of art is carried out in order to create a connection to WissKI duerer.online via a corresponding register.
The editorial commentaries primarily contain references to literature and sources (also to printed sources or image sources) as well as links to digital resources (Dürer bibliography, book, archive, image material).
All comments by the editors are in footnotes.
The guidelines for the editorially prepared text display were developed based on the following recommendations:
- Editionsrichtlinien für landesgeschichtliche Quellen der Schwäbischen Forschungsgemeinschaft und Schwäbischen Forschungsstelle Augsburg der Kommission für bayerische Landesgeschichte bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 19.02.2001 (based on this, among others, the following edition projects: Die ländlichen Rechtsquellen aus der Grafschaft Oettingen, hrsg. von Rolf Kießling und Thaddäus Steiner, Augsburg 2005; Georg Kölderer. Beschreibunng vnnd Kurtze Vertzaichnus Fürnemer Lob vnnd gedenckhwürdiher Historien. Eine Chronik der Stadt Augsburg der Jahre 1576 bis 1607, ed. by Silvia Strodel, Augsburg 2013)
- Zehn Thesen zur Edition deutschsprachiger Geschichtsquellen (14.–16. Jahrhundert), Matthias Thumser, in: Editionswissenschaftliche Kolloquien 2005/ 2007, Toruń 2008
- Grundsätze für die Textbearbeitung im Fachbereich Historische Hilfswissenschaften, Archivschule Marburg, Status: 26.04.2009
- Regeln für die Transkription deutscher und lateinischer Texte in der Bayerischen Archivschule, München, valid since 1.12.2011
- Editionsrichtlinien der „Bekenntnisschriften der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirche“, ed. by Irene Dingel, Göttingen 2014
- • Empfehlungen zur Edition frühneuzeitlicher Texte des Arbeitskreises „Editionsprobleme der Frühen Neuzeit“ der Arbeitsgemeinschaft historischer Forschungseinrichtungen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland e.V., 11.02.2016