eResearch tools to support the collaborative authoring and management of electronic scholarly editions

Scholarly editions contribute to and support research in the humanities by providing accurate reading texts of works of literary, historical, theological, and philosophical significance. In addition to the reading text, a scholarly edition also includes historical and textual essays, explanatory notes, appendixes, and a scholarly apparatus that provides access to alternative readings in other versions of the work. Computer-assisted scholarly editions have been appearing for decades, but most editions continue to be published in book form, and most electronic editions do not extend beyond the traditional book model. Since the mid-1990s, scholarly editors have experimented with web-based electronic editions, producing exemplary models such as The William Blake Archive, The Rossetti Archive, The Mark Twain Project, Nietzsche Source, Electronic Kierkegaard and the Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript project. But, despite such advances, these previous efforts provide one-off handcrafted solutions that address project-specific issues but don't facilitate re-use or interoperability of digital tools and data [1]. In recent years, it has been widely acknowledged that there is a critical need for a set of re-usable services to support the collaborative authoring, editing, visualization and publishing of scholarly editions [2]. To achieve this in the Australian context, the AustESE Project [3] is integrating and extending a collection of open-source scholarly editing tools within a scholar's workbench that employs a common data model and a systematic workflow