New Readers for Old Texts: Sharing the Workflow of a Digitally Enriched Children Literature Edition
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Libraries worldwide are investing a significant portion of their resources in digitising their collections. Digitised formats are immensely valuable for researchers but may seem dry and unappealing to broader audiences, particularly when the original content was intended for children. This talk presents the preliminary research conducted on digitised formats of popular children’s literature found in specialised libraries, focussing on the models provided by two institutions: the British Library’s “Turning the Pages” software and the National Library of Spain’s “Madgazine,” used in the interactive editions of Don Quixote and Leonardo da Vinci’s Madrid Codex. The discussion revolves around the specific workflow we tested for creating a digitally enhanced edition of a collection of stories entitled “Plage of Dragons,” published in 1923 and based on the Spanish adaptations of Edith Nesbit’s tales.
This webinar was presented as part of the DARIAH Friday Frontiers Autumn 2023 series.
María Goicoechea is Associate Professor of the English Department at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) and coordinator of the Master’s Degree in Digital Letters. Her research interests focus on literary and artistic reception in the field of cyberculture. She has published extensively on cyberculture from the double perspective of science-fiction and electronic literature, paying particular attention to changes in reading rituals, transliteracy, and the evolution of literary publishing formats. Prof. Goicoechea is a member of LEETHI Research Group (UCM), and of HERMENEIA (Universitat de Barcelona), two interdisciplinary research groups dedicated to the study of literature and computers. She has been the Principal Investigator of the project eLITE-CM in Electronic Literary Edition (50% co-financed by the European Social Fund). She has co-curated several electronic literature exhibitions and, together with Laura Sánchez, is the co-founder of Ciberia Project, a web dedicated to the promotion of electronic literature. She is the author of Mi robot lunático (2019), an interactive story for children, and editor of the Interactive Calleja Project (2021), a collection of digitally enriched short stories based on Edith Nesbit’s tales.
The slides and a full English transcript of this presentation can be found here: https://zenodo.org/records/10407230
Learning Outcomes
After viewing this webinar, learners will:
- recognise the workflows typical to digitation of literary texts
- identify challenges in digitising translations of literary text
- understand the ways in which researchers use digital versions of fictional texts
Video subtitles by Aine Foley