reSEArch-EU - European University of the Seas

The general idea of the recent edition of classes on editorial techniques and textual criticism (workshop for the students of the fifth semester, BA in Classics) was to combine the usual form of practical activities with the training session on selected aspects of scientific communication. It seemed important to create connection between the knowledge of philological procedures and a practical understanding on how to spread the very first results of a textual-oriented philological research by creating a digital research data set. The classes started at the beginning of the fall semester and the students completed the planned work by the end of February 2023. However, due to technical reasons it was impossible the publish the data set before the 10th of May 2023.

Agenda
Introductory remarks and the scope of the classes on editorial techniques and textual criticism: creating research data set based on the text from a small-scale edition of earlymodern Latin poems (the edition should be prepared during the classes).

Stage I

• Selection of the material (poems from a Latin version of ‘Historia rerum Prussicarum’ by Caspar Schuetz); searching for the information on the author and his literary work; selection of the poems that would be a suitable base for editorial procedures during classes.
• Discussion on the best practices in presentation of research data (interoperability, readability, accessibility; FAIR DATA principles; UG policy on research data management).
• Short talk about the research data repositories (which one of them would be the best in case of the project).

Stage II

• Creating the list of tasks to do during the classes.
  • Transcription from the Schuetz’s authorial manuscript
  • Modernisation of orthography and punctuation of the transcribed text.
  • Collation of the transcribed text with the 18th-century edition by
  • Gottfried Lengnich, a local jurist and historian.
  • Translation into Polish and English of the selected poems by C. Schuetz.
  • Reassessment of the visual material (quality check of the photographs taken during the visit in a local Archive).Verification of the type of licence under which the visual files can be a part of a data set (checking the law status of the photographs taken from the manuscript stored at the State Archives in Gdansk).
  • Preparation of the files in the formats selected for the data set.
  • Writing an introductory note for the data set.
  • Uploading the digital content to the cloud of the chosen repository.

Outcomes
Students had an opportunity to work together in a digital environment (i.e., in a digital cloud) so that they could learn the pros and cons of cooperation in terms of philological research which is, at least partially, digitally oriented.

For some individuals from the group the workshop was a very first occasion when they could know better the idea of multistage scientific communication (even for many scholars from the philological field of research, not to mention students, the idea of sharing information in a different way than by a book or scholarly paper sounds rather surprising).

Promotion

Social Media (FB/IG) of the project: a brief note and photograph of the students involved in the project (see above).

Following the guidelines for Open Science Ambassadors in the ReSEArch-EU project Dr Jacek Pokrzywnicki (UG, Classical Philology Division) in collaboration with five students, who are about to complete their degree in Classics, has created an open research data set comprising some poems by a local neo-Latin poet Caspar Schütz (b. 1540-d. 1594).

The team of students has started their works on the poetry of Caspar Schütz or Schuetz during the classes in textual criticism and editorial techniques. The main goal was to complete a small-scale edition of some poetic fragments from the first part of Schütz ‘s unfinished Latin history of old Prussia by the Baltic Sea Finally, the photographs, transcription, and translation of the poems into Polish, as a part of the editorial project, have been included in the data set.

The data set, published on the 10th of May of 2023, is now available at the repository for open data RepOD (for more click the link: https://doi.org/10.18150/I2EHKX ).