Daejeon, July 27–31
Digital scholarly editions (DSEs) represent one of the most established outputs of the digital humanities, offering scholars powerful tools to compare, annotate, reference, and study texts in ways that exceed the possibilities of print (Schmidt, 2014). As a “critical representation of historic documents” (Sahle, 2016, p. 23) digital scholarly editions combine a visual and textual layer to capture objects, comprised of “representation by data” and “presentation by media” (Pierrazzo, 2014, p. 212; Sahle, 2016, p. 23-24) Yet despite their potential, DSEs frequently fall short in practice. They are often difficult to use, visually limited, inaccessible to broader audiences, and difficult to sustain over time (Schillingsburg, 2006; Pierazzo, 2014; Di Pietro & Del Turco, 2018). These recurring issues point to a need not only for better technical solutions, but for more critical and reflective approaches to the design process itself: for whom are DSEs made, by whom, and under what institutional and infrastructural conditions? Moreover, cuneiform clay tablets represent a particularly underserved case in the landscape of DSEs. Existing digital resources for cuneiform scholarship tend to prioritise transcription and transliteration over the material and visual dimensions of the tablets themselves, leaving a significant gap that a DSE which actually links the visual and textual elements could help address.
This long paper will contribute to these critical approaches towards DSEs by reflecting on the design process of a DSE of cuneiform tablets from the Old Babylonian Period, developed as part of the Cune-IIIF-orm project. The Cune-IIIF-orm project (2022-2026) is a collaboration between Ghent University, KU Leuven, and the Royal Museum of Art and History in Brussels, bringing together an interdisciplinary team of Assyriologists, technical specialists, museum staff and digital humanists. Reflecting on the design process is compliant with a growing body of critical Digital Humanities scholarship that has argued for the epistemic value of design processes, rather than solely focusing on an end product that is generated. Two main aspects were central to our design process of the DSE. Firstly, the integration of a human-centered design methodology, focussing on assyriologists, which are the scholars who study cuneiform texts, as our main envisioned audience. Secondly, our design process was greatly informed by the use of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) as our main building block.
Firstly, our design process is grounded in a user-centered design framework informed by Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research (Mason & Vavoula, 2021). From the outset, we recognized that developing a DSE without sustained engagement with its primary users risked reproducing the usability problems previously noted with digital editions (cf. Pierazzo, 2014; Di Pietro & Del Turco, 2018). We therefore embedded a human-centered design methodology throughout the development process, involving cuneiform scholars in the design process. Through a focus group and iterative feedback sessions with Assyriologists, we identified the core scholarly tasks that the edition needed to support: close visual analysis of tablet surfaces, annotation of textual and iconographic elements, cross-referencing of named entities across tablets and related sources, and comparison of tablets and metadata. Multiple prototypes were created to test out some of these needs. User testing and user feedback was conducted at multiple stages of development, generating qualitative feedback that was systematically integrated into successive iterations of the viewer. This iterative process, characteristic of agile development methodologies, allowed us to refine the eventual interface.
A second aspect of our workflow is based on integrating and experimenting with the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) as our main building block for representing the cuneiform tablets within the DSE. IIIF is a set of open standards widely adopted by academic and heritage institutions to overcome barriers to access and reuse of digital heritage resources. It provides a standardized, interoperable framework that allows images to be shared, compared, and viewed across different institutions and platforms. Since its launch in 2012, IIIF has been crucial for digital heritage as it establishes standardized protocols that enable the sharing, comparison, and annotation of digital heritage collections across institutions. Both large and small-scale museums, archives, libraries and universities across the world have adopted IIIF to facilitate interoperability and enrich access to their digital collections. (Snydman et al., 2015). We therefore envisioned that IIIF would allow us to mitigate some of the sustainability and interoperability issues generally associated with DSEs (Schmidt, 2014).
Our design workflow will serve as an essential entry point to reflect critically on the use of IIIF for the development of DSEs. We will outline what some of the benefits were associated with using IIIF and how they tied in towards the needs of cuneiform scholars which were discovered with the human-centered design methodology. IIIF provided a standard that supported not just the display of cuneiform tablets, but also facilitated the needs for actually studying them. However, sustaining a IIIF-based edition beyond the project lifecycle depends on institutional infrastructure commitments that are far from guaranteed. We will outline some of the essential infrastructural requirements and hidden labour which went into the design and development of the DSE. The results of our design process further indicate the importance of integrating and actively reflecting on who the envisioned users are of DSEs. Finally, we will share the open-source code of the DSE which we developed, and thus aim to offer a transparent and replicable model for others interested in developing IIIF-compliant DSEs.