I’d just like to ask the community for advice on a possible project I’ve been discussing with a colleague who works in information technology. The idea began with a little scholarly dream I have had for a while, which is of an interactive website that visualises the variance between all the texts of a particular work and enables the user to navigate through that variance intuitively, encountering (and perhaps adding) notes on the way and (if necessary) reporting errors. Rather than construct a one-off website, I think it could be more productive to create an open source web application that could be used in the production of websites based around other works: you’d upload digital versions of the texts (and if possible, scans of the originals), and the application (suitably customised) would form the user interface. The website could then be made public in stages, eg. first to a group of editors, then to a community of peer reviewers, and finally to everyone. This also opens the possibility of using the application as a communal transcription tool. As I see it, however, the central challenge will be to find creative ways of visualising variance: I’ve seen various ways of visualising the variance between pairs of witnesses, for example, but the question of how to visualise variance between larger numbers of texts seems to me to be quite open (as does the question of how to make such visualisations comprehensible on the small screen of a smartphone).
These are very early days yet (no code written, no funding secured), and any advice that can be offered on any aspect of this project would be appreciated. Particularly helpful would be an indication of how useful people think an application like this might be (or of how it could be made more useful): if I’m the only one who thinks it would be interesting to produce editions of the kind and in the way I’ve described, then I had better drop the application idea and try to put together my website by hand!
