Rethinking Readability of Digital Editions — The Case of the AAC’s “Digital Brenner”

Abstract

Retrodigitization projects have become very common as demand for digital versions has increased considerably over the past few years. Many of these projects have been limited to the production of facsimiles, to a much lesser degree text has been integrated which is due to the costs that are involved in such undertakings. The AAC’s "Brenner" project was started as an experimental endeavour in humanities computing designed to fathom out the possibilities involved in the particular case of historical journals. The focus in this paper is on issues of readability of digital texts. The issue at hand is the exploration of features of digitized editions that may make up for the printed original and even go beyond what is offered by the printed original. The identification of useful display objects that can be easily implemented digitally was the main concern of the study. In describing the constituents of a planned web interface, we will try to figure out ways of improving the acceptability and quality of electronic texts.

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