Zum Einsatz digitaler Methoden bei der Erstellung und Nutzung genetischer Editionen gedruckter Texte mit verschiedenen Fassungen

Abstract

AbstractThis paper presents a digital working environment for exploratory analysis of the changes to the text of Raynal’s Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Europeéns dans les deux Indes, a French text from 1770 about the negative influence of European civilization during the colonization of the East and West Indies which was significantly revised in 1774, 1780 and post-mortem in 1820. After a brief summary of the printing history, the features of the environment are presented. Starting with a general map of the corpus by means of a navigation bar and word clouds, the online platform provides users with the opportunity to analyse the text genesis in an exploratory manner. The general map leads the users to text passages of interest with respect to the text genesis. Synoptic representations together with colour markings adaptable to the respective philological problem make the revision history easily comprehensible and the text differences easily identifiable. The approach is, in principle, transferable to scholarly editions of other texts and texts in other languages.